Joe Rogan Experience: #2207 with Shawn Ryan (Transcript)

You know, it’s.

The JFK Assassination and Government Transparency

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know what Trump said about that one, right?

SHAWN RYAN: What did he say?

JOE ROGAN: Trump said that if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t want to release it either.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah, yeah, I did hear that.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy. What a crazy thing to say.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That can only mean one thing in my eyes. Yeah, we did it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The only thing that makes any sense is the United States did it.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, more and more just keeps unraveling.

JOE ROGAN: Tucker just comes out and says it openly. He just says it openly. CIA killed Kennedy. He has a crazy laugh. I don’t, you know, I don’t know who could actually say it other than the people that have read those papers and, you know, who knows what they, you know, the President is basically a part time employee. Not a part time employee, but a short term employee.

You know, if you got a long running business and for some technicality, every now and then you have to bring in some f*ing CEO and he does a four year term and then hopefully he can finagle it so he gets another four year term. If he’s playing by the rules and you just bring him in. Yeah. Why would you tell that guy who killed Kennedy? Yeah, they hid sh from him all the time, which is totally illegal. What do you think?

SHAWN RYAN: About RFK’s, you know, possibly getting in to investigate all that stuff?

RFK Jr., Food Safety, and Corporate Influence

JOE ROGAN: I think it would be one of the best things for the health of the people in the United States. If you really care about health. I think there’s a lot of us, and it was me at one point in time, I’ve gotten more educated about it. A lot of us are very ignorant about what we’re doing to our bodies with food and with medications.

And I don’t think we’re being told the truth. And I think there’s a reason why other countries, multiple other countries have banned food elements, food ingredients that we use all the time. These red dyes, all these different. And this was all. There was just a recent thing that they did. Who’s involved in that? Brigham testified in that.

They had all these health experts testify and they were all hammering this point over and over again. They were talking about the food additives, they were talking about glyphosate and how f*ing dangerous glyphosate is. And an enormous percentage of people show traces of glyphosate in their blood. We’re getting it through all kinds of vegetables. It’s ubiquitously sprayed on monocrop agriculture crops. We’re all just consuming these poisons.

There’s no reason to have fluoride in the water. There’s f*ing no reason. We’ve been putting fluoride in the water. Oh, keep your teeth clean, you don’t want cavities. It doesn’t make any sense. And we’ve been doing it forever and there’s no reason to do it. And there’s real data that shows that high levels of fluoride in water lowers IQ. The higher the fluoride is in water in certain areas they can see a measurable dip in people’s IQs.

SHAWN RYAN: I didn’t know that. Have you messed around with the, have you heard of the Yuka app?

JOE ROGAN: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude, you got to get the Yuka app.

JOE ROGAN: What is it?

SHAWN RYAN: So you basically scan anything, like food related. It’s Yuka deodorant.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s.

SHAWN RYAN: I think it’s Y-U-C-A.

JOE ROGAN: There it is, there it is. Yuka. Shout out to Yuka, there it is.

SHAWN RYAN: See, like honey nut Cheerios. It’s. So it’ll tell you the additives in.

JOE ROGAN: There contains additives to avoid.

SHAWN RYAN: And it’ll tell you all this. It’ll tell you all the chemicals and what the chemicals do to you.

JOE ROGAN: Ah, that’s genius.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it’s.

JOE ROGAN: What a great ad. No ads. We just did an ad for them. Good for them, though. That’s what people need. I think if RFK gets into office, he will expose a lot of this stuff, just like he did when he was an environmental attorney.

You know, people think of him as just the vaccine kook. Listen, you got to look at that guy’s. The history of that guy’s work has all been about protecting people from corporations that are poisoning them. That’s literally what that guy did his whole career. And if he can do that with health, particularly with things that we can avoid.

Look, one of the things they demonstrated is that Lucky Charms as sold in the United States, they don’t sell the same one in Canada. In Canada, the dyes that we use to make it all pretty and exciting for kids, they don’t allow that because it’s f*ing toxic. Yeah, so we allow it. Which means someone’s corrupt. Yeah, someone’s corrupt.

SHAWN RYAN: Probably the whole system. Maybe.

JOE ROGAN: Probably the whole system is heavily influenced. At the very least. Forget about bribery. Let’s not even say bribery. Heavily influenced by relationships that these people have with CEOs in these corporations and the boards of executives and this weird little revolving door between the FDA and the CDC and all these different organizations.

And then they get. They leave and then they get this amazing job working for some huge corporation that they were helping regulate just a few years ago. It’s the most transparent thing it should be. If insider trading is illegal, how’s that legal?

SHAWN RYAN: Good point. I mean, does FDA approval even mean anything to you?

The FDA’s Track Record on Drug Approvals

JOE ROGAN: Not to me. It doesn’t to me. But it took a long time before I got to that. It took a long time before I really understood, like, why do we think that saturated fat is bad? Oh, it was a lie by the sugar companies. Okay.

Why do people tell you that vitamin supplementation doesn’t really help and you just eat a balanced diet? Oh, because doctors don’t know jack shit about nutrition and that you’re going to a guy who literally knows less than you because he went to medical school for how to fix knees or whatever the f* he specialized in.

And you’re taking this guy’s advice and he doesn’t know anything about nutrition. He’s not read any peer reviewed data. That guy’s just trying to keep up. He’s got fing bills piling in and he’s bringing people and shuffling them through the office. And he’s worried about his insurance in case you f up. Malpractice insurance and you have to pay your medical school bills. And those guys are barely getting by. But they’re floating. They’re trying to just run people through their office as fast as they can.

SHAWN RYAN: Does it bother you if there’s some type of a new drug? Does it bother you if it’s not FDA approved at all? If it’s new, like nobody’s looked into it?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I wouldn’t take anything no one’s looked at, especially a drug. It’s just like, give it some time, kids. Give it some time. I mean, how many times do they have to pull drugs before people like, what is the percentage of drugs that the FDA approves and then pulls? I believe it’s 25%.

SHAWN RYAN: I have no idea.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think it’s 25%. See if that’s true. So this is the ones that they approve and then eventually they find out, oh, this stuff is terrible for you, and then they pull it. Yeah, I think it’s 25%. Which, you know. What does it say? One third.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, shit. One third.

JOE ROGAN: I was off. According to a 2017 study, which is probably worse now, about one third of drugs approved by the FDA within a 10 year period receive alerts, warnings, or recalls in the years following their approval. That’s f*ing bananas. Give it some time, kids.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

Steven Crowder’s Undercover Investigation

JOE ROGAN: Also have you seen the Steven Crowder undercover thing he did with that COVID czar in New York?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOE ROGAN: Have you seen that? Jamie, go to his page and find the most recent one. Because the most recent one is fascinating. Because the most recent one, this guy is openly talking about how monkeypox is not really a threat, but they’re trying to present it as a threat so they could sell this medication.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: They’re talking about pushing this, man. This guy’s openly talking about monkeypox is really just gay guys get it from unprotected sex. Yeah. Is it on his Instagram? Go to it. I’ll show you which one it is.

Yeah, that’s it. Is it? No, no, no, no, no. That’s not it. That’s not it. That’s because that’s the one where he’s talking about how he shut the city down. There’s a recent one. No, I know. Maybe it’s somewhere else. Let me scroll down a little bit. See if you can find the one. See that one right there? That’s kind of yellow. That’s yellow there. But which one? There’s got to be one where he’s talking about monkeypox, because that was the one I was watching today. That’s not it. Because that’s all about shutting the schools down.

SHAWN RYAN: God damn it.

JOE ROGAN: We got to find it, okay? Just find it and get to us. Because I know I might have watched it on X. I probably thought I’m saying X now.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, good for you.

JOE ROGAN: Feel politically correct. Like when I call transgender first and a girl, she like, look. You like that how I did that? I said she. Were you talking to him directly? No, no, that’s not it. That’s Crowder confronting him when he’s. That guy’s fired now. The guy’s f*ed.

But the monkeypox one. God damn it. I know I saved it. If you want, I can find it. I saved it on my phone because I was like, this is just so bonkers that these people are having conversations in public and openly admitting that they’re trying to push people into taking drugs that don’t even work. Really? Interesting.

God damn it. This is going to be a problem. I’m not going to find it. If you see, just see if you can find it. It’s got to be out there because I watched it this morning. Did you go monkeypox? Nothing. It’s going to be in one of these links. I just have to take a second. Oh, wait. Hold up. Back up, back up. It was right there. Right above that. Dr. J. Varna. Okay, this is it.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s not the same thing as last one.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not. There’s no link to it. Oh, so is it because the New York Post doesn’t show it? That’s okay. We could just read what it says because it’s kind of interesting. We don’t have to hear him say it, but Steven Crowder’s kind of decided to do this James O’Keefe type deal, and I don’t know how they do that. It’s pretty wizardry. Yeah. You know, generally, I think you get like a gay guy who likes to talk and some handsome dude who can sit down with this guy and get him a little tipsy. That seems to be happening. Gay guys like to spill the beans.

He previously served as senior health advisor to then Mayor Bill de Blasio while tasked with running Big Apple’s pandemic response. Okay, so he was talking about the approval process while discussing Siga Technologies Technoviromant or TPOX drug. So this is the drug for monkeypox.

So “that’s why spinning it in the media is helpful. We want the FDA to approve our drug specifically for monkeypox, and right now it’s only considered experimental and they won’t approve it,” he said. And the US TPOX is not approved by the FDA for treatment of mpox, but can be used to treat patients as part of a clinical trial known as the Study of Technoviromant for human mpox virus, according to Siga Technologies.

The company’s website added that the STOMP trial is being conducted to evaluate the efficacy for the treatment of mpox. Varna then griped at the video filmed on August 14, that his then employer “is stuck with our drug, but the people aren’t going to be as confident in it because the data doesn’t look as strong as it should.”

And so then later he starts talking about the stock prices. So he says “sometimes you do a study and f*ing nothing works at all or people get really sick from it,” he said in the COVID recording. “The problem is if you do another study, it’ll take a year or two to do it because you have to get the ethics approval. You got to get the money, you got to get the patients to come in.”

In the videos, Varma then gloated about how he knows the reporters well and referenced a September interview with New York Times on mpox, which touted that TPOX as a drug used to treat mpox infection. He also described the World Health Organization’s emergency authorization process before explaining how he wants the media to report on TPOX.

So he was talking, one of the things in the video, he was talking about stock prices. So they’re talking about making it look like these drugs do better than they do, getting people to prescribe them. Okay, hold on.

Okay, so basically “we’re trying to get the media to say is, oh, the drug didn’t work because it was designed the wrong way. So they’re going to do another study and it’ll probably work. And in the meantime, people just prescribe it as an emergency drug. That’s what we want the story to be,” which is wild to say out loud.

And he said “the risk of mpox spreading in the US is very low, and it’s almost certainly going to stay among gay men.” Yeah. So it’s all just, it’s supposedly only, like, I don’t think in America, like, I think four people died from it, which is, you got to go hard.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s it. Huh?

JOE ROGAN: You got to go hard. Died from that.

SHAWN RYAN: You quit right before they talked about the 10 person sex parties.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, that was, that was another thing. That was when he got busted for having parties during the COVID lockdowns. While he was encouraging the lockdowns. Wow. You didn’t hear that part?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOE ROGAN: Oh. So he got, Crowder got him on camera saying that he was doing Molly and partying and saying, “I hope somebody doesn’t see me doing this because I could get in real trouble because, you know, obviously I reinforced the lockdown.” Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, surprising, but not, you know.

The Erosion of Public Trust

JOE ROGAN: Boy, everybody’s eyes have been opened up over the last few years, at least. People that are trying to pay attention to how nutty the people are who actually run the show.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a lot of people are, I mean, it’s crazy. It’s like everything you knew is just flipped upside down.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like a bunch of actors are running it. That’s what it’s like, because that’s what they’re really like. What politicians are like, are like actors who are not quite good looking enough to get into movies and television shows. They can’t host Entertainment Tonight, but they can read off a teleprompter, you know, and they can do a good performance.

Like, look, Kamala Harris had one good read off a teleprompter and she shot up in the polls. That’s the power of just a performance. When you want to believe something, you want to believe.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I just, I don’t believe anything anymore. You know, I can’t.

Organized Political Rallies and Paid Audiences

JOE ROGAN: Well, I was watching this. These guys were breaking down, you know, they can track cell phones. They can figure out, like, whose cell phone was there. They can get metadata. And they were talking about these Kamala Harris rallies, about how organized they are. These people are coming in on buses, and many of them have been to multiple rallies. And that when this one, this one local one, like 80% of the people came from somewhere else, and they were all bused in.

SHAWN RYAN: How do they know that? How do they know that?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’ll send this to Jamie because this one I actually have, but I think they know it because of the data. You could track data on a phone now.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, they’re doing the geofencing stuff.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know exactly how they do it, but they’re doing something in which they can tell when your phone has been in an area. Okay, I found this guy’s, I found the other video. Yeah. Here, I’ll show it to you, Jamie, because it’s even gross. You’re hearing it come out of this guy’s mouth. Hour and a half video on his YouTube channel that I think it’s taken from. Yeah, but this is the clip. I’m sending the clip from Instagram for whatever. I don’t know if Instagram’s hiding it. I don’t know what’s happening.

SHAWN RYAN: But they wouldn’t do that.

JOE ROGAN: It’s on his Louder with Crowder page. That’s why. Oh, is that what it is? Yeah. Okay. God, I hate looking up things on my phone in the middle of a f*ing show.

SHAWN RYAN: But sometimes you have to.

JOE ROGAN: So these guys, what they were essentially, what they were showing is that, here it is, that people, it’s very organized, and people are being bussed in and, you know, is that okay? Is that ethical? I mean, maybe just making it more convenient for them to go to the Kamala Harris rally. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, but if you’re organizing crowds, like, say if you do a game show, like if you host a game show, you know, Wheel of Fortune. Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

Those people are all paid. They’re most of them. Or sometimes you let fans do it for, like, a very popular show. But I have personally been on a lot of shows where the audience is paid. So it’s basically like if you’re filming a sitcom and nobody knows what the sitcom is, there’s a company that you can hire and you pay the audience to come in, and the people cheer. They have an applause sign. Everybody cheers. They laugh when you tell them to laugh.

Like there’s a guy in the audience that’s like, doing this to them that the people at home don’t see. So it’s just, it’s all theater. Right. So they could do that same strategy for a political rally, easily. If you’re talking about all the money that you’re going to be in control of when you are the President of the United States, which is a spectacular position.

Not just that, but then all the money you’re going to make in appearances and ever for forever, right? You’re going to do Goldman Sachs talks and make a half a million dollars for no apparent reason. There’s so much money involved. You don’t think you would pay audiences to come and cheer. That’s cheap.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, cheap.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know. I don’t. Do you think that’s immoral?

The ABC Debate Controversy

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think we have very loose rules on what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do. Like, there was a lot of outrage because people were saying that ABC somehow or another had gotten the subject matter to Kamala and that they had agreed to Kamala that they were not going to ask her about her DA record when she was in California and that they were not going to talk about some other person she was involved with that might be in trouble.

And they weren’t going to fact check her. And then they said they were only going to fact check Donald Trump.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Which is what led to her saying quite a few things that weren’t true. And no one said anything about it. Particularly about troops being deployed overseas.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Did you see that video where the troops are like, “what the f* are you talking about?”

SHAWN RYAN: I got a really good friend of mine that’s deployed overseas right now.

JOE ROGAN: Not according to Kamala Harris.

