FULL TRANSCRIPT: Lex Fridman on Joe Rogan Podcast

Sure. Also killed 10% of the population of earth. Lit people on fire and launched them on catapults onto thatched roofs.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, I think actually Dan Carlin makes a really good point. How long do you wait until, you know, that you can tell these kinds of stories about Hitler? I think that’s an example.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right, yes, that’s what he uses. But, you know, you want to be historically accurate here. And Genghis Khan, there’s a lot of different perspectives, including opening up trade and including what was the protocol based on which he was doing the murdering. So it was very clear before the invasion, he always said you can surrender and then we would not murder anybody. You just have to follow the law.

And the law is very, very sort of clear and it’s basically enforcing a law of the land, so free trade, free practice of religion, and you have to pay taxes instead of to your king, you have to pay taxes to the Mongol Empire.

JOE ROGAN: Did they really say we won’t kill anyone?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yes, 100%. They followed that and this is very well documented.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So everybody could have just laid down and 10% of the world’s population wouldn’t be dead?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

LEX FRIDMAN: The nuance there is that sometimes they killed the upper classes.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know, didn’t they kill the royals by like crushing them to death? They’d have lunch over them?

LEX FRIDMAN: They were, listen, this is a different time, but they were brutal. Because they want to, they use fear as part of the military tactics, right? They want people to be terrified and they want people to talk about how terrifying the Mongol Empire is so that they forfeit more easily. You know, there’s a lot of aspects of it, not to say that Genghis Khan is a feminist, but there’s a lot of progressive aspects.

He put a lot of women in positions of power. He gave a lot of rights to women. This is a very strange perspective.

JOE ROGAN: He did a lot of raping.

LEX FRIDMAN: Nope. There’s not — his kids.

JOE ROGAN: What do you mean nope? When he would conquer these places, he would take women.

LEX FRIDMAN: And he would become his new wives. Yeah, but it wasn’t their call. So that’s kind of rapey.

JOE ROGAN: That’s very rapey, yeah. If you just take them and make them have your kids.

LEX FRIDMAN: There’s the kind of mass rape that the Soviet soldiers did at the end of World War II when they were marching towards Berlin, which is extremely violent, vicious, and sort of that kind of rape, which is part of the terror of war. And then there’s like creating a harem of women, right? I think the main point is that this is something you talk about, that a large percent of the population, as that one study from 20 years ago found, are descendants of Genghis Khan.

JOE ROGAN: Huge, yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: I think the way to do that is to make everybody who is your descendant popular within the culture. You can’t have your DNA propagate throughout civilization by raping. You have to have a high status for people that are associated with Genghis Khan. You can’t have that kind of thing with fear. You can only do it with respect and high status. And he, for several generations, created an empire that was flourishing.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, you’re kind of whitewashing that. I mean, they killed a million people in Jin China and turned their bones into a stack, a pile that they recognized as snow-covered mountains from the distance. That’s what they thought it was until they got up on it. When the Shah of Khwarezm came there to check it out, he was like, where is everybody? They had abandoned the roads because there were so many dead bodies that the roads had deteriorated into muck.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, let me actually sort of backtrack a little bit here because I’m uncomfortable because I’m deeply involved in the military affairs of modern day. And so there’s a kind of – I was just kind of having fun. Yes, there was mass murder that was happening. It was vicious.

And I’m not a scholar of Genghis Khan. I was simply saying that it’s interesting how history looks at these different empires. For example, we venerate the Roman Empire, not we, but ancient Greece. And they were equally, if not more, brutal in their conquests and their destruction.

JOE ROGAN: There’s never really been a time where there was a leading superpower that wasn’t brutal.

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s, I think, become less and less brutal over time, and people document this. So war, the number of people, the percent of the population killed is less and less.

JOE ROGAN: But what about Ukraine and Russia? How many people have died, all told, between the two? It’s got to be close to a million.

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s over a million casualties, which includes death and injuries. And the estimates vary, but I think a good estimate is over 400,000 total, maybe over 500,000.

JOE ROGAN: On both sides?

LEX FRIDMAN: On both sides. And the dead on the Ukraine side is probably one-third or one-fourth of the total dead.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

LEX FRIDMAN: Much more than Russia. So three-quarters of them on the Russian side?

JOE ROGAN: On the Russian side, yeah. Really? What do you attribute that to?

LEX FRIDMAN: I think there’s military scholars that understand this really well. I think, in general, the invading force loses more people than the defending force. That’s one aspect.

JOE ROGAN: Of course, the Ukrainian military will say it’s about the effectiveness of the Ukrainian military. And also, one of the other things they say is that the medical capabilities, so the medics are really strong on the Ukrainian side, which is also tragic because you’re able to save lives, but you have the injuries, the pain of war that the veterans have to go through. So they’re able to save lives more effectively also. Right.

LEX FRIDMAN: But there is a big characteristic of the invading force usually loses more people. What was it like going over there and interviewing Zelensky?

JOE ROGAN: So I should say I went to Ukraine twice after February 24th, 2022 invasion. And maybe it’s good for me to also say where I come from because it’s surreal to be there for me.

LEX FRIDMAN: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: Both my parents are from Ukraine, from Kiev and Kharkiv. These are towns in Ukraine, cities in Ukraine. I’ve been there many times. I myself was born in Tajikistan, speaking of Genghis Khan. And I lived there in Tajikistan. And by the way, I’m regretting defending Genghis Khan in this conversation for fun.

LEX FRIDMAN: You didn’t really defend.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I want to be sort of say that over and over again. War is hell. And it’s almost a tension between how much Roman Empire, Caesar and these folks are venerated. And Genghis Khan is seen as this barbarian that was just destroying and raping and so on.

LEX FRIDMAN: They’re all horrible, vicious warmongers. All of them. Yeah. Anyway, Tajikistan.

The Impact of World War II on Lex Fridman’s Family

LEX FRIDMAN: I lived for a time in Kiev and Moscow. I have family in Ukraine and Russia. During World War II, many of my family members were slaughtered in Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev where Nazis conducted mass executions. My grandfather fought the Nazis as a machine gunner, one of the few survivors, which is why I’m here today.

The Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union

LEX FRIDMAN: I remember the song: “Двадцать второго июня, ровно в четыре часа, Киев бомбил, и нам объявили, что началась война.” It means “On June 22nd at 4 a.m., the bombing of Kiev began.” This was in 1941, when the Nazi armada launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive surprise invasion.

The greatest battles of all time were fought in this land – the battles of Kiev, Stalingrad, and Moscow. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands, millions of people slaughtering each other.

The Brutality of War

LEX FRIDMAN: Hitler and Stalin’s approach was total war – no surrender, victory or death on both sides. For many people in this land, this history is part of their blood. They remember these struggles – political, geopolitical, military, and social. It’s like the United States living just a few decades after the Civil War.

Lex Fridman’s Peace Mission

LEX FRIDMAN: It was surreal to be back there, trying to push for peace. I interviewed Vladimir Zelensky and will be traveling to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin. I’m aware of the risks and accept them. My goal is to do my small part in pushing for peace.

Opportunities for Peace in the Ukraine-Russia Conflict

LEX FRIDMAN: Since the beginning of the war on February 24, 2022, there have been three moments to make peace:

1. March and April 2022: When Ukrainian forces successfully defended the north and Kiev.
2. Fall 2022: After a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive that recaptured Kharkiv and Kherson.
3. Now: With the Trump administration’s momentum and willingness to make peace.

The Challenges of Making Peace

LEX FRIDMAN: Vladimir Zelensky, a historic figure and great leader, struggles to make peace because he deeply feels the suffering of his people and wants justice, not just peace. His strength in uniting and lifting the morale of the nation makes it difficult for him to compromise.

The Current Situation and the Role of Donald Trump

LEX FRIDMAN: The Russian military has regrouped and is gradually capturing land. The Trump administration wants to make peace. Trump is a great dealmaker who wants to end wars worldwide.

JOE ROGAN: He made the deal in Gaza now.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yes, they made a ceasefire deal with hostages in Gaza. It’s amazing that the Biden administration couldn’t get anything done in two years, but Trump gets it done in a day.

The Complexity of the Ukraine-Russia Conflict

JOE ROGAN: It’s a horrible war that’s confusing to the uninitiated. You have to consider the U.S.-backed coup in 2014, NATO’s expansion, and the agreements made when the Berlin Wall fell. It’s almost unbelievable that Russia and Ukraine, which were both part of the Soviet Union during my lifetime, are now at war.

Lex Fridman’s Perspective on U.S. Involvement

LEX FRIDMAN: I believe the U.S. should have given more money to Ukraine, hit hard, and then made peace quickly. You can learn similar lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no other way? What about having NATO back out?

LEX FRIDMAN: A lot of this is about diplomatic rhetoric. NATO was consistently antagonizing Putin. World leaders need to be shown real respect. Putin has clearly laid out the interests of the Russian Federation. At the negotiation table, his perspective needs to be understood and heard.

The Importance of Respect in Diplomacy

LEX FRIDMAN: You have to respect leaders like Xi Jinping and Putin when you’re at the negotiation table. Not when you’re on social media or as historians or activists, but as world leaders, you must show respect to get things done and end the bloodshed.

Zelensky’s Emotional Burden and the Challenge of Compromise

LEX FRIDMAN: I kept pushing Zelensky to open himself up for peace. He needs to be willing to come to the table and negotiate, respecting the other nation’s interests. Unfortunately, peace requires compromise. You have to sit across the table from someone you might hate.

Unlike Putin, Zelensky goes to the front lines, talks to soldiers, and sees the dead bodies. He’s an empath, tortured and tormented by the suffering. But as a leader, he has to put that aside and compromise to save his nation.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think Trump can do now?

LEX FRIDMAN: I think the right thing to do is for Trump, Putin, and Zelensky to meet, perhaps in Switzerland, Istanbul, or Minsk. I trust in Trump’s negotiation ability.

The Importance of In-Person Diplomacy

LEX FRIDMAN: The United States can use its military and economic power as leverage in negotiations. However, it’s crucial to meet in person and show respect. COVID highlighted the limitations of remote communication.

JOE ROGAN: It’s more like jerking off with a condom on.

LEX FRIDMAN: For the metaphor, yeah. I wanted to speak Russian with President Zelensky, which I speak fluently, and he speaks fluently. It’s his primary language. People seem to misunderstand this on the internet. He spoke Russian his whole life.

JOE ROGAN: So he spoke with you in Ukrainian?

LEX FRIDMAN: He kept going back and forth. But yeah, most of the powerful things were said in Ukrainian. So I’m listening to an interpreter through a shitty headset. The interpreter is not – forgive me to the interpreter – he’s not very good. He’s delayed. There’s noise.

JOE ROGAN: But wouldn’t it make more sense if he spoke to you in a language that you understand?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, we’ve really tried. But this is a man, once again. He’s the leader of a nation in a time of war, and he’s not stylistically who he is. Like, he’s all in. This is like a Braveheart-type character.

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Zelensky’s Leadership

JOE ROGAN: Which is so crazy because he started his career as a comedian.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right, right. I mean, you never know who the leaders are that step up. I think a lot of people sort of say that it’s trivial that he stayed in Kiev when the Russian military invaded. To me, it’s not trivial at all. I think that’s a truly heroic act. To stay when nobody knows what’s going to happen and all the experts are saying Kiev is going to be taken.

To stay as a leader in that same place where you were the night before, like working, and not flee when everybody, the CIA, everybody’s telling you to flee. To stay there like a bad motherfucker and actually go outside and film yourself speaking to the nation. That we’re going to win this. We’re going to hold strong.

JOE ROGAN: That’s an insane thing to do. And maybe it does require, like, it’s a Trump level insanity, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s similar to me to the Trump standing up when there’s still bullets flying and saying fight, fight, fight, right? That’s a, where does that come from? I don’t know. But most people don’t have that.

JOE ROGAN: It was refreshing when you see that.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. And he really united a nation. The nation was fracturing. He was actually not popular at all up to that war because the policies he was trying were not working.

JOE ROGAN: What policies specifically?

LEX FRIDMAN: So his, so the stuff that was working, I don’t know the internals of the Ukrainian politics that well, but so he won in 2019 based on his desire to fight corruption and to modernize Ukrainian digital system, which he did very successfully. It’s actually super interesting. You can, they have an app called DIA, which your passport, all your identifications, all appified, which I don’t understand why the United States doesn’t have that.

Corruption in Ukraine

JOE ROGAN: Is it less now than before?

LEX FRIDMAN: See, I want to be careful here because I don’t, like, it’s very difficult to know. The perception, there’s a serious concern about corruption. In a time of war, there’s always going to be more corruption. The United States spent $9 trillion on the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East. After 9-11, on that part of the world, they spent $9 trillion and it’s growing. Using all that money, you’ve had a lot of guests on this program talking about how that money was used. There’s a lot of shady shit that happened.

War breeds corruption. One of the reasons you should be concerned about the military-industrial complex is because that money is just not used well. But that’s a discussion. The reality of corruption in Ukraine is it should be dealt with after you make peace.

Balancing Democracy and War

LEX FRIDMAN: All the problems, the elections were suspended too. The ideas of democracy. There is censorship in Ukraine now. All of those ideas cannot be, all of those things cannot be fixed until the war has ended.

The reason there is censorship now in Ukraine is because it’s a war. The ideas of democracy in part have to be suspended during a war to effectively fight that war. This is the whole idea of martial law. The United States has this.

You don’t fuck around. You have to win the war. When your land is invaded, everybody has to be focused on this. The problem is it’s a slippery slope.

All the media channels are being controlled and the president and everybody is so invested in winning the war. Then where are the critical voices that say we need peace? They’re coming from the outside, but you need that. The thing is it’s a really complicated tension.

During the war, with martial law, you do want to suspend elections, potentially. It’s a really difficult trade-off. The United States has the same thing. If we were to be invaded, I don’t know by who, this is not, you know, if Canada invaded, I don’t want to make a joke out of this, but there’s going to be a martial law.

JOE ROGAN: A quick fight?

LEX FRIDMAN: Exactly. There would be a martial law where elections would be delayed or suspended and so on. All those criticisms, all those concerns can only be dealt with once you make peace.

In terms of corruption, there’s a lot of people that know Zelensky well, and this has been my impression having met him. I don’t think he, and I’ve not heard anybody that knows him well say that he’s personally corrupt. This is really important. He himself is not personally corrupt, and he legitimately is fighting corruption.

Now, he’s in a system that has corruption. Russia has corruption. It’s really difficult to weed out corruption. But he legitimately, at least to me, that’s really important that he is a single human being and the people really close around him, like really close.

Corruption starts to seep in, of course, when you go further out. But in that direct human being, he is not personally corrupt. Like financially speaking, he singularly believes in the idea of Ukraine as a sovereign nation, and he’s willing to die for that idea. That is his strength, and that is also his weakness when it’s time to make peace.

Lex Fridman’s Approach to Interviewing World Leaders

JOE ROGAN: When you are preparing to do something like this, and you are doing your research, you’re getting ready to go do it, what are your concerns other than your own physical safety, of course? What is your – like ultimately, what’s your concerns? What are your goals when you’re setting out to do this? This is very different than any other kind of podcast interview.

It’s – there’s no other format really where a world leader in the middle of a huge international conflict is going to sit down for three hours and talk to an American scientist, which is weird too, right? It’s like why are you doing it? You know what I mean? Like this guy who works in AI just decides he’s going to start a podcast.

The podcast becomes very successful, and all of a sudden he’s like, I’d like to talk to everybody. I’d like to go over and talk to Zelensky and talk to Putin, and everybody is like, why you? What the fuck are you doing? So you get a lot of that, and then unfortunately for you, you read the comments, so you get sucked into all that negativity.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to say there. First of all, on the comment side, I always have a little Joe Rogan on my shoulder saying, don’t read the comments. Don’t read the comments. And in this situation, it’s especially intense.

I should say like privately, after I did a conversation with Zelensky, every single person that knows the situation well knows me personally, has written to me, and it’s all been really positive. Like really positive. Almost like in the desert wanting water positive, because there’s a lot of voices that are afraid to speak that want peace.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. But online, and this is something we talked about online a little bit, there’s just like these like swarms of people that are like –

LEX FRIDMAN: Not even necessarily people. I don’t want to sort of go too far in that territory assuming that anybody who criticizes me is a bot.

JOE ROGAN: No, no. But there is – I’m not saying that, but there’s an enormous element of that that’s real. Whether it’s bots or whether it’s hired people, paid propagandists, the conversation is not a pure conversation between people expressing their ideas. There’s a lot of propaganda online, and it’s very confusing to try to discern what the percentage is. We’ve talked about this a bunch of times on the podcast, but there’s a former FBI analyst who estimated that it’s on Twitter alone.

This is before the purchase. He believed it was around 80%. So 80% fake accounts, 80% not just propaganda like government propaganda, but most certainly corporations are hiring people to do similar things. I’m sure there’s companies that will do that for public figures, actors, people that are involved in conflict.

This is part of the Blake Lively dispute is that she’s accusing that Justin Baldoni actor of an organized attack on her, which is probably what it feels like anyway when you’re involved in something on social media. Like, oh my god, this is organized, or they’re attacking you. But it’s a very confusing landscape. Ideally, what we would want with social media is different people, informed and uninformed, but at least expressing their ideas on things and exchanging information back and forth and talking.

It’s not the whole story, though. There’s a lot of other players involved that are not real. There’s AI for sure. There’s definitely large language models that are involved in this back and forth with automation, and they look out for certain code words, and these accounts attack certain ideas.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s hard to know what the actual will of the people is. Yeah, I mean it’s definitely true, and I’ve seen a lot of evidence of this, that there’s Ukrainian bot farms and Russian bot farms. Have you spoke to Elon about this, about bot farms?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, because he knows a lot more now, of course, because there was the big concern when he was buying Twitter. They were trying to say there was 5%. There was only 5% bots, and they were doing that on an extremely low sample size. They were doing it off of 100 people. So they got 100 people, and out of those 100 people, five of them they determined were bots, and so they went with 5%, which is just ridiculous.

Twitter User Statistics

JOE ROGAN: You’re dealing with how many people are on Twitter every day? What’s the total Twitter audience? It’s not as big as Facebook, right? Facebook is 3.2 billion worldwide, which is unbelievable.

LEX FRIDMAN: I think X has a smaller number, but very influential and very active, yeah. Very active, very influential. 245 daily active.

JOE ROGAN: What is the total amount of accounts on it, though? Because there’s daily active, and then there’s just people that just read them. There’s a lot of people that just read.

LEX FRIDMAN: 541.56 million monthly active users. So, again, that’s active users.

JOE ROGAN: So total users. What’s the total users? See, it’s all active. I want to know accounts. That’s the only – I don’t – they delete accounts all the time.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right. Yeah, they definitely do. So they must have some sort of a system where they weed out bots.

