Joe Rogan Podcast #2451: w/ Cheryl Hines (Transcript)

They will viciously attack each other, and then a minute later in the hallway, it’s like, hey, how’s it going? And I’m still in shock. I’m still angry about what just happened in there, and they’re already over it and they’re already like, yeah, that’s politics. That’s what we do.

The Romney-Obama Debates

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever see the debates with Mitt Romney and Barack Obama?

CHERYL HINES: I’m sure I did, but I’m—

JOE ROGAN: See if you can pull some of that up. God, why can’t we go back to that? They were civilized.

CHERYL HINES: Or is it civilized?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, completely, yeah. Mitt Romney’s Mormon, super religious guy, never swears, probably doesn’t do anything. Right?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So he’s super polite.

CHERYL HINES: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And then Barack Obama, because they’re matching each other’s energy, he was very polite, too. They disagreed on many things, but they were talking about what they wanted to do.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Not how this guy’s a piece of shit and they’ve been stealing and robbing and this and that.

CHERYL HINES: Or how they look turned into that.

JOE ROGAN: Whereas Trump, which is crazy, when you look like that—

CHERYL HINES: I—

JOE ROGAN: You know what I’m saying? It was like, the guy makes fun of his own hair. He makes fun of his comb over. It’s like—but here it is. Governor Romney and the University of Denver for your hospitality. The only person on this stage is a convicted felon. Is the man I’m looking at. Okay, this is just a comparison between—

CHERYL HINES: That’s—

JOE ROGAN: The Biden ones with Trump were the worst because they were trying to match Trump’s energy.

CHERYL HINES: Well, they didn’t know how to debate him. Yeah, that’s what I think he does.

How Debates Should Work

JOE ROGAN: Well, if you wanted to diffuse that, what you would say is, this is not productive for anybody. If you want to have a completely separate conversation about who’s a bigger piece of shit, and you want to do a podcast and you and me talk about how I think you’re a piece of shit, you think I’m a piece of shit, that’s one thing.

But you have X amount of time to say how you’re going to run the country and what you think is wrong with the policies, what you think is wrong with where we’re spending money, what you think was all the above. Yeah. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

CHERYL HINES: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And the idea that you can’t win that way is crazy.

CHERYL HINES: It is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy.

CHERYL HINES: And it’s really weird, too, that some, not all politicians really work on, I gotta get a catchphrase in there.

JOE ROGAN: Well, Trump’s really good at that. He names people Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe. It works. It works.

CHERYL HINES: It did work. I mean, because people get so thrown off, they don’t know how to respond. Like you said, that’s what they should say, but they just get so thrown off that it’s just paralyzing.

The Power of Social Media and Words

JOE ROGAN: Well, at least in this day and age, there’s a method through social media for you to respond if something you think is inaccurate or whatever, you respond. But there was a time where there was nothing. And whatever political party was in power, they controlled everything. They controlled all the news stories about you. They controlled everything.

There’s a great story with Hunter S. Thompson, and Ed Muskie’s running for president, and Hunter S. Thompson makes this crazy rumor about how he’s addicted to ibogaine and he has a Brazilian witch doctor comes in and treats him. And this guy literally cracks on the campaign trail because Hunter S. Thompson made up this crazy story about him.

And this guy, you see him having nervous breakdowns on the campaign trail. His subsequent speeches are all nuts and he falls off. But he was a front runner at one point in time, or at least he was very competitive, and it just—yeah, they killed him.

CHERYL HINES: Well, it’s the power of words.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHERYL HINES: Which, by the way, when Bobby decided to run and he came—I talk about this in my book Unscripted—but when he came on your podcast was a game changer. Because everything that you’re saying is true. And the press was going hard. They still do. They were going hard at Bobby. He’s this, he’s that. Here’s what he thinks, here’s what he represents.

And then he came on your podcast and you guys had a conversation.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: And you’re curious and you’re a great listener and you’re not judgmental, and people heard what Bobby had to say and it changed everything for him.

Changing Perspectives During the Pandemic

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think it helped also that I knew who he was. I read his book, and I had also had negative opinions of him before I actually read what he said.

CHERYL HINES: Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Before the pandemic, I was firmly on the side of science. I was much more of a left wing leaning person. I just assumed these people running universities, these academics, whatever they said was accurate. Everybody else was a fool and they believed in snake oil and witchcraft. This is what I thought.

And then during the pandemic, I was like, okay, these experts are clearly lying. I know they’re lying because they’re literally lying about me.

CHERYL HINES: Which was crazy. So when you’re in it and you know who you are and you know how you’re feeling and what your body is doing and other people, news outlets are saying that’s not true, it’s gotta feel so weird.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it felt really weird because they weren’t addressing the fact that it was healthy. That was crazy. So you’re talking about this massive pandemic and you’ve got this guy in his 50s. I’m supposed to be a vulnerable person and I’m in my 50s and I got over it in a couple of days.

And I’m telling everybody how I did it and they’re saying that I’m some quack who’s taking veterinary medicine, which was just a flat out lie. But it was weird. Yeah, it was weird to watch. It didn’t give me anxiety. It made me laugh a lot. I laughed a lot.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because fortunately, during this entire time period I was doing stand up and hanging out with comedians. We all thought it was so funny. Bro, CNN is so full of shit. This is crazy. I never would have believed it.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, but you have this outlet and you were able to talk about it and tell people.

The Scale of Joe Rogan’s Platform

JOE ROGAN: So it’s like they weren’t picking. They thought they were picking on me because they thought they were the bully. But during the whole exchange, they went, oh, my God, this thing’s way bigger than we thought it was.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So my show was like 10 times more listeners and viewers than their show. Which is crazy because all I can do is come on here and go, are you f*ing out of you? Do I need to sue you people? You guys are cracked.

CHERYL HINES: It is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy.

CHERYL HINES: So, yeah. So you saw things firsthand that you hadn’t experienced before.

Reading “The Real Anthony Fauci”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And then when I read Bobby’s book, one of the things that I knew about Bobby before. Fauci book or yes, the Real Anthony Fauci. Which was just. I would read it. I would listen to it on audio tape in the sauna. So I’m sitting there cooking at 196 degrees. You’re already kind of freaking out.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You can only stay in there so long before you die.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, that’s the whole key of the sauna. Get it way before you’re going to die. That’s when you get out. But if you stayed in there for a few hours, you’re a dead man. And so I’m kind of freaking out already. And I’m like, this is the nuttiest story of one guy and his cohorts who have been doing this kind of s, the same s they were doing during the pandemic, suppressing other medication, promoting something that they had that they were going to make a massive profit off of, gaslighting people, lying about the data, lying about this is the thing they did during the AIDS crisis.

CHERYL HINES: And they’re footnote after footnote, reference after reference, exactly saying “this is here.” “Here’s that.” I’m not making this up.

JOE ROGAN: No lawsuits, no one’s tried to sue him. This is one thing I keep bringing up. If that was lies, people would have. They would document how it’s not true. They would show the actual paperwork, they’d show the actual data. This is how it’s not. No, it’s all true. You go, well, how do I not know this? And what kind of irresponsible journalism do we have in this country where this has happened? And it takes this one guy to publish this book before people start talking about it.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

Bobby Kennedy’s Environmental Work

JOE ROGAN: I also knew his work as an environmental attorney. I think that was. That’s a very important thing for people to realize. Like what he did was essentially help clean up the East River. And if it wasn’t for him and his work, that would still be probably a polluted s*hole. Unless somebody else came along and stopped these corporations from polluting the river and then forced them to clean it up.

CHERYL HINES: Right, that’s right. And by the way, you know when people talk about Bobby and they want to paint him as somebody who is trying to hurt people or kill people or whatever that sounds like or looks like when you look at his career and who he is and what he’s accomplished. Yeah, he spent a lot of time suing huge corporations because they’re polluting waterways because it’s hurting people, killing people, giving people cancer.