SHAWN RYAN: And yeah, he’s sniping bad guys over in Africa.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. How mad would he be if he heard that?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, they’re pissed.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not in a war zone.

SHAWN RYAN: They’re pissed.

JOE ROGAN: They should be pissed. So this is from an Instagram account. I don’t know what podcast this clip came from, but let’s just play it.

Rally Attendance Analysis

SHAWN RYAN: Rally 5,003 mobile devices at Kamala Harris’s rally in Charlotte, North Carolina on Thursday afternoon. It appears over 3,600 came from Georgia, mainly Atlanta, Georgia, and approximately 720 from Savannah, Georgia. So that’s a North Carolina rally with almost 80% of the attendees being from Georgia.

JOE ROGAN: After you do the math, that’s only…

SHAWN RYAN: 600 or so local people from North Carolina that attended.

JOE ROGAN: That’s all who shows up?

SHAWN RYAN: And you’re planning to what, get 80 something million votes? Again, something ain’t right.

JOE ROGAN: And then all these people come from buses. And it’s kind of weird because at the Trump events you don’t really have…

SHAWN RYAN: Organized buses like that. People just kind of show up and park on their own.

JOE ROGAN: But at the Kamala rally, there’s just these lines of buses at every event, which is weird. And a lot of the people are also the same people that attend multiple rallies. Can you read those tweets?

SHAWN RYAN: Any of the same ones from previous events? Because this guy’s tracking the cell phones, I guess, and he says 90% have been to three plus rallies. 54% were even at Arizona and Nevada rallies.

JOE ROGAN: Now, it could be that she’s so popular that it’s like Swifties. They just follow her around. Or it could be, you know, the Grateful Dead was in the 1970s. Maybe that’s what’s going on. Maybe she’s just so amazing all of a sudden. Maybe she just, Stella got her groove, you know. Something happened and she just kicked into gear, and now she’s her best self. Yeah, her best self. She’s going to be the president. Yay. Let’s go to these rallies.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m sure that’s what’s going on.

JOE ROGAN: Could be that. It could be that.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t think it’s really immoral. I mean, it’s immoral. It’s just a rally. Well, everybody wants their rally to be full. I mean, you know, this is a facade, man.

The Whistleblower Affidavit

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. If you can do it for a game show, you can do it for a political event. I don’t think it’s immoral. I think if they did give her the questions and they really did, and this is someone signed an affidavit. See what’s going on with that? See what’s the latest with that, Jamie?

So someone signed an affidavit that was an ABC employee that claims these things. And it was very clear there was bias. It was very clear that they were fact checking him and not fact checking her. But, you know, unfortunately, he doesn’t do himself any favors because he kind of goes off the rails sometimes. “They’re eating dogs, they’re eating cats,” which, by the way, they may very well be doing that.

That’s the thing they do in Haiti sometimes. Sometimes they sacrifice animals. And, you know, they have local rituals, religious rituals that they do.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it’s been going on for a long time, though. You know, sometimes a kung pao chicken is a chicken. Right?

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that’s a real thing. That’s a real thing. And to try to pretend that it’s racist to say that. No, no, humans sometimes will do things according to this. It says that this started with a claim that there was an affidavit, but I don’t know that it’s ever been actually presented to anyone. Mm, interesting.

Didn’t it get discussed on Twitter and people were posting about the veracity of it? I think Elon even put it on his. Colin Rugg, I know had it on his. Yeah, I think it’s probably going to be hard to tell what charge made it file Congress, but it doesn’t say that it was. I don’t said it made it to Congress.

SHAWN RYAN: They talked about it.

JOE ROGAN: Bill Ackman. That’s right. Bill Ackman was the guy who tweeted it. Didn’t know if the claim was accurate, but shared it anyway, which is what’s fun. It’s fun to do on the Internet.

Vance addressed the supposed whistleblower’s allegations with reporters, saying it should be a national scandal if true. Trump again mentioned the whistleblower September 13th at a rally in Las Vegas, claiming that Harris had received the debate questions in advance. “Fortunately, we had a leaker or a whistleblower. I don’t care which. I love that person,” the way he talks. It’s such a Trump statement.

Representative Dan Meuser in Pennsylvania said in a Fox News interview that he would bring in ABC News and the whistleblower before Congress to testify about the affidavit. They said that the person who did it was killed in a car crash, and that seems to be false. Yeah, that was amplified by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who also doesn’t do herself any favors.

I think they do stuff like that. This is my take on that. When I saw all these people tweeting that the guy died in a car crash, I was like, that might be a trap. That one might be a trap. Yeah, I think they do stuff like that. Well, they’ll throw out a fake story and get people to share it without looking into it at all. And it turns out to be complete horseshit. And it makes the whole thing look like horseshit.

SHAWN RYAN: Now.

JOE ROGAN: Now it looks like the, makes the affidavit, it’s at least connected to horseshit. Yeah, you know what I mean?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it’s a good tactic.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, smart tactic.

SHAWN RYAN: They got a lot of good tactics.

Campaign Strategy and Media Appearances

JOE ROGAN: They’re very organized, which is really interesting. And that’s one of the things about Trump is that he’s so dominant and he’s so swing from the hip that no one can kind of corral him, you know, and it seems like she’s really open to being coached. Like, some of these speeches are very different than any speeches she’s ever given before. And you see the difference between that and then, did you see the Oprah interview?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOE ROGAN: It’s off the rails. Yeah, off the rails.

SHAWN RYAN: I heard about it in the f*ing…

JOE ROGAN: Wine mom country again. Wow. Tim Dillon is the best. Tim Dillon’s like, “She’s saying gypsy curses. What is she saying?”

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man.

JOE ROGAN: It’s when you get her off the rails and she is, it’s kind of f*ed up, right? Because that’s not the job. The job is not being able to sound cool in an interview with Oprah. That’s not the job. But that’s the most important part about getting the job.

SHAWN RYAN: I just want to hear how they’re going to accomplish all this stuff?

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re going to do it once they get in, even though they’re already in.

SHAWN RYAN: That seems to be the typical response. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, one thing that you could see really clearly is there is a ferocious effort to stop Donald Trump from becoming president again that I’ve never seen before. I’ve never seen, I’ve seen tight races. I’ve seen people very divided. You know, I’ve seen it for years. There’s always been a division between the Republicans and Democrats in this country, but not like this.

Not like this, where the guy almost gets killed twice and they don’t even talk about it.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s scary, man.

JOE ROGAN: It’s nuts.

SHAWN RYAN: Scary.

The Assassination Attempts

JOE ROGAN: Almost gets killed twice, and the second one, they just brushed it off. Like, I don’t even think the guy got a shot off. Huh?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The guy was set up at a golf course for 12 hours with a bulletproof vest on, an AK-47, and was specifically there to kill Trump. And you don’t think that’s crazy?

SHAWN RYAN: It’s crazy they didn’t cover it. I mean, it barely got covered. Barely.

JOE ROGAN: Barely in and out. And then the brother of the guy or the guy’s son gets arrested for child pornography, which is…

SHAWN RYAN: Do you know, have you looked into the BlackRock commercial stuff at all? Is that real?

JOE ROGAN: The one shooter was in the BlackRock commercial. That was the kid that tried to kill Trump.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They said that this guy was in a BlackRock commercial, but I heard that that’s not true.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s bullshit.

JOE ROGAN: But that could be another one that they just throw out there.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, right.

JOE ROGAN: You throw one out there like that, and then people retweet it, and those people look stupid because you retweeted something dumb. And then it just weakens the public’s faith in what you have to say about things and also makes the story look stupid.

Like that story about that whistleblower will forever be connected to people retweeting the fact that he died in a car accident even though he didn’t die in a car accident.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s always going to be shrouded in bullshit.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Kind of genius.

SHAWN RYAN: It is, man. It’s a great way to discredit.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a great way to get somebody elected. It’s just, it’s when you’re seeing the manipulation just in full bloom, just marching down the street in front of everybody, and no one’s freaking out about it. That’s what’s really weird.

Kill Teams and Security Threats

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think? I mean, have you thought about who’s behind all this? These assassination attempts? You think they’re lone wolves or…

JOE ROGAN: Well, was it Matt Gaetz that was saying that he’s been informed that there’s five different kill teams looking for Trump in the country right now? Somebody did just say that two of them are domestic. Trump said it. “There’s five guys. They think they’re going to get me. They’re not going to get me.”

So what is the quote? “Big threats on my life by Iran. The US Military is watching and waiting. Moves already been made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again. Not a good situation for anyone. I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before. Thank you to Congress for unanimously approving far more money to Secret Service. Zero no votes.”

Zero no votes. Strictly bipartisan. Okay. Oh, I understand. Zero no votes. Like, no one voted against it. Strictly bipartisan. Nice to see Republicans and Democrats get together on something. “An attack on a former president is a death wish for the attacker.”

Yeah. It wasn’t just him that was saying that, though. It was, I’m pretty sure it was Matt Gaetz. I know I have that saved, too, if you want to, but so if there really are five different kill teams in the country looking for Trump right now, that’s just insane.

SHAWN RYAN: But it should be hard to find him. You know, I mean, he has rallies, you know, giant rallies.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: In New York, there was 60,000 people.

JOE ROGAN: That’s insane.

SHAWN RYAN: See, that’s the difference between the Kamala Harris rallies. If that guy’s telling the truth, if they’re going to tell the truth, and they really are just sort of manipulating them and putting on theater. That’s a big difference between what’s happening with Trump.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

The Media Monster and the Fight for Free Speech

JOE ROGAN: If he got organically, got 60,000 people to come see him and freak out in New York, it’s kind of… The media is a monster. It really is. It is a… It’s such an obvious monster. Such a deceptive, sneaky, propagandist monster.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s… How long do you think the media has left? They’ll be around, you think?

JOE ROGAN: So it all depends on who gets into office, really. It depends on… So the real fear was when they started getting their claws into Twitter. The real fear was when the government started suppressing accurate information and Twitter let them do it. That was scary close.

So Elon buys Twitter, releases the Twitter files, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and all those journalists, they all uncover all these different aspects. That’s super disturbing and totally illegal, and they release everything. And then Twitter becomes kind of crazy. Like, Twitter’s wild now. Like there’s… It’s just totally wild, wild west, unregulated.

And then the… What do you got, Jamie? This is it. Yeah. Okay. One of the five known teams hunting President Trump before Butler, Pennsylvania attempt was Ukrainian. So this is Matt Gaetz talking about this.

But I think that if that hadn’t happened… So if all of social media remained like, staunch leftist, left wing, just giving completely into whatever propaganda the government wants to give them regarding vaccines or Ukraine or anything else with no critical arguments about it that are accepted. Just anybody who doesn’t follow the narrative, especially people like, you know, they censored people from Stanford and MIT.

They were trying to tell them to pull those guys like Jay Bhattacharya, other doctors about COVID.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, oh, yeah, I did. I did.

JOE ROGAN: Censoring, like legitimate experts in the field who aren’t kooks. Guys like Peter McCullough, who’s the most published doctor in his field of study in human history, and they’re like, no, no, you’re a kook. You’re a kook. And we know now that that was not true and he was correct.

Now we all know, right. All these years later, most people kind of know what the f* happened. Even the people reluctant to admit they got duped.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: If they… If Elon does not come along and buy Twitter, I don’t know where we are right now. I really don’t. Because if they had the clamps on Twitter then, and they did the same thing with Twitter that they’re doing right now with other social media apps, it would be f*ing awful out there.

SHAWN RYAN: I know, man. It’s… Elon’s been a blessing.

JOE ROGAN: He really has.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s a big one. I mean, I don’t think they’re going to be around that much longer. I feel like that the media will die with the baby boomer generation.

JOE ROGAN: I think if Elon didn’t buy Twitter, they would have been fine. I really do. Probably the only thing that f*s them up is YouTube. But they got a clamp on YouTube too. You know, YouTube is… They’re very restrictive in what you can talk about, especially during the pandemic. They would ban you from YouTube for talking about things that we know for a fact are true. Now it’s…

SHAWN RYAN: We deal with a lot of that.

JOE ROGAN: We dealt with a lot of it. Right.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ll bet you did, too.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Anybody on YouTube, I mean, you have to, like, parse your words, you know. Like Jimmy Dore, even when he’s criticizing the vaccine, he said, “but you should take the vaccine because it’s safe and effective.”

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He always has to say it, like, to cover his ass, like a joke.

The YouTube Censorship Machine

SHAWN RYAN: Was it nice for you to come off YouTube? Did you… And did you enjoy that when it first happened? My, like, was strategy, pain in the ass gone.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, I don’t pay attention to it. But my strategy was to become 10% less famous. So when I went over to Spotify, Spotify was going to give me all this money and I was like, oh, great, just f*ing be a little less famous too. That’d be good. Like kind of like go the Howard Stern route. Kind of fade off into the sunset.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Did it work? No, it didn’t work. Little did I know I was going to get caught up in this massive controversy, you know. But it also, even back, even before that, this podcast was growing on Spotify a little too quick.

But so there’s no, like extra pressure being on YouTube. But there is a pressure. If you’re relying on YouTube, if you… I guess I meant they’ll demonetize you.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I meant. I meant with like the censorship stuff. I was wondering, you know, when here’s something interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we got demonetized all the time. A lot of episodes got demonetized until we announced that we’re going to go exclusive to Spotify. And then from that moment out, there was like a few months of a window.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

JOE ROGAN: They never demonetized us. They just took all the money.

SHAWN RYAN: Don’t go, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: No, they didn’t. No, no, it wasn’t that. They wanted the money now. Like, why would they demonetize me? Because they don’t get it cut either. So what they’re trying to do essentially is get you to fall in line by getting you to self censor because it benefits you financially.

It’s a creepy… It’s a creepy form of censorship because you do it to yourself. And it’s kind of okay because you can’t really prove that they got you to not talk about things you wanted to talk about. And they can’t really prove that you followed this public narrative just because you want to keep your job.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I, you know what really bothers me is because we both put a lot into this, you know, and what bothers me it’s like, just tell me what you want me to take out. What is it? I don’t even want to f*ing tell you.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to talk to them. Well, this is how my feeling on the thing is, I don’t think they should be talking to people about what to put in. I think if you’re not doing anything illegal, if you’re not saying anything illegal or doing anything illegal, don’t take it off.

SHAWN RYAN: Some, some of it I, I’m totally with you. Some, some of it I get, you know, like, you know, pedophilia, 100% illegal stuff, even language. I mean, there’s three year olds out watch. I got a three year old kid, you know, he’s watching.

JOE ROGAN: They have YouTube kids, like so kids is great.

SHAWN RYAN: So I get it when they like mark my s with 18 plus. But if, if, but they won’t tell me, you know, it’s like, well, just like I, I can’t correct the fing problem if you don’t tell me what it is.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

SHAWN RYAN: And I mean, I mean they just don’t, they don’t want to abide. They don’t want to box themselves in and not be able to or censor somebody.

Self-Censorship and the Strike System

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s that. And there’s no benefit for them to tell you what you said. That was wrong. There’s no benefit. The good thing is to get you to self censor. That’s the best. To put the threat over you. That’s why they give you strikes. One strike, two strikes. Shawn, you got three strikes. You know, it’s kind of silly. It’s weird.

It’s like, is this the penal system or is this a goddamn social media platform? It should be… If advertisers don’t want to advertise on that particular content. Okay, that seems easy to manage, guys. And guess what? There would be a lot of advertisers that would be willing to advertise on that content. You’re just not being creative enough with your advertisement.