Concerns About Twitter

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of concern right now on Twitter about censorship. I try to stay out of Twitter as much as I can, honestly, because I think it’s bad for your mental health. I really do. I think people just barking at each other all day is not good to absorb. I want to absorb real people that I interact with. I mean, I try to pay attention to the news. I try to pay attention to whatever controversial ideas are out there and try to see what I think. But I don’t think it’s good to dive in to social media all day. I think it’s uniquely bad, and I think so many people are involved in it, and they don’t realize that they’re poisoning their brain, just like they would poison their body if they were eating junk food all day. I think it’s genuinely bad for you.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, and you and I, and also in particular, doing a podcast, and we’re also very different human beings. I would say your psychological fortitude is pretty strong. I wear my heart on my sleeve maybe a little bit more, and when I fight, stuff gets to me. And when you try to put compassion out there in the world in the way I did, especially with this conversation with Zelensky, the attacks like… You just have to recognize who the kind of people that are doing that are.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Those are just really weak people, really weak, psychologically damaged, mentally ill people that are probably medicated.

LEX FRIDMAN: To push back, I think some of them are actually good, sophisticated people. They’re just acting not their best selves. I’ve seen this. There’s people that are like I know them personally, and online, the worst stuff comes out of them.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, because they’re mentally ill. But then all of us are a bit mentally ill.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, well, we’re all a little mentally ill.

JOE ROGAN: No one is enlightened that I’ve met. I’ve never met one person that’s perfect, right? I don’t think it’s possible with this journey that we’re on as these meat vehicles, these soul-carrying meat vehicles navigating a very confusing world. I don’t think it’s possible to be perfect. But you can have a desire to be a good person, and some people don’t have that.

Woke Ideology and Assholes

JOE ROGAN: And the excuse that they always use is – I mean this is the Donald Trump excuse. You do anything you can to stop Hitler, right? And this is why they want to conflate, and they always want to pretend that everyone is Hitler. The problem with that is just after a while it’s crying wolf, and people are like, oh, this is a bullshit game you’re playing, and you’re just using it as an excuse. Elon has talked about this a lot about – and he’s absolutely correct, is that people use woke ideology as an excuse to be an asshole. And it’s really just people that are assholes that are attaching themselves to things that make them feel righteous. And so they wrap themselves in this idea to give them virtue and to allow them to say the most awful things about other people that have different perspectives.

And then just by nature, if you’re doing that, you’re doing the wrong thing. You’re a bad person. You can justify it all you want. You can find people that agree with you all you want. But those people also are on the right track – or the wrong track rather. The people that are listening to you and agreeing with you, they’re on the wrong track. They’re the wrong track if we want to be collectively a kind, compassionate, cohesive society, a community of human beings that all live together. That’s totally possible. If you can do it in small groups of people, you can do it in enormous groups of people. It just has to be an ethic that gets promoted. It has to be something that you see people that you admire adhere to, and you do it as well.

Whenever someone goes outside of that and whenever someone starts making horrific, unfounded personal attacks because someone has a different political ideology or just going after them every day, all day long, you’re just broken. You’re on the wrong path, period. Intelligent, aware people that have control of their emotions recognize that, and they’re not going to take your perspective seriously. So you’re going to be less and less effective with what you do.

The Line Between Good and Evil

LEX FRIDMAN: And in general, the failure mode is to paint the world – to draw a line between good and evil. Whether it’s a line in geography, Russians, Putin is evil, or if it’s Trump, Trump is evil. The version of that is Hitler. I’m a big proponent of Solzhenitsyn’s famous, the author of Gulag Archipelago, that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, that all of us have that in us. It is good to be humbled by that reality, and if you are humbled by that reality, then you’re not going to see any other people as purely evil or purely good. All of that kind of thing is used to just hate others.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and even when it’s unfounded. Like I’m watching the Pete Hegseth confirmation hearings, and these ignorant people are going after his tattoo, not even knowing what the tattoo is, and trying to pretend that it’s some sort of radical, hateful tattoo when it’s just an ancient Christian tattoo. It’s so strange. I mean that tattoo is in churches. That symbol is in churches. That symbol has been around for a long time. It’s just a Christian tattoo.

And I was watching the Piers Morgan show, and Piers Morgan had Michael Knowles and Dave Rubin and two super wacky leftist people that didn’t know what the tattoo was, and they were criticizing it. And Piers Morgan kept going, what is the tattoo? What is it? Tell me what it is. And the guy would go on, you’re not answering the question. Go back to it. What is it? Well, let’s look it up. He’s like, no, no, no, don’t look it up. I want you to tell me if you’re saying it’s offensive. And so then the woman chimes in, and Michael Knowles just clowns her, just absolutely knows the history of the tattoo, including – she’s talking about it before – it existed before Islam. And she’s criticizing what it is, and he’s like, do you understand that Islam didn’t exist when this tattoo, when this symbol existed? Like it’s not an anti-Muslim symbol because there was no Muslims when this symbol was created. Like this is bonkers, and they’re all in, digging their heels in, pretending, just trying to win this conversation, just trying to win.

And Piers Morgan is doing that. He’s like the Jerry Springer of political ideology now. He just has people get on the show and yell at each other. It’s very entertaining, and he gets great sound bites out of it. It’s kind of genius in terms of like an engagement perspective. If you looked at your show, it’s just like, how do I get more engagement? Well, that’s how you do it. You get some wacky leftists who are going to say nutty things. You get some right-wing persons who are going to say nutty things, and you get them all together yelling at each other.

LEX FRIDMAN: I wish he did less of that. I should say that Piers Morgan, I think, is a great interviewer. Like he’s legit a great interviewer, but he also has – he can put on his Jerry Springer hat on too.

JOE ROGAN: Making money. Listen. I mean –

LEX FRIDMAN: He does both. He does do long-form, great interviews.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. He’s found his lane. All right. His lane is Jerry Springer. But he’s doing a good job exposing these people. It’s very valuable. Like that conversation was very valuable for me. Because this is adorable, watching this guy like flounder around trying to come up with a reason why this tattoo is so offensive.

LEX FRIDMAN: But see, what I don’t like about that is that guy’s floundering, but there could be actually facets to that person outside of this ridiculousness that’s interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Right. You’ve got to cleanse that from your mind, son. I do. If you want to be the guy who’s on television talking about important issues, and you’ve got this stupid thing in your head where you’re arguing about a tattoo that you don’t even understand. Yeah. You’ve got to cleanse that stupidity out of your mind. Sometimes the best way to do that is to get clowned on television.

LEX FRIDMAN: Sure. So he got exposed. She got exposed. They both look like morons.

JOE ROGAN: And then Michael Knowles, who did a fantastic job of smiling, never raising his voice, calmly explaining it. Have you seen it?

LEX FRIDMAN: No, I haven’t.

JOE ROGAN: See if you can find it, Jamie. It’s pretty wonderful. Michael Knowles is a pro. He’s a pro. The way he handled it was remarkable. I know people criticize that guy, but people criticize everybody. I’m just saying, in this moment.

LEX FRIDMAN: Don’t read the comments, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, don’t read the comments. Yeah, even about other people, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, that’s the thing. I think you said that. You sometimes read comments for the frenzy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t even like doing that. I try not to do that, too.

LEX FRIDMAN: This is the thing that bothers me about comments. I don’t read them, but my mom will read them, and she’ll text me something like, Don’t listen to what people say.

JOE ROGAN: My mom will send me things. Is this true? Mom. Come on. Yeah, this is it. This is wonderful. Watch this. The two people on the far right of the screen, the lady in the pink jacket and the dude with the beard, they’re messed up. They got cooked.

[Video Clip: This is what I accuse Pete of as being too alert and energetic. I found it overwhelming, actually, while I was there, tired, trying to dust the sand out of my eyes. But you suggest that the graduate of Princeton and Harvard, who for decades has been in the U.S. military, served his country honorably, that he’s somehow unqualified to work at the Pentagon. The most egregious accusation you make against him, though, is that he’s an extremist because he has a tattoo. Could you tell us what the tattoo is?

The tattoo specifically, I did not make the allegation that he’s an extremist. You repeated the allegation. So what’s the tattoo? He’s an insider threat. Yeah, right. So what’s the tattoo? I can tell you. Let Bajar hang on. Bajar, hang on. Bajar, hang on. Bajar, hang on. Simple question. What is this tattoo that you’re so upset about? Bajar, hang on. Bajar, hang on. Simple question. What is this tattoo that you’re so upset about? I wasn’t the one upset about it. I was talking about his fellow colleague. This is exactly what I said. His fellow colleague. Do you know what it was? In the U.S. Army, called him out as a potential insider threat looking at the tattoos on his chest. What is the tattoo? You don’t want to answer that. What is the tattoo? And also, I called him an extremist based upon his own book. Read the book, The American Crusade, his own words. What is the tattoo, Bajar? If you don’t know what the tattoo is, just admit it.

PIERS MORGAN: Oh, my Lord. Listen. What is it? Do you know what the tattoo is, Bajar? I want to know what you’re doing. You’re genuinely intrigued. Do you know what you’re doing, Bajar?

JAMIE: When the lady talks, it’s even more brutal. It’s genuinely painful. A woman hasn’t spoken yet. A woman hasn’t spoken yet. Let her speak. A woman hasn’t spoken yet.

Be honest, Bajar. I did hear him answer it, but they were all talking over each other. Did he actually say the words?

JAMIE: Yeah, they weren’t talking about the cross. They were talking about a different tattoo.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, she is talking about that as well. But it’ll go on to that.

Does she know what that tattoo is or not? Listen, what I do know is I read his book. Do you? Do you know or not?

Bajar, wait a second. Be honest. Be honest. Look, ironically, no one’s going to crucify you if you don’t know the answer. But do you know the answer?

No, no, we’re simply asking you. We’re simply asking you. Do you know what the tattoo is that you got so upset about?

JOE ROGAN: No, it goes further. See if you can find where the woman’s speaking, because it gets even more brutal. Because she’s incorrect, and Michael Knowles corrects her. And when he corrects her, it’s great.

It’s a good way to expose. See if you can find the other one, Jamie.

JAMIE: Very narrow. That’s going to be in here.

JOE ROGAN: I missed the whole show. It’s an hour-long show.

JAMIE: Click right there. I’ll know where it is.

PIERS MORGAN: What is the answer?

PIERS MORGAN: This falls along a threat as an insider.

No, no. I’m going back to Michael. Now you had to tell me. You had 98 chances to answer, and he failed the test. Sorry. I’m going to Michael. I’m going to Michael. Don’t talk over each other. Michael.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: The tattoo in question is called a Jerusalem cross. This is a medieval Christian symbol. It goes back a long time. In fact, at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, there was a Jerusalem cross on the floor of the cathedral and on the program for the funeral. There’s one other tattoo that some have suggested could be extremist. It’s the phrase “deus vult”, which is a medieval Christian slogan, a long traditional slogan that refers to God’s will, and it goes back a long way. These are very traditional, very mainstream Christian symbols that not only are not extreme in any way, but which even the people who want to accuse him of extremism couldn’t possibly name. That is pathetic.

BAJAR OMAROVA: All right. I don’t really have that. Insider Guardsman did it, which is what I said. And also, I said that he called himself too extreme for the U.S. military in his book.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: That’s pathetic.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay. Is Pete Hexler lying that he’s too extreme in his book? Let me go to Julie. He’s too extreme for radical leftists.

Let me go to Julie. Let me go to Julie. He’s got it. Is he lying? Be gentlemanly, please. The other lady has not spoken. Julie, if you wait very patiently. Your view of this. I’ll tell you what, but before you answer, I know you said in your substack about this, under normal circumstances, he, Pete Hegsteth, would be precluded from serving in any leadership role. So explain why you said that.

JULIE KELLY: Well, let me, I will explain in one second. Let me go back to something that was said in the very beginning, that he spent more than 10 years at Fox News, and that’s what qualifies him to be in this position that he wants to be in. I spent more than 10 years at Fox News. I don’t think I’m qualified to run the DOD whatsoever based on my time at Fox News.

PIERS MORGAN: That’s what makes him.

JULIE KELLY: I said that was one of the things.

PIERS MORGAN: If you, if you, well, I don’t think that’s even a remote qualification. That’s one.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Being able to communicate ideas as the Secretary of Defense and explain policy is actually a very big part of the job. There are plenty, there are plenty of qualified Republicans out there who can run the DOD who also are good on television. It does not need to be Pete Hegsteth.

Secondly, again, you talked about NGAs. I am bound by an NDA at Fox News. If I were not bound by an NDA and the Fox News wanted to release me from that NDA, I could tell you about my time with Pete Hegsteth. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. But I will say that the reason that there are so many people who anonymously came forward at Fox News is that because they’re also bound by confidentiality provisions, which one-third of all American workers need to sign on their first day of work. And if they were to go public, they could get sued.

The reason this accuser is not heard from is because, according to The New Yorker, she tried desperately to meet with Joni Ernst on the committee and Joni Ernst turned her down. So the reason that she has not been able to come out publicly is because she has an NDA and even privately she could not meet with a senator on this committee who is also a rape survivor to share her story because that rape survivor did not want to hear from a woman who was going to put her potentially in a position to vote against Pete Hegsteth.

Pete Hegsteth has written himself while at Princeton saying that women who are passed out, if you have sex with them while they’re unconscious, that’s not really rape.

PIERS MORGAN: Right? Now, the American military has a tremendous… Is that true? Is that written somewhere?

JULIE KELLY: I don’t know how it doesn’t sound true, but yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s hard to say, but scoot ahead to where they start discussing the tattoo. It’s in the same flow. It’s not that far away. This is definitely not a good format, though.

LEX FRIDMAN: No. Well, at least they’re letting her talk.

JULIE KELLY: You can just go have your way with that. Not really. So I don’t know which soldiers you’ve been talking to who think Pete Hegsteth is a great thing for the military. There is not one woman out there who cares about being assaulted on deployment who thinks that this is the person that needs to be in charge of the United States military.

And as for the cross that you talked about, yes, “Deus Vult”, which is the cross that he has and the slogan that he has. “Deus Vult” is a Christian. It is an old Christian cross. The phrase, however, was uttered by Crusaders as they were slaughtering Jews and Muslims during the Second Crusade specifically. So it’s not just a random cross. It’s not just a random phrase.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: It’s not true. The phrase was uttered after the Council of Clermont, when Pope Urban II declared the Crusade. It was actually probably “Dieu le Voule”, but it’s been rendered in Latin as “Deus Vult”. It has nothing to do with slaughtering Jews. It has nothing to do with slaughtering Muslims, because the Muslims had invaded Europe, not the other way around.

JULIE KELLY: Oh, my God. Are you really saying that the reason the Crusade, which was sent to the Holy Land to liberate the Holy Land, from whom? From Jews and Muslims? And that is the phrase.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I’ll tell you why the Crusade began, because the Eastern Emperor asked for help from the Western Pope, because the Seljuk Turks were slaughtering Christians in the Holy Land. Because those lands were Christian before the Muslims invaded in the 7th century. So, that’s why.

JULIE KELLY: No, no, no. Those Crusades…

MICHAEL KNOWLES: It’s good to know Michael’s pro-Crusade.

JULIE KELLY: I’m sorry. Those lands…

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Those lands…

JULIE KELLY: No, no. Keep going. Those lands became Christian after the First Crusade, okay? So let’s be very clear. Because the lands were Christian in the 1st and 2nd centuries, and then the Muslims…

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Islam didn’t exist before the 7th century. What are you talking about?

JULIE KELLY: Okay. I could… Listen. Listen. I’m not going to talk about the Crusades, but the point is…

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I thought that was a good literature. I’m there.

JULIE KELLY: People… For people… But what that has to do with… But what that has to do with… What that has to do with Pete Hexeth is, it’s not that he has a random cross that talks about his faith in Jesus Christ. He used a very specific terminology.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: But putting all of that aside…

JULIE KELLY: A phrase that was first uttered to defend persecuted Christians in the Middle East, just like they’re being persecuted today.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Okay. It… Okay. If you want to talk about the Crusades…

JULIE KELLY: And that’s who you want as the Secretary of Defense. Wonderful.

PIERS MORGAN: Listen. If you want to talk about…

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Julie, finish your point.

PIERS MORGAN: If you want to talk about the Crusades…

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Julie, finish your point, and I’ll go to Michael.

JULIE KELLY: Listen. To… My point is that I cannot even believe that something the Vatican apologized for is something you’re defending, which is the slaughter of Jews and Muslims during the Crusades.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: What did the Vatican apologize for?

JULIE KELLY: Excuse me. The Vatican said the Crusades…

MICHAEL KNOWLES: What are you talking about? Oh, my Jesus.

JULIE KELLY: You know what? Why don’t you give me a call after this, and I will walk you through exactly what the Vatican apologized for.

PIERS MORGAN: All right. Let’s try and bring things back. All right. Let me…

JOE ROGAN: All right. All right. Let’s debate another time. Let me bring Dave Rubin in. The worst way to have a conversation. I mean, I’m getting a headache from this. Those people. All… That whole panel. I’m sorry. But, like, we can’t… You can’t talk like this.

LEX FRIDMAN: Each of those individual people… I’m not sure about the Secretary of Defense. Even the woman would be a fascinating four or five-hour conversation.

JOE ROGAN: She’ll… You should probably have her on. Yeah. Well, her and McAnul’s and Piers Morgan.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yes. Yeah. This is not the right…

JOE ROGAN: I’m so exhausted of this bullshit. I know. I’m, like, angry right now. Yeah. I know. I know. I want to play more for you. This own… We’re in the zone. That’s for sure.

Pete Hegsteth’s Controversial Statements

JOE ROGAN: Publish the column saying sex with unconscious women isn’t rape. Jesus. Imagine not just thinking that, but publishing it.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean…

JOE ROGAN: What did he actually say?

LEX FRIDMAN: If you want to read it, we can read it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, rape, in quotes, intercourse, bemusing yet mandatory orientation program revolved entirely around whether in an instance of sexual intercourse constituted rape. The actual instance portrayed in the skit was, in fact, it was a skit, in fact, not a clear case of rape, at least not in my home state, so this is Hexus saying this. In short, though intercourse was not consented to, there was no duress because the girl drank herself into unconsciousness. Both criteria must be satisfied for rape. Unfortunately, the panelists never cited any legal definition of rape, yet the panel, all females in the session I attended, claimed that rape it was.

Huh. What year was this?

LEX FRIDMAN: I have no idea.

Defining Rape and Consent

JOE ROGAN: So are they talking about… This is what’s confusing. Are they talk… It says a skit, and then it says they’re talking about a legal definition of rape. Has the legal definition changed over the years? Like when was this? Is he talking about a legal definition or is he talking about his own opinion? There’s a giant difference between the two of them, right? Especially if you take it something out of context, you don’t know if he elaborated.