JOE ROGAN: So.

CHERYL HINES: So why would he spend all of his life fighting for people, fighting for individuals, and then suddenly change and want to really hurt a lot of people? It just doesn’t track. It doesn’t make sense at all.

The Vaccine Debate

JOE ROGAN: Well, the whole thing came about because of vaccines and his questioning of the vaccine narrative, which is now way more mainstream. Because I, like many people, said the scientists must be correct. Everybody else is a kook. You got to get your vaccines, you got to do whatever you. But I was also pretty aware of, I had a friend who had a child that they vaccinated him, and when they vaccinated him, he stopped responding and he never responded again.

He became non verbal autistic for his whole life and he firmly believed it was because of the child’s reaction to the vaccines. That’s a taboo to bring up. When you bring that up, people immediately back off, they get scared, they get nervous. I firmly believe that when you have this sort of a visceral reaction to any sort of a subject like that, without a rational examining of what is objective truth, when you have that visceral reaction, something’s happened, you’ve been co opted.

There’s a thought in your head that you can’t question this or you’ll be ostracized, you’ll be cast out of the crew, the tribe, you’re out. And that’s what everyone’s afraid of.

CHERYL HINES: That is because that is what happens. Exactly as we’ve seen. But to that point, you know, as a mother, it’s so frustrating to hear parents say, this is my experience, the experience I had with my own child. I’m with this child every day. After the vaccine, there was a change. This is what, this is my experience. And for people to get mad at them for even like you’re saying, talking about it, they’re not allowed to talk about the experience they had or ask why it happened or let people talk to each other to see if they have shared experiences that can lead us to something better.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHERYL HINES: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy and it shouldn’t be accepted. We shouldn’t communicate like that. It’s not smart. We’ve been lied to so many times. I mean, why would you just assume that that stopped, that that has ended? You know, if you just go back and think about all the different things that both the government and of course pharmaceutical drug companies have lied about or at least been wrong about, the amount of drugs that they had to pull, it’s substantial.

Historical Medical Mistakes

CHERYL HINES: It’s a giant chunk. Well, that’s the question. So we understand and accept that there have been drugs out there that everybody thought were good, were helpful. And then 10 years later, 20 years later, the companies, scientists, whomever, realize, oh, actually they’re doing more harm than cancer.

JOE ROGAN: What about thalidomide, like what it did with birth defects in children? It’s crazy. They used to prescribe that to mothers.

CHERYL HINES: Well, it’s even like getting X rayed. Yeah, they used to have mothers, you know, that were pregnant, X rayed to see how the baby was doing for a long time.

JOE ROGAN: It’d be cool if it gave the baby superpowers, but it never does. It only happens in the science.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, that never works out on the.

JOE ROGAN: Good way in science fiction.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, it’s intense. Do you ever see those images of what happened to the women that used to work in those X ray offices? So every day they used to have to turn on the X ray machine and they would X ray their hand to make sure that it would work. And they all got, like, hand cancer. Oh, it’s horrible. It’s weird because they have one hand that looks normal and one hand that looks like a wicked witch hand.

CHERYL HINES: Right?

JOE ROGAN: So see if you can find some of those. It’s very strict because we didn’t know any better, right?

CHERYL HINES: Because we didn’t. Nobody was out to kill anybody. To murder, to do harm, but it was doing harm. So let’s take a step back, readjust, and do something different.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the extreme amount of money that pharmaceutical drug companies have put into making sure that they’re in control of the narrative, or at least they’re influencing the narrative. It’s like this is this lady.

CHERYL HINES: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that crazy?

CHERYL HINES: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s just from X raying your hand. So they would use it to calibrate the machine every day. Oh, my God. Test their hand first. That lady cooked her hand. Isn’t that awful? Oh, it’s so spooky.

CHERYL HINES: That’s really crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yikes.

Airport Body Scanners and Radiation

CHERYL HINES: What are the. You’re not going to have the answer to this, but I might what are the. What are the things, you know, that we have to go through in the airport?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, that’s radio. Yeah, that’s like a radio frequency, right? What is that? Let’s. Let’s pull that up. I do not think that that’s dangerous. But look, there’s a lot of people that think WI fi is dangerous. There’s a lot of people that think that 5G is dangerous. They think that EMF from even electric cars is dangerous. There’s people telling you you shouldn’t have earbuds in your ears. You know, you should only listen with a cord or speaker if you can.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Well, it makes sense. You’ve got things going directly into your head.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s probably not the best thing for you, but. I mean, it’s like, how many people are wearing AirPods and how little damage is it actually doing? That’s the question is, like, how was the real issue? Most TSA body scanners us use millimeter wave radio waves, so not X rays. And do not add to your ionizing radiation exposure. So. So it’s not X ray based. Right. It’s radio wave. But is it. What is it? Is it dangerous? How does the dose compare to a flight. What is that? X ray scanners. That’s just scanners. Is there any dam.

CHERYL HINES: Just look at that. This is.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, follow up. Millimeter wave scanner radiation. Is it dangerous? Is there any dangerous aspects of it? Health and radiation protection agencies note that doses from older backscatter X ray scanners were extremely low. Yeah, whatever. Meanwhile, they f*ing don’t go anywhere near it when they turn it on. Right. When you go to the dentist’s office, they hide behind a bunker.

CHERYL HINES: They go into the other room and.

JOE ROGAN: You’re like, they’re in a bunker right.

CHERYL HINES: Next to my head.

JOE ROGAN: And they make you wear, like, a lead vest over your. Your.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, it’s intense.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, do they still do that?

CHERYL HINES: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: I haven’t gotten one of those with the lead vest in a while. No.

CHERYL HINES: And they. You’re right. They go into the other room and they’re like, don’t move. You’re just sitting there with a.

JOE ROGAN: You know, if there’s anything anyone should have about these body scanners. Let’s see.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, I don’t want to. I’m not causing any outrage here. I’m just curious.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s true.

CHERYL HINES: I’m just flying.

JOE ROGAN: The TSA ones are dangerous.

CHERYL HINES: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Major health agencies did not see any proven health risk at the levels used, but people still raise a few practical Concerns. So, millimeter wave scanners use low power non ionizing radio waves. And studies and reviews have not found harmful effects at the power levels used in airport screening.

Sensitive groups analysis that modeled risk for children. Pregnant people. What? Why does it say pregnant people? Which kind of people can get pregnant, do you think? Hey, AI, hey, super genius. You think maybe it’s women, you fing ahole? And frequent fliers still found that low added risk from back scatter scanners far below routine medical X rays or even the radiation from flying itself. Well, that. That is a thing too.

CHERYL HINES: All right.

JOE ROGAN: Radiation in the plane, flying, when you’re flying.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, there’s so many things. Isn’t it just. Why?

JOE ROGAN: Let’s go.

CHERYL HINES: We’re all going down.

JOE ROGAN: Put that into perplexity, please. What is. Why is flying flying? Why does that give you radiation? Is it because you’re closer to the sun? Like, what? Is it less protection? Yes. Yeah. Is that what it is? Yes. Is that all it is? Yeah, mostly. I mean, you’re up high. Yeah. There’s not a lot of stuff to diffuse less air. Right.

Something I saw someone bring up recently, too, having those screens right behind your head. Because there’s one in there. Oh, yeah. Oh, that’s got to be bad for you.

CHERYL HINES: Well, Wi-Fi on the plane, it’s like just bouncing around. Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wi-Fi. Well, they used to be able to.

CHERYL HINES: Smoke, which is crazy. I was just. The plane that I was on had the no smoking sign. And it’s never.

JOE ROGAN: I would feel super uncomfortable getting on that plane.

CHERYL HINES: Good old a plane. When you’re like, okay, how old is this f*ing plane?

JOE ROGAN: They used to have little ashtrays. Remember those?