If you’re just treating it as a business. Or are you treating it as not just a social media video website, but a way to push and a way to amplify a very specific message.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, if you can control what comes out of people’s mouths and you can control what they think.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And if you… If you’re making a lot of money on YouTube and you’re doing great, like, wow, I’ve got a f*ing real good life now. And then all sudden YouTube comes along and says, oh, you were talking about the vaccines. Shawn, Shawn, we can’t have COVID vaccine misinformation on our platform. This is going to cost lives.

And some… Some platforms make you do like a re-education thing. We have to like talk to them and have conversations with them about what you did that may have been offensive or what you did that may have violated the terms and conditions that they have for their community.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I think we had to do that. I think we did that.

JOE ROGAN: Fing creepy. That s‘s fing creepy. Because you’re dealing with some fing woke kid in Silicon Valley who up talks and this person, okay, what you’re doing, Shawn, right now with your show, I know that you don’t think it’s harmful, but it really is. It really is. It’s truly harmful. Yeah, truly harmful. Exposing government corruption.

SHAWN RYAN: And I can tell, I can. It’s… It’s… Yeah, it’s real harmful, all right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s f*ing weird, man. It’s weird. But I love the fact that at least it exists. And even though it’s not perfect, because I don’t think YouTube can be perfect, because they’re managing at scale, in order for them to get all the pornography and the murder cartels upload murder videos to YouTube. Like they’re constantly trying to put out fires.

You imagine the amount of data that YouTube has to deal with on a daily basis. It kind of behooves them to just f*ing give them strikes, threaten them. Let’s just slow everything down. Like too much of this getting us in trouble. We just want to make a lot of money. Yeah, like, I got it, I get it.

There’s only one YouTube. It’s kind of genius. And it’s a perfect setup, like the algorithm where it’s constantly like recommending stuff that you’re interested in. It’s f*ing great, great time waster. But it’s also a tool for shaping narratives. And if only one narrative is pushed out there and other narratives will literally get you demonetized, so you lose your ability to make a living and then possibly get your whole channel removed, which it did to many people. They just removed their whole channel.

The First Amendment and Platform Censorship

SHAWN RYAN: Where do you think this is going to end?

JOE ROGAN: I think it is going to end. That should be… All that stuff we talked about should be illegal. That stuff should be covered in the First Amendment demonetization. No, because look, if you want to have standards where you say that the advertisers that we have, we have a group of advertisers and they have requested no shows where someone swears, no shows where someone talks about sex, no shows where someone talks about over drinking or anything like that. They just have rules. We don’t want to be associated with that, that. Okay, that’s totally reasonable.

But when you want to like stop a channel from uploading a video because they’re making an argument that maybe the lab leak hypothesis is legitimate and you’re pulling that off the air. Well, now what are you doing if you’re deleting an episode that’s accurate about really dangerous information. Dangerous information not just to us, but also to the organizations that, that, that paid for this, these crazy gain of function research projects like, what the f* are you doing? And what did you do?

And if you were talking about that on YouTube and even expressing your ability to just guess that maybe it came from that area. Like, have you ever seen that Jon Stewart interview where he’s on the Colbert show?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Fing amazing, right? Amazing. But even that, like, Colbert’s trying to stop him and like, just saying maybe these people working on these fing viruses let one leak. Maybe that would get you removed from YouTube. That’s a violation of the First Amendment, in my opinion. Yeah, because you should especially some of these people are very informed people.

They were biologists and they were talking about the very specific design of this virus, the farrowing cleavage sites and how it’s very different than anything you see from a natural spillover. They were talking about technical, very specific details and they were getting banned. Like, Brett Weinstein almost lost his channel.

SHAWN RYAN: I didn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: I didn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: We had to have him on, do an emergency podcast, like, let people know what the f* is going on. Damn. They almost pulled his channel.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn. That’s…

JOE ROGAN: He’s a biologist, a brilliant one, and he’s talking about real information. It’s scary, man.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I don’t know. I think about it all the time, obviously, I mean, industry. So it just, I, I, I hope X, you know, turns out to be the new, the new thing.

The Future of Independent Media Platforms

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think X is going anywhere. I think Elon knows how important it is and he’s got all the money in the world. I think he’ll keep that running. And I think it’s also getting attached to AI now, which is going to be an insane moneymaker. I don’t think X has any problems.

I think he’s going to grow it into some sort of an all in one app. They probably have cryptocurrency on it and private messaging and phone calls. You’ll be able to shop on it. That’s what it’s probably going to be, if I had a guess.

And I think that for places like Rumble, the more places like YouTube and Facebook and all these other places censor people and force people into these boxes and make people toe the line – if they want to make any money off of advertising or if they don’t want to get their channel deleted – the more companies like Rumble will emerge. That’s what I think.

I think there’s going to be just… Right now, Rumble’s a hard sell for some folks because they see it as like, “oh, the right wing f*ing MAGA platform.” It’s not Truth Social. It’s not Truth Social video. There’s a lot of people that have those prejudices, but Russell Brand’s on there, a lot of people are on there. It’s a good platform and it’s an important platform and it should… We should support it and want it to grow. We should want them all to grow.

Like, Spotify’s got video now. We need more video platforms because audio is just not enough. Just audio podcasts… You want people to share things virally.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the viral stuff, it’s all like Elon Musk when he smoked a blunt on my podcast. That’s all video. You want video of that.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the more we have platforms where that stuff is just free, where you can just say whatever you want, say whatever you think about anything, which really X and Rumble are the only places that I know of that you could really do that right now. Have you had any problem on audio at all?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOE ROGAN: Good.

SHAWN RYAN: I haven’t either.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, audio is like… They’re leaving that alone for now. I think it’s probably because it’s not as easily shared.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what’s coming next.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, probably. I mean, all they would have to do is just put images of you and images of me and then have our audio and upload that as a video and then maybe they would start coming after audio.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I mean, I hope this starts to turn around.

Political Concerns About Free Speech

JOE ROGAN: I do, too. But I don’t think it turns around if Kamala Harris gets into office. I think they clamp down more. I think the same stuff that they were trying to do with Twitter, they’ll try to do with something else, with other things. They’ve already openly discussed it.

She’s openly discussed that the same rules have to apply to Facebook, they have to apply to Twitter, and that Elon Musk could lose his privileges. And there’s so many wild things that they’re saying. Tim Walz said that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to misinformation or hate speech. Well, it certainly does.

Sometimes people say things wrong, and the goal of the First Amendment is you say something wrong, and then this guy who’s an expert says the right thing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then you correct them.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I mean, the misinformation, it’s all opinion, right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, so much of it turns out to be true. How about “masks don’t work”? You would get screamed at for “masks don’t work.” Well, guess what? They don’t f*ing work. They don’t work. Fauci said, “masks don’t work.” Remember that interview before the pandemic, before they knew how big it was going to be?

SHAWN RYAN: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: He was like, “you don’t have to wear a mask.”

SHAWN RYAN: Then it was “wear two face diapers.”

JOE ROGAN: It’s bananas. How easily people fell in line. That scared me the most.

SHAWN RYAN: I know it was. I mean, it’s like… what are you… There’s nothing they won’t do. There’s nothing they won’t do.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of cowards out there. There’s a lot of people that have never been pushed, and they don’t know what to do when they get nervous and they’re out there voting.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think they’re cowards or do you think they just… they’re just lazy and they like being told what to do? It takes all the decisions out of their day.

JOE ROGAN: There’s both. But there’s also people that are scared of a negative response, so they say what everybody wants them to say.

Someone described this really very eloquently, and I saved it on my phone because I was like, this guy nailed it. But essentially, they were saying, especially with beta males, they don’t say something because they have an opinion and they really want to express that opinion. They say something and they consider, “am I going to get in trouble if I say this?” And then if that’s the case, they don’t. And “am I going to get in trouble if I agree with them?” And probably not, because right wing people don’t really go after you the same way left wing people do.

If you want to talk about a woman’s right to choose. If you want to say, “I agree with a woman’s right to choose.” But like Bill Burr’s bit, you ever see that bit? And he goes, “I think I agree with the woman’s right to choose, but I also think you’re killing a baby.” It’s kind of a crazy bit. It’s because it’s really funny because he’s brilliant, but it’s just… That’s really what it is.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, that’s the truth.

JOE ROGAN: That is what it is. It is what it is. I mean, factually, that is what it is. And this is coming from someone who’s pro choice. But I think that if you look at all the things that they have that distract us, all the different things that are in the news constantly, whether it’s the Diddy raid or f*ing J. Lo and Ben Affleck breaking up and you just getting force fed all kinds of while the border is wide open, while they have apps where people can get flights.

SHAWN RYAN: The CBP One app.

Immigration and Border Security

JOE ROGAN: What the f? Yeah, that sounds like… You know, I had Chamath on. Do you know Chamath? I don’t want to mispronounce his last name. I’ll f it up. Brilliant guy. And we were talking about how hard it was for his family to legally immigrate into this country and how difficult it was to get a visa.

And I mean, this is a brilliant guy who’s one of the… he started Facebook. He’s one of the original guys at Facebook. And he’s this guy who did it the right way. And every step of the way, there was this tremendous anxiety when he would go to get his visa renewed because he didn’t know if he’s going to get kicked out of the country because someone could arbitrarily go, “no, not good enough.” Because he had to prove to be here that he has skills that an American doesn’t have. He’s a real expert in something.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I went down to the border about… I think it was about two years ago, and went down with Ed Calderon.

JOE ROGAN: I love Ed.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, what a great guy.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a great guy. I’ve met him out a couple times.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that’s where I found him. So thank you, but… So I went down to TJ with them, and this was before it really hit the news cycle. And we walked into a migrant camp. There’s probably a couple thousand migrants there.

And so I yanked one of them out and interviewed him and used Ed to help translate. And I mean, the guy’s been sitting there for like… I think he was there with his wife and kids for like, two years. And I was like, “why don’t you just go across, dude?” I mean, it’s an honest question. Like, “why don’t you just go across?” He said he wanted to do it the right way.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: He’s like, “I just want to do it the right way.” He’s running around with this little battery pack charging cell phones for 50 cents. And I’m like… I’m just like, f* it. Hey, man, why don’t they just… Because nobody’s anti immigration. Not that I know of.

JOE ROGAN: No, we’re anti terrorists.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Why don’t you just fix the immigration process and maybe we can get some more people in here quicker legally, if you do that. And then we actually know who’s coming in and we have documentation of who they are.

JOE ROGAN: And wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Meanwhile…

JOE ROGAN: That’s racist.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And they want them to vote, which is even crazier, and they’re pumping them out into swing states. It’s so transparent. It’s happening right in front of everybody’s face. And it’s a wild grab for power. And the only people talking about it are people like us, which is really crazy. The only people that are talking about it are people that aren’t really connected to some sort of executive corporation. A bunch of producers, a bunch of people telling you what to do.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, this is not even something that right wing news wants to discuss.

SHAWN RYAN: Good point, good point. I mean, if you… Have you done any digging on who’s coming across there?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s… I talked to Phil about it. Dr. Phil did this big investigation. He’s got his own network now, Merit Media. It’s gotten so bad that Dr. Phil decided he has to start a network for news.

SHAWN RYAN: Good for him, man.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a great guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Good for him.

JOE ROGAN: Great guy, but he was essentially talking about how they really don’t know how many people that are coming through that are criminals. They’re dropping off their IDs on the Mexican side. They just get rid of their IDs so that when they cross over, they have nothing on them. You don’t know who they are. You don’t know what they’ve done. Gang members, cartel members, guys escaping Venezuelan prisons. No one knows.

All you have to do is get over here and we’ll give you an EBT card, we’ll set you up, go to New York City, they put you in a nice hotel, they give you free food. And meanwhile, these poor people in Chicago that are like, “what about us? What about American citizens that pay tax dollars. You guys don’t give a f* about us. You haven’t done anything for us.” Why? Because they know those people are going to vote Democrat. They know they already got them. They already got them. “We’ve got those people. Statistically, they look at the numbers, statistically, we’ve always… This has gone blue. We’re fine. Yeah, we’re good. Let’s just get some people in them swing states.”

Afghanistan Withdrawal

SHAWN RYAN: It’s fing scary, man. I mean, I’ve been diving into the border for quite a while and ever since this Afghanistan withdraw, that… I mean, that was like a big… I mean, that was just fing…

JOE ROGAN: Did you talk to Tim about that? Tim Kennedy, when you had him on?

SHAWN RYAN: A little bit.

JOE ROGAN: Dude, he told me some. He told me some that he just… You can’t imagine. That guy saw so much overseas and he said the worst things he ever saw was the Afghanistan pullout.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude. Do you know who Tyler Andrew Vargas is?

JOE ROGAN: No.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s the one Marine that survived that big explosion. That suicide bombing at Abbey Gate. Abbey gate killed 13 marines.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The Southern Border and National Security Threats

And so I called him. Well, everybody wanted him to come on the show. And I was like, I’m never going to get this guy. Like, all the media, everybody wants it. But I was like, all right, fine, I’ll reach out.

So hit him on the gram and messaged right back. And he got in and he’s like, man, he’s like, I’m so glad that you reached out to me. He’s like, I was literally just praying with my fiancé that you would reach out, because he had just did an ABC Good Morning America interview. Interviewed for seven hours. They released five seconds of that interview because it made the administration look so f*ing bad. They wouldn’t air it.

So I got him on, kept getting dinged by YouTube. They didn’t like the real footage it was, which was actually like from his cell phone that we put, we do previews and shit. But man, like to have his testimony about what happened that day and the care that afterwards, which was f*ing atrocious.

I watched this guy, my studio’s on the second story, and I watch a 23-year-old kid hobble up those fing stairs with one leg, one arm, all kinds of shit going on, his intestine. I mean, I just, I was like, man, what the f, man? This didn’t even have to happen. They had the guy, they had the f*ing guy in the sights. They could have killed him. And nobody gave him permission. I just, maybe they, I mean, I can’t backseat quarterback it, but maybe they shouldn’t have asked. Just eliminated him.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, he’s talking about before we got into the actual incident, he was talking about like mom trying to throw their babies over the wall and getting caught up in razor wire and just seeing a fing baby dangle there by the leg. And there’s like no repercussions for how that went down. The media just wants to fing cover it up.

And so I started digging deep and I teamed up with the former CIA targeter Sarah Adams, and then really good friend of mine, Scott Bannon. We went over to Vienna to interview this guy, Ahmad Massoud, who’s the leader, the commander of the Northern Alliance out there. That’s like the resistance that’s kind of fighting the Taliban. The Taliban pretty much took over government in Afghanistan.

JOE ROGAN: And I saw the parade.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, with our shot, with all our shit that we left there. Crazy. Yeah, man. So got a bunch of intel from Massoud and looping all the way back around to the southern border. I mean, so once Taliban took control of all of our shit, I mean this could go on for a while. But so now what they’re doing is they have the passport office over there just making legitimate passports.

JOE ROGAN: There’s—

Taliban Control and Terrorist Networks

SHAWN RYAN: Now there’s 21 terrorist organizations over there training. Hamza bin Laden, who we were told was killed, is actually f*ing alive. And he’s marrying into all these other terrorist networks. So he married Mullah Omar’s daughter. He married into all these different terrorist networks.

And so these guys used to be like competitors kind of, just like the UFO guys. They all hate each other, but they all have the one common theme, like disclosure. These guys, the one common thing is, let’s go take over the Western world.