LEX FRIDMAN: Article for his college newspaper stating that having sex with unconscious women isn’t rape because the criteria for rape isn’t met. So this is in his college newspaper.

JOE ROGAN: So how old is he? Is he like 50? How old is Pete Hegseth?

JAMIE: Yeah, he’s up there, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: 44.

JOE ROGAN: So college would have been around 2000-ish?

Well, yeah. I remember in 2000-ish, I remember when we were doing the podcast, there was a brief moment of time where people were talking about if a man had sex with a woman and they had both been drinking, that it was rape. That the woman could not consent because she was drunk, but the man’s drunk too, right?

JOE ROGAN: So it gets weird. It gets like we understand like traditionally men are pursuing women and that plying someone with alcohol is a famous thing that people do. It’s kind of a weird legal thing. Come on, one more drink, have another drink, have another drink.

And we all know that when people get drunk, they do stupid things. But we don’t know what happened if you’re both drunk. So this is, what I’m getting at is that 2000, these conversations are already being had.

The question is like, is he saying this from his personal perspective? Or is he saying it from a legal perspective? I don’t know what else was in the text, you know, I’m trying to be as charitable as possible. Because if like more was in it, like that’s a reprehensible act, that’s like, did he say anything like that? Or was it just specifically talking about the legal definition? Because he said in his state, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: Also, it says, to be clear, he did not write it himself, he published it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh. That’s what this is. In short, Hegset did not publish it, I’ll put it up on the screen. He did not, or did publish such a column while he held the role. He did not write it himself. He did not write it, it was written by someone else.

LEX FRIDMAN: Okay, so he just published someone’s opinions.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, that’s very different. That’s very, very, very different. He said he said that. That’s not what he said at all.

See that right there. I’m just so exhausted. That’s exhausting.

Both, like I was thinking about Trump with both sides. But that right there is crazy because my opinion of him shifted briefly when I was like, you know, I was watching Daniel Negreanu, you know, the great poker player was on Tim Pool’s show.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And they were talking about his shift in political ideologies. And then a lot of it came from when they were accusing Trump of saying that thing that Obama repeated falsely during the campaign was that he was talking about white nationalists and neo Nazis and saying there’s very fine people on both sides.

And Negreanu had heard that he had heard the clip where Trump said it where it was edited, he’d never seen the full thing. And then once he saw the full thing, he was like, what the hell? And it immediately made him realize, like, oh, my God, they’re lying. They’re lying.

And then he talked about how Obama repeated this is years after Daniel had known it was false. Obama repeating it at the campaign speeches. And then Obama sitting right next to Trump and they’re joking around with each other. “Hey, pal, I know you’re a neo Nazi lover. You rascal had you win.” I guess.

But just what that lady did on that show, and then when we find out that Hegseth didn’t actually write that, he just published it, you know, and he published it in college as a 20 year old or whatever he was. I think there should be also room for that lady to then change her mind and apologize.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. A lot of us parrot, a lot of us parrot, including probably you and I never.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. How dare you? Parrot bullshit we see online.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, of course. We should give each other room to like, yes, say, I messed up. People don’t want to say that. This is what they have to understand. Even people I don’t like. Listen to me. It’s their strength in that it’s better than digging your heels. There’s strength in saying I was uninformed or was misinformed. I messed up. I’ve said it before. It’s important to do. You got to do it because you can’t have you can’t have an erroneous idea in your head and repeat it over and over again. You can’t have an incorrect, false opinion that you have defended and now you can’t ever accept even with new information that shows that it’s not true.

Lex’s Reflection on His Genghis Khan Podcast

LEX FRIDMAN: I should also say, because it’s sitting in my head on this topic, I’m probably going to do like a five plus hour interview with Jack Weatherford on Genghis Khan. And I read his book. All right. And I don’t, I’m not proud of the way I formulated my for the heck of it. In the beginning of it? In the beginning. I’m still bothered by the looseness with which I talk about rape.

There is, and I don’t think I have in me the eloquence or the skill to improve on that. I think in general, it’s trying to find the right words to describe the historic, the historically accurate thing, the data that we have, and then the narratives. I think the point Jack Weatherford makes is that we keep oscillating back and forth on Genghis Khan. He’s one like this epic great conqueror, like currently Alexander the Great has that good vibes all around him.

JOE ROGAN: Nobody talks about him as a horrible human.

LEX FRIDMAN: Horrible human.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But currently Genghis Khan has this kind of a barbarian, evil, just rapist. Well, they’re so good at it. They were so good at murder. They were so good at war. I mean, just so uniquely good at military strategy. It’s about, he always kept the army to about 100,000, it’s small. So it’s 100,000 horses, each soldier had five horses, so four spare horses with them. So imagine it’s 500,000 horses.

LEX FRIDMAN: Which they used their blood to fuel them.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they would use their blood. They used that for food. So it’s very portable. Logistically, the whole, I mean, just imagine this armada moving at like, they could move like 50 miles a day. This entire army, and they don’t have to follow the roads, which all the military would follow the roads. So you can go around. You can surround. And they did the, as you know, they can retreat, feign retreat, and then attack from the sides.

It’s the blitzkrieg. It’s the genius stuff. A lot of people, including Dan Carlin, say it’s the greatest military in history. It would defeat every single military, including Napoleon, with the musket and everything. They would destroy Napoleon. And then, of course, in the 20th century.

LEX FRIDMAN: You know what they didn’t defeat?

JOE ROGAN: Samurais.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right. But they never really fought.

JOE ROGAN: They did. Twice they fought, but it’s not a real battle. These guys are crazy. They thought they were crazy. These guys were, like, practicing their whole lives for one-on-one combat with swords.

As far as I know, they never really had a full-on battle. I wish they did. There were some battles. There was battles on an island, one of the islands outside of Japan. But the Japanese successfully held off the Mongols. And they were, like, one of the only civilizations to ever pull that off.

LEX FRIDMAN: I think one of the issues with Mongols, except Kublai Khan, is they were not good with water. They didn’t know how to. The ship thing was not.

JOE ROGAN: Oh. What a big mistake. Imagine if they were as good with water as they were with horses. That would have been a real problem.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, a lot of things they had advantage on. Like, for example, they could ride on ice.

JOE ROGAN: How’d they do that?

LEX FRIDMAN: In Mongolia, these people, like, ride horses.

JOE ROGAN: Did they have different horseshoes? Did they even shoe their horses back then?

LEX FRIDMAN: No, I don’t think so.

JOE ROGAN: Really? No, no, no. Like, they don’t have, like, when did they start shoeing horses? That’s a good question. But that doesn’t feel like a Mongol thing.

People can ride the mountain archery. Oh, my God. I’m sure you know about this. The mountain archery is so insane. They had the ability to hang off the side of the horse so they would shoot from under the horse’s neck. So they were completely defended by the horse, and they were shooting arrows. And their bows were 160 pounds.

So you had to be insane. They said that a lot of the skeletons they find from that era, their bones are deformed because your whole body has just been pulling 160 pounds with your right arm or your left arm, like, your whole life. So your right side is, like, insanely muscled, and your bones are all twisted and thicker and denser tendons and everything because they’ve been doing that since they were children. They start out at, like, 2 years old.

Yeah, insanely formidable army, insanely formidable. But here’s something to take into consideration about how Genghis Khan’s genes were spread. Just right off the bat, it’s all awful, all horrible. I wish no one ever got killed by anybody ever. It’s all awful. All war is hell. All of it.

Historical Context of Rape and Survival

LEX FRIDMAN: All is hell. There was so much of it going on throughout human history that women would… There was a survival mechanism in accepting this conqueror as your new husband when he slaughtered your husband. It’s the only way your genes passed on.

So these women were able… I mean, even if they said they fell in love with him, even if they did marry him, even if they were happy to marry him, there was, like, almost an evolutionary requirement because we slaughtered each other so much that if you wanted your genes to pass on, you had to accept the slaughter of your former mate.

And in modern-day society, we would call that rape. Right. But it’s… You have to use different words for that time because there is rape where… like, violent rape as part of war, as part of a mechanism of terror. I think even as just part of society up until, like, a few thousand years ago or even a few hundred years ago, I think human beings…

JOE ROGAN: I’ve had a bunch of friends who have served overseas, and the stories they tell from Afghanistan, especially with the child raping, is bone-curdling. Like, blood-curdling… Just, like, you just want to leave the room when they’re talking. You don’t even want to hear this. You don’t want to think that this is happening, and it’s happening right now because it’s an old culture. It’s an old culture, and it’s separate from the rest of the world. It’s very remote, very difficult to access. You have warlords and herders who are living in these nomadic tribes to this day. Not much different than when Alexander the Great conquered it.

Genghis Khan’s Pragmatism and Progressivism

LEX FRIDMAN: So I should say that Genghis Khan, from everything I understand, was not progressive, but he was very pragmatic. This is why he… Allowed all religions. All religions, which is… Thomas Jefferson, I should say, deeply admired Genghis Khan for this, the freedom of religion. And he didn’t just say freedom of religion. It’s freedom of an individual to practice any religion they want, which is a… It’s like individualism. It’s a really revolutionary, badass idea for that time, for that place.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he was… He recognized strength, and the value of accepting strength, and the strength in unity, the strength in community. If people can worship whatever they want, but all be united under one banner, it’s better than dividing everybody.

LEX FRIDMAN: In the feminist thing that I mentioned, he would put women in power. Why? Is he a feminist? No. He understood that women are able to… Men conquer better, in his perspective, and women rule better, because they keep a stable society.

So he would do… He would marry a woman to the king of the place, and then send the king off to fight. The ruler to fight, knowing for sure he’s going to die. But the woman is now ruling, and then there’s a lot of progressive things about… There were a lot to show their face, especially in the Persian lands, where they conquered. They’re allowed to wear these fancy headdresses, which is… Take a floss a little.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, exactly. The Sikhs got excited about that. Yeah, exactly. New rules.

LEX FRIDMAN: And the other thing, on the… The tricky thing is, the Mongolian tribes, where Genghis Khan came up, by the way, came up from nothing. Father slaughtered. I mean, this is from nothing. They all… That was a common practice, to steal wives, to steal women.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, he had one of his wives stolen, and she came back pregnant. That was like the origin story. The origin story of Genghis Khan, right, is like the love of his life, who was married to him for his whole life, that he proposed, or he said, we’re going to marry, at nine years old. She was kidnapped, and he had to raise an army in order to rescue her back. That was sort of the split in the road. He would have been a normal Mongol, but here he has to raise an army to rescue her back.

LEX FRIDMAN: Wow. Then he realized he’s really good at this whole rescue thing. It started with… That’s sort of crazy.

JOE ROGAN: You know what? What I could find is that the horses were unshod.

LEX FRIDMAN: Unshod. But they did do something that this says here, they used some sort of skin to cover it.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

LEX FRIDMAN: They were around for at least 200 or 300 years before them, so they probably knew about them. Skins. That’s interesting.

Origins of Somali Pirates

LEX FRIDMAN: What you’re saying about him developing the ability and like, hey, I’m really good at this. Do you know that’s exactly what happened with the Somali pirates? Do you know the Somali pirates’ origin story?

JOE ROGAN: No.

LEX FRIDMAN: The Somali pirates called themselves the People’s Coast Guard of Somalia. They were defending their waters against Europeans dumping toxic waste in the ocean. They were fishermen. They found that these ships were dumping water and killing all their fish. These motherfuckers, we’re going to hold them responsible. They boarded these ships, kidnapped them, and said, hey, you have to pay us. We’ve lost all this money from all our fish. We don’t have any fish. Give us money or we’ll kill these motherfuckers.

They gave them money and they said, hey, let’s start kidnapping people. This is way better. Then there’s obviously a narcotic aspect to it because of cat because of the widespread use of this narcotic cat which is like an amphetamine. Is it a leaf? K-H-A-T?

JOE ROGAN: That’s like the guy on the boat. Look, look at me. I’m the captain now. That guy’s cracked out. They’re all real skinny.

Genghis Khan’s Leadership and Meritocracy

LEX FRIDMAN: What’s really important in that dynamic is who is the leader that emerges. That’s the interesting thing about Genghis Khan. He became super powerful. That person could have been incompetent. Genghis Khan could have been a bunch of different people. He instilled one of the really revolutionary things is meritocracy.

By the way, he appointed his kids. Several people, including Marcus Aurelius wrote fancy meditations. He failed as an emperor by appointing his kids. Before him, the five emperors all appointed generals based on merit. Genghis Khan always appointed based on merit. Who’s the best person here to lead the groups? Which is a revolutionary idea for the time because it was usually based on kin. Your relationship, your brothers, your sisters, your father, and so on. That was really important.

The other thing I mentioned about the tribes, the origin story, is everybody would kidnap and actual rape the women. They would steal women in the Mongol Empire. As soon as he won over the entire original Mongolia, he banned. That was a strict rule. There’s no kidnapping of wives. That was a rule for Mongolia and that rule propagated everywhere.

JOE ROGAN: That’s wild. This is what got us into this stuff.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

Historical Context and Perspective

JOE ROGAN: Which is one of the pieces of evidence where there was a lot of cracking down on the whole rape thing. But there’s a caveat of why is there so many dead bodies where the atmosphere changes? Yeah. Why is the carbon footprint different than the human race during the time that he was alive?

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s interesting because we also have to look at things in a perspective of living in the year 1200. What is it? 1240s? When was he around?

JOE ROGAN: I should know this. 12 or 13. Well, Jamie will find out.

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s very hard to do and it’s not apologizing for these people. I’m not saying that we should apply the way they looked at the world today. I think the way we look at the world is infinitely better and we’re moving in an infinitely better direction. And I think we have large extremes that go in one direction and then things push back in the other direction too far. There’s an overcorrection and then they balance out. I think we’re generally moving in a direction of a more kind, more peaceful society. I think we’re better.

That said, 1200 years ago the world was hell. There was no newspapers. No one could read. Where did you get your information from? You got your information from priests and from generals and you shared information from your farmers. The world was horrific. People fought with bows and arrows and cannons and catapults. And murder was commonplace.

If you were 12 years old, you’ve probably seen a few people killed already. It was a different time to be alive. Diseases would kill everybody. There was no medicine. You broke your leg, you’re dead. You get infected, you’re dead. The world was a very, very different place. It was so dangerous and so terrifying.

People relied on their base instincts and the worst aspects of humanity. They relied on that to survive because that was all around you. You had to become a monster if you wanted to live in monstrous times. That’s why the rule of law had to be enforced in a brutal way.

Genghis Khan’s Protection of Merchants

LEX FRIDMAN: One of the really powerful things he did was protect merchants, people that traded. If you mess with people that trade on the Silk Road, you’re going to get slaughtered. It’s not like there’s going to be a process. You get slaughtered.

In fact, one of the reasons I hesitate to say this because people are projecting to the future is that he took Kiev and slaughtered people because they broke the rule of, I forget the term for this, but the people that are sent out to communicate before the battle starts.

JOE ROGAN: Ambassadors. And the ambassadors. The rule is you don’t mess with them. And the Kievan residents killed them.

LEX FRIDMAN: You break the rule, it’s like that’s it. Then it’s total war. And you have to do that. I mean, you don’t have to do that, but that is one of the…

JOE ROGAN: Well, if you’re living back then, you have to do that. Then you look at… But the result is complete slaughter. And by the way, thank you for rescuing me. I said a bunch of stupid stuff, and you’re adding more complexity and depth and nuance.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, we just got started.

JOE ROGAN: I love you, brother.

LEX FRIDMAN: I love you, too.

Getting Ready for a Podcast

JOE ROGAN: I love you to death, man. You know how you, when you begin a podcast, I don’t know if you’re like this, but for me, I got to get cooking. Sometimes that’s one of the reasons why I like to talk to people. I like to talk sometimes for like 15 minutes even before we go on air. The danger is they’re going to say something, and I’m going to ask them to repeat it. I don’t want that. So sometimes I’ll come in hot, and I’m like, let’s just go right now.

But your brain, you don’t know we’re going to talk about the Mongols and rape. And so then all of a sudden, we’re in this very intense conversation about the responsibility you have as a podcaster, which is a crazy thing to say, but you do. You have probably more responsibility than anybody. And then this subject comes up in the middle of that, and then you’re like, uh. And before that, we were joking about ejaculating in space.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, that’s how we started it.

JOE ROGAN: Bro, I mean, we used to open up some of the most serious conversations this podcast ever had with a Fleshlight ad.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. The early days of the podcast, that was the only sponsor we had. So it’s like, you know, this is, again, you reacting to criticism, right? So it’s like the fear of the criticism of you yourself knowing you could have done a better job of explaining that had you prepared something, which is really the difference between off-the-cuff conversations and, like, your actual well-considered thoughts on things expressed in the best way possible, which is what you would do if you’re going to write it out, if you’re going to write a sub-stack piece about it.

Creating a Healthy Relationship with the Internet

JOE ROGAN: Well, one of the things I’m trying to do for myself personally, I think a lot of people have to do this, young kids have to do this, is figure out how to create, like, a psychological framework where I’m not affected by the Internet. It sounds, like, ridiculous to say, but you say, don’t read the comments, but they come at you. They’ll find their way, and I need to…

LEX FRIDMAN: It doesn’t work. Nobody’s good at it. Even Elon’s not good at it. Just post and ghost. Post and ghost. Post things you think are interesting and just get out of there. Don’t read stuff about yourself.

JOE ROGAN: Someone said this, I think it was Anthony Hopkins, he was talking about someone’s opinion of him, he said, that doesn’t concern me.

LEX FRIDMAN: No. Was it Anthony Hopkins?

JOE ROGAN: I think it was. But he was like, their opinions of me are not my business.

LEX FRIDMAN: But let’s add to this little puzzle. What if a bunch of your friends, say you’re getting cancer online, by the way, Tucker Carlson is good at this, he doesn’t read anything.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he doesn’t even have social media.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. I know. I always want to send him things, but these motherfuckers aren’t even going to look at this. What if, like, all your friends have read the thing, right, or your parents, or so on, your loved ones, like, and the thing could be just a bunch of lies about you.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

LEX FRIDMAN: Like, for me, that’s a little bit of a tricky thing.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s not something you should ignore, right? If you want to make a statement, there’s nothing wrong with that. What I’m saying is, don’t regularly engage in people’s opinions of the product that you put out.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

Negative Commentary Online

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think it’s healthy for you, because I think, first of all, I’ve said this before, I’m only kind of joking, but I’m kind of serious, most people commenting are losers. Sorry. If you’re doing it all the time, and you’re doing it in a negative way all the time, and this is not everybody, there’s a lot of, like, really well thought out commentary on YouTube videos that I see, on, if occasionally I’ll read someone’s Instagram page, and I’ll read my friend’s comments, some people are brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but it is a haven for fuckheads.