CHERYL HINES: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: In the seats.

CHERYL HINES: And that’s really crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And typical commercial flight, you get a small dose of extra cosmic radiation on the order of what you expect from a medical X-ray spread out over several hours. Whoa. So every time you fly, it’s like getting X-rayed. That’s kind of crazy. What happens to pilots? Okay.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, that’s a good question.

JOE ROGAN: Put this in.

CHERYL HINES: That’s a good question.

JOE ROGAN: Do pilots have any health risks from radiation exposure while flying?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, it’s a good question because I.

JOE ROGAN: Would imagine if you’re flying all the.

CHERYL HINES: Time, they’re the ones that would.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like getting an X-ray every day.

CHERYL HINES: That’s. I mean, everything is killing us. Right. That’s why I came on. I wanted to hear what’s going to kill us first. I don’t think there’s so many things.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHERYL HINES: This is going to be a. Like a. I don’t think everything meteorite that’s going to hit us first, but there’s.

Radiation Exposure for Pilots and Flight Crew

JOE ROGAN: A lot of stuff keeping us alive longer now too. Pilots and other air crew do get more radiation than typical travelers. But whether that causes health problems still being studied. And any added risk appears modest. On a personal level, like they would be the ones that you would be able to study from the best. Whether or not flying and flight attendants, whether or not flying is actually bad for you.

CHERYL HINES: Well, we haven’t heard anything yet.

JOE ROGAN: No.

CHERYL HINES: So that’s good news.

JOE ROGAN: You would imagine that somebody would have said that. Many studies find pilots and flight attendants have higher rates of some cancers. Uh oh, especially melanoma and other skin cancers and in some studies, breast cancer. However, reviews say it’s not clear how much of it is from cosmic radiation versus other factors such as disrupted sleep. That’s true. Like UV exposure during off time and lifestyle. Firm causal link to flight radiation alone has not been established.

That does make sense with the disrupted sleep because I talked to a pilot once who did a lot of late night flights and it’s like your whole body is just so wrecked. Like people who do the night shift, that can’t be good for you. Your circadian rhythm’s all f*ed up. You’re sleeping dirty.

CHERYL HINES: Can you adjust though? Can’t you adjust if you can, but.

JOE ROGAN: If you’re the guy who gets the night shift every night, you know, you’re working at a factory and you punch in at like 8pm, you’re not. That’s just your life, man. That’s how you live.

CHERYL HINES: That’s like shooting a film. And you do three or four night shoots. Someone snaps.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: There’s always one person that just can’t handle it. Freaking crazy. Oh no. Chad just went. We just lost Chad. I don’t know what happened to him, but he freaked out.

JOE ROGAN: Some people when they can’t sleep, they become big babies.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Very emotional. Yeah, very emotional.

The Unique Pressures of Film Sets

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a thing, there’s an indulgence on sets too, from actors that’s like. There’s a kind of a lack of appreciation sometimes because you just get accustomed to it, of how fortunate you are to be able to do what you do.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, very few people get to be an actor in a movie.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And you’re spazzing out because you didn’t get enough sleep.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. And meanwhile the crew really didn’t get enough sleep.

JOE ROGAN: They didn’t get enough sleep either.

CHERYL HINES: They’re working two hours before you and two hours after.

JOE ROGAN: But if they spaz out, they’ll get fired.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, immediately.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And that’s the difference. It’s not an equality thing. So these people, they’re aware they’re like royalty walking around this film set. You know, it’s kind of odd.

CHERYL HINES: Well, it is odd. And at the same time, it’s a very unique experience. Right. Because this person has to be on camera and every inch of their face is, you know, going to be 6ft tall in a movie theater. And so everybody’s just making sure that person is doing okay and they look okay and they feel okay. Because if they don’t, then they don’t. You don’t have anything. You don’t have anything to shoot.

So everybody is just, yeah, are you okay? Are you feeling okay? Are you hydrated? Do you need water? Do you need a piece of turkey?

JOE ROGAN: Well, the results of that, psychologically, over a prolonged period of time, people usually get really weird.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Agree.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the. Their normal experience is everybody’s treating them like, can I take care of your hair? Brush your shoulders.

CHERYL HINES: It’s true.

JOE ROGAN: It’s kooky.

CHERYL HINES: It’s kooky. And that’s why, you know, people that start early, especially that have success early.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

CHERYL HINES: It’s not. It’s not good. It’s not a good way to kick off your life. It’s like, this is not normal. If you think this is normal, you’re going to be real sad in a few years because.

JOE ROGAN: And I don’t think you can recover from a bad developmental period that way.

CHERYL HINES: That’s hard.

JOE ROGAN: It’s different. It’s different than anything else. You could have a bad childhood and it’ll make you more resilient, but a bad childhood in front of the whole world, and you’ve never had to really work, and you’ve never had to really struggle, and you’ve been famous since you were young. So your interactions with people from the time you were young is people loving you for your work, which is not good for kids.

CHERYL HINES: No, it’s not. And the way you look, that’s a big part of it, which is hard. So it’s not just your work. It’s what we’re talking about. You have to look good while you’re doing it. That’s part of the job.

JOE ROGAN: Especially as a woman, that’s a big factor. But I always liken it to concrete. Like, if you make concrete incorrectly. So if you decide to mix it, but you don’t add enough water or you don’t. It’s only. You can add water later. Once it’s solid, it’s like, that’s what it is.

CHERYL HINES: It’s going to be lumpy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just going to be sucky, weak a concrete. That’s going to break.

Early Career Breaks

CHERYL HINES: Wait, when did you get. What was your first break? Was it news radio?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, I was on another show before news radio. It was a sitcom that was on Fox. That’s what I actually moved out to LA for. And if that show got canceled and if I didn’t have a lease on an apartment, I would have went back to New York. I hated it.

CHERYL HINES: Why did you hate it?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I didn’t like the whole scene. It felt. I was used to fight gyms, pool halls and comedy clubs. Those are the people I was used to. They are the funniest, most brash, blunt people. And everybody’s cracking on everybody. And it’s jolly. Those are jolly places, for the most part.

And then I went from there to this weird world of groupthink and seeing people read the Hollywood Reporter every day and get really upset.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And I would keep telling them, that’s the devil’s rag. Why are you reading that? Don’t read that.

CHERYL HINES: Right. Because they’re just mad that they didn’t get the role or they didn’t get the film or whatever. It is odd. But yes, that it’s kooky.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s also the group think thing. It’s like, I saw it right away. If a film was really good, if everybody decided it was really good, you had to say it was really good. You couldn’t say, I f*ing hated that.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: There’s this Jack Nicholson movie where he played this ahole and I think it was Helen Hunt.

CHERYL HINES: As good as it gets.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, that one. And I was like, Jesus Christ. The whole idea was that he was a fed up dude because he was on some sort of a medication. That medication made him racist. It didn’t make any sense. The whole thing was nuts. And I remember everybody saying, what an amazing movie. I’m like, God, I felt bad for her. Get the f out of that relationship. Find someone who’s nice to you. This is crazy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, this is crazy Races.

JOE ROGAN: It didn’t make any sense. And I remember arguing with people on a set about it and they were all, oh, I thought it was an amazing film. They had to say it. It was Jack Nichol.

CHERYL HINES: Right?

JOE ROGAN: It was amazing movie.

CHERYL HINES: I was like, right.

JOE ROGAN: That movie is f*ing depressing, man. That was all that poor lady had.

CHERYL HINES: She.

JOE ROGAN: This fing ahole. This old a*hole was like.

CHERYL HINES: It was like the movie Precious.

JOE ROGAN: I didn’t see that. Yeah, I heard that was.

CHERYL HINES: It’s just. You’re just watching and you’re like, well, nothing else bad could happen.

JOE ROGAN: And then it’s another thing.