So he is basically, Hamza bin Laden is married into all these terrorist organizations. Now they all have one common goal, to come over to the Western world and ruin our way of life. And so what they’re doing is they’re funneling as many of these terrorists into the passport office, creating them legitimate, real passports and then they sprinkle them, they get them flights into all over South Central America and then they funnel them up.

JOE ROGAN: Up.

SHAWN RYAN: Through the Darien Gap into the US. And so there is zero, I don’t give a f what the FBI or any of these people are saying they have. There is zero way to track how many of these fers have come in to the US.

And so now what we’re going to see is like 10-7-style attacks like we just saw in Israel and the mall in Russia. And everybody’s like, oh, why hasn’t it happened yet?

JOE ROGAN: By design.

SHAWN RYAN: By design.

JOE ROGAN: Like the leaving the border porous, allowing these people to come in.

SHAWN RYAN: Absolutely, I think it’s by design. I mean, they basically told border patrol, stand down. Like, do not do your f*ing job, we’re going to blast you. I mean, remember the guy on the horse that they said was whipping people and it wound up being like the reins of the horse?

I mean, yeah, I think it’s by design from the government, but I don’t, I think that they’re, look, I think that the government is more incompetent than it’s ever been before. And I think they have one common goal and that I think the goal is voting. They want them to vote, but I don’t think that they, I don’t think they’re competent enough to realize the death and destruction and the other repercussions that we’re going to face by keeping that border open.

Because they don’t have anybody with any experience that’s, they don’t have anybody with any experience that’s, that they don’t have any solid intelligence stuff going on that’s telling them like, hey, this is what’s going to happen. It’s all agenda driven.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

SHAWN RYAN: Does that make sense?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it does make sense. It does make sense that all they care about is voting is get the people in, don’t worry about the consequences. But the more insidious conspiracy would be that they want unrest because it gives them an opportunity to clamp down on rights.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, shit, though. I mean, unrest. I mean, they got really good at unrest in 2020, right? All through or even before 2020, up to that election. So I don’t think they need to import terrorism.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but it’s a different kind of unrest. The kind of unrest that you get from people blowing up Target is very different than the kind of unrest you get from a legitimate terror attack.

Vulnerabilities in America’s Power Grid

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, do you ever think about why nothing’s happened yet, like China, if you looked into the power grid at all?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, dude, it’s not good.

SHAWN RYAN: Lights out, buddy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so easy to kill.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The power grid’s so weak. It’s so vulnerable. It’s really nuts. It’s nuts because anybody could target it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, well, I mean, China, we have those, we have, we have, we get those big trans. Everything’s imported from China and we have these huge transformers. You could tell me, shut up if you already know all the shit, but all of those transformers are imported from China and they’re not checked.

JOE ROGAN: They’re not even—

SHAWN RYAN: They don’t even f*ing check them for malware or Trojan horses or anything. And it would take, I mean, these transformers, it’s not like the little box outside your house, the green box. I mean, they have to take overpasses out just to transport these things. So you’re talking years.

And I think the number was like nine. If they took out nine transformers, then the entire US would be out of power. On top of that, so then DOE, Department of Energy, actually investigated one because somebody was, it got to D.C. that whatever. They decided to look into it and they wouldn’t fing release the results. They wouldn’t fing release the results.

So they’re in our, they’re in our water treatment plants. They’re in our power grid. I’ve been talking about this shit from years.

JOE ROGAN: And then cell phone towers.

SHAWN RYAN: Cell phone towers.

JOE ROGAN: And then—

SHAWN RYAN: And then FBI Director Chris Wray comes out and says, oh, yeah, turns out our grid’s really vulnerable. China’s in there. And they’re also in our treatment plants. They can f*ing poison us.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They own land around military bases. Like, it’s, if they are on a long term strategy, it’s very effective. They’re doing a great job. Just get, they undercut the competition to give us cell phone towers and all sorts of things. They position them around military bases. Mike Baker was explaining all of it to me.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And I’m like, this is, how is this, how are they letting this go through? Is it incompetence? Is it fools running it? Are they corrupt? Like, how did they do that?

I mean, one of the things that really f*ed us, we got away from manufacturing and we relied on all these countries. And we really found that out during COVID when you couldn’t get shipments. It was like, whoa, wait a minute. How much of our shit is made over there?

SHAWN RYAN: Like, everything.

The Cost of Outsourcing Manufacturing

JOE ROGAN: Like, how much medicine is made overseas? How many different things that we need that we constantly use we don’t even know how to make? Yeah, a lot.

SHAWN RYAN: Masks.

JOE ROGAN: You seen those?

SHAWN RYAN: Pulling the masks out? I didn’t wear them very long, but I, whatever. I fell for it for about 30 days. And then I was like, this is. But yeah, you pull the mask out and I live out in the woods, so I didn’t. But yeah, Made in China. I’m like, what, didn’t the thing come?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, from there they’re making money. Hand over fist.

SHAWN RYAN: Right, cool.

JOE ROGAN: The whole thing is nuts.

SHAWN RYAN: Go us.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s nuts. But getting away from manufacturing this country really did not do this country any justice. It’s just for corporations to save a little bit of money and to push everything off to third world countries to manufacture things. That’s including our phones.

And I’ve said this over and over again, if Apple could make an American made phone and charge me more money, I’ll pay double for. Yeah, charge me a phone where I know the people get union wages, they get health care, they get paid correctly, they can live a good life and they work normal hours. They don’t have to sleep in a f*ing bunk like they do in that Foxconn building when they have nets all around the building to keep people from jumping from the roofs.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You’ve seen that shit, right?

SHAWN RYAN: No, actually I have.

JOE ROGAN: You haven’t seen that?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOE ROGAN: The Chinese factories where they make iPhones are so f*ed. The people are so distraught that they put all these fencing with giant nets all around the buildings because so many people were jumping to their death that they decided, we’ll just catch them with nets.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Look at this. Those are the nets. Those are suicide nets all around the building.

SHAWN RYAN: Sorry, buddy, back to the assembly line.

JOE ROGAN: How crazy is that?

SHAWN RYAN: That is f*ed up.

JOE ROGAN: How crazy is that? Instead of making the conditions better where people don’t want to kill themselves so often that you need nets around a building, they go, nah, nets is fine. F* those people.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude, it’s, I mean it’s straight slavery.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s close to it. I mean, they don’t really have any other options. And when you’re getting a phone, and what’s a phone? Like 1500 bucks? Is that what it is? Charge 2000. Yeah, charge 2000. People pay it.

Most people are like putting on a part of their bill to pay a little bit of it off every day. And you really don’t need to fing switch phones every year like everybody does. But you don’t need to. It’s stupid. Like I have a 2000, I have a iPhone 11 that I use sometimes. Like one of my numbers fing works great. Nothing wrong with it. Yeah, nothing wrong with it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Five year old phone or four year old phone, whatever the f* it is. So you could get a made in America phone and you wouldn’t feel like you’re supporting this horrific shit that everybody turns a blind eye to because that’s the only way you get that kind of stuff. They have them all made over there.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, it’s. I don’t think it’s coming back, but.

The Decline of American Manufacturing

JOE ROGAN: Well, it could. I mean, there would have to be a large concerted effort. But the problem is it took decades to go away. It’ll probably take slightly longer to come back, you know, because there’s got to be planning and funding and people have to make long term investments. It’s going to be a big gamble.

Yeah, but so I mean, and I’m sure you’ve seen Michael Moore’s documentary, the Flint, Michigan one. What is it called again? Roger and Me. Roger and Me, that’s right. I want to say “Who Killed Roger Rabbit?” Roger and Me.

But it’s all about what happened to Flint, Michigan once they pulled out auto manufacturing. And the entire population, just those people living check to check, they were doing okay, but they had jobs and then all of a sudden gone. Every job’s gone. There’s no jobs, there’s nothing to do. The entire industry is gone.

And just people went into dire poverty, like horrific dire poverty, like instantaneously and just so a corporation could make some more money.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s sad.

JOE ROGAN: It’s horrible. It’s fing horrible. It’s horrible. And it’s horrible that that’s an option that a corporation would decide, eh, f this town.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think it would? I mean, you think it’s going to come back or you think it could come back?

The Optimism of Human Nature

JOE ROGAN: It could come back. I’m optimistic, but honest. You know, I try to look at it honestly, but also go, I think most people are good people. I really do. I really believe that.

You know, even most of these people that are walking in from Guatemala, I do it too, 100%. If I was living in the middle of nowhere and you told me, hey, America’s letting people in. You get a landscaper job and make 20 bucks an hour, but what? Yeah, I would 100% walk.

SHAWN RYAN: Why wouldn’t you?

JOE ROGAN: Why wouldn’t you? I think most people are good people and they just want a better life. And I think the more we unite under that idea and stop buying into this bullshit that, like, if either side is correct, that it’s the end of democracy.

I think we have to, like, stop all that tribal nonsense that’s happening between the left and the right, because people are just subscribing to ideologies and getting captured in them just like a religious fervor. Like, they think that they’re doing the only thing that could possibly be done to save us all and that the other side is a dire threat.

That’s why something like 24% of Americans think it would be a good thing if Donald Trump got shot.

SHAWN RYAN: I just read that.

JOE ROGAN: Fing insane. Yeah, fing insane that people would think that violence by an assassin would be a good thing on a former president. Like, we’re that f*ed.

But I think that that’s just a lot of media manipulation and a lot of f*ing, a lot of people getting riled up and living in these echo chambers and these bubbles. But I think ultimately, at the core, most people are good people.

And I think if we had some wins, if some things like that did start getting built and they start bringing back more American manufacturing and people start getting excited about the idea that America becomes not just a place of innovation and art and creativity, but also, like, we start manufacturing great shit again, there’s no reason why we don’t do that.

The Rise of AI and Automation

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I just, I don’t feel like, I feel like technology is advancing at such a rapid pace. I mean, I feel like AI will take over. AI and robots will take over everything.

JOE ROGAN: Well, if AI and robots do that, at least we can get AI and robots to manufacture things in America.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That would be good.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m with you. I just, I don’t see, I guess what I’m saying is I don’t see the union worker. I don’t see where their place really fits in.

JOE ROGAN: There’s going to be a lot less, that’s for sure. It’s pretty much every job. Every manual labor job is under threat.

SHAWN RYAN: I think every job’s under threat.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think podcasts. What are you going to do, b*h? How are you going to think like me? Yeah, good luck. Good luck.

And comedy. You’re always going to have comedy. Movies are in real trouble because AI can write pretty f*ing amazing scripts. And the CGI, the way they can crank out video is bananas now. Yeah, I mean, it’s bananas. It’s just, it looks perfect and it comes out like minutes instead of years.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you really think podcasting is safe from AI?

AI Translation Technology

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. Well, I know AI is going to translate, so Spotify is going to translate my show to multiple different languages.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

JOE ROGAN: Eventually, once they get the technology completely dialed in, but they’ll be able to do it in Spanish, German, French, and you’re going to be able to hear the, it’ll sound like me, but speaking fluent French.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Are they…

SHAWN RYAN: Is that, are you, like, the test bunny?

JOE ROGAN: No, they’ve done it already.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, cool.

JOE ROGAN: They’ve definitely done it, but it’s, they’re going to be able to, once they have it completely dialed in, where there’s no glitch, because there’s going to be some weird glitches in context, and, you know, cultural things like that aren’t going to make sense if you translate it. Yeah, that’ll be weird.

But once they get it dialed in pretty good, it’s going to, it’ll be great for everybody. It’ll open up the world to, like, I want to know what these folks are saying in Russia. You know, I’d like to listen to a Russian podcast.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, I’ve watched some Russian news things and seen the teleprompter roll, and it’s like, they’re always mocking us and make fun of us for having 78 genders. And, like, they relentlessly mock us in the news. Like, that’s interesting. This is how Russia looks at America.

BRICS and the Global Economic Shift

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I think that would be great. I mean, probably shouldn’t be talking about my direction that I’m going to go. But f* it. Whatever. That’s what I want to do. I want to start going in and talking to all these foreign dignitaries and getting a different perspective on what we’re doing.

I don’t think we’re the good guys anymore. You know, I don’t agree with a lot of the shit that I was involved in, you know, as a SEAL or CIA contractor.

JOE ROGAN: And…

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I mean, like, BRICS. Are you familiar with BRICS?

JOE ROGAN: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, I think. Don’t quote me on this. I think they have 22 countries now. It’s kind of like, it’s kind of like a counter to NATO. It’s all these countries that are tired of us, tired of the tariffs, tired of the weaponization of the US Dollar.

And so basically, what they’re trying to do is throw the US Currency…

JOE ROGAN: Off.

SHAWN RYAN: The world stage and pull it and use Chinese yen. Whoa. And, you know, I mean, that would destroy us. If all trade went to, if the world reserve currency went to the Chinese yen, that would, that would destroy our economy.

And so, but yet they’re gaining a lot of traction on this. And so, yeah, I would love to go to any one of these 22 countries and talk to them and just ask, like, why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? Because that gives, nobody’s f*ing talking about this shit, you know, and…

JOE ROGAN: And I didn’t even know about it until just now.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, there’s no journalists talking about this. You could look up BRICS on X. There’s a page. It’s pretty, I don’t know if it’s, like, an official one, but, but they’re always posting, like, updates about it and what’s going on.

And so I think it would be, I think it would be really important for somebody to go around and start talking to, you know, getting another perspective rather than what, you know, FOX and CNN have to say about it.

A Crisis of Faith in American Foreign Policy

JOE ROGAN: What changed with you that altered your perspective about us being the good guys?

SHAWN RYAN: COVID.

JOE ROGAN: Really? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, that’s, I mean, I used to get, like, really upset when people would, you know, talk about, you know, the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and, and when I was still in, you know, and I got so pissed off, I moved out of the f*ing country. And I was like, I’m just, I don’t even want to listen to this shit anymore.

But after diving in and looking at the policies that came out and kind of, you know, it’s kind of like when it’s just reflecting on some of the policy decisions and stuff that didn’t really make sense at the time when I was in that. Now I look back and I’m like, man, what the… Like, I didn’t have time to think about it then. Because it was, okay, go on the next stop, go on the next mission, whatever, right?

And, but now, like, looking back through the podcast and talking to, you know, my podcast started with all my former colleagues in mil and agency. Nobody thinks we should have been there, especially Iraq. Nobody thinks we should have been there.

It’s, and I just keep going down the rabbit hole. And, man, I just, I don’t, diving into the military industrial complex, all the lies that the government has been telling us, all the unreleased classified shit. You know, the, it’s just, it’s overwhelming and it’s just, it’s created a hundred percent complete distrust in government.

I mean, the Dick Cheney stuff, I mean, you know about Dick Cheney? Halliburton?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Have you looked into that?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: At all?

JOE ROGAN: Well, he was the CEO of Halliburton, and then Halliburton got no bid contracts to rebuild in Iraq for billions.

The Halliburton Connection

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t think, I don’t think people understand, like, how…

JOE ROGAN: Crazy that is, how big.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it was the f*ing logistics company for two wars. That’s like, that’s everything, Joe. They’re, they’re delivering your mail, they’re building your barracks, they’re cooking your food. They’re in charge of garbage, they’re in charge of fuel. They’re everything, everything. Everything that’s logistical over there is Halliburton, KBR.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: In both countries. And I mean, you know, I think people think Afghanistan. They’re like, oh, man, you’re probably on a tent or sleeping on the side of a mountain or something. No, man, there’s f*ing Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, Thai restaurants. I mean, that’s all, that’s all logistics.

I mean, it’s, it’s f*ing, it’s, it’s cities that we built over there. And it all was built by Halliburton.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: Who was, who is, you know, the CEO’s vice president in the f*ing country. Like, what? Are you serious?