It’s a place where people can go and just try to insult people and say the most negative thing possible, and they generally, I think, there’s generally a lot of, like, dull-minded people that gravitate towards the negativity. You know where that differs? It’s Christians, which is interesting. Like, a lot of, like, low wattage Christians are still super nice, you know, and they’ll just praise Jesus and look for forgiveness, the real ones, right? Which is a great thing that we should all aspire to.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, like the default state is super nice.

Thoreau and the Unnatural World

JOE ROGAN: Yes, default state. What you’re supposed to do, if you really follow Jesus’ teaching, is, like, be completely nonviolent and be a beautiful person and love everybody like it’s your brother. That’s what he wants. That’s like, you know, and if you follow that, but there’s just too many assholes and too many disgruntled people out there that have terrible lives.

You know, the most men lead lives of quiet desperation, the Thoreau line that I love so dearly, it’s such a great line. That’s so true and maybe even more true today because of the unnatural world in which we’re thrust in. So not only are people doing things that they hate most of the time, but they’re also engaging with their phone more than they are with people. So they’re engaging in this very bizarre, non-physical way that is detached from any human interaction, detached from emotions, eye contact, the feel of being with someone, the back and forth of a conversation between two people.

Steel Manning in Disagreements

JOE ROGAN: Like if you and I were going to disagree about something, if there was like some political thing or some social thing that you and I disagreed about, we could sit and just, I want to know why you think the way you think. Like I want to know. Like if you think of a thing and I disagree with it, the first thing I want to know is, and this is not something I always had. I got way better at this in my life as I’ve gotten older and had more conversations with people. You got to like absolutely know what this person thinks. Don’t like attack it. Don’t twist it around. Don’t distort it.

You have to kind of steel man it. You have to be as charitable to that position as possible. And then occasionally when you find things that you disagree with, you have to stop and you have to say, okay, here’s my problem with this. And it has to be done in good faith. You have to be doing it not to win. You have to be doing it to figure out what’s right.

Attachment to Opinions and Ideology

JOE ROGAN: And everybody’s so attached to their opinions and their ideology that most of the time, most conversations are had where one person, at least on social media, one person is trying to win. You’re trying to win all the time. You’re playing this stupid game. It’s a dumbass game where everybody’s a loser.

LEX FRIDMAN: But we just watched the Piers Morgan thing. That’s the same thing. It clearly pulled in your attention.

JOE ROGAN: I love it. You’re aware of it. See, you love it. You’re part of the problem, Joe.

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, 100%. I’m a huge part of the problem. Don’t get me wrong. Meaning you’re a human being.

JOE ROGAN: Well, yeah. Well, also, how much do I contribute to people wasting their time? TikTok reels, Instagram reels, Twitter things. How many Twitter articles get written about every stupid thing I said? I mean, for three days, Dragon Believer was trending. It’s because some wacky old lady thinks I believe in dragons. But this is just the nature of the world.

JOE ROGAN: I love that aspect of the Internet. I love the wacky shit. Even the Ukraine war footage, which is horrible, what it’s doing is giving you a more nuanced version of the world. And some of it’s not good. I watched a video today of a guy who got killed by a tiger. Well, he didn’t get killed by a tiger. He got torn apart by a tiger. The wounds, man. The wounds. I didn’t think, what would a tiger do to you if a tiger bit your face? You want to see?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. I know you do. You’re getting a little curious. I’m switching over to Android, buddy. Welcome. Yeah, I just have a few more steps that I have to do before I switch over. And I’m going to try to communicate only with encrypted apps from now on.

JOE ROGAN: Hey, is WhatsApp signal?

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s just sort of like limiting Twitter replies to registered accounts. You know how people like to do that? I’m going to try to do that. I’m going to try to use WhatsApp for everything. I was going to use Signal, but…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I don’t know. The people that use Signal, I don’t know. It seems too secret squirrel. I don’t even know what that means, but yeah. You sound like you’re a spy of using Signal.

LEX FRIDMAN: I use it, though. I use it all the time. I mean, I’m totally being hypocritical here.

Graphic Internet Videos

JOE ROGAN: What was I looking at? Oh, the tiger thing. Bro, this one’s rough. This one’s rough. This is Tom Segura. I sent it to him today. Tom Segura and I send each other every day the worst shit that we can find on the internet. And it has been, like, legitimately, it’s been one of the worst aspects of modern life for me. It’s like every fucking day, me and Tom are sending each other guys getting killed by assassins. Nice. It’s every day. There’s so many footage, so many videos of cartel members whacking people. After a while, you’re like, holy shit, I don’t know if I can do this anymore. Like, every day, someone’s getting run over by a truck. Every day.

And you’re, that’s, so here it is. So this guy, they’re shooting at the, give me some volume so you can hear this. So they shot at the tigers just before this because this guy had been bitten up. And so, see, they’re shooting at him right now. And the tiger’s like, nah, bitch. And the tiger’s just biting down on this guy. So this, so this is what the guy looked like. This is his wounds. Wow. Not dead? Bro. Look at his head. Wow. I mean, his bone is exposed. Oh, he’s moving. Yeah, no, he’s alive, dude. What the fuck? Look at his face. Watch him show his face. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. So this guy climbed into a wildlife enclosure. Those were not wild tigers. It was, they were, you know, I don’t want to say tamed. They’re not tamed. But they’re in some way at least minimized in their effectiveness.

Paul Rosolie’s Conservation Work

LEX FRIDMAN: You know, our buddy Paul sent me that. Paul Rosolie sent me that.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. So this does remind me of the jungle. Yeah. Bro. Our buddy Paul is fearless. He’s a bad motherfucker. Yeah. Paul Rosolie is a bad motherfucker. That guy is literally putting his money where his mouth is, where his life is, trying to save the Amazon, like living in it, helping people, you know, hiring people to guard it, taking people that were chopping the wood, chopping the trees down, and then giving them a new job to protect the trees. It’s fucking amazing. And he feels the pain. He literally, like physically, feels the pain of lost trees.

He sent me something. I don’t even know if I’m allowed to talk about it, but if we’re not, I’ll edit it out afterwards. But he sent me a video. I can’t show the video, but he sent me a video of an uncontacted tribe that he discovered.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. Did he send you that?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Fucking insane. Yeah, it’s insane. Just complete uncontacted tribe naked in the forest, hundreds of them, and they’re like pushing these boats filled with bananas out to them to give them food. The reason, we could probably talk about it, they try not to show it so that people don’t show up and try to find them.

LEX FRIDMAN: Exactly. You want to kind of protect them.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. That’s why I don’t know if we could even talk about it, but he has brought up the uncontacted tribe before on the show, and one of his friends was murdered by one. One of the tribes, he was, these guys drop off food to these people. One day they’re like, you know what? Enough. Whap. I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. We hung out. We talked to a guy that works with Paul that has like a scar from a spear.

JOE ROGAN: Jeez. Yeah. Jeez. Bro. At least 100 uncontacted groups in the rainforest. Unbelievable, man. They’re living like they were living 20,000 years ago. Maybe even more. You know? Completely uncontacted. That is to me one of the most fascinating aspects of human life today. It’s not just that we’re on the verge of quantum computing and AI becoming sentient. It’s that we’re coexisting at the same time with people that have a completely subsistence-based lifestyle with the stuff that’s around them. You know? Stone tools. Literally. Pointed sticks for spears. They’ve been doing this for thousands and thousands of years. And they’re living at the same time as smartphone addiction.

LEX FRIDMAN: Not only that, those people probably, their roots go, they could be the original civilization. I mean, I believe that there is. Look at that.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that crazy? Look at those people. That is so wild. Man, that would be so. If you could just be a fucking fly on the wall and observe that life like without interfering somehow. So just remotely. God, that would be so incredible. You would be doing what the aliens are doing right now.

JOE ROGAN: I think that is what they’re doing. I think it’s real similar. I really do. I think if you just looked at the natural progression of human beings and what we’re talking about with quantum computing and AI and the technological innovations that are without doubt going to hit us like a tsunami over the next 20 years, 30 years, whatever it is. What are we going to become? We’re going to become what they are. The same kind of thing. And if there was a planet that had something like us that’s emerging and just figuring out how to split the atom and still involved in tribal warfare, a primate that’s still involved with tribal warfare but now has nuclear bombs, that’s us. Also dick pics. Also OnlyFans. Also just massive social media addicts all over the entire planet while we’re engaging in tribal warfare with hypersonic weapons.

So they would be studying us the same way we’re studying these folks. Same thing. When we find out a guy got hit with a spear, we’re like, oh, fuck, what happened? These people are crazy. You’ve got to be careful. When Paul was saying that they were there and they realized that the tribe was close, like they were starting to hear things and they realized they were probably being hunted and they just got the fuck out of there as quick as they could, that’s terrifying.

I do not want to wake up to news on my feed that Paul Rosolie got killed by an uncontacted tribe.

LEX FRIDMAN: That guy leaps into adventure. I’ve gotten the chance to hang out with him and it’s great. I haven’t met many people like him in the way that you’ve described but also in the way where he sees, Elon is a little bit like this actually, he sees the opportunity for adventure and he just leaps into it. There’s not a deep, deliberate process of strategy and planning and so on. It’s just something pulls at him and that’s a really fun person to be with but couple that with just extreme confidence. He’s good at surviving. He’s good at taking risks and good at surviving. So like the uncontacted tribes or the crazy shit we did in the jungle just like getting lost and almost dying, all that kind of stuff. And he’s a really nice guy. Super nice. Really nice guy and it’s just like there’s something to that. He’s an actual good person. He’s really doing this for a good cause.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, yeah. And it’s not just the Amazon rainforest. He’s also gone to Africa and India and sort of trying to save nature. I mean you go out hunting. The forest is a bit different than like the Amazon rainforest. Their life is like

JOE ROGAN: It’s a lot different. It’s like real intense. There’s a lot. You’re in the middle of a soup of life. When you have that much life, just think about the amount of insects. You were around it, the buzzing at night. Explain that, what that sounds like.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, it’s an orchestra. I mean it’s millions of little organisms and it’s screaming. There’s no silence at night.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They’re all fucking. They’re all screaming and fucking and killing each other. And it’s all life eats life all around you. It’s life eating life.

LEX FRIDMAN: And one of the ways to experience that is the sound. The other way is just standing there. Stuff starts crawling at you pretty quickly.

JOE ROGAN: Did you get bit by a bullet ant?

LEX FRIDMAN: No, but you know step very close to it. There’s a lot.

JOE ROGAN: I want to get bit by one. In the context here, I would love to get bit by one. Would you do it on the podcast?

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh yeah. With Brian and Bullet Ants? Yeah. Let’s go.

JOE ROGAN: You have to take a day off of everything else, I think.

LEX FRIDMAN: What are you, a pussy?

JOE ROGAN: I think you do. I think you don’t want to be interviewing a person about AI just sweating. Just sweating in agony. I think. Everybody likes to think they have super high pain tolerance. You know that about men? It’s fun. Men always like to think, oh man, I’ve got fucking crazy pain tolerance. Meanwhile, don’t women have a much higher pain tolerance? Much higher. You know what’s the highest? Red-headed women.

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh. That explains a lot.

JOE ROGAN: This is up for debate, but I sent Jamie something recently. Do you remember that thing I sent you? We were talking about it on the podcast multiple times because I had read that that they had a higher pain threshold. I’m like, that’s weird. I wonder why.

Well, because everybody’s been fucking with gingers forever. They’ve been beating their ass. They’re like an MMA guy who’s got two older brothers. You know? They’re fucking, they can take it. The scariest MMA fighters have older brothers who used to beat them up. Because they’re ready to fucking throw down all the time. Like, the scariest guys or an abusive stepdad. Those two. That makes a scary guy. Or an abusive father. The guys that I know that are the fucking scariest, they had abusive dads. They had people that beat them up when they were young. And they just get fucking used to going, just ready to go. They don’t have a fear of going. They want to go. They want to go all the time. Let’s fucking go. Like, they’ve just been, that’s the only way to survive.

If you’re a kid and you have a brother who’s four years old and your dad is a raging alcoholic and he beats your mom in front of you and your brother beats your ass too, like, fuck, man. You better be hard or you’re not going to make it. There’s no pillow to cry into, man. You’ve got to fight your brother. He’s four years older than you. He might knock you out today. He knocked you out last week. He laughs at you when you’re on your back.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. I mean, not to return to the topic, but Genghis Khan murdered his older brother because he was picking on him. Because he stole his fish.

JOE ROGAN: Stole his fish. Yeah, he said, fuck you. Shot him with a bow and arrow. The mom freaked out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Called him a monster. She was right. Well, also, you learn how to kill your brother when you’re, you know, what was he, six? Wasn’t he? Yeah, something like that. Something like that, yeah. Like this? And he gets married at nine.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, you’re getting off on the wrong foot. And conquers an empire at 16. But they didn’t expect you to live past 30. You know? If you got to 30, you were an old fuck back then. Meanwhile, Genghis Khan lived, like, into his 60s, I think.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He lived really long and he was consulting with monks because he was trying to figure out how to live longer. How to live forever. He was like, you know, he felt the iron ebbing from his blood. And he felt the body weaken. And he wanted to visit today. He’d be on TRT. He’d be great. Meanwhile, his kids are kind of disappointing. I mean, it’s like…

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, of course. Yeah. Isn’t that always the case?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s the thing. Like, show me a man who’s a great man who’s the son of a great man. It’s tough. It’s tough. It’s a hard road. I mean, you have to have a very exceptional father who recognizes the requirements that this kid is going to go through if you’re Genghis Khan’s son. And meanwhile, you’re also running an empire.

Like, raising kids is… It is a very involving thing. And it’s a nuanced thing. And you have to know which ones to push and which ones to just let them be themselves, which ones to support, which ones to encourage, and how to encourage and how to instill discipline, how to show them how important it is to feel the pain of loss and to feel like failure and to understand that this doesn’t make you a bad person. These are just the lessons of life and the energy that comes with doing something well and throwing yourself into something and finding success versus half-assing your existence and feeling filled with misery and regret. And that’s a difficult thing when you’re sleeping on silk sheets.

LEX FRIDMAN: You know, that was like what Marvin Hagler used to talk about. Like, you know, it’s hard to get up in the morning and run when you’re sleeping in silk sheets. He was talking about the pull of as you become successful, boxers get softer. And it’s because they start getting rich. You know, and then, you know, just chill a little bit. Well, if you have a son then and the son’s growing up rich and you’re chill, like, man. Like, you want to make a conqueror? You want to make a champion fighter? Give them a rough childhood.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think you should do it. You definitely shouldn’t be mean to your kid just so that they can be a badass fighter.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, I think it’s also there’s probably a balance you can hit, but a lot of these folks, because they had nothing, they want to spoil their kids. They go too far in the other direction.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s harder to be a strict parent, I think. Mitzi Shore used to ignore Pauly just to make him funnier. She talked about it. She talked about ignoring him when he was crying.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, it’ll make him funny. She was right. She knew what she was doing. But it’s like to do that, if you’re a conqueror and you came up from shooting your brother with a bow and arrow and then raising an army to take back your wife and then you have children and your children are born when you’re 40 and you’ve got this insane empire that’s like one of the most spectacular and impressive military accomplishments. If you just look at it in terms of just the sheer numbers of human beings they sent into the reincarnation cycle. I mean, it’s a crazy number, man.

They killed somewhere between I think the estimates are 50 to 60 million people over the course of his lifetime.

JOE ROGAN: 10% of the population of Earth.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, and how by direct… Brutal, one-on-one contact. Bows and arrows, fire, catapults, swords, spears, trampled. And through all of that it doesn’t seem like power corrupted the guy. So he was big on unmarked grave, no statues were allowed to be made of him, no paintings, no anything. Not just that, they killed everybody that was involved in it. The people that went to bury him, another group came out to kill them and then another group came out to kill the people that killed them. They came in three waves so that no one would have any idea where Genghis Khan is buried. And we still don’t know.

Leadership and Admiration

LEX FRIDMAN: You know, that’s one of the qualities of… There’s a perception of Zelensky, sort of the actor, the showman, all that kind of stuff. Some of that is true. But in his interactions that I’m aware of with the soldiers, there is no… Like he wants to be on the exact same level, sleep on the same bunks. No glamour, none of that. Which I personally admire in a leader in general. Just walk amongst the soldiers. It’s a very admirable thing.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, if you’re going to ask people to leave… Could you imagine if Biden was at the front line? You know what I’m saying? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you see Kamala Harris at the front line in Afghanistan. Could you see that? No. Did you see Obama at the front line? No. Did you see Trump at the front line? Out of here. 78 years old, leave him alone.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. It’s a very admirable thing. And that’s the thing if people have always said the number one concern that people have with the military-industrial complex is sending young men to die in a war that’s unnecessary for profit while you are in an air-conditioned office. Right? That was during Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Who was it? McGovern? Did McGovern say that? But it was a very powerful speech. He said, I’m tired of watching these old men in air-conditioned offices send young men to die in these unnecessary wars.

JOE ROGAN: Actually… But if you’re willing to be out there too, that’s a very different thing. That’s a very different thing.

LEX FRIDMAN: I mean, some people make the argument that a president should moderate how much they do that because you could die. But it also wears on… To make compromised decisions in the realm of geopolitics, in the realm of war, you have to have a bit of coldness. If you really feel the pain of soldiers, you may make unwise decisions.

JOE ROGAN: In terms of diplomatic decisions?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yes. In terms of, for example, you’ve seen a lot of people die. Children die. And if you’ve seen enough, the idea of quote-unquote peace is a dirty word.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Like, you want justice.

LEX FRIDMAN: Isn’t that a problem right now, not just in Ukraine but also in Gaza?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, this is the thing that… The sheer number of people that died that had nothing to do with it is crazy. It’s crazy. I think the most recent estimate, and they don’t even know because there’s so many people that are under rubble, the most recent estimate was somewhere north of 60,000 people.

And how many of them are kids? Like, what’s the number of kids that have been killed by missiles that have done nothing wrong? Like, what’s that number? And those kids have families. And those kids have mothers and brothers and sisters and some people that lived and some people that died. And whoever makes it out of that, you want to radicalize somebody. You want to radicalize somebody to just want nothing but revenge. I can think of no better way. No better way.

Middle East Conflict and Conspiracies

JOE ROGAN: And here Donald Trump is tasked with going in there and trying to make peace. I think I’m pretty optimistic about just knowing the skill set of all the people involved in Israel-Palestine, in Russia-Ukraine. I’m pretty optimistic about… I can’t believe those people, those hostages are still alive.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. How many of them are still alive now?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know what the exact numbers are. But it’s crazy that they were not freed sooner. The whole thing is horrible. From top to bottom. Including all the people that have decided what happened. People that are saying it was definitely a false flag. Like, these things are complicated. These things are complicated. It’s definitely… Whenever something horrible happens and someone messed up… Like, someone messed up. Israel is the most protected place on earth. It’s one of the most secure countries on earth. For them to let something like that happen is just a huge mess up.