CHERYL HINES: No, it just gets worse. And by the end of it, you’re just feeling like, why are we alive?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t like those kind of movies. I don’t want to feel depressed.

CHERYL HINES: No. Okay. So then you got.

JOE ROGAN: Then News Radio.

CHERYL HINES: News Radio.

JOE ROGAN: So that I stayed in LA just because I had a lease. That was it. I’m not kidding. I was so ready to go.

CHERYL HINES: You were not going to break that lease.

JOE ROGAN: I was trying to say I didn’t have the money.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, I was like.

JOE ROGAN: I was like, okay, I have some money because I did the sitcom for six episodes. So I had some money. So I was like, how much money would it cost me to just f*ing pay this lease off?

CHERYL HINES: A lot.

JOE ROGAN: And I was like, I just stay here. And then I got another development deal. I got a development deal with NBC, and they had this pilot before I did the show. They said, we have this show that we have a pilot for, but we’re going to fire this one person on the pilot. And would you come in and reform it?

CHERYL HINES: Did you know who was being fired?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, it was actually a friend of mine.

CHERYL HINES: Did you know at the time?

JOE ROGAN: Well, he got replaced.

CHERYL HINES: It’s hard to replace him.

JOE ROGAN: It’s Ray Romano, who’s a good friend of mine.

CHERYL HINES: He’s a friend of mine.

JOE ROGAN: He’s awesome. And I had worked with Ray multiple times in New York, but Ray got fired, and then they replaced him with another guy who was in the pilot, and then they decided to fire that guy. So I was like, okay, well, at least I’m not taking Ray’s job.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, that’s good.

Fear Factor and Eating Challenges

JOE ROGAN: But then Ray went out to do Everybody Loves Raymond, which he did. Him getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to him. So then I go in and they let me watch the pilot. It was already made. And so I got to see. It’s Phil Hartman and Dave Foley and Candy Alexander and Maura Tierney and Andy Dick and Steven Root. I’m like, holy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I can be on this show. It shows amazing. So I did that. Then I did Fear Factor.

CHERYL HINES: Well, how long was news radio?

JOE ROGAN: Five years.

CHERYL HINES: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But it really wasn’t popular. It was only popular on reruns. Really? Yeah, once it got into syndication. Because we moved around, like over the course of five years. We moved nine times, I believe.

CHERYL HINES: When you were doing newsradio. That’s right. I don’t know what years it was.

JOE ROGAN: 1994 to 1999.

CHERYL HINES: Okay. So I got Curb Your Enthusiasm in 1999. So before that I was working for Robin Michelle Reiner as a personal assistant. And I was also doing catering at night sometimes just to make ends meet. And one of my jobs, and I never knew what the job would be, you know, they’d say, show up here at whatever, five o’clock.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: One of my jobs one time was news radio. There was a little green room where, you know, agents and people, VIP. And I was in charge of making sure the food on the table looked good.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hilarious.

CHERYL HINES: I just stood there for hours. I think Phil Hartman came in and was like, hey. I didn’t know him at the time. I’d met him and he said, oh, you know, who are you here to see? I said, oh, I’m just in charge of this table. But that was my big job for the night.

JOE ROGAN: My friend Joey Diaz, who is at that time, he had just recently gotten out of jail. He came to visit me on the set and he realized that the good food was all in the VIP green room. And he back. He’s like, he got overweight for a while, but back then he wasn’t. Back then he just looked a big football player. He like a big scary looking Cuban guy. And he was in there eating a shrimp cocktail.

And they were like, who is the scary guy that’s eating and is he supposed to be in here? They all freaked out because Joey went into the super secret room. And I was wondering, I wonder if he went in there when you were in there.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, could you imagine if I was like, excuse me, sir, you can only have six shrimp. I have to watch the table.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he wasn’t supposed to be in there. He just went in. He was just my friend hanging out. He just went in there. He’s like, this is where the good food is. And he went in there and started chowing down. They were all freaking out. It was very funny.

Life in Los Angeles

CHERYL HINES: But did you like LA any better when you were doing news radio?

JOE ROGAN: I always wanted to leave. I always felt like it was radioactive. I always felt like there’s a part of this. Look, the weather’s great. The Comedy Store was amazing. It was great to have that place. But there’s too many people. When there’s that many people, I think you devalue people. I don’t think people are worthwhile to you.

I think people are way better off living in a small town or a small city. I think it’s healthier community. Yeah. I just think when people become up. When you get on the highway and you see millions of people, and you see the 405 at 4pm it’s kooky.

CHERYL HINES: It’s 10 lanes just bumper to bumper in both directions.

JOE ROGAN: And everybody thinks that everybody else is annoying because you’re in your way.

CHERYL HINES: Everybody on the road. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You’re not going anywhere and someone decides to get in front of you. F*ing God.

CHERYL HINES: It’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody gets crazy.

CHERYL HINES: It is true.

JOE ROGAN: Not healthy. No. I felt like that wasn’t healthy. And I really hated the whole mentality behind the groupthink that was a part of Hollywood because everybody’s trying to get cast in something. In order to get cast in something, you have to be. You have to ingratiate yourself with the producers and the casting directors. Everybody has to like you. So you have to have the same opinions as they do.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if you don’t, you have to fake it. I was like, this is gross. This is gross. The way they behave is gross. The casting people would treat you as gross. I didn’t like it at all.

CHERYL HINES: What you mean just going in and auditioning? No, it was hard.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there was a lot of it where there was this arrogance, this, they’re giving you this chance, so they’re really arrogant. I was like, hey, I don’t even care about this.

CHERYL HINES: That’s why you got the part.

JOE ROGAN: That’s why I got Fear Factor because I was the only one who made fun of it.

Fear Factor Experiences

CHERYL HINES: And did you? You never had to do. You never had to eat the spiders.

JOE ROGAN: I ate a bunch of stuff. I ate some spiders. Yeah. I ate a Iraqi cave spider. I ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach. I ate a tomato hornworm. I ate a sheep’s eyeball. I ate a bunch of stuff. I ate it just to show the people that you could eat it.

CHERYL HINES: Ew. Did you ever throw up after?

JOE ROGAN: No, I only threw up once at home.

CHERYL HINES: You waited until you got out.

JOE ROGAN: It was really good editing. They did a great job. And there was this girl that was. She had a. She’s not like Bobby. Bobby has never thrown up. It’s just he doesn’t. So he will eat anything and do anything.

CHERYL HINES: Bobby has never thrown up. It’s just he doesn’t. So he will eat anything and do anything.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’ve definitely thrown up, but this time it was. This lady was eating worms and she had to swallow the worms and she couldn’t. So she spit them up into the glass. And then she could keep going if she could re-drink what was in the glass and she already spit up. And so she did it. I ran into the kitchen and threw open the sink.

And I was like, how. And I kept thinking, how odd. What a great job they did the editing and the music that it got me so wrapped up in. Even though I was at home, I was like five feet away from that lady while she was doing that. And I didn’t throw up.

CHERYL HINES: And it didn’t bother you?

JOE ROGAN: It bothered me, but I was trying to help her. I was trying to get her, talk her through it.

CHERYL HINES: That’s why you were so good on it, because you were never making fun of people. You were never.

JOE ROGAN: I definitely made fun of people.

CHERYL HINES: Well, but not in a. You’re so crazy to be on this show. And why are you crying? You’re the one that wanted to come on. You were very.

JOE ROGAN: I wanted to help them try. I wanted to help them, at the very least, do their best. And there was a lot of that. I said, look, I know this sounds crazy, but if you just force yourself to chew this and swallow it, you could do it. You got to just take your mind out of this place. It’s not that bad. And sometimes I would eat things just to show them.

CHERYL HINES: Ew.

JOE ROGAN: I ate a roach just to show them. I’ll eat this if you do. No, I want you to eat this roach. It’s not that big a deal.