JOE ROGAN: And now he supports Kamala Harris.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Right?

The Collapse of Media Trust

JOE ROGAN: When you see the left getting excited that Dick Cheney is supporting their candidate, you know, the world’s gone haywire.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s great. The same people that used to think Dick Cheney was the devil, now all of a sudden they’re like, look, Dick Cheney, it’s…

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, there’s no, nobody died. It’s like nobody actually has an opinion anymore. They’re just told, you know, they’re just told, hey, this is, this is what we’re going with the next two hours.

JOE ROGAN: How long they can keep that up with the Internet? Because the distrust in the media is at an all time high. It’s probably, it has to be higher than it’s ever been in human history. Ever been in the history of printed words right now. More distrust than ever.

And at the same time, you have these independent people that have become bigger than the media. That’s never happened before. There’s never been a thing where just like an app that you get on your phone has 30 times more views than the top show at CNN. Yeah, that’s never happened before, but now that’s the world that we live in.

And so propaganda is not effective anymore. And it’s also the delivery method that they use. It sucks. They sit there with makeup on, with perfect clothes, and they said right now in Syria, and they start reading these things and they’re reading them off the teleprompter.

And you know that that person could be working at f*ing Entertainment Tonight. They could be working at, you know, any other show. They’re just a talking head. Yeah, they just, no one believe, they know that the mouthpiece for some giant corporation. No one thinks that’s the real news anymore.

You have to be like old boomers who are like real tired, like those old liberal boomers. They’re still like MSNBC to the death, you know, like the Stephen Kings out there. Yeah, MSNBC to the death.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The Media Landscape and George Soros’s Radio Investment

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I was saying about the baby boomer generation. I mean, I think that the media will die if things continue just the way they are and the censorship doesn’t get too bad. I think the media is done when the baby dies.

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t George Soros just buy 200 radio stations?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, man.

JOE ROGAN: First of all, what a bad investment. Because who the f* listens to radio? That’s a bad investment. But second of all, what are you going to do? Because one thing that I do find is that right wing talk radio is probably the only talk. That’s like the only place where you get a lot of right wing ideas. Like, there’s a lot of like local right wing talk radio.

The reason why I know is my mechanic, whenever he fixes one of my cars and he brings it back, he’s always listening to right wing talk radio. So I turned my car on the other day and I’m listening to these guys argue about Kamala Harris and the border and that she was the f*ing border czar. You know, they didn’t swear, but they were going over this and I was like, that’s interesting.

Like maybe that’s what he wants to stop. You know, if you want to own 200 radio stations, just start firing all those right wing guys.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I think. You know, you would stop a lot.

JOE ROGAN: Of that because I think that’s where a lot of people are getting their information that aren’t using podcasts because it seems like I don’t hear a lot of left wing AM talk radio shows. Do you?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOE ROGAN: No. Weird, right?

SHAWN RYAN: It is.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like the one area that seems to be dominated by right wing talkers.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, we’re probably about to.

JOE ROGAN: But I don’t. I mean, I don’t know what a good move that would be. Maybe he knows more than me about how many people that affects. And maybe my mechanic. I should ask him.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I mean, the guy’s so wealthy, I don’t think he really cares about a good investment.

JOE ROGAN: Also, he’s so old.

SHAWN RYAN: Just wants a megaphone.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he wants to. He’s, you know, he likes to manipulate governments, he likes to manipulate society. I think he thinks it’s like his. It’s his version of a video game.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I think he genuinely seems to enjoy it. Yeah, it’s really interesting.

SHAWN RYAN: I think you’re right.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, Elon’s openly said he thinks that guy hates humanity. Like that.

SHAWN RYAN: It appears that way.

JOE ROGAN: That is a wild thing to say. It’s such a wild thing to say. And it’s such a wild thing to do. Like a super villain in a Batman movie. Like some billionaire guy who likes to hire the most progressive district attorneys that’s going to let people out of jail and then fund the next person who’s more to the left of that person.

And just keep pushing it, keep pushing it, keep pushing it until you get tents everywhere, violence in the streets. You know.

SHAWN RYAN: He’s done a damn good job.

Political Donations and Corporate Influence

JOE ROGAN: How come there’s no right wing guys like that do it the other direction?

SHAWN RYAN: I always wonder that too.

JOE ROGAN: I always wonder that. Well, it’s also like, if you look at the amount of donors that donate to the left versus donate to the right. Have you ever seen that chart?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOE ROGAN: It’s f*ing nuts. The left gets so many more donations than the right does. It’s a giant difference.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think that is?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know, man. I think a lot of rich people feel guilty and they get into philanthropy. And also it’s a good way to cover their ass and make them look like better people. And the people that really go after you if they don’t think you’re a good person, are generally the left. So if you could like throw them a little cheddar. You like, I wonder, I wonder if they’re.

SHAWN RYAN: Buying their place outside of the rules. Like, hey, I donated your thing. You know, it’s got to be a little bit of that rules.

JOE ROGAN: Got to be a little bit of that in there, you know. What do you got? The top donors to OpenSecrets.org, seven of the or six of the top seven are Republicans. Oh, individual donors. Oh, individual donors. What I was talking about was like they showed a chart that had like Google, Facebook, all these mega corporations that were donating.

So this is like individual donors. Wow. Some guys donated $105 million, but that’s guys probably worth billions. That’s probably some sort of a write off too, isn’t it? That’s pretty crazy. Go to top corporation donations via party because that’s the chart that I was looking for.

It was just nuts to say how much, just how much money overall is being spent to push the Democratic party. It’s pretty extreme, you know, and you got to think why is, what are they getting out of that? Like what’s the end goal? And how could you look at what’s going on right now and go, this is great.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I, that’s what I. Sometimes I think it’s all. It is a complete facade.

JOE ROGAN: This is the number one. This is corporations. So they donate more than Google organizations, federal contributions. So $82 million is the top top one. And that’s Empower Parents PAC. And these are right wings. Is that why it’s red? I’d assume so. So it seems like the top four. Why, what is, what, what is that Google chart that I was saying? And I don’t see even see Google on this. Is it Alphabet? Would they put it under Alphabet? Yeah, I don’t know. I’ll try, I’ll try again. Okay. This is another secrets though. Yeah. Open secrets might be like.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not donate to nonprofits though. I just have to top of corporate donors is just all I typed in. Okay. Is this corporate donors to what though? That’s why I was waiting. Giving to programs that empower organizations to do more. So you could find promising fund. I think that’s fundraising shit. I don’t think that’s necessarily political donors.

Campaign donors, parties, PACs. That’s the individuals, right? No, this is the corporates. This is the corporates ones. Yeah. So what was that Google chart then? The number two donator to the Democratic party was that Sam Bankman Fried guy. Which is crazy.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That one seemed like maybe that was a good way to skirt around stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t work.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: This is what it says Google or Alphabet gave on open secret. It says they gave just under $10 million to contributions and then spent like $21 million lobbying. Lobbying top recipients, obviously. Kamala Harris.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They’re all look at. So Google’s all blue.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, is this who, this is who they donated to?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. One Republican donation. Never back down, Inc. What is that? It’s weird because, you know, it’s supposed to be the will of the people. It’s supposed to be the government works for the people. And it’s not that. It’s some very bizarre, enormous amount of money that’s being spent to make sure that the people in power continue to run things the exact same way.

That’s what I think. They’re really terrified about Trump. It’s not necessarily even that he’s a Republican. It’s much more that he’s a guy that is not going to play the game.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then when he gets in there, he’s going to like. One of the things that he’s talked about is having Elon come in and do some sort of a government efficiency agency. They’re terrified of that.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because it’s not efficient. Yeah. And he’s going to come in with like that Tesla mindset. It’s like you’re working 16 hours a day. You’re sleeping on the f*ing couch.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: We’re here to get some shit done. And he tried applying that to government. That’s, you know.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I shaved. What did he shave, like 80% of the staff off Twitter?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: When he got it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He was like, what, what the f* are you people doing? Why do you have so many people working here doing nothing?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was right.

Elon Musk, Twitter, and Free Speech

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he was right. Especially. You don’t want to censor people. Like it’s, it’s interesting how people react to it that he’s ruined Twitter. He’s destroyed Twitter. No, he’s, he’s. You could still block these crazy people if you want. You can still not see them if you want. But what he’s allowed is everyone to talk. Everyone.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if you don’t think that that’s good, you’re very short sighted. You don’t understand human beings. Like, you cannot have human beings censored because someone is going to be in power and they’re going to take advantage of that censorship. They’re not different than us. They’re not these incredibly benevolent beings who just want everything to work out. Well, no, they’re people.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And a lot of them are dirty, dirty people. Dirty, corrupt people that went to ditty parties.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s, it’s. It’s that. Control what they say, control what they think. You know.

JOE ROGAN: It’s wild. It’s a. It’s a crazy time to be a person. To watch all this go down in the same time. AI is being developed and we’re not even exactly sure where it’s at right now. You know, at any moment in time, it could be a sentient force, and AI is already manipulating, lying, changing things in order.

One of the things that they put this AI program, they gave it a task, and they gave it a specific allotted amount of time, and it couldn’t achieve it in the allotted amount of time, so it gave itself more time.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: They also have things called hallucinations. AI doesn’t want to admit it’s wrong or it doesn’t know things. So if it doesn’t have information, it will kind of create an answer.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And they don’t understand why it’s doing that. And sometimes that answer is not true.

The AI Race and Global Dominance

SHAWN RYAN: I got to be honest, man, this AI stuff scares the shit out of me.

JOE ROGAN: It should. I think it’s a life form. I think it’s the next kind of living thing. I think we’re going to give birth to it. I think. I think we’re just running head first towards the cliff. Just feet on the ground, full clip, looking down, not looking ahead. And I think we’re going right over a cliff with this thing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I did. I don’t. I mean, it’s a tough. It’s a. I mean, what are we going to do, though? I mean, China, you know, Xi Jinping has come out and said that he believes that the winner to the race of AI will achieve global domination.

So what do you do? Do you try to control it as Americans? Do you try to control it or do you go, f* it, we got to do it, man, we got to go, we got to go. Or China’s going to pass this up, which they probably already have, but I.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t think they have. I think one of the things they’re doing is they’re stealing our tech. And there was some recent speculation that China had gotten access to some of OpenAI’s work. They think it’s possible, which means it probably did happen. I think there’s probably a shit ton of espionage.

I mean, this is the reason why they banned Huawei products from the United States. I’m a cell phone dork. I really love technology. And Huawei had a phone that was coming out that was really excited about. I’m like, this is crazy. They were doing 100 megapixel cameras and phones way before anybody else.

They had a Porsche design Huawei phone. There was like this incredible phone. It was like built better than any other phone. It was much more expensive, but built better than any phone that you get in America. And I was like, wow. And this is back when I would use both Android and Apple regularly. And then they banned it. I was like, that sounds kind of crazy. Only one company. Like there’s other Chinese companies.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

China’s Technological Infiltration and Manufacturing Dominance

JOE ROGAN: And then I started looking into it. And it’s not just the cell phones, it’s routers, it’s all sorts of things. They found third party inputs in different pieces of technology and different ways that they can exploit and use this stuff to siphon information from networks.

Like if they’re attached to a network that’s at a university and they’re doing research projects, they can siphon that information. They also embed students in these places that are beholden to the CCP. These students rise up, get their PhDs, and some of them wind up going back to China.

The whole thing is really strange because we’re such an open, loose society that we’re vulnerable to these kind of attacks. You can’t buy sht in China. You want to buy land in China? Good luck, f face. They won’t sell you a house. They’re not going to sell you land near the military base. You out of your f*ing mind? But in America, we’re so goofy. We let China buy up farmland that’s near military bases.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then we let them sell us the cell phone towers surrounding the military bases and we don’t even check.

SHAWN RYAN: Let them fly spy balloons, you know, traverse the entire United States.

JOE ROGAN: Apparently that was something they didn’t want to tell Trump about. They hid that from Trump.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, that was that. Some of this had happened during the Trump administration. But they didn’t tell him. Yeah, because he probably like, shoot it down. F*ing 100%. He’d say, shoot it down.

SHAWN RYAN: Why wouldn’t you?

JOE ROGAN: Why wouldn’t you? They did eventually shoot it down.

The Energy Race and America’s Vulnerable Grid

SHAWN RYAN: You know, it bothers me though. Maybe they’re not ahead of us, but I mean, the energy that they’re building coal mines every day to power all this stuff. And we’re going on about, should we use fossil fuels or not. And we just talked about how weak our grid is.

So if we don’t beef up the grid and start going nuclear, then we’re going to f*ing lose this race.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that, like California, for example. California is not going to have internal combustion engine cars by 2035. By 2035 you have to buy only electric cars.

SHAWN RYAN: That actually, that one that happened.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it can be reversed for sure and it probably will be once the great war happens. But if you’re going to say that and you have a grid that you have to shut down, like you have to do brownouts every summer because of people using the air conditioning.

And after he said that, after Newsom said this about this thing about 2035, within two months, they asked people to stop charging their Teslas because it was wrecking the grid.

SHAWN RYAN: Mind blowing, right?

JOE ROGAN: You’re asking people to stop charging their electric cars and you’re not doing anything to strengthen your grid. Like what are you doing to beef this up for 2035? Do you have some immense project that you’re building that is going to make a much more sustainable, much more robust grid that’s going to be able to handle 30 million electric cars in your state? Are you out of your f*ing mind?

SHAWN RYAN: There’s, yeah, there’s literally no. I mean, I look into this all the time. There’s no infrastructure going in to correct the problem because the problem is so big that nobody wants to tackle it.

Semiconductor Manufacturing Challenges

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And it’s a long term problem. You know, just like when they talk about putting in chip manufacturing plants, Nvidia just stopped its production in Austin. See what happened with that?

So apparently they weren’t achieving the results that they demanded that they desire. You know, you have to have certain tolerances when you’re making these computer chips. And so they set this plant up in Texas and I think they just canceled the contracts for a bunch of people working there because they’ve kind of recognized that this is just not going to work.

SHAWN RYAN: Why is it going to work?

JOE ROGAN: Good question. I didn’t really get into it. I just read part of it. I mean, asking Jamie to pull it up. I think it’s not meeting their standards.

SHAWN RYAN: Nvidia is the company. Didn’t they start buying Samsung? Didn’t Nvidia start producing all their chips in the ocean? They’re buying these massive ships.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s, you’d have to look that up in the ocean. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Part of this, there’s a huge thing that Intel did in Ohio. They’re still trying to do it to make chips there for semiconductors or whatever. And part of the reason, but this was in Texas. No, no, I just say part of the reason I picked it was because there’s no seismic activity there. Oh, that makes sense. Like in the ocean.

SHAWN RYAN: Sounds opposite of that.

JOE ROGAN: Super sketch.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Why are they doing it in the ocean though?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t look into.

JOE ROGAN: I didn’t look into international law.

SHAWN RYAN: It was one of those articles I started reading and I was like, I don’t understand any of this sh*t, but.

JOE ROGAN: See if you can find the Texas one. They’re canceling the, see if it’s Samsung. God damn it. I was just reading it too. Multiple semiconductor manufacturing projects delayed in the US.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, that’s a month old.

JOE ROGAN: Not recent. Popped up. No, this is pretty recent. This is pretty recent. They were talking about they’re not achieving the results they desire. Which is what my point is. It’s a long term project in order to get up to the manufacturing levels that China’s at right now. It’s a long term project. We’re really behind this.