But what I had heard was that there was also a lot of troops that were stationed near where there were protests. So there was a lot of protests about Netanyahu before October 7th happened. Which most people weren’t even aware of. There was hundreds of thousands of people in the streets protesting Netanyahu before October 7th.

So then October 7th comes and then all of a sudden… Now, whenever you have any sort of military engagement any sort of… You’re at war right now. When those things happen one of the first things that happens is all the protests and all the bullshit stops. Because now a bunch of people got killed. And when anything like that happens and you are now involved in a country-wide assault on this other country everything else gets put aside.

And so the big conspiracy fear has always been when a leader knows that they’re going to get pushed out they’ll start a false flag or start a war. So they look at October 7th and they say they let that happen. Or they say they had knowledge of it they knew it was going to happen but they wanted an excuse to raze Gaza. They wanted an excuse to just have a full-on bombing campaign against Hamas.

I mean, you definitely need to look at the incentives there. That’s one of the concerns in Ukraine for President Zelensky. The prospect of ending the war. Because right now the country is unified. If you end the war and you have elections now you have to face a lot of the consequences internally about the potential discovery of corruption about the suspension of democracy about all these things.

Long-Form Conversations and Immigration

JOE ROGAN: And the same thing with Netanyahu who, by the way, also they want to do a three-hour podcast with me. I talked to him before October 7th for an hour. I regret talking to him for an hour. One of the things I really learned a lot from you and from just myself you can’t do. One of the things I really don’t like what happened with me talking to Donald Trump is like 40 minutes with Donald Trump. It was a mistake. I was almost willing to do that with Kamala Harris. I was entertaining the 45 minute one. I was entertaining. Because I was like maybe if I could just come in at a 10 to work my brain up. Like really come in and just engage with her real quick. I just wanted to get loose.

The problem is I want to see how you are as a real person.

LEX FRIDMAN: I think actually genuinely with you and Kamala Harris I think 45 minutes is horrible. But I think you’re so skilled and compassionate. It’s fun. It’s fun to talk to you. I think you would just end up being much, much longer. That’s the hope.

JOE ROGAN: If that’s the hope. Yeah. There would be questions though. Some questions would be very complicated like the immigration question. I would say what’s happening? What is happening? Do you think that there should be limitations to this? Do you think it should be stopped outright? Do you think we should round up all the people that we know that are terrorists that made it across?

Are we keeping track of them? Do we know how many? Do we know what happened? Do we know why it happened? Why are people opposed to the idea of cracking down on Border Patrol, making more soldiers available, putting walls up everywhere? What is the reason to not do this? Tell me what you’re thinking. And when people start talking about labor, they’re talking about bringing in labor and then our population is lower. Chuck Schumer brought that up. He talked about we need workers. And I’m like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are we saying? We don’t – is that really what the problem is, that Americans aren’t willing to do jobs and you want to bring in illegal people?

How about we just make legal immigration easier for poor people that are trying to get over here? How about we just scan them, screen them, make sure that they’re not murderers, make sure they’re not cartel members, and then let them in easier? Wouldn’t that be a better way to do it, to vet people? But the idea of not vetting people just doesn’t make any sense at all. That would have been a problem. That conversation would have been a problem because it doesn’t make any sense at all.

JOE ROGAN: And I’m a grandchild of immigrants. I believe in immigration. I think America is the shining light in the world. Like if you can get here, you can actually make something happen. There’s not a caste system. They actually reward people from started from the bottom, now we’re here. Like that’s a thing here, although that’s Drake, he’s Canada. But it’s that thought.

LEX FRIDMAN: That’s going to be America soon, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we’re going to take over Canada for sure. Yeah, that needs to happen. Yeah, 51st state. Let’s go. Puerto Rico’s next. You’ve got to become a real state now, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico’s got a weird thing where you’re allowed to not pay taxes, but you can’t vote. Do you know that deal? That’s the Peter Schiff deal. You don’t vote, but you don’t pay federal income tax.

I don’t think you’re going to go to jail someday. I think one day they’re going to pull you inside and go, “We changed that rule and you owe us $4 billion in back taxes, you criminal. What are you doing out here? Hanging out on this island, just stealing money.”

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, we definitely need legal immigration, the idea of bringing the best people in the world here. But also, Marc Andreessen talks about this. We need to make sure we recruit the Midwest, the farm boys. Get them to do epic stuff inside Americans.

JOE ROGAN: Well, here’s step one. Ramp up the education system.

Jesus Christ. At what point in time do we not say, How far do we have to slip down the list of the best performing students in the world before someone comes along and says, Hey, the whole thing about this place is if our kids are losers, they’re going to grow up to become loser adults. Make it way easier to be a winner. What’s the best way to do that? Have a way better education system. Just imagine if they completely revamped the education system in this country. Just poured a shitload of money and had the wisest minds come up with a brilliant strategy for more creative ways of approaching learning, pushing people into viable pathways that maybe didn’t even exist when the education system was structured. Because things have changed so much in the world.

You could probably do a way better job than we’re doing, which would make people come out of that that would emerge better qualified people. So we would get more shit done in America. So America would prosper overall. The GDP would grow. Everything would be better. You’d have less poverty. That’s where they need to start. It’s not just letting all the immigrants.

How about fix what we got here and then expand that outward? Make this place the best it can be and then expand that idea out to the rest of the world. So instead of letting everybody walk here from third world countries, because third world countries suck, expand what’s better out to the rest of the world.

LEX FRIDMAN: And a big part of that is actually culturally changing, accepting, celebrating, venerating meritocracy. The guy in the class, having gone to school in the Soviet Union, I was good at math and I was actually, believe it or not, super cool because I was good at math in class. I was the cool kid because I was good at math.

JOE ROGAN: In America, we think you’re a dork. Shut the fuck up, bitch. I think it’s wrong. I think they’re wrong. You should get violent. You should. But I think they’re wrong, but it’s a fascinating thing to make fun of the smart kid. Especially math. Look at that fucking robot over there. Science. Isn’t that weird?

LEX FRIDMAN: But honestly, in all walks of life, sports is a little better. We do celebrate great athletes, but there’s still kind of this participation trophy thing. There’s still a kind of sense where we want to help the people that aren’t quite as good at a thing.

JOE ROGAN: That’s only with little kids, though. Sports are there. How little? Once kids get into the teenage years, sports is a meritocracy.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yes, but culturally, do we really say this is amazing that this person is winning? Yeah. I want to take you to a Texas football game. Well, Texas is different.

JOE ROGAN: This is what America should be. This is what America should be. It should all be fired up.

LEX FRIDMAN: But not just about football. No, but all kinds of things. But about everything. Music, math. Here’s the problem.

JOE ROGAN: Football, like physics. Quarterbacks get laid. All right. That’s a handsome guy.

LEX FRIDMAN: That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Okay, scientists. Physicists in the Soviet Union will get a lot of pussy.

JOE ROGAN: What about Feynman?

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, he got, yes. Yeah. But he’s another level.

JOE ROGAN: Those guys were freaks, right? Oppenheimer, you saw the movie. He was a freak. Yeah. Those guys were studs because they were the smart people and there was a lot of grad students that wanted to fuck the professor. And that was normal stuff back then.

LEX FRIDMAN: But I don’t know if they were studs in the general population.

JOE ROGAN: They were studs in a way. They were like, look, Einstein was a national hero, right? There’s no one like that today. There’s no one scientist that’s groundbreaking research of theory of relativity where everybody’s aware of it. There’s nothing like that today.

LEX FRIDMAN: We celebrate people like Neil deGrasse Tyson who are communicators of science.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but not to the same extent. He’s criticized way more than Einstein ever was. Einstein was pretty celebrated. Even Feynman, for the people that knew him, he was a cultural figure. He wasn’t an obscure name. If you brought up Richard Feynman, most people that watch the news and read newspapers probably know who he is if they were in their 30s. That’s not the case today for, say, someone who’s groundbreaking research of AI or someone who’s involved in quantum computing. It’s just a few of these science communicators.

Brian Cox, guys like him were great at it in terms of space. And some guys are better at it in terms of talking about AI or talking about all the different emerging technologies because there’s so many of them. But there’s no one person other than Elon. But Elon’s such a unique character. You can’t put him in the same category as Einstein because he’s just a cultural weirdness. Like, who is this guy? Making memes, cracking jokes, dunking on people, telling people to go fuck themselves, buys Twitter. It runs a bunch of different companies simultaneously while playing video games constantly.

That doesn’t fit in anywhere else. That’s a very unique thing that exists, this Elon Musk guy. He’s one of the most unique human beings in all of history.

LEX FRIDMAN: But you can’t even move to even the Jeff Bezos, who, by the way, successfully launched the first rocket yesterday to orbit, which is incredible. Amazing. I think that should be venerated.

JOE ROGAN: Sure, but he’s not doing the calculations and designing and engineering the machines like Wernher von Braun was. So it’s like what we’re fascinated by today is different. It’s like we’re fascinated by these public figures that talk about the work that’s going on, but the people that are actually doing it, there’s not one standout.

LEX FRIDMAN: Although to say both Jeff Bezos and Elon are legit good engineers, to see them on the factory floor, they know what they’re doing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, for sure. But the thing about Elon is weird. He just does so many things. You get confused. You’re like, how can you do this? And was talking about possibly buying TikTok. I wonder if they would go after him if he did that. Would that be like a minute? But Bezos, or rather Zuckerberg rather, they bought Instagram. So they have Facebook and Instagram. Why couldn’t you have TikTok and Twitter? What are you talking about? Monopoly-wise? Yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t think they’ll go after him. They’re trying to split up Google right now, Alphabet. Really? Like to make maybe Chrome or YouTube its own business. There’s an argument. There is some argument, but like they—

JOE ROGAN: The crazy thing about YouTube is how effective it is, right? Like YouTube is—just think it seems so straightforward to just have a place where people can upload videos. Okay. That’s straightforward. Everybody should be able to make one of those. But no, there’s just one.

LEX FRIDMAN: Really hard to actually pull that off on the engineering side to be able to like— Oh, yeah. There’s just no other place like it to be able to host that much data. How about the scale? Just the volume.

JOE ROGAN: The volume of fucking data that comes into their site every day. Yeah. And then there’s people, of course, online sort of criticizing YouTube for censorship, blah, blah, blah. They should, though.

LEX FRIDMAN: They should. But like, hey, more people need to be like, this fucking thing exists. It’s like Wi-Fi on the airplane. It’s like this is—there’s no other platform like YouTube in terms of like the set of features, the community they create, the search and discover.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Do you think Apple regrets having it—being one of the first built-in apps on the iPhone? That could have had a lot to do with the growth. Well, it definitely did, I’m sure. They didn’t make it, but they included it. Right. Also, Google Maps was, too, so they made their own. Well, I mean, you probably want to have the best shit on your phone if you want people to buy it.

You’re kind of trapped. Everybody knows YouTube is the best shit. And if you get YouTube on an Android phone natively, instantly, which you can, when you get an Android phone, it already has YouTube loaded onto it. Why wouldn’t you load it on an iPhone? Everybody uses YouTube. You’ve got to pick your battles. This is 2007, though. That’s true.

You can only have three-minute videos. You’re right. They probably didn’t realize how big YouTube was going to be, right? But what they did do that’s the sneakiest thing that drives me crazy is the 30%. So, like, if you start an app, you put an app in the App Store, the Apple Store, they get 30%? Like, that’s crazy. Because YouTube dominates so much, if people get censored, that’s really painful. Yeah.

Well, they’re so in control of the video market. Yeah. I don’t envy it. It’s got to be an insane place to try to manage. But it’s just kind of wild that no one else has been able to come up with anything even remotely close. You’ve got Rumble. They do really well. But Rumble is like a very conservative, ivermectin-using, libertarian sort of space.

The opposite of Blue Sky. Blue Sky is like… Exactly. But there’s a lot of left-wing shows on Rumble. Rumble is essentially like a legitimate free speech platform. They don’t censor left-wing views. Isn’t Breaking Point, are they on Rumble? I watch them on YouTube.

I was thinking Twitch for a while, though, was kind of close, and then Amazon bought it. Right. Twitch was close. But then when Amazon bought it, Twitch kind of disappeared. It’s still a thing, but it doesn’t make money. It’s not profitable. Arguably, neither is YouTube. But isn’t that crazy?

Like, if they didn’t buy it, maybe it would have been. Because Twitch was huge. It still is. Really? Yeah. I mean, that’s what kids watch. But a lot of kids, they stream everywhere now, right? And there’s a bunch of…

Is video games different? That’s right. Is there a bunch of different… Twitch became more…

It was just on TV, and it’s kind of reverted back to it now. Most of the popular stuff is IRL streaming, people walking around, going places, doing streaming, doing nonsense. That’s so weird. And so what are the video games streamed on? What does everybody like? It’s still that. It’s still that. There’s been a few other ones that have tried.

People like YouTube tried to do it. Facebook tried to do it. Microsoft tried to do it. It didn’t work. Twitch is still… No, I watch video game streams on YouTube. YouTube is still there. Twitter has now tried to do it, but the Microsoft one went away.

YouTube doesn’t really advertise the live streaming stuff very well. You can find it, but it’s not… So essentially, it’s just Twitch for video games. It’s dominant, for sure. Dominant. Dominant. Okay. I’m just old.

So I thought there was a bunch of new ones that were good, though, that people were using. It took off, but it’s not. Everyone sort of went back to Twitch after they made a deal. So was that a deal where they get a famous streamer, and they say, hey, we’re going to give you money to come over to this new platform, and then they try to start the platform?

Yeah, and that’s a good idea. You buy everyone to come over, and hopefully everyone sticks. It just didn’t stick. Just think about the resources you would have to have if you wanted to take on YouTube.

Like, look if Elon had decided, like, okay, we need to turn X into the new YouTube. Well, he kind of wants to do that, right? Yeah. But if you wanted to start a separate app, because Twitch – or, excuse me, X is still mostly people exchanging information, mostly exchanging hyperlinks.

The closest thing it’s to is, like, TikTok on the video. The short video clips is good. So I could see, actually, Elon buying TikTok. It makes total sense, and integrating it into X. Yeah. But in terms of long-form content, it’s just not quite there because you have to implement all of these features. And it is, engineering-wise, really difficult to have that much video. We upload hours at a time.

Yeah. Hours. So think about it. Like, each one of our shows is at least two hours, three hours mostly. That’s so much fucking data. If you’re letting everybody do that, how much are you paying for bandwidth? Like, what is that like? Because it’s free, and then you have to get ads.

And then the ad is like, hey, we don’t want anybody saying fuck. Oh, shit. All right, put up a filter. Get rid of all the fuck so that Paul Malove can sell their fucking hand soap.

YouTube Censorship and Business Model

JOE ROGAN: Whatever it is, whoever is getting upset at us. Oh, did someone talk about the vaccine? Yeah, you can’t get an ad because we’re trying to sell vaccine ads, so don’t be difficult. Don’t ruin my giant business that I’ve created on your data.

But it is surprising that nobody has built a competitor. Not even close. And it just shows how incredible the teams are, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, they nailed it. This is what they did. They made the perfect algorithm to constantly show you things you’re interested in. You know, when I go to my YouTube feed, they’re right every day. Every day they’re right. I’m like, oh, I’m interested in that. Oh, when was that built? Oh, look at that. Oh, is that real? This is what they got me every day.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I actually tweeted complaining a little bit about YouTube recently. We had a whole meeting. What were you complaining about?

Multi-Language Audio Feature

LEX FRIDMAN: So they have this incredible – I don’t want to complain about Wi-Fi on the airplane before saying the positive. So they have this incredible feature called MLA, multi-language audio. I don’t know if you know about this, but you can have multiple tracks of audio for a single podcast or video in different languages. So I had to do that for a Zelensky interview that’s overdubbed into three languages for the different –

JOE ROGAN: Did you use AI to do that or did you hire people?

LEX FRIDMAN: So I did both, but in this case I did AI because of the voice cloning. There’s something really intimate and powerful about hearing the person speak in that language. And I’ve just found out that, you know, for example, on audio, people listen to the Zelensky interview, it’s dubbed into English. He’s speaking Russian or Ukrainian.

They listen and they enjoy it. Like you could see the numbers. You could see how they write to me personal messages, how they – you know, on Instagram stories, they’re listening to it in English.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And they’re able to listen to it for a prolonged period of time like it’s in English. Did you review it and listen to it and make sure the context translates correctly?

AI Translation and Voice Cloning

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. So I should give a shout-out to a company called Eleven Labs that do the voice cloning, that do the translation and what’s called text-to-speech. They’re incredible people, not just the product. Actually, there are certain companies that I work with. Nothing frustrates me more than incompetence and nothing excites me more than competence. Like they’re just sweet people.

By the way, like stayed up crazy hours through the holidays. A lot of big companies like take like two months off. They just – you know, they’re 9 to 5. They’re all very polite. There’s a manager of a manager and there’s meetings and it’s slow and there’s this bureaucracy. With Eleven Labs, with a lot of startups, good startups, you like have this just vibrancy and kindness and everybody is excited, all that kind of stuff.

They do the text-to-speech. You know, you have like text on the page that you can speak in the Joe Rogan voice. I mean you’re aware of this thing. So if you want to translate, you first transcribe the original language, translate it on the page and then text-to-speech, bring it to life in that other different language. The translation step is the tricky one, is the hardest one where a human should correct and help. I got – I mean we had very little time to do this. We had to do it really rapidly.

JOE ROGAN: How much time did you have?

LEX FRIDMAN: I don’t remember the exact number of days but probably five or six days to do everything.

JOE ROGAN: In three languages.

LEX FRIDMAN: In three languages and he and I did the difficult thing, which is we kept switching languages sentence to sentence.

JOE ROGAN: Oh no.

LEX FRIDMAN: We kept – and he would swear in Russian mid-sentence. So of course the translator is like sweating because most of the sentence is Ukrainian and then he says an expletive or go expletive yourself. He swore a lot. That part would be in Russian, the swear. So you have to catch all that. You have to not make mistakes. Some of it, there was AI in the loop. We had to figure out because nobody really has done this kind of thing before, so we had to figure it all out. Mistakes can be made when you’re Russian like this.

JOE ROGAN: Rushing like this.

LEX FRIDMAN: Like I just did. By the way, me saying that could be transcribed into me saying Russian.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, right.