CHERYL HINES: Ew. Did you chew it?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah, you have to. You can’t swallow. It’ll be.

CHERYL HINES: Do you remember what it tasted like?

JOE ROGAN: Not much. Yeah, they don’t. They don’t. Yeah, I know, but it’s in your head. It doesn’t. Was crunchy, real crunchy. But the actual taste itself was not bad. I mean, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t like, I look forward to roaches.

CHERYL HINES: What about rats? Did you do a lot of rat work?

JOE ROGAN: We did work with rats where people had to lie in a thing in a coffin, covered them with rats, and the rats would be. Nibble on them. Yeah, that’s not good. But they were pet rats. I mean, they were fed a healthy diet. They were raised rats. They weren’t dangerous street rats that have been eating each other.

CHERYL HINES: Did anything I mean, you probably can’t talk about it, but did anything ever go horribly, horribly wrong?

JOE ROGAN: No.

CHERYL HINES: Really?

JOE ROGAN: No. We got lucky, though. It’s just luck. I really believe that because we made them ride bulls once.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. And you can’t control a bull.

JOE ROGAN: I told the people, don’t do it. When all the contestants. I said, I wouldn’t do this. I’ll tell you right now, I don’t think you should do it because it’s not worth it. I go. The kind of catastrophic injury that you get from a bull stomping on your face, it’s like you don’t come back from that. Okay. You have to understand, there’s 100% possibility that this bull will stomp you or kick you while you’re in the air being launched off its body and get kicked in the face. That’s possible. Don’t do it. I wouldn’t.

CHERYL HINES: Some people would back out, right?

JOE ROGAN: They all did it.

CHERYL HINES: They all did it.

JOE ROGAN: They all did it. I think. Appreciate it.

CHERYL HINES: I don’t think anybody back out from the bowl. How do you. I mean, they got.

JOE ROGAN: They flew. This one lady weighed 98 pounds, and she got. She got bucked and she went flying and landed right on her back and was knocked out. Yeah, it was horrible. I would have never done that. I mean. And look, I’ve had bull riders on the podcast before. I. You know, I’ve talked to multiple. We had bull riders on Fear Factor.

CHERYL HINES: Doesn’t it. This is. You might know.

JOE ROGAN: Is that you?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Did you see it? What a cute ringtone. Hey, put him on speakerphone.

CHERYL HINES: Seriously?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, why not?

CHERYL HINES: Honey, you’re on speaker. I’m here with Joe.

JOE ROGAN: We’re on the podcast. You’re on the podcast, so don’t swear.

CHERYL HINES: Hello? Can you hear me? Honey, you’re on. I’m. We’re talking to Joe right now at your live.

JOE ROGAN: Well, thanks.

CHERYL HINES: Hey, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: I’m looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing you too. You probably shouldn’t have told people that, because then they start attacking you.

CHERYL HINES: Is there anything you need to tell me or.

JOE ROGAN: I was just going to ask you how to be nice to my wife. Why didn’t you call me?

CHERYL HINES: I’m in tears over here. Honey, it’s really. It’s going horribly.

JOE ROGAN: Well, bring me back some of that alpha. Alpha brain. Yeah, we’ll do.

CHERYL HINES: Okay, baby. I love you.

JOE ROGAN: Take care.

CHERYL HINES: Love you.

JOE ROGAN: Bye, Bobby. Love you too. Sorry. That’s hilarious. What was the. What were you showing me? That Mexican OT Did bull stuff. No, Mexican OT did it. He got up. No, I mean he got up and ran away. Oh, my God. This is a guest that was on my podcast. He’s awesome. He’s a brilliant rapper. Oh, my goodness, dude. Oh, my goodness, dude.

CHERYL HINES: That’s so terrible.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my goodness, dude. Don’t do that no more.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, can I ask a question to. To the men? I mean, do you wear special equipment down there when you.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I assume they do. They might not while they’re doing that, because I saw one guy get a horn right up his butt. Yeah, but there’s no special equipment that’s going to protect you there.

CHERYL HINES: But what about your.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you should wear a cup. For sure.

CHERYL HINES: You should wear something.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Because that doesn’t seem like that’s healthy.

JOE ROGAN: Definitely not healthy.

CHERYL HINES: I don’t think there’s anything healthy about it, right?

JOE ROGAN: No, definitely not healthy.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, it’s just like a lot of pressure on your balls.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Have you ever done it?

JOE ROGAN: What, bull riding? Yeah. No, no. I told you I would never do that.

CHERYL HINES: I thought you were just telling the other people not to do it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, no, I would tell. No, no, no, no. I have a healthy respect for animals.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Especially big ones. I think people get super delusional. We also get super delusional when we compare size. Like if you say, oh, a monkey smaller than me, that thing will f*ing kill you.

CHERYL HINES: I know. It’ll pick your eyes out, right?

The Danger of Monkeys

JOE ROGAN: Oh, they’ll rip your face apart. Yeah. There’s a crazy video of this guy in India who’s sitting down and he lets this monkey sit on his lap and he’s being all calm with the monkey and then the monkey just decides to tear a giant chunk off his scalp. And the way it does it, it just bit head and just yanks like a football sized piece of meat off this guy’s head.

CHERYL HINES: And there’s no stopping it. There’s no stopping it when it starts happening.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t know how strong they are.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Imagine being so strong you could just rip someone’s skin clean off their head. And it’s like a little thing. Little 30 pound.

CHERYL HINES: It looks adorable.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And he thought he’s being cute. It’s like, I’m going to be peaceful. I won’t play it. I don’t know if she wants.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, yeah. No, I can’t watch it.

JOE ROGAN: But you want to watch it.

CHERYL HINES: No, I don’t. Do you want to? You can watch it. Yeah, I’ll look away.

JOE ROGAN: So he lets this thing on his lap, and then it just decides to bite his head. Look at it real quick.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, my gosh.

JOE ROGAN: He’s missing a giant chunk off his head.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So he’s scarred for life. It was a dumb decision. You let that thing dominate you. He didn’t understand what he was doing.

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: He let that thing get on top of him. The thing just decided for no reason, he just bite his head.

Emus and Ostriches

CHERYL HINES: Now, we used to have a pet emu.

JOE ROGAN: They’re the dumbest birds, by the way.

CHERYL HINES: They are so dumb. Their heads are tiny, so their brain must be. And the rest of them is big. So you just had this emu coming at you every day. It wasn’t relaxing. I used to, it got to the point where I had to walk outside with a shovel.

JOE ROGAN: Just to protect yourself from the emu. That’s crazy. I have a friend who has ostriches.

CHERYL HINES: Are they nicer? I wonder if they’re nicer.

JOE ROGAN: He says the same thing. He hates them. He has this big ranch in Texas and he got ostriches. He’s like, dude, I hate these things. Yeah. Look at that face.

CHERYL HINES: No, it’s terrible. They’re mean.

JOE ROGAN: And they tried to bite us on Fear Factor, too. We had an episode where they had to drink a whole ostrich egg, a raw ostrich egg, but we had ostriches in the background. They started just f*ing with people, biting their heads.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, they’ll peck you.

JOE ROGAN: You know what else is dumb? This lady was a falconer. That’s what they’re called, right?

CHERYL HINES: Falconer.

JOE ROGAN: Falconer. When they trained.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, that’s Bobby. Bobby wrote the book. Yes.

Owls: Not as Wise as We Think

JOE ROGAN: Oh. So this lady, she had a golden eagle. She had a couple of falcons are the most fascinating. But then she had an owl, and she’s like, owl is, there’s, first of all, one misconception is that owls are smart. She goes, they are so dumb. They’re the dumbest birds. Next to emus. Only emus are dumber than owls.

CHERYL HINES: I didn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: I was like, really? That’s crazy.

CHERYL HINES: Why?