Yeah, they’re way, way, way, way, way ahead of us. They make everything and they make amazing things. Now. It used to be made in China was junk made in China. They make some of the most incredible electric cars you could buy.

The Drone Warfare Future

SHAWN RYAN: Well, the drone game too. I mean that’s the future of warfare, right? Is all these drone swarms and DJI, you know, that’s a Chinese company. And this is going to be a big f*ing problem when we realize, hey, the next one isn’t going to be guys in caves anymore.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Samsung withdraws its personnel from, that’s it, Taylor plant located in Texas due to 2nm GAA yields unable to improve beyond the 10 to 20% range. That’s it. Click on that. So see what it says. So that it is Samsung. So this is an enormous project that Samsung and everybody was all excited. Samsung was going to start making chips.

So the Taylor Hub was initially planned to mass produce wafers of advanced process processes below the 4nm. I don’t know what that means. Nanometer lithography. Lithography allowing Samsung to secure lucrative clients in the U.S. Unfortunately, despite progressing with the chip making plant, the company has faced a challenge that has become all too familiar with the entity. Ensuring healthy yields, particularly with its 2nm GAA process.

The situation surrounds 3nm GAA is not pretty either with Business Korea reporting that Samsung’s yields for this technology stand at 50% whereas TSMC has a significant lead as its 3 nanometer yields are in the 60 to 70% range. That’s the Taiwan Semiconductor Company. Yeah.

So they’re just not, not good enough yet. I mean they’re doing it from the ground up and it’s going to, there’s going to be a lot of trial and error. It’s going to take a long *ss time, you know. I mean, remember when SpaceX started and you know, rockets were exploding and people like oh my God, the rocket exploded and Elon was like, yeah, we’re going to blow some rockets up because we have to figure what the tolerances are and how to do it correctly. And this is all part of the process. We knew this was going to happen.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, and that’s when you’re doing something that’s that enormous. Like if you want to start making all the computers here, like good lord, that is a stretch. They’ve been doing it over there for so long, they’ve got it down to a science.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And you know, you’ve got all these companies, whether it’s Lenovo or all, they’ve been manufacturing laptop forever, manufacturing chips and hard drives and processors and like to catch up with them. Good lord, they’re so far ahead of us.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, it’s, I mean, I don’t, I hope it comes back to the US but I would just, I would like to see us just start getting stuff from somebody other than China. That’d be nice, be a great start, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think Samsung has stopped making their phones in China. I think they’re the only country.

SHAWN RYAN: Did they really? Yeah.

AI Dominance and Technology Espionage

JOE ROGAN: Google that. 90% sure that’s true. This article is saying that these Nvidia chips which are I guess are ours because it’s a Silicon based or a Silicon Valley based company, puts the US way further ahead of China with artificial intelligence. Yeah.

The gap between China and US leading in artificial intelligence chip technology is set to widen even further after Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang unveiled next generation processors for what he called the new era of generative AI and robotics used in industries.

But we are right, but we’re not making those. But the thing is, the other part of it is they’re going to get access to this stuff, which is this is the really creepy thing that people keep admitting is that it’s very porous. The top secret information that these companies have. Espionage is super common. It’s so valuable. Yeah, it’s so lucrative that, you know, they don’t even, sometimes they probably don’t even know when stuff is getting siphoned over there.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, you have to just think. I mean, it’s Chinese. From what I understand, it’s Chinese law that anything, any business that is taking that is being conducted within China. If it helps, if the technology helps the military, or could potentially help the military, then China, then CCP has access.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And that’s end of story. So anything, any f*ing thing over there that’s being developed or manufactured, all of that technology is in their hands. It just is.

JOE ROGAN: It just is. It’s not countries. What China’s doing is companies do not get to function on their own. They function under the wing of the government.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, they suck these American companies in with getting around the red tape, you know, and then it’s, you know, the cheap labor, cheap prices. And then once it’s going, I mean, they control it. That’s dealing with this money train to end right now because you’re not in America, buddy.

JOE ROGAN: And people are whores. And they just go over there, they take that money. Got a great deal. Thinking about buying a jet. I mean, we’ve seen what they do. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Do you know the story about the woman who was working on anti gravity technology?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

Anti-Gravity Technology and UAPs

JOE ROGAN: She was working on anti gravity technology. She was originally from China and then disappeared and went back to China. She apparently was making some breakthroughs and came back to America and wound up dead. I forget how she died, but some slippery circumstances where you’re like car accident or something like that. You’re like, damn, that’s wild.

SHAWN RYAN: Like the guy that came up with the HYDRA engine.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Oh, that guy. Yeah, the guy that came with the water engine. That’s a great story too. But this woman, if they’ve developed some sort of anti gravity technology, and I’ve always wondered, when we’re looking at these things that people are calling UAPs or whatever you want to call them, how many of those are super sophisticated drones?

It’s not zero. It’s not zero percent. I’m not saying that they’re not, that there’s not a real phenomenon going on that people are seeing that defies science and logic and might be a super intelligent creature from somewhere else or super intelligent thing from somewhere else, if it’s even biological at this point.

It might be that all life eventually becomes digital life and all life eventually becomes some sort of artificial Intelligence, or at least connected to artificial intelligence that might be the progression of biological life that eventually creates something way better than itself. And that’s what propagates the universe.

And if someone in this world has developed some sort of technology that’s similar to what they use, that’s a huge advantage.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah.

UAP Technology and Government Secrecy

JOE ROGAN: And that’s the thing that gets me about all this UAP talk. I’m like, if some other country had or if we had something that was just a game changer, something that didn’t require any propulsion systems at all, it relied on gravity, and bends space and time and can instantaneously traverse between one point in the sky and another. That kind of technology is nuts.

And if that is in the hands of the United States government, it would make sense that it would, like, help them to, like, spread this UFO nonsense.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I mean, do you. You’ve dove into this more than anybody else I know. I mean, what do you think this. What do you think it all is?

Extraterrestrial Life and Nuclear Weapons

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s a bunch of things. I think there is a possibility, a very strong possibility that there’s life out there, and that if I was life out there, and I was much more advanced than us, I would definitely visit us.

And there’s also the fact that the sightings kicked up in a huge way after 1945, after the atomic bomb, after they, you know, did the Trinity experiment, and after they dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all those nuclear tests that they did in the 50s and the 60s, that’s exactly when the sightings start ramping up.

And if I was an intelligent life force from another planet, I go, all these crazy monkeys have nukes. And then we’d have to, you know, you’d have to think, okay, do we intervene? Well, if they blow themselves up, it will take so long for that planet to get back to a point where it has intelligent life again.

If they kill every person on this planet, we’re back to shrews and mice and f*ing a couple of monkeys in the jungle. How long before you can get a city again? How long before you can get a cell phone again? How many millions of years does it take?

And if I was an intelligent life force that realized that this is an error that can be corrected, I would probably correct it. I’d probably put a stop to the nukes. I’d probably make a show of force, hover over military bases, shut down all of their electronics, shut down all the. Just to let them know. Yeah, I would probably do that.

But, you know, how much do they actually intervene. And how many of them are there? Are there different ones? I mean, if there’s one that comes here, who’s to say there’s not a s* ton of different kinds. Some of them malevolent, some of them that only want us for our biology, some of them that are just doing tests on us, some of them that are, you know, kidnapping people and erasing their memories and putting them back in the woods.

Those stories are too common. There’s too many stories that are real f*ing similar that. Like the Travis Walton story. Ever heard that?

SHAWN RYAN: What’s that one?

The Travis Walton Abduction Case

JOE ROGAN: This guy was a logger in the 1970s. They. He was in. Or was it Oregon?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, did they make a movie?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fire in the Sky.

SHAWN RYAN: Seen it? Yeah, I’ve seen it. Crazy story, kind of like that. Do you know who. Who is that? Chris Bledsoe.

JOE ROGAN: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Have you heard of him?

JOE ROGAN: What’s that one?

SHAWN RYAN: Chris Bledsoe. He’s a guy that had an experience as well. You’ve not heard of Chris Bledsoe?

JOE ROGAN: Maybe I haven’t. Or forgot. It’s possible.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. It’s kind of the same thing. His memory’s kind of gone, and that’s what it sounds like.

JOE ROGAN: They all have a very similar story. They get medical examinations, and there’s girls that were pregnant and, you know, newly pregnant and got abducted, and all of a sudden they weren’t pregnant anymore and they couldn’t figure out what happened.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, I didn’t know that.

John Mack and Abduction Research

JOE ROGAN: There’s quite a few of those. John Mack had this book. John Mack was a psychologist who was at Harvard who wrote this book. I think it’s called “Abduction.” And it’s all him interviewing people that have had these kind of experiences happen to them.

And this book was in the 1990s, right. So there was. You know, I don’t think these people got to share stories where they could come up with the same story organically. Like, today, you’ve heard so many stories online about UFO abductions or crash retrieval or something that you could formulate in your own mind a dream that seemed like these things that you had heard over and over and over again.

But when you go back to, like, Betty and Barney Hill, which were one of the first people that ever got abducted by aliens, they have the same sort of story as all these different people that didn’t know anything about the phenomenon, didn’t know anything about UFO abductions, and then all of a sudden had one event in their life that freaked them out for the rest of their life, and they take them through hypnotic progression.

These people should hear the recordings of Betty and Barney Hill. They’re yelling and screaming, they’re freaking out. No one thought about being abducted by aliens in the 1950s or whenever that was. Yeah, but these people have this wild f*ing story that’s super similar to all these different stories that John Mack talks about.

And maybe there’s different kinds of aliens. Maybe there’s aliens that are just like our scientists that just come down here and study and report on the state of the biological entity known as the human beings and visit and return. And maybe they monitor us and watch us and make sure that we don’t do anything really f*ing stupid. Like give us enough room that we figure it out on our owns. But don’t, don’t intervene unless they’re about to nuke themselves.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: That’s best case scenario.

Ancient Tablets and Billy Carson

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t, I don’t know what all this is, man. I just, you know, I, I try to dive into it on the podcast and, and have talked to, you know, a handful of guys and I don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Know, man, some people are 100. Like, Billy Carson’s all in. I found out about him on your show too.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’d seen a couple of clips of him, but I’d never seen a long form interview of him until your show. That was a great episode. He’s fun. You know, he was on my friend Andrew Schultz’s podcast and Andrew was like, we’re not going to check nothing, we’re just going to let him, let him go. No fact checks. Let’s just, let’s just have fun and see.

But when he starts talking about those ancient tablets, he’s an expert in the deciphering of all those ancient tablets and he got a lot of information on that. Those things are fascinating because it’s all the same stories, even back then, these flying ships and all these different depictions of things that came from the sky and these giants and the Anunnaki and all these different things that came from some other place that had interaction with human beings.

Biblical Connections and the Afterlife

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, he kind of mixes it with, with biblical stuff, right? That’s kind of, I don’t know, that’s what I lean towards with all this stuff. Stuff, to be honest with you, is maybe I think there’s some consciousness aspect. I think there’s, I think there’s, I think it is the afterlife.

JOE ROGAN: It’s possible, that’s for sure. It’s possible that whatever these things are that come here, they’re from some sort of another dimension and that we just don’t have the ability to interact with that. We’re limited in our capacity as a biological entity to interact with these dimensions that are real, but we just can’t access them. We can’t get to it. We don’t have the frequency. We don’t have what it is.

But in some cases, under duress, under some situations, in some, you know, just like a person can be hypnotized, just like a person can go into a trance, I think there’s a way every now and then that people can kind of access these realms. And I think that’s probably what some of these entities are. I think people are probably having real experiences with something that probably is real but that normally you cannot interact with.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Do you.

Remote Viewing and Psychic Phenomena

SHAWN RYAN: Have you. Have you ever looked into. Because I think I kind of group all this stuff in together. But have you. Have you looked into the remote viewing stuff?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I have.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, dude. Yeah, that stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Pretty nuts.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I had a remote. I did this show called “Joe Rogan Questions Everything.” And we had remote viewers on. We tried to get them to do things. They couldn’t really. It wasn’t really effective. But I’m also, okay, this is an unnatural environment. It’s a television show. It’s weird pressure, you know, skeptical people that are looking at this and. And I don’t know if they’re the real.

I think it’s probably a skill that can be developed, but I don’t know how consistent it is. You know, it’s like, I don’t believe in psychics, but I do believe that sometimes you just know things and sometimes you get a premonition. And I think the connection that people have with each other is not as simple as, you call your friend up, hey, I haven’t talked to you in forever.

I think we’re connected somehow quantumly. I think we’re all connected in some sort of a weird, undiscovered way. And that’s why, you’re thinking about someone and they call you sometimes, you know, people say, oh, that’s just a coincidence, man. I don’t know about all that, because sometimes it’s someone I haven’t talked to for f*ing years. And you’ll be having a conversation with a buddy and you just start thinking about that guy. And then all of a sudden your phone rings.

SHAWN RYAN: Happens all the time.

JOE ROGAN: That’s weird.

Brain Function and Human Potential

SHAWN RYAN: That’s. I. I mean, what they say. We use 10% of our brain.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not real. You know, I don’t think that’s real.

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t?

JOE ROGAN: No, no. They. They. What that was. They didn’t really understand when they were saying that they didn’t really understand what the brain does and what parts of the brain do, and they thought that, we’re only using 10%. No, it’s different parts of the brain have very different functions, and under different circumstances, different parts of the brain are activated.

I think just. We have a limited understanding of the actual function of the brain, the whole thing and how it’s. How it’s work, how it’s making chemicals and making psychedelic compounds and hormones and epinephrine and norepinephrine and all this different dopamine and serotonin and how it regulates your system and changes the way you interact with the world. It’s all weird stuff, man.

I don’t think they completely have an. They can’t recreate a human brain, you know?

Joe McMoneagle and Remote Viewing

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. You know, some of this. Have you heard of Joe McMoneagle?

JOE ROGAN: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude, you. You have to talk to him.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s he?

SHAWN RYAN: He is remote viewer number one for the U.S. but he’s. He’s. But he’s not kooky or anything like that at all. He’s really. No.

JOE ROGAN: How do you not be kooky if you’re remote viewing, dude?

SHAWN RYAN: He. Just have a conversation with him. It’s. He’s. He’s there.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: No weird vibes. Not from my end anyways. But. But the way he, you know, I asked him, I’m like, well, how do you. How does it. How did it happen, do you think? Does everybody have this, or. You know, I was just pinging him with questions, and he said he thinks we all have had it since the beginning and that. That. I mean, he was basically saying, if you look at how animals communicate, they kind of communicate telepathically.

And he was talking about, you know, caveman times, you know, used to point at s* and grunt and nod heads and look at things, and everybody would know what you’re thinking about. And he goes. And then we started traveling in groups, and then language was kind of born. And he goes, Language actually slowed down our initial form of communication, which was, you know, it wasn’t maybe as descriptive, but it was just as deliberate as speaking a language.

And then you introduce technology. And basically what he was kind of saying is, you know, that our brains have been kind of dubbed down from, you know, thousands and thousands of years of technology coming out and language and all these other things and how to.

JOE ROGAN: Lose the ability to.

SHAWN RYAN: Exactly. We don’t. I mean, you hear it all the time. You don’t use it, you lose it, you know? And so basically what he’s saying is we’re losing our instincts.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that makes sense if you don’t use it. I mean, isn’t that what the appendix? Isn’t the appendix an organ that we no longer need anymore because we cook food?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I don’t know.