Translation Challenges

LEX FRIDMAN: So for example, we said he was talking about corruption, sensitive topic. He said something like anybody who we caught doing something with the weapons, being corrupt, we would beat – the exact term is beat them on the hands. He was speaking Ukrainian, which in Ukrainian means we’ll crack down on them. That was automatically translated to slap them on the wrist, which makes sense as a direct literal translation.

Beat them on the hands, slap them on the wrist. Makes sense. But like – and I didn’t catch it. I’m not sleeping. I’m like reading it. I speak all the languages, so like I’m trying to like figure out this puzzle. And we didn’t catch it, and then of course like a lot of people got really mad, and they spoke up. The internet in general is like how can you translate this?

Of course, it must be because I’m a Putin shill. I’m getting funded. I’m not translating. But yeah, that’s – you see, it’s very – there could be sensitive moments. Like you had a lot of really high-profile figures here. There could be sensitive moments if translated. It could do a lot of damage on the flip side. It makes it accessible, especially for important conversations. It makes it accessible to people that really need to hear it.

JOE ROGAN: Why were you under such a time constraint?

LEX FRIDMAN: Because the seriousness of the conversation, like every single day there’s major missile launches.

JOE ROGAN: Right. So did you – it just – you didn’t have a five-day deadline. You just – it took you five days to do it.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yes, and I don’t want to sort of put it on them, but President Zelensky’s office was asking like as soon as possible. They were really pushing it, and they were implying, probably correctly, that there’s just going to be a lot of dynamic stuff happening on the peace negotiations.

So he wanted to use this as a statement. And the same – because the Kremlin watched this, so everybody’s watching it. And like it’s part of the puzzle pieces that they’re using to figure out when are we going to meet, when are we going to – what are going to be the outlines of a treaty. So like you have to take it very seriously.

But then I’ve learned a lot because I – you need to probably hire more and trust everybody involved and turn it around much quicker. You know me, in terms of production and everything, the team is one person. And then there’s now folks helping with editing, but it’s a tiny team. And so for things like this, you have to take it seriously. You have to like maybe have like a special force team that kind of steps up and helps.

JOE ROGAN: Right, a group of people that are translators that you could really count on to get it right. Because a lot of the – But you would want to have to personally review it anyway.

LEX FRIDMAN: 100 percent, but you want the translators you trust to do a good job. And one of the things we learned really quickly is you can’t just get any translator. I mean translation is an art. It truly is. And like people were – they were translating it. It’s like open mic comedy.

JOE ROGAN: Right. It really like –

LEX FRIDMAN: Right, right, right.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think – even the same joke in the mouth of different comics would just be way different.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right. And the way they were translating it was cold. They were missing the points. They were not understanding the context.

JOE ROGAN: The AI way is genius.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, but the translation piece of the AI still needs the human in the loop. It needs the human to fix it.

JOE ROGAN: And how does the human emphasize emotion? Like if he has a specific intonation, if the way he’s like – he’s talking about – how does the – how does AI know how to say the words in translation and which ones to emphasize?

AI Voice Cloning and Intonation

LEX FRIDMAN: So this is where 11 Labs is really incredible. They – it uses the actual words to figure out the intonation. So the –

JOE ROGAN: So the translation of the words? Right. Or the original word? Hearing the word?

LEX FRIDMAN: No, it’s always working on the text. So let’s just stick with English for now. Before I say translation. Text on the page. I have – like I have a Dwight Eisenhower speech here. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies.” That feels like a serious thing. Like we could probably infer how to read that. If I gave you that text, you would infer the heaviness, the timing, and AI is pretty good at doing that, not perfect. And you can –

JOE ROGAN: What if he delivered that speech like Hitler? Like I want to know like how are they getting the – like when Hitler would yell about stuff and then they had a translation of it in English. And so are they doing it off text or are they doing it off the sound of the – like when he’s saying the words and translating it? Because then you would know he’s conveying a certain amount of emotion. Or are they editing it in post and saying he’s got to be louder here. He’s yelling. Is a human involved in that?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, there’s a human involved in every part of that. So they’re setting the hyperparameters of like how – yeah, like how loud is it, how like dynamic it is. They can change all of that and they can change specific – they can basically generate like five different options for the sentence and then –

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy. But that is an art form, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, but it really is so crazy that we’re not going to be able to tell if he said something.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Like we’re kind of there. There’s real cheap ones of me selling everything I see all the time on Instagram. Like different rappers and country-western songs and go to this restaurant. Like you just generate them from AI. But you can still kind of tell. But then I’ve seen some ones. I’m sure you’ve seen that one, the one guy where it’s a completely AI.

AI-Generated Content and Voice Cloning

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure you’ve seen that one, the one guy where it’s a completely AI-generated thing, voice and everything, and he’s talking, and he’s telling you this is completely AI-generated. And you probably can’t believe this, but it’s true. He’s explaining how it’s done, and it’s nuts. It’s so realistic.

LEX FRIDMAN: And, I mean, I should say, like, from my experience with the Zelensky conversation, it’s dubbed into all these languages. It’s dubbed into English. He’s speaking Ukrainian and Russian. There’s a lot of people, like I’ve seen this, that think he’s speaking English just because it’s so close. It’s his voice. It’s crazy.

Responsibility in Translation and Content Creation

And so, like, now I have this responsibility. Here I am with my exhausted, sleep-deprived, translating, like, his exact words. I could put whatever words in his mouth. Like, I could have, the slap on the wrist thing, I, you know, let me just take responsibility, I guess. I messed up, you know, it was three hours. It’s very tough to, like…

JOE ROGAN: Right. But, like, I could have, you know, put in, like, I like inappropriate things in there. Just throw it in there, just throw it in there, you know, just for fun.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, that’s kind of crazy, right? And it sounds, and there’s a lot of people that believe, like, okay, this is what he’s saying. So, I mean, there’s a huge responsibility with that, and I think that’s why people trust a particular podcast and so on. Like, you’re not going to mess with that responsibility.

JOE ROGAN: Right. No, you’re very aware of it, and you take it very seriously.

Challenges in Interviewing Controversial Figures

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, but it’s still hard to decide who and how to talk to. It was really, really difficult to think through the Zelensky conversation. It’s difficult to think about whether to talk to Putin or not and how to talk to him. It’s difficult to think about Benjamin Netanyahu, to talk to him after October 7th. He’s one of the most universally hated people on the planet now.

And it’s like, okay, so how do you talk to him? And what do you get him to say about the innocent people that have been killed? But he has a certain perspective, which I should say that a lot of people inside Israel probably support.

I mean, I should also say, not now, but earlier in Qatar, when Hamas was in Qatar, they were interested in doing a podcast. The members of Hamas were not in hiding, so the representatives were interested in doing a podcast, and there I decided not to, because it’s like, everyone knows what Hamas is. It’s almost like easy, why not do a podcast? But it was like, well, that just feels, I mean, you are platforming hate there that’s in a way where you can’t properly dissect and present and analyze and push and pull.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t criticize them. You’re not going to be in a position where you can criticize them.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, I should say in Qatar, it’s safe.

JOE ROGAN: What’s that?

LEX FRIDMAN: In Qatar, it’s safe. So there I could criticize. In fact, one of the ways I would imagine talking to Hamas is pushing them actually pretty hard. In that case, I would actually push hard, and they would probably, because a lot of them are kind of just pretty shallow and insane. So, like, they would just get really angry. Like, there’s a real anger.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They would not come off as, one of the fears talking to dictators is just the charisma.

Interviewing Netanyahu

LEX FRIDMAN: Like, they would, you know, my opening statement to Netanyahu was, you know, a lot of people hate you. When I talk to him in August, a lot of people are protesting outside. There’s a lot of people that hate you. What do you get to say? What do you have to say to those people? That’s the opening thing. He says, like, he said something like, everybody loves me. I just gave a talk in Iran, and 20 million people listened to me, and they love me.

So that’s just, like, so how do you talk to a person where the reality is, like, well, no. No, there is people that love you, Prime Minister Netanyahu. But there’s quite a lot of people outside that don’t love you.

JOE ROGAN: What did you expect him when you brought that up? Did you have expectations? What did you expect him to say?

LEX FRIDMAN: I expected for him to analyze where that hate comes from, to start to empathize, fake or not, to understand that perspective. And to understand the perspective, maybe, of the Palestinians or the Gazans that hate him. And then maybe make the case of Israel, like, after steelmanning the Palestinian case, say, well, listen, we’re, like, this tiny country that everybody’s shooting rockets at. Then make the case for Israel, the historic case, the military case, the geopolitical case. But he didn’t. It was like, everybody loves me.

JOE ROGAN: Jeez. Do you think he really believed that?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, yeah. He believed it. He’s locked in.

Israeli Politics and Elections

JOE ROGAN: How much more time does he have in power?

LEX FRIDMAN: I mean, that’s a consistent minute-by-minute thing. He – as long as he is being elected. And it’s the same question for Zelensky. How long does he have in power? It’s the same question –

JOE ROGAN: When does Israel have their elections again? Are they doing that while they’re in the middle of this conflict?

LEX FRIDMAN: I’m not deeply familiar with, like, the dynamics of it, but I think they can have elections at any time. Like, there’s coalitions that can – I think it’s – a bunch of countries have this kind of thing. So I think there’s elections, like, coming up. There might be a martial law type of situation. And, forgive me, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s basically under constant internal political pressure where he can lose power.

JOE ROGAN: Are you aware at all of his political opponents?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, there’s a bunch. There’s a bunch of – there’s a bunch of people – I mean, they have to walk a tight rope because there is a lot of fear and anger inside of Israel. Now, like you said, after October 7th, there’s, like, an existential fear when the whole assumption of the Israeli people was that, like, this kind of attack cannot possibly happen. With the Iron Dome and the defenses, and so you have a more – there’s more room, there’s capacity to elect more radical people that are more right-wing, they’re more aggressive, they’re more militaristic.

False Flag Narratives

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is why – one of the big reasons why people love to dive into the false flag narrative because they find an incentive for people to allow something to take place. Because if you allow something to take place and you sacrifice a certain percentage of your population, you have now new rules, and you have much more power, and you have a society that’s behind you now because there’s a reason why they want to fight.

And this is why any time there’s anything that ever happens, there’s a bunch of people that think it’s a false flag. A bunch of people think 9-11 was a false flag. And then there’s real ones that we know about, like Operation Northwoods. Didn’t happen, but they really did sign – the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed a proposal where they wanted to blow up American airliner and blame Cuba. We wanted to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, and they wanted to invade Cuba under false pretenses of a false flag.

We really do stuff like that. Like, it’s a – and I say by we, I mean humans, humans in power. Nero burned Rome, like Hitler burned the Reichstag. There’s false flags that they create these situations to force people to fight, and that’s a real thing. But it’s also – it’s also like people get caught with their pants down too. So it’s like – it’s hard to know what’s what.

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s hard to know what’s what. But the same organization that did the whole pager thing, the sophisticated intelligence required for that, somehow missed an obvious breach of a –

JOE ROGAN: Right.

LEX FRIDMAN: And they were warned by Egypt. The whole thing is very, very, very, very tragic.

Starship Launch

JAMIE: Jamie, just quick request. Are you tracking the Starship launch?

JOE ROGAN: I know. You want to watch. We’ve got five minutes, I think.

JAMIE: Okay. Four minutes. It’s 3.56 right now. So it launches –

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I want to watch it. America. We’re going to wrap it up with that. Is it launching live?

JAMIE: Yeah, it’s live.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up. That would suck. What if it blows up while we’re watching?

LEX FRIDMAN: I don’t think at this stage blowing up – I mean it would be really awesome if it doesn’t blow up, if it flies and then it’s caught by the –

JAMIE: In 13 minutes.

LEX FRIDMAN: In 13 minutes. Okay, we’ve got time. Jamie, keep an eye on it. At this time, I mean, it’s called Starship Test 7 for a reason. Like you want to –

JOE ROGAN: Blow a few up every now and again. Find out what the tolerances are.

LEX FRIDMAN: It is nice for Jeff Bezos to succeed on the first try. Like the first one is really important because there’s a lot of skepticism. Couldn’t this even be done with the new Glenn rocket? And now Bezos and Elon are homies again.

JOE ROGAN: Homies. They’re expressing platitudes on Twitter.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, they’re going to sit together at the inauguration.

Finding the Launch Video

JAMIE: What, Damon? I’m trying to check. I’m not finding the right video.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. No worries. Where should I go? Because I tried typing SpaceX.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, be really careful. Just find the official SpaceX channel or you can go on X.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, go on X. There’s going to be a bunch of bots selling you crypto if you’re not careful. Oh, don’t go on Pornhub. That’s a different one. You can’t go on Pornhub in Texas. You’ve got to enter in the United States.

LEX FRIDMAN: Violation of human rights.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m saying.

Presidential Inauguration

Are you going to the inauguration?

LEX FRIDMAN: Perhaps. Are you?

JOE ROGAN: Unfortunately, yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: Really? Unfortunately?

JOE ROGAN: Socializing. All the socializing.

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, you’re doing it on purpose for work?

JOE ROGAN: No. I just – No. Listen, I never go out to things for work. I don’t work. It’s more like I felt like it’s an opportunity like –

LEX FRIDMAN: To meet people?

JOE ROGAN: No, like you would regret it if you didn’t go. Like it’s a historic –

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s a historic moment. And also George St. Pierre said he’s going somewhere.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay. Yeah. I think Gordon’s going too. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a very different thing this time around. People are very hopeful with him as president now, which is very different than in 2016. 2016 is like this existential crisis that the media just blasted into everybody’s head. And I think enough time has passed and enough faith has been lost in the media that people have sort of woken up out of that and realized, like, we can’t keep going the way we’re going.

LEX FRIDMAN: I hope the good vibes continue in general. Like the politicization of everything will not escalate quickly here. It’s possible. It’s possible. Even the inauguration itself. Like I hope they’re not – it’s not a divisive event. It’s more of an inspiring event.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s going to be divisive with some people. There’s no getting around that. Some people just their psychology. Like that lady in the pink that was yelling. Like the lady that said that Pete Hegseth said that when he really didn’t say it. He just published it.

SpaceX Launch Discussion

JOE ROGAN: Someone else wrote it.

JAMIE: It says 37 minutes.

JOE ROGAN: 37?

LEX FRIDMAN: We don’t have that kind of time.

JAMIE: This just went live, so it doesn’t say anything. Just a big old SpaceX.

JOE ROGAN: There it is. Is that it sitting there chilling?

JAMIE: I’m trying to double check most of these. They all say 37 minutes and counting.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

JAMIE: Now, let’s see. Who’s Felix?

JOE ROGAN: These are just channels.

JAMIE: Oh, so a bunch of different channels.

JOE ROGAN: There’s tons of channels with it.

JAMIE: That’s what I’m trying to find the most accurate or real one because someone could be live streaming a fake one.

JOE ROGAN: What are they live streaming, though?

JAMIE: Yeah. All sorts of stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Does SpaceX have its own page?

JAMIE: So that’s – I just typed – I just went to live on YouTube.

LEX FRIDMAN: This is where I was bringing up the Twitch. Like, it’s hard to find.

JOE ROGAN: Right. So I get it live. Does SpaceX have an account?

JAMIE: That’s – when I typed it in, that’s when he was bringing it up. You start getting all sorts of crazy shit, and I get, like, space – all these weird – that’s not them.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not them?

JAMIE: SpaceX live?

JOE ROGAN: No. That would not. They wouldn’t put that in their official account.

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, wow.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not – you know what? SpaceX might have just closed their YouTube channel, I’m guessing, like, because they want to do it on X, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, that makes sense.

JAMIE: So I went to there, and that’s what –

JOE ROGAN: Oh, how weird. How weird. It went up three minutes ago. So it’s just a bunch of fakers pretending to be SpaceX. SpaceX live? Like that? You’re not SpaceX tricking me into looking at your channel.

LEX FRIDMAN: They’re boosting the algorithm.

JOE ROGAN: I guess. So this is it. This is an older one, I think.

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, this is old?

JOE ROGAN: And some of them – Everyday Astronaut is really great. I recommend people stream him. He’s a great – wait, I feel like – have you talked to him?

LEX FRIDMAN: I’m not exactly sure. But he was – he went after Bart – what is his name? Sibral?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Did he?

LEX FRIDMAN: He’s really – I mean, and not went after, I should say. Just he’s an opportunity to educate. Like, he, like, has this really long –

JOE ROGAN: Got to get the two of them in the same room.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, for sure. That’s what he wants. He keeps being on my case. Like, I want to debate him.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever have Bart on your podcast?

LEX FRIDMAN: No. But Bart wants to debate him. I was like, do I want this?

JOE ROGAN: Right. Of course you do. No. Just shut up. Do it. I think – I think there’s a – yeah. It’s something that happened in the past. Like, what are we going to learn from it? Say it was completely fake. Like, what’s the – I would rather focus on modern-day conspiracies.

LEX FRIDMAN: What? You don’t want to know if they fake the moon landing? Are you crazy?

JOE ROGAN: No, I do want to know. But, like, okay. To me –

LEX FRIDMAN: How does your life change?

JOE ROGAN: A lot. A lot. Okay. This is how. Yeah. Because you know that the government is able to fake the moon landing and to get people to shut their mouths.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And a bunch of people disappeared.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, I agree.

JOE ROGAN: The story is nuts, dude. Yeah. Do you know the story about – god, what was his name? I don’t remember, but he was a journalist. What was he assigned to do?

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, the one that got murdered?

JOE ROGAN: He was assigned to do an audit of NASA, and he wrote hundreds of pages, and his analysis – this is, like, 1964, 65, 66, somewhere around then. So it was years before the moon landings. God, I can’t remember his name. I used to have this at the tip of my tongue. So – but he parked his car with his family in and on a train track, and a train smashed their car, and the document was never retrieved. It was – it vanished. It went away. Bye-bye. And then a few years later, everyone’s on the moon.

I wonder what the – Gus Grisham, the pilot of Apollo 1, the guy that burned alive in that thing, he hung a lemon on that thing, saying that it would never work. They couldn’t communicate with the tower. How’s this thing supposed to get us to the moon? And that guy, you know, people – his family believes he was murdered for that. There’s a lot of weirdness in the moon landing, buddy. There’s a lot.

LEX FRIDMAN: If they really did pull it off, and then all these people are cucking for the government of the 1960s, it’s kind of hilarious.

JOE ROGAN: Wait, they pulled off the fake?

LEX FRIDMAN: The faking.

JOE ROGAN: The faking. Yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: So Tim Dodd, everyday astronaut, apparently has an answer to all of this.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah? He’s a –

LEX FRIDMAN: What’s his answer to the Van Allen radiation belt?

JOE ROGAN: There is an answer. I’m not going to turn the debate into – I don’t –

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s a cute one.

JOE ROGAN: Whatever it is.

LEX FRIDMAN: The answer?