JOE ROGAN: Why do we have this idea that they’re?

CHERYL HINES: Do you have a hoot? Don’t pollute. Remember that. They’re very wise.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Why do we think they’re wise?

JOE ROGAN: I mean, he’s counting how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie Roll pop. Remember?

CHERYL HINES: Yes. But he could never get to it, so maybe we should have learned. Yeah, this guy’s full of s*.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he’s full of s*. He’s a fake.

CHERYL HINES: Professor, we’ve had some owls in our day with Bobby.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, pets?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. I mean, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Is this Bobby? No, no, this is someone. I saw this going around the other. What is this? Is that his falcon? You can’t see where it is. Whoa. That looks like an eagle. He sees it from way up. Is that an eagle or a hawk? What is that? Does it say? It doesn’t say. I don’t know if it said specifically. Again, it’s another Facebook link. They had a golden eagle. The golden eagle is amazing. But it kept trying to land. We had a little campfire outside. It kept trying to land on the fire.

CHERYL HINES: That’s weird.

JOE ROGAN: Why is this bird so stupid?

CHERYL HINES: That looks like a hawk.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it looks like a hawk.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

Hawks vs. Falcons

JOE ROGAN: So this lady had, she had hawks and falcons, and she’s like, the problem with hawks is as soon as you let them loose, they immediately find something to kill. She’s like, they just, everything that’s near them, they kill. She goes, this sucker kills birds, he kills squirrels. You let the owl go. The owl just goes over there, come back to you. The eagle, the same thing. Not the hawks, the hawks, it’s time to kill.

CHERYL HINES: No, that’s what they do. It’s weird. Like I said, Bobby loves hawks and falcons, and he will. I went hawking with him once.

JOE ROGAN: How do you do that?

CHERYL HINES: Well, you have these, they do it in twos. Like, these two birds. And.

JOE ROGAN: Are they his birds?

CHERYL HINES: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So he’s trained these birds.

CHERYL HINES: He’s trained them. And the other.

JOE ROGAN: That’s kind of a crazy thing to be good at.

CHERYL HINES: It’s a very crazy. But look. Even since he was young. But so it’s pretty fascinating because you have to do it when, after the leaves have fallen from the trees and there are two birds that hunt together, and they go up into the trees, and then it’s really beautiful at first for me, because it’s.

JOE ROGAN: Until the carnage.

CHERYL HINES: So they start going from tree to tree and they’re communicating with each other, and they’ll see, bunny cute, sweet. You see where this is going? And they see a bunny down there, and they go. And they go. And one of them does something, and then the other one swoops down and grabs it and they just tear it apart. And the next thing you know, it’s just bunny guts. Yeah. So it’s cute until then, but it’s pretty fascinating to watch them do it.

Predatory Birds

JOE ROGAN: There was some kind of a war in my backyard that was going on for a while. And I don’t know what animal was doing it, but I found a bunch of beheaded hawks.

CHERYL HINES: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I don’t know what bird was killing the hawks, but they’ll kill the hawk and rip its head off.

CHERYL HINES: Ask Bobby. He will know. Oh, I bet he will know.

JOE ROGAN: I assume it was something bigger, but.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, they’re big already. It’s hard to imagine what owls eat. Hawks, I’m really. But are they fast enough to get an owl as fast?

JOE ROGAN: Owls are silent. And the thing about owls is there’s a really interesting video that you could find where they take a bunch of different birds and they have them fly from point A to point B. And then they have a sound meter and the sound registers the decibels of their flight.

CHERYL HINES: What they mean owls.

JOE ROGAN: It’s almost completely silent. They’re so silent. They’re so sneaky. So there’s a great black and white video of this owl in, it’s night vision. The camera. And you see this owl swooping up on a hawk’s nest and snatches a hawk right out of the nest.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, my God. I wonder.

JOE ROGAN: It comes out of nowhere. You see eyes in the distance. Yeah, it’s really weird.

CHERYL HINES: I don’t think I’ve ever seen an owl in flight, but not that I.

JOE ROGAN: In real life, you mean?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I did. Where I used to see.

CHERYL HINES: Is it only at night?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. I’ve only seen them fly at night. But where I live. One time I was driving home and there was this owl that was right on the side of the road. And as I was driving, he took off with a rabbit in his talons. And then just decided he didn’t want to carry this rabbit anymore and let it go. Like maybe it was dangerous because the rabbit was kind of big. And then the rabbit dropped in the middle of the road. So I pulled the car over and I got out and I look at this gutted rabbit and this owl who had just jacked this rabbit and then just decided.

CHERYL HINES: That’s so weird that he. I’m assuming it was an aggressive male owl.

JOE ROGAN: Might have been a female. Protecting is young food. A lot of them is that.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, I wonder if the rabbit was diseased or something.

JOE ROGAN: No, it was food. No, but how.

CHERYL HINES: But that’s.

JOE ROGAN: The rabbits can’t even hear it coming. That’s the thing about owls. That’s why they’re such brilliant nocturnal hunters is because. See if you can find that video of the birds. The different sounds between, there’s a hawk, there’s an eagle, and then the owl.

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like nothing. It just swoops in and snatches them. They eat a lot of cats too, by the way.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, I didn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. A friend of mine found there was an owl nest and he found like six cat collars in the nest.

CHERYL HINES: Oh. I always just assumed it was coyotes.

JOE ROGAN: It is a lot of coyotes, but it’s also owls. Owls kill a lot of people’s cats. And they can fly with your cat.

CHERYL HINES: That.

The Silent Flight of Owls

JOE ROGAN: That’s what’s crazy. So watch to fly over a series of super sensitive microphones. So that’s a pigeon. Super loud. Pretty loud. Now watch the owl. It’s Ken’s test.

CHERYL HINES: She was.

JOE ROGAN: Nothing. You don’t hear anything. Isn’t that crazy?

CHERYL HINES: You don’t even hear the wings.

JOE ROGAN: Nope. And those are super sensitive microphones. Yeah. Wow. Now see if you can find the video of the owl snatching the hawk out of the nest.

CHERYL HINES: That’s so crazy. I didn’t know this.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Owls are super predators. Yeah. They see so well at night and they have those big heads.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Then their heads can turn.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy eyes. Yeah. Watch this. So see those, those dots in the distance? That’s them. Watch this snatch. The other hawk barely knows what the hell happened.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, my snatch.

JOE ROGAN: Yep. Just steals them right out of the nest. Owls are big too.

CHERYL HINES: They seem to work alone. They seem a little—

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHERYL HINES: Like lonesome.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, I mean, you can’t fly a flock of owls, you know.

CHERYL HINES: Like the hawks, when they hunt, they hunt together, you know, and they’re communicating.

JOE ROGAN: Make so much noise.

CHERYL HINES: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: They got a clumsy approach with the owl. Sneaky.

CHERYL HINES: And how about the pigeons? They do not have a chance.

JOE ROGAN: So loud.

CHERYL HINES: What do they eat?

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good question. That’s a good question. Birds eat or nobody eats pigeons, though.

CHERYL HINES: What?

JOE ROGAN: Rats in New York City. There’s a crazy video of a rat in New York City grabbing a pigeon and attacking it and eating it. Yeah. And dragging it away. You’ve never seen that?

CHERYL HINES: I like that. You think that’s what I’m looking at online?

JOE ROGAN: What are you looking at online? Fashion tips.

CHERYL HINES: It’s not that.

JOE ROGAN: If you want to live in a big city, that’s the nature that you get. You get rats and pigeons.

CHERYL HINES: There are a lot of rats in—

JOE ROGAN: D.C. Rats kill pigeons all the time.

CHERYL HINES: Rats kill pigeons?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. If they catch them slipping, they’re close enough where they can grab them.

CHERYL HINES: It’s disgusting.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, rats are disgusting. Have you ever watched that documentary on Netflix called “Rats”? No. Whoa.