The Appendix and Human Evolution

JOE ROGAN: What is the reason why the appendix is going away? I think that’s what it is. I think it’s a change in diet over time has made it unnecessary. So it’s like slowly being phased out of the human anatomy, and that’s why it ruptures sometimes. But I don’t think it has a real function anymore what it used to have.

Oh, here it goes. The appendix is kind of helping us in two ways. Both with the gut. It helps fight off invading pathogens. That’s one thing that is true when they take out your appendix. Like your immune system is not as good, but also to repopulate the gut with its beneficial bacteria after gastrointestinal issues.

So what is… How did the appendix form and why is the appendix like… There’s a thing that was speculated about what the origin of the appendix is and why we don’t use it the same way we used to. Why do humans have an appendix? Worm shaped. Modern researchers believe the appendix has many key… Okay, okay, here it is. Go to the top. Beckett.

Worm shaped tube attached to large intestine in the human body. It’s an organ that is credited with very little significance and often removed indiscriminately to avoid complications due to infection. However, modern researchers believe the appendix has many key functions in the human body, and it protects the body’s internal environment from infection.

What is the original origin of the appendix, though? That was the thing that I had read. I think it was something about process fiber, vestigial. Okay. Support the theory that the appendix of vestigial origin that was once used by our herbivorous ancestors. This is it.

It was found that in herbivorous vertebrates, the appendix is comparatively larger and it helped in the digestion of tough herbivorous foods, such as bark of a tree. So the thing is we’re changing, right? We don’t eat like that anymore. So it’s changing and its function changes. And it makes sense that if we don’t use the mind the same way our ancestors did before language, we would probably lose this connection that animals do seem to have with each other.

Lost Intuitions and Human Connection

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I mean, you know, there’s all kinds of… I mean, if you heard of people… Have you heard of people? Kind of… How do I describe this? Me and my wife were just having this conversation the other day. Have you heard of people that kind of… They start preparing for their death, but they’re not realizing they’re preparing for their death?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I have heard of that.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s like an intuition that they’re unaware that they’re going to die. And so they start preparing everything for their departure and not even realizing that, you know, that they’re going to pass.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I have heard about that.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I mean, I think that’s just another example of… I think that we have lost a lot of intuitions and we don’t really know how to go back and exercise them. That’s kind of what I think.

Technology’s Impact on Human Development

JOE ROGAN: I think it makes sense. I think technology certainly distracts human beings from human interactions. And kids today are growing up more socially unbalanced and more… Their progress is retarded. There’s something about the use of technology that is certainly… It’s limiting kids abilities to interact with each other person to person.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And over time, that’s probably going to be the norm. You know, and if you wanted to think about the rise of spectrum disorders and lack of emotional connectivity and empathy that people have that seem to have those especially like on the far ends of the spectrum, and then accentuate that with like, added technology, constant technology. Each technology is more and more invasive.

The population of people that have these problems, it’s like… It’s almost like we’re moving towards becoming a different kind of person.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. You know, my… This person works for me. Turned me onto this podcast the other day and it was talking about how this is unverified, but it was still fascinating conversation. They were talking about how in… I can’t remember the amount of years, but humans will begin to lose their peripheral vision because they’re looking at a phone so much that we’re evolving. I guess you could… I don’t know if I would call that devolving. Yeah, devolving.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. That makes sense.

SHAWN RYAN: It does, right? I mean, it’s like, shit, go anywhere. That’s what everybody’s doing.

JOE ROGAN: Narrow band of focus. Yeah, right. And the pro, like, if you look at most people’s phone usage, like, what’s the average person’s phone usage? I bet screen times, like four hours, average.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ll bet it’s more than that.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, but let’s say it’s just four.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a giant chunk of your day.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that’s… I mean, if you’re up for twelve hours, it’s twenty-five percent of the day.

JOE ROGAN: So if twenty-five percent of the day you’re just looking like this, that’s got to have an ultimate effect on your vision.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

JOE ROGAN: Especially over time and especially if this becomes like completely normal for a thousand years.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t a thousand years, man. It was like… I mean I… It was way… It was within a lifetime. Yeah, yeah. Just makes sense that would happen.

JOE ROGAN: But we’re an adaptive organism. We adapt.

Psychedelics and Accessing Information

SHAWN RYAN: You know, weirdly, it’s this stuff all just scares the hell out of me. I mean, I think psychedelics plays a role in all this, you know, in accessing, you know, other information.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think so too. I think it’s a giant crime that stuff’s illegal. And it’s limited. And it’s limited. Like, you know, right now they’re doing some research on it and you know, the FDA was going to approve MDMA therapy for benefits for veterans rather dealing with PTSD and they stopped it and they decided more tests need to be done.

Meanwhile, you’re seeing like real results from people, life changing results and there’s a lot of people out there that need help and they should be doing something and it’s not hurting anybody.

A Life-Changing Ibogaine Story

SHAWN RYAN: Dude, do you want to hear the best story I’ve ever heard from them?

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

SHAWN RYAN: So I got, I got one of my best friends, former Green Beret, worked with him at the agency for a long time. He was blown up, survived. Survived like the worst f*ing car bomb I’ve ever seen. Like, got up, walked away. Dude’s head’s like right next to the car, then gets out. I don’t want to mention his name because I’m going to bring up some symptoms.

But he, then he got, he got fing shot in the head by a .38 special round in the middle of the road and survived it. And I’ve stayed with him through this whole process when anyways couldn’t walk without a cane. Was bedridden five, six days out of every week. Hadn’t had sex with his wife in over two fing years. Couldn’t go outside without sunglasses on because of the light sensitivity.

And I’ve been telling him, hey, you need to… Dude, you have to go down and like do the sideboe thing. I… Nothing else is working. I think this shit’s going to change. I wasn’t even aware of all this stuff. I knew about the bedridden stuff, and… But he was hiding it a lot, hiding a lot of that shit from me.

And his wife got in, called me, and so I got him piped in to this program, went down, did ibogaine, and did 5-MeO. Left his f*ing cane there, went home, banged his wife, doesn’t need the sunglasses anymore and is not bedridden. And that was about six months ago. And I just talked to him the other day, and it’s… He’s still, like, good to go.

JOE ROGAN: That’s wild.

SHAWN RYAN: And it… Dude, this shit happened. Like, when did he bet… It was four years. Four years of, like, living through that shit. I mean, cracked skull.

JOE ROGAN: One ibogaine treatment.

SHAWN RYAN: One ibogaine treatment done. I was like, do you think you’ll go back and, like, see what… Like, if more benefits show up? And he was like, no, I’m not. I’m not going to do it. But he’s like, not unless I start to slip. But he’s like, I’m like, good. I’m at peace. I feel f*ing great.

JOE ROGAN: That’s incredible. You know, imagine if there was a drug that could do that. There is, but imagine if there was a drug that the pharmaceutical drug companies could sell that could do that.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: There would be treatment centers everywhere.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Are you suffering from PTSD? We can cure you here at Ibogenesis. And then you go into that place and you get hooked up, it would be just like f*ing these GLP-1s that they’re trying to get people to lose weight. It’d be everywhere. Yeah, everybody would. Everyone has stress, everyone has trauma. Come on in.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: And they just be selling it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. You know, and I mean, even mine, like, I haven’t… I haven’t drank in almost three years now.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just…

SHAWN RYAN: I went down and did that ibogaine experience, and, like, it was just like…

JOE ROGAN: Have you done ibogaine? No.

SHAWN RYAN: Why not?

JOE ROGAN: What was good about it? Tell me what was left. Well, it’s very effective for people with addiction.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Well, there it is right there.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: I drank it almost three years. But, I mean, it was like, do you want, like, the whole experience?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

Shawn’s Ibogaine Experience

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. So I went down to… What? Went down to Mexico, and I just kept having these guys come on my show. And first one was Eddie Gallagher. He was talking about psychedelics, and I was like, oh, no, that shit’s for hippies. I’m not f*ing with that.

And then, you know, the one that really got me was I have this guy on his name, D.J. Shipley. And he, like, I saw that one you saw that one?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s great.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude, DJ’s a beast, bro.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I follow that guy on Instagram.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, like, takes Navy SEAL to a whole different level. But anyways. But yeah, he like, went out of his way after the… After we recorded. He was like, hey, dude, like, you should really fing think about going down there. And I was like, all right, well, you know, I’ve done all the… I’ve done like a ton of research. I’ve talked to a bunch of guys about it. I understand, like, how it works now. And so f it, I’ll go.

And so I went down there because I just wanted to be more in the moment with my… With my family. I got two little kids now and… And so I went down there and that was like… I felt like I was kind of like through the PTSD type stuff and… And maybe not, but… But I would… I just wanted to get rid of anxiety and be in the moment with my family and da da, da, da up.

And so I went down and did the ibogaine thing and we took these pills and like the… I didn’t get a lot of visuals, but the first visual I got was I was just sitting there, like, looking in this mirror, shaking this f*ing maraca and my head’s like… I was like, all right, this shit is not working well, then my head, like, it like split open like a…

JOE ROGAN: In the mirror?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, dude. It was like I watched my head like peel like a f*ing banana. Like it was just like, whoosh. And then… And then another head, like just blossomed out of it.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

The Ibogaine Experience

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it was really odd. And then I was like, alright, it’s definitely f*ing kicking in. I’m going to lay back. And it was kind of, to me, like the whole experience maybe, I guess I just lost total concept of time. It didn’t feel. It was like 12 hours, but it didn’t feel like 12 hours, but it didn’t really feel like 5 minutes either.

But I got like this life review kind of thing and just had these TV screens. It looked like all black, like you’re in space or something. And then these two lines of TV screens that were going in my peripheral vision and what was playing in those TV screens was. And it was moving, like at kind of a slow pace.

And so, like, I could see what was going on in the TV screens through my peripheral, but if I tried to concentrate on any one particular thing, then they would like all just disappear until I stopped trying to concentrate on one thing and then they’d all appear again. And I could, like, look at it through my peripheral and I’d be like, oh, that was in Baghdad. That’s when I was 5 years old and my dad was, like, yelling at me, and that was this. And it was like. But it wasn’t like I wasn’t like, reliving traumatic events. It was just, like, passing me by.

JOE ROGAN: Like recording.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like old VHS tape.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And so I just let them, like, pass. And then I went into some other stage, which I don’t really understand, but it was a bunch of, like, these walls of stuffed animals. And I was kind of like, going through this maze. And then, like, the last thing I talked about before I did the experience was China.

So then I had, like, this horrible thing about the Chinese invasion. But what came out of that? Like, it’s like, oh, well, that doesn’t sound very good. Well, yeah, what came out of that? I lost 11 pounds in literally one week. It’s a week long type of experience. I lost 11 f*ing pounds. It’s also a heavy metals detoxer, by the way. So that’s probably had like, some heavy metals blocking me up or something.

But the whites of my eyes, like, cleared up. And it wasn’t just me. I like, journaled all this down. And then I didn’t tell my wife any of this stuff. And I came home and she’s like, your eyes look, like, a lot lighter. Like, the whites look a lot lighter, whiter. And my brown eyes looked like they had lightened up.

JOE ROGAN: Huh?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And then it was also like I had realized everything that I was ingesting that was poisonous. It was like this going back to intuition. It was like this intuition of, like, I just. I was like, I didn’t come. I didn’t go down there to quit drinking. It just f*ing happened, man. Like, I was just like, I don’t think I’m going to drink anymore. So I haven’t had a drink in, like I said, just under three years.

JOE ROGAN: And do you think you had a drinking problem?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, f*, yeah, man. I had a drinking problem. Big drinking problem.

JOE ROGAN: But you didn’t think it at the time.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, my drinking problem had digressed quite a bit. So I mean, I used to drink close to two-fifths of vodka a day.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep. But, you know, then, and that was coming out of the agency, I didn’t have anything to do really. And I was processing a lot of kind of what had happened over the past 14 years. Didn’t have any friends, was severely depressed, whatever, man. Loved to party.

And that just. It was, wake up, drink many bottles of vodka all day long, and then at night, I’d crack a fifth. But by the time I went there, it was like probably two bottles of wine instead of two bottles of vodka a night still.

JOE ROGAN: Holy shit. Yeah, it’s a lot of wine.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, that’s. Yeah, it is. But anyways, came back, and I just didn’t want the wine anymore. I used to take Adderall. Addicted to that. Didn’t need that. Didn’t need this Ambien anymore. Didn’t need anything.

JOE ROGAN: And cold turkey.

SHAWN RYAN: Cold turkey, man. Weed. Quit weed for about six months, and then. And then, yeah, then I went back, but. And even sugar, man. I quit sugar for about six months.

JOE ROGAN: Months.

SHAWN RYAN: And it was. The funny thing is, man, like, it was zero effort. It wasn’t like, I’m not f*ing drinking and I’m not going to do sugar, and I’m not going to smoke weed and no more Adderall. I just didn’t want it. And there was no. There was just no urge. There was no addiction left. It was gone.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: And that’s the thing they say about ibogaine, that it uniquely rewires your brain.

The Illegality of Ibogaine

JOE ROGAN: And there’s some sort of a scientific understanding of how it works. But the fact that it’s illegal in this country is bananas.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, how many people are suffering through opioid addiction? It’s an enormous number. And if there was a thing that we are aware of that could help all of our citizens that are struggling right now, listening to this. There’s people who are struggling, and there’s a thing. And it’s illegal in this country, as far as I know. I don’t think people are dying from ibogaine.

Ibogaine was. It was very funny that Hunter chose this, but Hunter S. Thompson used that during. Was it the McGovern elections? It was like, ’72, whatever it was. And when he wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. So he created a rumor that Ed Muskie, who was one of the candidates, had a severe ibogaine addiction and that Brazilian scientists were coming to visit him and give him this treatment.

And it became such a rumor, and it spread so far, and that it started affecting him. And he was giving campaign speeches, and he was denying it, and he was all sweating, and he looked like a maniac. And Hunter essentially derailed this guy’s campaign by saying that he was addicted to ibogaine, of all things.

SHAWN RYAN: I think ibogaine would be impossible.

JOE ROGAN: Impossible to be. See if you can find Hunter on the Dick Cavett show where he admits that he started the rumor. It’s very funny. Wow. I f*ing loved that dude. God, I wish I met him.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, me too.

JOE ROGAN: He was a maniac.

SHAWN RYAN: That would have been wild.

JOE ROGAN: But the fact that he used ibogaine was really funny and ironic because that’s the thing that gets you to quit addictions.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I mean, it’s not a fun experience, man. There’s a lot of fun.

JOE ROGAN: I couldn’t believe people really believe that.

SHAWN RYAN: Muskie was getting it. I never said he was.

JOE ROGAN: I said there was a reason Milwaukee, if you wanted. Which was true. And I started the rumor in Milwaukee. Oh, shit. That guy, he f*ed everybody up. Because he would do actual journalism mixed in with fiction and he called it gonzo journalism. He essentially started a new kind of journalism. It’s like you. There was an understanding that some of this was not real. And you had to kind of like figure out what was real, what wasn’t real. And he was just going to do it his way.

SHAWN RYAN: He was a cool dude, man. He was a cool. That would have been a hell of an interview.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. But the fact that he chose ibogaine is kind of funny.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because it.

SHAWN RYAN: They say it’s like the one that you would.

JOE ROGAN: You can get addicted to.