JOE ROGAN: It has to be cute. Like, to send people through thousands of miles of intense radiation and have no biological animal that you’ve ever done that to that’s come back alive, and just let’s try it on people.

LEX FRIDMAN: So let me try to convince you as an agent of the Mossad and the CIA. I don’t – I think – okay, this is from me looking at Wikipedia for about five seconds. So I thought the belt is not all the way around, so you can go around the belt.

JOE ROGAN: No, you can get through the top and the bottom, but you have to fly out of Antarctica.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And you really can’t do that. And then –

LEX FRIDMAN: The way we did it, we had to go through it, and we had to go through it, I think it was for a couple hours.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe it’s possible. Maybe it really is. We’re going to find out soon, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: Hopefully, unless they go through Antarctica.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s like a donut. That’s what it is. The intense band of radiation is like a donut. But apparently the actual amount of radiation is not that intense. I mean, again, speaking as a Mossad’s CIA agent.

LEX FRIDMAN: It depends on who you’re asking. Van Allen thought it was pretty intense.

JOE ROGAN: Also, there was Operation Starfish Prime. Do you know about that? Operation Starfish Prime, they were trying to blow a hole through the radiation belt, so they launched nuclear weapons into space and detonated them and had the opposite effect. It supercharged the radiation belt and made it more radioactive. Operation Starfish Prime. Google that.

LEX FRIDMAN: It was temporary, though, wasn’t it?

JOE ROGAN: What’s that?

LEX FRIDMAN: I think it was temporary, and it dissipated over time.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It dissipated.

JAMIE: Jenny is also a Mossad.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, he’s right. No, he’s right. But, I mean, when they measured it, when they measured it, it was way more radiation. They didn’t blow a hole through it at all. They fucked it up. They supercharged it. But just the fact that they were trying to do that, they were trying to blow up nuclear weapons in space. Like, if I was the aliens, that’s when I would start showing up. Like, look at these assholes.

LEX FRIDMAN: High-altitude nuclear tests.

JOE ROGAN: What are people doing? Not only that, it shut off the power in Hawaii. It fucked Hawaii up. Hawaii had, like, a brownout. Like, these guys are psychopaths. Can you imagine, like, sitting at a table with a bunch of generals, and this guy comes in with a cigar? I want to launch a nuke in space. I want to see what happens. I just want to see what happens.

LEX FRIDMAN: You know what my favorite one of those is? The very first detonation of the very first nuclear bomb. There was a non-zero chance that that bomb was going to destroy the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Just imagine what that feels like, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And they were like, let’s see. Let’s see. Boom. Nope. We’re still here.

LEX FRIDMAN: They were reasonably sure that it wasn’t going to do that. But, you know, you’ve never done that before. Who knows? And there’s a lot of people asking the question of, like, in the war in Ukraine, whether Putin is willing to use even tactical nuclear weapons.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: Just send a statement. That’s an open question.

JOE ROGAN: It is an open question. And it’s, like, a terrifying possibility. We, I think, generationally have forgotten what nuclear weapons are.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right. Like, most people think it’s, like, a fun TikTok meme.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Right. The mushroom cloud can just, and then what happens next?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. What is next?

JOE ROGAN: More of them. Back and forth, back and forth. Now, everything’s gone. Everything’s gone like that.

LEX FRIDMAN: And that’s why I’m excited about Starship launches.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The backup. The backup. Get out of here. I love Earth.

LEX FRIDMAN: Let’s live on the sex cult on Mars.

JOE ROGAN: No. I love Earth. I prefer Earth. The sex cult. Right. But if you had to be a person who lived and Earth was going to blow, you’d probably try it. You’d try it. You’d say, listen, maybe we can, maybe I’m going to be the Davy Crockett of Mars. And then years from now, this would be a mall. And everybody will remember when Lex came over on the rocket.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really is exciting to see what kind of societies form on Mars, even just 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people, 100,000 people.

JOE ROGAN: What are the prospects of terraforming? Because the problem is, like, Mars is too far from the sun. Like, it’s just not warm enough. Like, so what are they going to do in terms of, like, oxygen? And do you know Terrence Howard, the actor? You know Terrence Howard’s theory? He’s got a great theory. It’s a really interesting theory.

He thinks that all solar systems, that instead of it being like a collection of debris from the outer galaxies, it’s that too. But what it really is, is the sun is ejecting matter. And we know that, right? So after millions and millions of years of sun ejecting matter, the matter coalesces and becomes a planet. As it gets further and further from the sun, it becomes more hospitable to life. As it gets into that Goldilocks zone, where Earth is, it peoples.

And then he thinks that this is happening all throughout the galaxy. That planets get to a certain stage, and then they people. And then those planets are slowly going to move further and further away further, and get colder and colder. And it’s up to these creatures to figure out how to get out of there before it becomes inhospitable. And that’s where the advanced civilizations come in.

And this is why he thinks the most advanced civilizations are on the planets that are furthest from the sun, because they’re the ones who’ve adapted and figured out a way to exist off of some other form of energy other than just sunlight.

LEX FRIDMAN: Wait, does he have an idea about which planets in our solar system might be peopled?

JOE ROGAN: It probably used to be Mars.

LEX FRIDMAN: Mars. Still or no?

JOE ROGAN: No. There’s nothing on there now. I mean, it’s not hospitable. But there could have been, there was an atmosphere. There could be life there. Now there’s water there.

Life on Mars

JOE ROGAN: There could be, well, there’s probably some sort of bacterial life, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: There’s probably, the real question is, is there any evidence that there was other life?

JOE ROGAN: Like, think about how difficult it is for us to find, like, dinosaur bones, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, dinosaurs have to become a fossil. It’s like, it’s a very complicated process. They have to die in mud or something. They have to get covered up, and then they calcify. And if you don’t know, when you get a fossil, the bone that’s fossilized, it’s not really that bone. What it is, is it’s been remineralized by all the earth elements. And so it’s kind of a different thing. But it’s in the shape of the bone. That’s fossilized bone.

And what if you’re talking about, like, 30 million years, 50 million years, 100 million years, 200 million years, a billion years? What if Mars a billion years ago had life on it? What would be left?

LEX FRIDMAN: Nothing. I mean, in that case, nothing.

JOE ROGAN: What would be left? Nothing. Like, Earth is 4 point something billion years old, right? How old’s Mars? Do we know?

LEX FRIDMAN: How old’s Mars?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s good. Like, is Mars older?

LEX FRIDMAN: I believe it’s older, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: 4.6 billion?

LEX FRIDMAN: So that’s pretty similar, right?

JOE ROGAN: When did the solar system start forming?

LEX FRIDMAN: See, these are just wild guesses by a bunch of eggheads.

JOE ROGAN: The solar system formed 4.5 billion years. Bunch of eggheads with wild guesses. I’m going with Terrence Howard. I think he’s right.

LEX FRIDMAN: What a brilliant idea, though. I’m offended you call him an actor. He could be a mathematician, physicist.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a lot of things. Brilliant guy.

LEX FRIDMAN: His conversation with Eric Weinstein and you was just as art. It was a good conversation. Some conversations are art.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That was a good one because he’s a good guy. He’s a good guy, and Eric’s a very good guy the way he handled it. You know, he’s stern and very clear and obvious that who is right, but very kind and very friendly, which is a quality that Eric has.

Self-Taught Brilliance

JOE ROGAN: Like, the ability to do that, especially when you’re talking about something that’s so incredibly complex and esoteric. You know, like, you’re talking about, like, super complicated math, and he’s showing it to him. Do you know how to do this? Like, you’re showing it on the board, and you can tell he doesn’t know how to do this. He’s like, let me explain how this works. And then you realize, like, oh, boy. Self-taught. You know?

This is the thing. Like, there’s a lot of brilliant people that just don’t get the correct education, but they’re still brilliant.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, the raw horsepower is there.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, the raw horsepower is there. Yeah. But I think this theory that he has about planets peopling, I find it so fascinating. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. I was like, I think he’s right.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. I mean, we’re going to find out. Like, even if you discover bacteria on Mars, that’s going to change everything. Like, I’m convinced that there’s alien life throughout even the galaxy. But that’s a really open question, and most people don’t think so.

Challenges for Civilizations

JOE ROGAN: You know what I think? I don’t think it gets past where we are very often. I think it probably fucks up a lot. I think it’s too difficult to harness the power of the sun while you’re a tribal monkey and not blow yourself up or fuck things up horribly or just get involved in natural disasters that you didn’t adequately prepare for.

I mean, we’re still not prepared at all for asteroid impacts.

LEX FRIDMAN: I mean, yeah. Younger Dryas impact there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And also super volcanoes. We’re not prepared at all. If we have a super volcano, if Yellowstone blows, which it’s going to – one of these is going to – one of the big ones is going to blow. They just do. It might blow 100,000 years from now. It might blow next week. They fucking happen, and we’re not prepared. We’re not prepared for that.

LEX FRIDMAN: Even if you just look at the L.A. fire, sorry to interrupt, like imagine the chaos that’s going to be created.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, and imagine the L.A. fires with no fire department. Okay? Imagine that. Imagine that there’s no one out there trying to put that fire out. That would be fucking insane. And I think civilization has probably gone through a gang of those before.

Ancient Civilizations and Catastrophes

JOE ROGAN: I think Graham Hancock, as much as he gets criticized, I think he’s on to something. I think Randall Carlson is as well. I think they’re on to something. I think it’s probably the end of the ice age. It’s probably asteroid impacts. There’s too much physical evidence that corresponds with the timeline for it to be ignored.

I mean it’s a pretty accepted theory now, the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. It’s just like what happened during that time and what existed before that time. And all the stuff that we see a few thousand years later, is that a reimagining of civilization out of complete and utter chaos?

Because I think it might be. And it might be one of the reasons why we’re so fucking barbaric. It might be that our ancestors were the ones who survived the most horrific time in history where we got hit by asteroids and civilization just evaporated instantaneously. Millions of people probably instantaneously died.

We were left with chaos in a completely different climate. Places that were covered in ice are now raging rivers. The whole thing’s fucked. All the animals are dead. Most people you know that are anywhere near the impact are dead. People get washed away in the floods. Entire civilizations just instantaneously flooded and destroyed.

That could happen again. That could happen again tomorrow. That could happen again next month. We’re in the shooting gallery. We’re in the shooting gallery of the universe. And I bet that’s pretty common.

The Race for Intelligence

JOE ROGAN: So I bet the race is to try to get intelligent enough that you can do all these different things but also intelligent enough that you abandon these ancient primal instincts that you have. And that’s where we’re at the cusp of that. We’re at the cusp of our tribal chaos mixed in with impossible knowledge. And it’s all like happening at the same time.

And so there’s this wild race that’s going on. And people like you and people like me and people that are hopeful, we hope we get it right. We hope we get it right. But we might not get it right. And I think out there in the universe, I think it’s probably more likely that people don’t get it right than do get it right.

And if they do get wiped out, I mean we got the Toba volcano, we got down somewhere around 70,000 years ago to a few thousand people on earth. What are those motherfuckers like? Like Jesus Christ. Those are our ancestors. Those people must have been brutal.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, that’s one of the things I’ve just seen even on the smaller scale of the war in Ukraine is, you know, your house or the city gets destroyed and people adapt immediately. Like the tough people rise up. Like it changes you immediately. There’s a resilience to the human spirit.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy. You can adjust so if an asteroid hits earth, like the United States, you know, let’s say 70% of people dead.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. You get an unlocked power that like your character in the video game has.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean this is where the people in Texas immediately become the valued commodity versus like, I don’t know, people in Silicon Valley or something.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. Technology doesn’t matter. None of that matters. Survival matters. Individual, radical individualism matters. And that’s one of the things that gives me hope. Community matters. Local. Very local. You got to band together. But like it really is a tension of – because it’s not collectivism. It’s not like –

JOE ROGAN: Right. So governments that rely on central authorities fall apart from that kind of thing.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, 100%. Any natural disaster government, like a real big one, like an asteroid impact, it’s gone. The government doesn’t do anything anymore. They’re useless. Power goes out for a month. They’re gone. Everybody’s gone. It’s any man for himself. No one’s protecting you from outlaws.

You’ve seen that already in the California fires. There’s gangs of kids, 100 at a time, breaking into houses and looting them in the middle of these evacuation zones. You’re seeing chaos. They can’t protect you from that if something happens.

And this is something we’re not prepared for. We’re spending so much time doing other things and not recognizing the incredible vulnerability that our society has, this very fragile system that we put in place that’s so much better than at any time in human history. This is the best time to be alive ever, by far, and it’s so fragile. And we don’t think it’s fragile because the power stays on.

Individual Freedom and Resilience

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, and one of the things, just having traveled across the world, the thing that really America stands out with and why I’m excited about what’s happening now is the radical individual freedom. I think the freer the country is, the individual, back to Genghis Khan with the freedom to practice religion, the freer the people are, the more resilient they are to the terrors, the catastrophes of the world.

They just respond. They’re much more dynamic. The more centralized and collectivist the society is, the more you’re susceptible to corruption, to this kind of propaganda that you’re not able to respond to, even like the pandemic. Just governments are not able to do that. The Fauci’s of the world will always emerge.

JOE ROGAN: Right. It’s not even – say even Fauci wanted to do the right thing or something. It’s just – it’s very – it’s impossible for the centralized authorities to do the right thing.

LEX FRIDMAN: You have to have a distributed – you have to put much more weight on the freedom of the individual. That’s a really important thing that you just said. It’s impossible for the centralized authorities to do the right thing. It really almost is if they want to do their job. That’s why I doge it. I mean there’s a lot of promise there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You want to decrease the power, the size, and the bureaucracy of the federal government. You want them to be mobile, agile, small, efficient, and distributed to the state or to just the small companies, the companies.

LEX FRIDMAN: How about stop going after the American people? How about that too?

JOE ROGAN: Which part?

LEX FRIDMAN: Every part? All sorts of things. All sorts of things. You know, attacking people, what’s happened with this country because of January 6th and their version of it and what actually happened. Then, you know, what the FBI did with the Twitter files with influencing things, what they did with Facebook where they contacted them and were telling them to take down memes.

Mark Zuckerberg and Social Media

JOE ROGAN: Can I actually just say about that? I don’t know if he gets enough credit, but I think what Mark Zuckerberg did on your podcast is actually – it may not seem that way, but it’s courageous.

LEX FRIDMAN: I think it’s courageous. I think he had to do it too. I think it’s both things. But internally, he’s running a gigantic company.

JOE ROGAN: He’s running a gigantic company, but also this is the way things are rolling. Like you either get in the way and get rolled over or you get on board. And if you want your company to succeed in today’s day and age and not be disdained and universally – whether it’s – whether people boycott it or people just start hating on it.

The stock drops, like if a new thing that’s like Facebook – because Facebook is – although it’s so common, it’s one of those ones you could do without kind of – it doesn’t have the kind of information gathering aspect that X does. Like if I want to find out what’s going on in the world, I go to X. Facebook is not like that. It’s like people talking about stuff and posting videos and things like –

LEX FRIDMAN: I mean there’s also WhatsApp. That one could take a hit. That could take a big hit if people just decided like fuck you and your censorship. And I think more people are inclined to say fuck you and your censorship now than ever before.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s a good business decision to stop censoring people. And the community notes thing is fucking genius. It’s the greatest invention ever in terms of like the ability to find out what’s right or what’s wrong. Let’s let people post things, and it was not true. Enough people report it. People look at it and go, oh, it turns out that’s not true at all, and here’s why it’s not true. That shit’s huge. It’s huge.

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s funny when Elon gets community noted too.

JOE ROGAN: He gets community noted. It’s so great. It’s so great. Yeah, you get community noted, son. Everybody does. But it’s the best way. It’s the best way to find out what’s real and what’s not real.

But then it’s also like should you let people on your platform that are just fucking straight-up Nazis and trying to recruit people, should you let horrible racism exist on your platform?

The problem is that slippery slope, man. If you say no, if you say no, then other people are going to decide. You remember Punch a Nazi, where people are saying you should punch a Nazi? I remember like Kurt Metzger was – he was like, well, who fucking gets to say who’s a Nazi? If it was just like a guy running a gas chamber, yeah, punch a Nazi. But if it’s just some guy who doesn’t think that a trans woman should be competing against his daughter in high school sports, like that’s not a Nazi. Like you’ve changed the term.

LEX FRIDMAN: I think the slippery slope is important. There’s people like Pavel Durov who’s running Telegram, and he was – Europe, rest in peace, is going after him for like –

JOE ROGAN: You get arrested.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, because there is legitimate terrorists talking to each other on Telegram, but like what’s the alternative?

JOE ROGAN: But if it’s an encrypted app, how are you going to stop it? How are you going to stop – if it really is encrypted, if they can’t read it, right? Like this is WhatsApp. If you use WhatsApp, if you and I message each other on WhatsApp, no one can read it but us.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, but the government wants the back door. That’s what they wanted with Telegram.

Government Surveillance and Encryption

JOE ROGAN: Right, but that’s crazy because you can use that back door in all kinds of ways. Like they use that back door for Signal. That’s how they found out that Tucker Carlson was talking to Putin’s people about setting up an interview. He was like, we know you did it on Signal. Tucker’s like, I didn’t even know you could do that.

LEX FRIDMAN: That’s what Tucker says.

JOE ROGAN: You think Tucker’s lying?

LEX FRIDMAN: How dare you?

JOE ROGAN: He’s not lying.

LEX FRIDMAN: You son of a bitch. You are a Russian plant.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Russian, yes, for sure.

LEX FRIDMAN: All of them?

JOE ROGAN: All of them. All of them. You got to –

LEX FRIDMAN: I’m eating, bro.

JOE ROGAN: I want to see what happens. I want to see what they do with that goat. You got to –

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, Tucker said they read a signal.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s very possible. But technologically, I’m not sure how it’s possible to do that. I mean, it’s possible that –

LEX FRIDMAN: But the way it’s been explained to me is even though your phone is encrypted, it’s not encrypted to you. Like you see it, right? You see as much as you – it’s encrypted peer-to-peer, right? So if they can just see your phone –

JOE ROGAN: You mean there’s some kind of screen recording type of thing?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, 100%. Not just screen recording. Get access to your phone. Find out all your contacts, all your emails, all your passwords, all your notifications, end-to-end encrypted.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s difficult.

LEX FRIDMAN: I mean, it’s possible. It’s difficult.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s not through signal if you’re going through the phone. So if you’re using Pegasus, you’re just compromising the entire phone. If signal’s on that phone, you know the passwords already. You go into signal, you can go into anything.