CHERYL HINES: I would never.

JOE ROGAN: You should.

CHERYL HINES: No. God, no.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a game changer.

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so nutty. When you find out that the biomass of rats in New York City is roughly equal to the biomass of people, meaning the weight of all the people in New York City is roughly equal to the weight of all the rats.

CHERYL HINES: In New York City. That’s gross. But you lived in New York.

JOE ROGAN: Is that accurate? Accurate? I think that’s accurate. It might be the numbers might be the same number of people as there are rats.

CHERYL HINES: But you didn’t have a problem when you lived there.

JOE ROGAN: I didn’t live there. I lived in New Rochelle, which was a suburb.

CHERYL HINES: That’s a—yeah, nice.

JOE ROGAN: Westchester. I was a road comedian and I needed a parking spot. I couldn’t afford to park in New York City. It’s too hard.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It was, you know, whatever it was for a parking spot, it was like half my rent. I was like, I can’t afford that.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Also, I don’t like it. I don’t like being stacked on top of people like that. All my friends who live there, they’re like, yeah, I don’t even know my neighbors. This guy right across six feet away from you. You don’t even know him. That’s kind of crazy.

CHERYL HINES: No. There are always people upstairs, like, banging around. Yeah. Moving furniture.

JOE ROGAN: Not interesting.

CHERYL HINES: Not your vibe.

Living in New York City

JOE ROGAN: So here it is. For the big picture comparison. 8.3 million humans at 70 kg each are about 580,000 metric tons of human. So rats at roughly 0.102% of human biomass in New York City, even though they’re extremely visible. Oh, so it’s only like less than a percent. Wait a minute.

CHERYL HINES: Well, they’re tiny. I mean, compared to—

JOE ROGAN: So the number of rats. Is the number of rats the same. Is that what I’m getting wrong? An estimated about 3 million rats in New York City. But there’s like 10 million people.

CHERYL HINES: That’s disgusting. 3 million rats.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they really know. Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: How could they know?

JOE ROGAN: I think they’re probably underestimating it because underneath the city is where all the rats live. There’s no way they’re doing an accurate count of all the rats.

CHERYL HINES: I feel like LA—

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I know what I screwed up on. This is what I screwed up on. Yeah. It’s actually ants. With the biomass of ants on Earth. I think that’s true. I think the biomass of ants on Earth is roughly equal to the biomass of people.

CHERYL HINES: The things that are going on inside your head are insane.

JOE ROGAN: That is a kooky number, though. If it’s true, we might find out that’s wrong too. I think it’s right, though. Is that what it is?

CHERYL HINES: But I feel like LA, New York City are aggressive and huge.

The Biomass of Ants

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay. That’s not true either. Yeah. Is that right? What? What is that? Get rid of that little source thing. I can’t. It’s okay. It’s not showing. Oh, there it goes. 20 kajillion. I’ve never seen that word.

CHERYL HINES: Me either.

JOE ROGAN: 20 quadrillion individuals worldwide. That’s the number of ants. Wow. I mean, so it’s 20% of human dry biomass. What does that mean? After you peed. And more than all the wild birds and mammals combined. That’s crazy. There’s more weight from ants than all the mammals and birds combined. That’s crazy.

CHERYL HINES: That is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s crazy. I have them in my backyard and they’re leaf cutter ants. No, they’re cool.

CHERYL HINES: They’re cute. They carry all those little tiny—

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird. It’s like, how do you guys know. How do you know to do this?

CHERYL HINES: And they work together.

JOE ROGAN: They work together.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, they have the—have you ever seen what the leaf cutter ant colonies look like under the surface?

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: So they take them and they—unfortunately, they do a genocide on the leaf cutter ants for science. And they fill up their entire colony with cement. And so they show what the structure—

CHERYL HINES: You mean when they were studying them.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, well, this is how they find out you have to kill everybody and turn them into concrete. And so this enormous leaf cutter ant colony that’s underground, then they dig it up and only the cement is left. And it’s bananas.

CHERYL HINES: It’s so little tunnels.

JOE ROGAN: They have fermentation tubes. So they have an area where they put leaves in to ferment. And then they have a tunnel that goes up the surface so it can get air.

CHERYL HINES: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: So this is it. They fill up. This is the leaf cutter ant colony. Look at the ones on the outside going, hey, what the f? What the f? My cousin’s in there.

CHERYL HINES: They are freaking out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they’re freaking out. And so then they have to excavate and they dig out this area and it is absolutely massive.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, so these are—that’s the concrete that—

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. So the concrete that’s left is what the colony actually looks like underground. It’s enormous. It’s like the size of a house. Look at that. Look at these stupid f*ing ads that you can’t even get rid of that cover a quarter of your screen. But look. Pause that real quick. Look at that.

CHERYL HINES: That is crazy. Bananas.

JOE ROGAN: Absolutely bananas. But that any little ant and all of his friends can make something like that.

CHERYL HINES: They’re all friends. I think that there are some that are like, I hate that ahole.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Probably so lazy. We’re all working our asses off and he’s just over there, like, taking it easy.

Ant Behavior and Intelligence

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s some ants where the female will find the male and they cut his legs off, his arms and legs off and then carry him to the colony so that he could breed. Find that. Which ant is that? Yeah, they find him and they cut his arms and legs off so he can’t go anywhere.

CHERYL HINES: And he just does one thing. Wow. Yeah. Like, do you think he thinks it’s an honor?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think he thinks. Right. How can he? I know. I think they’re like—they’re almost like little robots.

CHERYL HINES: But—yeah, I mean, it seems like they are working together and coming up with plans and, you know, landscapes and—

JOE ROGAN: But the thing is, it’s—this is a universal thing. This is what’s really weird. Like here we are in Texas, but there’s probably leafcutter ants right now in Florida. There’s probably leafcutter ants right now all over the world. And they’re all doing a similar thing.

CHERYL HINES: Underground, but leaf cutter. So they’re completely different than, say, red ants?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, there’s a bunch of different kind of ants. But the thing that differentiates leafcutter ants is that they go to trees, they chop off their leaves, they take these little pieces of it, and then they carry it back into their leaf cutter ant colony. And then they have all these places where they store the leaves and the leaves ferment and they kind of rot and they have air pipes that go up to the surface.

It’s super, super complex. And it just makes you think a lot. Like, what? How do they know to make this chamber and then a passageway to the chamber. And how do they all know all over the world? It’s very weird. It’s a very weird thing that they do. But I have them in my yard and I just sit there and watch them.

I can only find stuff about them amputating the limbs for, like, saving their lives, not breeding. Now, it was a specific kind of—no, I typed it in four different times. So all I could get was the—that queen ants will amputate their wings afterwards. But I didn’t see anything about cutting off a male’s limbs and dragging them for breeding. It says they all do it to address wounds. I wish I could remember what it was. It was a specific kind of ant.

CHERYL HINES: I’m going to—

JOE ROGAN: It’s just a town on that ruthless world of insects. We’re lucky they’re little, you know, because they’re smart.

CHERYL HINES: Well, you don’t think they think even though they’ve got some sort of activity?

JOE ROGAN: I think they have activity, but I think they’re operating on a program.

CHERYL HINES: They don’t have feelings.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they have any feelings. No, I definitely don’t think they have feelings. I mean, if, like, a praying mantis was the size of a German shepherd, we’d have a real problem because they’re vicious 100%. You wouldn’t be able to get away from them.

CHERYL HINES: Do you think they have feelings?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think so. I think they’re—they’re the scariest life form to me.

CHERYL HINES: Why?