SHAWN RYAN: Honestly, I don’t think I could get addicted to any of them, but.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t think so either. I’ve heard of people that get addicted to certain psychedelics, but I think there’s people that do psychedelics to learn more about themselves. And I think there’s people that do it to escape, and I think they escape reality with it. And then they get used to escaping and then they choose that as their reality and they do it way too much. I think there’s abuse with everything.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I think you can certainly abuse at least some psychedelics, but the benefits of them far outweigh the negatives. And there’s a lot of people that are hurting in this country and they should have access to all the different things that could help them.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the fact that you have to.

SHAWN RYAN: Go to Mexico to do that, it’s ridiculous, man. I mean, it’s fing working. And it’s just like, why the. What? Why can’t you like, let us. I’m speaking for the veteran population right now, but like, why just why can’t you just let us fing get better? Right?

Everybody knows the 22 a day, which is actually like 40 something a day, veterans that are killing themselves. And this is a f*ing game changer. But I don’t think Big Pharma is going to allow it. I just, I think that’s what the holdup is.

JOE ROGAN: Well, maybe that’s something that RFK Jr. can help. Yeah, if they get in office. Yeah, if they get into office. I mean, but when you hear about the five kill teams and you hear about all this different that’s going on.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, October hasn’t even started yet. You got a full month of October and who knows what the f* could happen up and leading up to the elections.

Threats Leading Up to the Election

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I don’t think they’re going to let up, whoever they are.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think so. Whoever they are. And not only that, but forget about the organization, forget about that. There are people out there, probably like Iran and maybe state actors or who knows, that’s trying to kill Trump.

What about the f*ing general kooks that have been buying all this rhetoric every day that he’s a threat to democracy, and they think that this is the one thing that can give them meaning in their life, the one great act that they can accomplish to go out and kill Trump. I mean, it’s.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know, man. I mean, there’s just, there’s so much that goes into this. Like that first shooter, right? What was he, 20 years old? Yeah. 20 years old. Then you got, Trump’s basically been in the media for what, about eight years? I think he showed up, what, about a year before the 2016 election? Right. Kind of went in.

So we’re going on, what, eight years now of the media just slamming him over and over. He’s a threat to democracy. This is going to ruin the country. So if you take that 20 year old, I mean, since he was 12 years old, that’s all he’s heard. Yeah, 12 f*ing years old, that’s all he’s heard.

JOE ROGAN: And little kids have no ability to discern.

SHAWN RYAN: So is it a very well orchestrated act to kill him or is it media manipulation that nobody really thought too far into this and now it’s all, now we’re seeing the consequences of what that kind of pushing an agenda like that will do.

JOE ROGAN: It’s probably both things. It’s probably both things. It’s probably all the above. And the fact that 24% of Americans think or polled, obviously polled, because those are the dumbest motherf*ers of all time anyway. People that answer polls, you always have to think of that. Like, 99% of people don’t answer polls. So out of that 1%, 24% of those retards are dumb enough to think that it’s a good idea to shoot Trump.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that the American people shouldn’t be able to decide on their own. That’s what’s really crazy. They think they’re right and you’re wrong. And no matter what, they have to stop you from getting your vote. They have to stop you from voting in the direction that you are thinking you are going to vote for.

It’s just a scary time. Scary time for the Republic really is. Yes, it is, like, weirdly scary and also, like, weirdly chaotic in the sense that this is all happening at the same time as the rise of podcasts and social media and new ways to get information. So more people are aware of how f*ed we are now than, like, during the Vietnam War.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

The Future of Civil Discourse

JOE ROGAN: People were against the Vietnam War, and they’re against fighting the troops in the Vietnam War, but they didn’t really know what was going on. They didn’t have full access to it like we have now.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I don’t know where this ends, man. Part of me thinks it’s just… part of me thinks we’re just going to end in some type of a civil war.

JOE ROGAN: That’s terrifying.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that seems like it’s definitely being pushed in that direction.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I think it’s… I think we’re all kind of already there. It’s just not… it’s just going to look a lot different.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a cold war, right?

SHAWN RYAN: You know? Yeah. You see these states banding together. You know, you see blue states banding together. You see red states banding together. You see a lot of governors aligning, sending National Guard down here to Texas to try to secure the border.

You got these extreme… look, I don’t… whether you agree with me or not, they’re extreme. And so, like, the abortion stuff. You got states that are making these super harsh abortion laws, like, “we’re going to hunt you down if you get one and throw your a in prison.”

And I think… I can’t remember how many states now have passed constitutional carry. Like 20. I can’t remember. I think there’s only like a state or two left that need constitutional carry. But I mean, I think the… basically what I’m getting at is I think the lines are kind of being drawn right now, or the alliances are kind of forming up. Like, “hey, let’s pass these super, super red laws, these super left laws or blue laws, and it’ll drive everybody out of the state that we want.”

You know what I’m getting at?

JOE ROGAN: I do know what you’re getting.

SHAWN RYAN: I think this is all kind of happening naturally.

The Role of AI and Open Source Information

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know what the solution to any of this stuff is. I hope it’s a greater understanding that we develop over time where we figure how to communicate better and work together.

And I think some of that can be facilitated through AI if it’s done correctly. If it’s like a real open source AI where people can get a real better understanding of the actual mechanisms instead of whatever beliefs you have and why the system works the way it is. If you could just have it laid out.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Factually laid out, where there couldn’t be no shenanigans. You can’t deny it.

SHAWN RYAN: I think one way would just be having podcasters and journalists. I mean, how the f* would you do this? But one thing on my show, and I kind of went off the rails a little bit the last month, I got a little… probably more political than I want. I was… I hate politics, man.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, me too.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it’s the kind of…

JOE ROGAN: They come up all the time. I like them.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Every time I dive in, I feel like… I feel like I fed a hooker on a rusty couch. You know what I mean? It’s like, I don’t think this s‘s going to wash off. But you know what I’m talking about.

JOE ROGAN: I do, I do, I do.

Critical Thinking and Tribal Politics

SHAWN RYAN: But anyways, where I was going is… people have just lost the f*ing ability to think for themselves. They can’t critical think anymore.

And so, like, one thing that I do on mine is if I bring somebody on that’s… I’m like, “don’t say Trump 500 times on my show. Let’s not say, ‘f the left, f the right.’ Like, let’s not say ‘these fing Democrats and these fing Republicans.’ Just give me the policy, just give me the problem. Just leave all that s* out.”

Because if you leave all those adjectives out, then it forces people to go, “well, s*, I don’t really know.” It forces them to formulate their own opinion because they don’t know what their side thinks about that particular issue. Unless you’re talking about abortion or something like that.

But you know what I mean? If you leave that out, if you can leave those adjectives out, then I think common sense will start to make a comeback because it won’t be so tribal. It will be like, “well, actually, I don’t really… I don’t know where the party that I align with stands on this. So I’m going to have to formulate my own f*ing opinion here.”

And man, that would do wonders.

JOE ROGAN: We definitely need more people that are willing to do that too, because some people just don’t have the time or the interest to form their own opinions on things. It’s so much easier to just agree with whatever their side believes.

How did you get started in doing a podcast? Like, what was the motivation behind it?

Shawn Ryan’s Origin Story

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, well, I used to teach weapons and tactics and I taught Keanu Reeves for John Wick 3.

JOE ROGAN: And…

SHAWN RYAN: And then I got a lot of hate, I’ll just put it that way. I got a lot of hate from the special operations community, from the two way community. And I was like, “you know what, man? Like, it’s very egocentric community anyways.”

And so I was like, “I’m fing done with this s.” And so I just started… dude, I didn’t know what to do. I was doing camping stove reviews and I bought a bunch of f*ing alpacas and put them in my front yard. And I thought I was going to be a farmer.

Yeah. And then… but you know what I did? I was like, “dude, I’m so f*ing tired of my guys killing themselves and going into depression and suicide attempts.” And I got sick of the same talking heads on TV kind of documenting what was going on over there. It was a bunch of people who had never even stepped foot in any of those war zones documenting what happened over there.

So I just started and I built like, I don’t know, maybe 250,000 subs on YouTube from gun stuff. And so I started… I was like, “I got to… one, we got to document the history. Two, there’s a major f*ing suicide epidemic happening.”

So let’s talk about some guys that had attempted. I mean, I tried to kill myself. But let’s get some guys that have really been through it, dug themselves out of it.

JOE ROGAN: And…

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s… so it’s… so we’re documenting history the way it happened. We are talking about the veteran crisis that’s going on and how people got out of it.

And then it also… and then at the end of every episode was, “hey, let’s talk about your business,” because it’s stories what sell. So let’s do the whole story and get everybody super attached to you. Let’s document the history, talk about your vulnerabilities, what it was like transitioning back into civilian life, how f*ed up it was, how you ruined your family, how you tried to kill yourself, all that, how you came out of it. And then let’s talk about your business.

And so, I mean, these guys would come on and their business would jet launch overnight, which I’m sure you know. But I just did… I just like doing it. I liked f*ing helping people and I… and but I’ll tell you…

JOE ROGAN: Like…

SHAWN RYAN: I started… it was awesome. I loved it. I still… there’s nothing else I’d rather do. I started feeling a lot of resentment to my guests because they would come on my show and then they would pass me up business wise like that.

And I was like, “man, what the f do I have to do to make a business out of this s? Like, I’m great at jet launching everybody else’s, but I’m not making any f*ing money here and I got a family to support and this isn’t going to work out.”

And then I don’t know what happened, man, but then something just switched. Like God just stepped in and was like, “you’re doing good s*. I’m going to bless you.” And I just hit a turning point and now I just talk to whoever I’m interested in.

The Power of Authentic Conversation

JOE ROGAN: Well, you’re doing a great show and I think that’s all it takes.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: I think you do a great show. And then the beautiful thing about social media and YouTube and all these different things is that people could just share it. Like, I’ve had a few people… I think Billy Carson, I think somebody sent me that one.

And it’s just like someone would say, “hey, check this out,” and just send you a text message. That’s such a massive advantage of YouTube and Spotify and a lot of these apps is that someone could just send you a show. Like, “you’d really love this show. Check it out.” And then you just click it, and all of a sudden it’s playing.

And I play it in my car, play it in the sauna, and I’m listening to this, and it’s a complete new thing that’s available anytime you want. You can pause it.

I know it’s you. One of the things I like about your show is I can 100% tell this is just you talking to these guys. Like, “what did you do? Okay, explain that to me.” Like, it’s just you.

And in this world of talking heads, that has become a very refreshing alternative to a lot of people. And if you do a good show like yours, it just grows. It’s just people will find it. People share it, and it just organically grows.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, thank you for checking it out.

JOE ROGAN: Hey, my pleasure.

SHAWN RYAN: Why did you start yours?

Joe Rogan’s Podcast Journey

JOE ROGAN: I started just on a laptop, answering questions with a friend of mine, my friend Brian. We were just f*ing around. We thought it’d be fun to just do for fun.

I always wanted to do a radio show, but I thought, “no one’s ever going to give me a radio show.” When I was touring, doing clubs back in the day where you would have to do morning radio, I would like to do it. I would like… because I have these crazy things that I’m interested in, crazy stories.

So I’d come in, do these morning radio shows, and I’d be like, “wow, what a great job that would be. Morning radio game.” Yeah. I’d f* up and swear… that wouldn’t work.

And then the rise of podcasts happened. Adam Carolla had one, and there’s a bunch of other ones. And then Opie and Anthony. Anthony Cumia from Opie and Anthony started doing his own show called Live from the Compound, where he’s doing karaoke holding a machine gun, and he’s out of his f*ing mind. He built a television studio in his basement.

And I was like, “f*, he can do that and do that online. I need to start doing something.”

So we started out just doing this little… oh, and also the Tom Green show. Tom Green had his own Internet talk show, and I was a guest on it long before my podcast. I was like, “you just got to figure out how to make money out of this.”

You could see the seeds of my podcast being planted while I was on his show. I was like, “this is amazing. No executives, no one talking to you.”

And then I actually even was in talks with the company that was doing it with him to do my own thing with them, but I just decided to do it on my own. I’m like, “I don’t do nothing with nobody.” I wanted it to just be 100% me just f*ing around.

And in the beginning, all my friends, like, “what the f* are you doing? Why are you wasting your time?” They come over my house, and my kids were really young at the time, so in the early days, you would hear… we were in one of my spare bedrooms with a desk set up, and you’d hear, “mommy, she took my thing.” The kids are arguing with each other.

So it was from that moving to a little studio, rented a little office space somewhere, and then moved into a warehouse and got a real studio and then started having security there, and then started… I was like, “well, I should have a f*ing gym here. Let’s put a gym in.”

And started bringing in guys to train with. And then it just got big. All organic. I never did ads for it. I never put a billboard up. I never went on other people’s podcasts and said, “please watch my podcast.” Never did any of that. Never promoted it. It just grew.

The Power of Independent Podcasting

SHAWN RYAN: That’s awesome.

JOE ROGAN: All. But it’s all the same reason why yours is growing. It’s just I talk to whoever I want to talk to.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, I watched your show a bunch of times. Reached out to you on Instagram. What’s up.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but the way you do it and the way I do it is, I think that’s why it’s interesting, because I can tell, like, when you’re talking to that guy that was talking about the direct energy weapons and Antarctica, all that crazy sh*t, like, you wanted to hear what the guy had to say.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, you know, this is why he was on there. You know, this isn’t like some producer has told you the list of guests that you’re going to have for the week, and you’re not really interested in it, and you got to interview some f*ing kid in a boy band.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I can’t do it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I can’t do it.

JOE ROGAN: I, like, there’s no reason to do it. Yeah.

Starting from the Attic

SHAWN RYAN: You know, when I started, I was, but we started in the attic. It was me and my wife. We had these sht cameras that had like 30 minute timers. So I was, Mike Glover was my first guest. And so my wife was like running back and forth, resetting these 30 minute fing timer cameras.

And I’m trying to run the sound and listen to what the hell Mike’s saying, and I’m like, this is f*ing awesome. We’re going to do this for a long time.

JOE ROGAN: What year did you start?

SHAWN RYAN: I started. First one, got pumped out Christmas of 2019.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s also a great example because a lot of people want to say that the podcast market is too saturated now. Like, I’ve heard people say that, oh, it’s too hard to make it in the podcast market. I’m like, I don’t believe that. Yeah, I don’t believe that. I think if you got a good show, it’s going to rise. Same here. And that’s you.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Thank you. Well, I studied the hell out of your show and when I was doing it and, you know, I wanted to, I just wanted to make it different. I didn’t want to copy the Red Curtain, you know what I mean?

Making It Your Own

JOE ROGAN: You made it yours. Yeah. You really did. And that’s the great thing about this. And we need more voices like yours out there. More different people that are doing the same kind of thing, following their own interests, talking to people.

Honestly, having these long term, long form podcasts, like the one with the guy studying the UFOs, I think that’s like four and a half hours long, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Which one is it?

JOE ROGAN: What’s his name? John Alexander.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I did one that was like nine hours.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, John Alexander. This one is, how long is this one? Let me check. Let’s say.

SHAWN RYAN: Resume six hours on YouTube.

JOE ROGAN: Six hours? Yeah. Yeah, it’s six hours in a couple of minutes of you talking to this guy about paranormal programs in the government.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t want to let him go.

JOE ROGAN: No, it was amazing. It’s crazy stuff, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

Closing Thoughts

JOE ROGAN: Well, listen, Shawn, it was great to meet you. I really appreciate you. I appreciate what you’re doing, I appreciate how you do it, and it’s good to become friends.

SHAWN RYAN: Hey, thank you for having me, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: My pleasure. It’s good to be here. All right, bye, everybody. Watch the show. Shawn Ryan Show, son. Everything, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: All right, bye, everybody.

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