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, in that way.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You have access to the phone. But that’s – right. That’s legitimate hacking, right.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right, but this is what they’re doing.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

LEX FRIDMAN: Like –

JOE ROGAN: That’s not what they wanted with Telegram. They wanted a legitimate full-on backdoor. Gavin DeBecker has explained this to me. He said with Pegasus 1, you needed to click a link, right? This is the Jeff Bezos thing. Someone sent him a bad link on WhatsApp. He clicked it. They had access to his phone. They were compromising information on him. With Pegasus 2, they just need your phone number. So they got your phone number. Boom, they’re in your phone. That’s it. And so if that’s the case, if you have an app like Signal, like I would assume they could read your signal. Because it’s like right there on your phone. Like if you already got the phone open and they’ve got a compromise where they can get into your phone.

LEX FRIDMAN: That’s actually, by the way, why I’m going to Ukraine, going to Russia, going back to Ukraine.

JOE ROGAN: Trying to get your phone hacked.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, I also try to make sure like dick pics that I sent to you and Tim Zillin aside, I try not to – there’s nothing to hide.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Do you have a burner? Do you get a burner phone do you bring when you go overseas?

LEX FRIDMAN: I know.

JOE ROGAN: You bring a real phone?

LEX FRIDMAN: I wouldn’t tell you.

JOE ROGAN: Bro, that phone is hearing everything we say.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

JOE ROGAN: What are we saying that we need to hide?

LEX FRIDMAN: I mean there’s some embarrassing things for sure. Like, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Drunk texts.

LEX FRIDMAN: Drunk texts.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean from the past. Some shit from the past. I’m so glad I grew up when I did. Oh, my God. Imagine if you were 15 with a phone and you could take a picture of your dick.

LEX FRIDMAN: So somebody – so there’s like a hit piece on me. Fine, great, wonderful. I love you all. Write some more. But this journalist found like some shit poetry I wrote.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, no.

LEX FRIDMAN: I mean it –

JOE ROGAN: When you were young?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, well –

JOE ROGAN: Were you hanging around with comedians?

LEX FRIDMAN: It was like late – it might have been late 20s, early 30s.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not – like there’s not even an excuse that you’re not that young.

LEX FRIDMAN: It just sucked. It just sucked.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: And it – and I was just reading it because they – they know how to get – who is this article for? Because –

JOE ROGAN: For the person writing it. They want to hate on you. And it’s clicks. And you’re popular. So they want to hate on you by attacking your shitty poetry.

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s just hilarious because like –

JOE ROGAN: Well, they got you. You gave them a little rope.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And they hung you with it. But like what I’m saying is that’s not a big deal. The bigger deal is like if you grew up with that. So there’s like shit you said when you’re 14 or 14 or 16.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: But even the piece – like that stuff, like the article, all that kind of stuff, you could even – I mean one of the big things we have to do is allow people to evolve and just say, yeah, that was shit poetry.

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, I’m still – well, I’m worse at poetry now. But like that was embarrassing that I would be publishing shit poetry.

JOE ROGAN: I think that these people that attack, almost all of them are leftists. And I think leftism is a religion just like being a Christian is a religion in that there’s like a – there’s a way that you approach it. Mark Andreessen says it best. He was describing that it has all the attributes of a cult. And I think people have a default system in their mind, we all do, that we fall into that gives us like a religious-like adherence to some ideas. And the thing that this cult is lacking, which is paramount to Christianity, is forgiveness. There’s no road to redemption. Everyone is ostracized and kicked out. And what you wind up doing is you wind up cannibalizing your own thing. You can never be left enough. There’s always crazy people that are like far to the end of it. And every ideological group gets defined by its most extreme members.

That’s why when people think about like far-right people, who do you think are the worst people? You think of like people who want war, warmongers, assholes, stupid people, uneducated. And that’s what people think of when they think of like the worst. They think of like white nationalists. That’s what they think of when they think of far-right. So you can kind of like – you flavor everything else in the group by the worst members of the group. And if you don’t have forgiveness in your religion, like you have a fucking terrible religion. If you don’t have a path to redemption and you want extreme adherence to dogma, even if like – even if whatever this idea was, this ideology that you’re pushing, is like clearly, clearly destructive to a bunch of humans, that’s what they’re dealing with. It’s like people fall into thought patterns, man. Most people are too busy to formulize their own opinions, so they develop opinions to sort of merge with the people that they’re in touch with all the time. And if you get stuck in one of those fucking woke hives, like you’re basically surrounded by mentally ill people that are preaching in a logical version of the world that no one believes could ever exist.

LEX FRIDMAN: I hope there will be left-wing leaders that emerge that kind of shed that. I think they will have to just by virtue of their survival. I think the woke thing is so widely rejected now. And when I say the woke thing, I mean this – what Elon calls the mind virus, the crazy aspect of it. Like your kid knows it’s trans when it’s two, that kind of shit. Like the people that are just far off the rails, that’s going to die off. It’s just too nutty, and it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s ultimately destructive to a lot of different groups of people. And it’s not fair. It’s like the trans women in sports thing is the most unfair aspect of it. Like that one’s so crazy. When you see people argue for it, inclusivity, like you’re out of your fucking mind. Like you’re out of your mind. And the inability to discern who’s a pervert and who’s actually trans, like the impossible nature and then just greenlighting perverts to do whatever they want.

JOE ROGAN: And that – my concern is I do think the wokeism is either dying or dead. My concern is those folks who are now looking for a new religion. There’s people like that on the right.

LEX FRIDMAN: I think they’re mostly rejected.

JOE ROGAN: No, there’s a lot of people like that on the right. The right has a woke right. They have an attacking, woke fucking – they’re not united. There’s an aspect of the right that attacks other people on the right, especially now because the right has like more attention than ever before. There’s a whole – always going to be a group. In any sort of ideology, there’s going to be a group of people that use the opportunity to attack people to elevate themselves.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, I think Mark Andreessen –

JAMIE: It’s going up? Five minutes.

LEX FRIDMAN: Five minutes. I think Mark Andreessen calls the battle, I think, on the right maybe between the techno-libertarians versus the nationalists. So there’s these like protectionist people that say like no more immigration, mass deport everybody, and then there’s these people, which they align on a lot of ideas, these people that say we need to fucking build.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: Like they’re both America first, but they just have a different flavor of that. You know, the Mark Andreessen’s of the world probably are – or at least Silicon Valley accepts immigration. Like we need to allow legal immigration of the best people in the world.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

LEX FRIDMAN: But the nationalist part of the right, they’re like, no, fuck that. Fuck you with your H-1B. Fuck you with the –

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. We don’t need any more. We need America.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. We don’t need –

JOE ROGAN: What is your take on the H-1B thing? Because I saw the argument, and I was like, wait a minute. What is it? Do you guys want cheap labor, or are you trying to get like super skillful engineers from other places? Like what are we asking for here?

LEX FRIDMAN: I think, as I understand, H-1B is just abused to get cheaper labor.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: But – so he needs to be reformed.

JOE ROGAN: I think the argument got really muddled.

LEX FRIDMAN: Right, because everybody was looking at the worst aspects of H-1B, which is the cheap labor, right? But there is an aspect, and I think there’s an O-1 visa. There’s different kinds of visas where like we need to get the best, baddest motherfuckers from all the rest of the world and have them work here.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that, baby, 353 to go. Look at it steaming. Look at all those carbons being emitted into the atmosphere by people who sell electric cars. You’d have to drive 100,000 fucking cars 24 hours a day for a year to get any of the release of carbon that that thing has.

LEX FRIDMAN: Here you go with your woke bullshit again.

JOE ROGAN: You’d have to drive my Chevelle until the universe died of heat death to get as much as you’re going to get off of this one rocket launch. Turns out you need a combustion engine to get off this.

LEX FRIDMAN: Do you think we do, man?

JOE ROGAN: What do you think is going on with the UAPs? Do you think these motherfuckers have some new shit?

LEX FRIDMAN: Well, that’s the Eric Weinstein. Like, you don’t need to worry about the rockets. You need to crack physics.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: Weinstein has a very unusual theory involving that one university that has a completely overqualified physics department. It’s also connected to a stockbroker or not a stockbroker, a financial thing. What are those things called? You know what I’m talking about, Jamie?

JAMIE: No, I need a port.

JOE ROGAN: A key word or something. God damn it. What the point is?

LEX FRIDMAN: A big tank?

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s like some financial investment group that does better numbers. They do look like Bertie Madoff numbers, like nutty numbers.

LEX FRIDMAN: What’s that?

JAMIE: Venture capital.

JOE ROGAN: Venture. Thank you. That’s it. So this company is connected to this university. This company makes extraordinary amounts of money. This university has an insane physics department, and they’re not publishing anything. And Eric’s like, what are you guys doing? What the fuck are you doing? So he thinks that these motherfuckers branched off. He thinks that the government probably got a bunch of like super top secret squirrel type dudes. They’re working on some high level shit, and they branched off decades ago. And that they’ve been working on this for a long time.

Of course, the military often swoops in and wants that talent, wants that technology, wants those ideas, right? They’re probably connected, all intertwined with the military, because who’s going to build these things, right? You need the defense department. You need defense contractors, rather. You need like Raytheon. You need someone like that who knows how to make spaceships, like make this fucking thing. And they’ve probably back-engineered it all. They probably found some crash things that are probably left here on purpose, and like figure it out, monkeys. And then in 1947, these dudes are fucking fumbling around, and all of a sudden they figure out fiber optics. All of a sudden they figure out transistors. All of a sudden there’s a bunch of weird shit that just kind of emerges after these crash sites. That’s what I like to believe.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, I kind of believe that. I also believe that they’re not so focused on us. They’re doing it here and everywhere else, too.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe. Why wouldn’t they be focused on us?

LEX FRIDMAN: I just feel like there’s a lot of tribes in the Amazon. I bet it takes a long-ass time for it to get to the distance that our Earth got from the sun, where you can get liquid water. And it only lasts for a little while until it freezes again.

JOE ROGAN: Well, maybe, if that’s the case and they understand that, then yes, then we’re special. If you thought about, like, the way, let’s just assume that the way life was created on Earth is the only way life is created anywhere in the universe. Let’s assume that all those rules apply. Like water and everything like that. And let’s assume that Terrence Howard’s on to something. The peopling. The peopling.

LEX FRIDMAN: 17 seconds.

JOE ROGAN: You would imagine that it would have to get where we are, where the water melts, where the ice melts. Doesn’t that make sense, that that would happen everywhere?

LEX FRIDMAN: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

JOE ROGAN: 3, 2, 1. Here it goes.

Rocket Launch Reaction

JOE ROGAN: We have the stuff. That’s a hundred million diesel trucks blowing coal. This is America, baby. Look at that thing. Vehicle’s pitching gun rage. Holy shit, man. And that thing’s going to get caught.

LEX FRIDMAN: Bro, I want a rocket. I just decided I want a rocket.

JOE ROGAN: You could go up on that, dude. I need a rocket. You’re a podcast in space. I want a rocket. Look down.

LEX FRIDMAN: All right, we’re more than 30 seconds into flight. Telemetry shot. 33 out of 33 engines. This is pitching downrange. Look how high that is. In 30 seconds.

JOE ROGAN: Booster ship, avionics power, telemetry nominal. Is it going to snap off?

LEX FRIDMAN: I don’t know. I don’t know. You just heard the radio. It’s about six miles away.

JOE ROGAN: When it snaps off, where does it go?

LEX FRIDMAN: Watch the starship arc. It’s just endless blue skies right now.

JOE ROGAN: They drop it in the ocean?

LEX FRIDMAN: No, it lands.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s right. That’s right. It’s the Falcon.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, it gets caught by these arms. Within a minute in the flight, the vehicle’s super-starling.

JOE ROGAN: I know. I was thinking about, like, the Saturn V. I think it was, like, a booster. I forgot. It actually can land, which is even nuttier.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, it’s nutty. It’s that this gigantic thing that’s the size of a skyscraper is going to, it just lands. They just pass through the greatest stress the vehicle’s going to experience going uphill. Speed is 2,000 kilometers an hour.

JOE ROGAN: What the fuck? It keeps getting faster. Look how high it is, huh? As they get away from the gravity of Earth, look how it gets faster, you fucking flat-earth dorks. It gets easier and easier.

LEX FRIDMAN: I don’t know, look flat from here.

JOE ROGAN: It does look flat. They’re right. Oh, my God. Bro, you believe this CGI? You really believe this is happening?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, yeah. You are a shill, Lex. Watch. The camera might go off for a little bit, which will explain everything.

JOE ROGAN: Have you seen the guy who takes the flat-earth people to Antarctica, where they can see the sun spin around? And they’re like, oh, shit. You can go to Antarctica, there’s not an ice wall?

LEX FRIDMAN: No.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, I like people that can change their mind in that way. Bro. Let’s see. Let’s see if it lands. It should be a few minutes. It’s so nuts. I think this here in the corner is like all the different boosters or something. So it’s 54 miles, or 54 kilometers, in the sky right now. Fuck, dude.

LEX FRIDMAN: And it actually has, I think, satellites on board. I was active. Turned them all off. Just slowed down.

JOE ROGAN: Yep. Stage separation. So that fucker’s going to go land. That’s going to go land. That’s so crazy. That’s a building. What does that take now? Like two minutes before it comes back down?

LEX FRIDMAN: Maybe three, four more.

JOE ROGAN: That is so fucking crazy. It’s going to go land now. All right.

LEX FRIDMAN: Hot stage confirmed. We’ve got a booster hopefully on our way. Look at the Earth. It looks round. And a ship now making it happen.

JOE ROGAN: The lies. The Earth looks kind of round. Those motherfuckers. Oh, wait a minute. It looks flat there. This is a new camera. This is definitely fake. Oh, this is the real camera. That other one is bullshit. It looks kind of more round than me. That other one is a fisheye lens. There’s stars out there.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Look at the fucking, where’s the stars? This is bullshit. This is in a lab in Nevada.

LEX FRIDMAN: Go for booster return. This is a screensaver. What is this? We are go for booster return. Wow. I think they have a payload of a satellite that they’re like testing, releasing. Bro, imagine what it feels like looking out the window. The one on the right is going way faster now. It’s humbling. It’s almost to 6,000 kilometers an hour.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God. The other one’s heading back down. It’s still slowing down. Wow. Ooh. Space station? What is that? Is that the space station? Is that what that is?

LEX FRIDMAN: I hope so. I don’t know what the fuck is. She just said it. She just said it.

JOE ROGAN: All right. Otherwise, we just saw some UFO. She just said it. Definitely a UFO. Is it possible they get that close to the space station? Like, hey, guys.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, I mean, they’re extremely precise about their flight trajectory. There’s going to be 13 of those center engines igniting again. And that will then go down to…

JOE ROGAN: See, would you ever fly on one of these?

LEX FRIDMAN: No. No, no, no, no, no.

JOE ROGAN: How much would I need to pay you?

LEX FRIDMAN: No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m already rich. You can’t get me with that. That’s the one fucking money thing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t have that expensive taste. I would love to fly on one of these, man.

LEX FRIDMAN: Flat.

JOE ROGAN: Dude, that’s so insane.

LEX FRIDMAN: Incredibly flat. Look, it’s CGI, bro.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think would happen if you did send flat earthers up in that and they got to sea? Do you think they would believe? How many of them are schizophrenic, though?

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, they’ll think everything was a lie. Like, what percentage of the flat earth community?

JOE ROGAN: Like, the percentage of all communities, it’s like 1% that are schizophrenic, right?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But don’t you think… Isn’t it? Like, across the boards? Something like that.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So, it’s not disparaging the flat earth community.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I’m just saying.

LEX FRIDMAN: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Can you be like schizophrenic light? Higher percentage. Can you just be a little schizophrenic?

LEX FRIDMAN: You definitely can. I know a dude who’s got a touch.

JOE ROGAN: They got a touch. Yeah, a little bit. Just a touch. I told this story once. I was talking to this comedian. And I’ve known this guy forever. I thought he was totally normal. But he’s always, like, odd. And he starts showing me pictures on his phone of clouds. And he’s like, see that? I go, yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s going to go through a cloud right now. Whoa. It’s a high-ass cloud. Oh, shit. 20 kilometers up.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. For that? That’s so fucking cool. How fucking cool is that? That this thing is going to go land now? You want to make a bet about if it’s going to catch?

LEX FRIDMAN: Oh, it’s going to catch.

JOE ROGAN: All right. Yeah, I believe so, too.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: No, I wouldn’t bet against it. That would be un-American.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. What do you hate un-American? Look how cool that is, man. Wow. They’re focusing on it now from a distance. It just dropped fast. Now it’s only two kilometers above.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. That’s going down quick.

LEX FRIDMAN: It will be the second tower catch. Oh, this is so insane. This is amazing. This is so insane. So it has this… It’s controlling fully the position of it. Look at this position of it. Look how wild this is. Look at the tower coming in to catch it, too.

JOE ROGAN: Get ready for that boom. Oh, my God. Fuck, yeah. Fuck, yeah. Fuck, yeah. Wow. Holy shit. That is so fucking badass. That is so nuts. Seven minutes from when it left. Seven minutes for the whole flight?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. That’s a fucking building. You heard it here, Beckzilla. That is so dope. Look at the other ones. What is that?

LEX FRIDMAN: Climbing in speed. 16,000 kilometers an hour.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God.

LEX FRIDMAN: 140 kilometers away. Wow. Wow. New Glenn yesterday. Starship today. This is why I fucking love America.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so incredible, dude. That’s so incredible. Hey, the question is, like, how tall is that in reference to, like, a building? Isn’t it, like, a 20-story building or something crazy?

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, it stood before it took off right there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, wow. It is? I don’t know how much bigger it is than the Millennium Falcon. Oh, my God. In comparison to the Millennium Falcon. How fucking amazing is that? What’s the other one? Is that Blue Origin?

LEX FRIDMAN: That’s from SpaceX.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s another SpaceX one?

LEX FRIDMAN: It’s bigger than the Blue Origin rocket, but quite a bit.

JOE ROGAN: It is. I think it’s the biggest rocket ever made.

LEX FRIDMAN: 123 meters.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and that part right here, halfway, that’s what came back. Right. So that’s got to be… I mean, do you think it’s… It looks higher than half. How many floors of, like…

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah, it’s got to be 70 meters. That’s so crazy. That’s so big.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s like 33 Raptor engines, so it’s just raw power. Just even one of those engines is… If you ever see it live, it’s incredible. It’s so much cooler watching it actually happen live than it is watching a video.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. When you watch a video, you’re like, yeah, that’s cool, but we didn’t know what was going to happen.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s the cool thing about live.

LEX FRIDMAN: Yeah. Fuck yeah. That was awesome.

JOE ROGAN: That was fucking awesome. Let’s end with that. We’re on another positive note. American ingenuity, baby. Let’s go, America. Peace on Earth. Good word to all. Love you, brother.

LEX FRIDMAN: Love you too, man. Bye.

JOE ROGAN: Bye, brother.

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