Praying Mantises

JOE ROGAN: Because they’re so strong for their size. They’re way, way, way—like you can’t even—like I’ve seen praying mantis snatch hummingbirds off of a bird feeder and kill them. And the hummingbird—

CHERYL HINES: Are you serious?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. They wait on a bird feeder. They sit there like this and they—

CHERYL HINES: Just wait and they don’t move.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t move and the hummingbird doesn’t recognize them. The hummingbird comes over, eats out of the bird feeder and just snatches them. And the bird’s way bigger than the mantis. And the mantis can hold onto the hummingbird.

CHERYL HINES: Where did they take it, kill it—

JOE ROGAN: And eat it right there.

CHERYL HINES: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

CHERYL HINES: But aren’t they small?

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. That’s why we’re lucky that they’re really small. Because if they were the size of like a dog, they would 100% be able to kill you just like that monkey is, like, super strong. Well, if a mantis was the size of that monkey, the monkey would have no chance. That mantis would just snatch it and just start eating it.

CHERYL HINES: That’s a good point. Because that guy—because a monkey must look at a man and think, that guy is bigger than me. But I don’t care. I’m going for it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, I don’t think they have any respect for people. I think their interactions with people are that people are soft and that they’re scared of them. And so they, that’s how.

CHERYL HINES: What’s the monkey going to do with the scalp? You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: See, look at that mantis. See him sitting there?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The hummingbird doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just motionless. And so as the hummingbird gets close. Trust. Get a little water.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, no.

JOE ROGAN: And watch how it snatches it too. It’s so fast. Watch it right there. Bang. Gotcha. Look at the size of the bird. I mean, the body mass of the bird. It’s got to be a lot more than the mantis. And the mantis is just holding on to it definitively like it has no chance. Oh, the guy knocked it loose.

CHERYL HINES: What a b that is.

JOE ROGAN: Let nature happen, bro.

CHERYL HINES: So crazy.

Praying Mantis Predators

JOE ROGAN: Really crazy. It just gets it. So there’s other ones where you see the mantis, like, hanging on and eating it. They’re incredible little creatures.

CHERYL HINES: Is that what they mostly eat? It’s hummingbirds?

JOE ROGAN: No, they eat all kinds of stuff. But this one is just sitting there eating a hummingbird.

CHERYL HINES: Ew.

JOE ROGAN: The other weird thing is the amount that they can eat.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, that’s why it looks like a tiny twig.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, how can it eat a hummingbird?

JOE ROGAN: There’s a video. Well, there’s one Instagram page that I follow that’s just mantises eating a bunch of different bugs.

CHERYL HINES: That’s what you follow?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I follow a lot.

CHERYL HINES: Is it relaxing or, it’s just fascinating. It just, like, gets your mind off of politics.

JOE ROGAN: Just weird. Weird to watch this creature and it eats a roach that’s, like, bigger than it and it eats the whole thing. Like this, this guy just gets this roach. Look at the size of that roach. He’s just going to chew through that entire roach. And that sucker’s still alive for the beginning. He just eats his head, and then he stops being alive. And then he just goes right through him. Like, look at this. This is nuts.

CHERYL HINES: And then do you think it doesn’t eat again for a long time? Like snakes probably.

JOE ROGAN: Probably doesn’t have to. Ew. Just look at your nuts. I know.

CHERYL HINES: So gross.

JOE ROGAN: Eat its legs and it keeps going and it eats the entire thing. Like, there’s nothing left of that roach. And that roach is as big as him. Like, where’d it go? How are you doing that?

CHERYL HINES: I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: You ever see a fat praying mantis? No, they don’t exist.

CHERYL HINES: I hardly see them. Oh, but I haven’t been looking.

JOE ROGAN: There’s the page. Yeah. You have a highlights reel on.

CHERYL HINES: You have a highlights reel.

JOE ROGAN: Joe, that’s hilarious. It’s called cryptic mantis. It’s just all of them eating. Is that what the name of it is? What is it? Cryptic. Yeah, cryptic with a K. Mantis. Mantis.

CHERYL HINES: And their eyeballs are crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a weird animal. I mean, if that insect was big, it would be a real problem. So look, he’s like dangling that roach in front of it and just snatches it.

CHERYL HINES: Ew.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that’s like you eating a poodle. It’s crazy. He just eats the whole thing in one sitting.

CHERYL HINES: The whole poodle, the nose, the head.

JOE ROGAN: Eyes, eyeballs, tail, everything. It just eats everything. Ew. Yeah, but they, that exists in nature. I mean, we’re playing a totally different game, you know our game.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: We’re soft and.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that thing. Yeah. A Peruvian dragon mantis. Yeah. Imagine that was, like big. Imagine that thing was like the size of a giraffe. Be a giant problem. Just runs into a city and eats everybody.

CHERYL HINES: Sounds like a movie does.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how actresses think.

CHERYL HINES: That sounds like a great movie. I could be the scientist. The mantis gets stuck in a tube with a guy’s head. Yeah, something like that.

The Fly and Jeff Goldblum

JOE ROGAN: Dum, dum dum. Like the fly. Remember that Jeff Goldblum movie?

CHERYL HINES: Of course.

JOE ROGAN: It was great.

CHERYL HINES: Of course.

JOE ROGAN: And that was a remake of an earlier one. There was an earlier the Fly movie, which was a lot weirder.

CHERYL HINES: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it was weird for the time because the guy had, like, a weird costume on, like his fly head on, but like a person’s body. But the fly was cool because you see Jeff Goldblum, like, that’s the original fly. Oh, say like a one human hand, one fly hand. But the Goldblum one was great.

CHERYL HINES: No, I love, I love the Goldblum.

JOE ROGAN: So this guy just had, like, a mask on. He’s like a regular dude with a mask.

CHERYL HINES: I’m the fly, you know, but I got a hand. So you got.

JOE ROGAN: But the Goldblum one was cool because you see, like, him start to slowly turn mad.

CHERYL HINES: Yes. And his mannerisms. And he’s so great.

JOE ROGAN: Spikes start poking out of his skin. He’s like, what is this? He didn’t realize that a fly had gotten in there with him and they’d matched DNA.

CHERYL HINES: Jeff Goldblum’s great.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he’s great. He’s.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, he’s very, he’s very, very intense and at the same time, very likable.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Fun, jolly.

CHERYL HINES: Tell me about you. Yeah, tell me what makes Cheryl work.

JOE ROGAN: Well, him in Jurassic Park, like, really helped make that movie. Like, the rational scientist that was like, okay, what have you done? You know, because you could do it. You never decided whether you should do it, you know?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. He’s always thinking.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Not judging, not freaking out.

JOE ROGAN: Well, definitely sort of judging, but it was just that, like, yeah, there should be a f*ing scientist that says, what are you doing? Yeah, what are you doing?

CHERYL HINES: Are you sure you should be doing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, these don’t belong here. These are from a time where we weren’t around. You shouldn’t bring them here. We can’t compete with them. If it wasn’t for that big rock that hit the Yucatan, we probably would have never become people, because they would have been around.

Jurassic Park and CGI

CHERYL HINES: I never saw Jurassic Park.

JOE ROGAN: What? What? How, how’d you avoid that movie? It’s one of the greatest movies of all time.

CHERYL HINES: No, it didn’t sound good to me. Like, dinosaurs.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so good. It’s such a good movie. It’s such a good movie, too, because it’s, it was, like, one of the first movies that used CGI, but they did it really well.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the thing about CGI with dinosaurs is it’s so different than CGI with, like, do you remember I Am Legend, the Will Smith movie? Never saw that one.

CHERYL HINES: No. Is it science fiction?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHERYL HINES: I don’t watch.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s a zombie movie.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like a disease sweeps over the ground. But in that movie, there’s a, there’s CGI lions in New York City, and they look so vague. They look bad.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, because.

CHERYL HINES: What was that? That was like, 2010.

JOE ROGAN: Was it even? I feel like it was earlier than that. When was, I am Legend, 2007.

CHERYL HINES: Okay, but go ahead. You were going to say. Why?

JOE ROGAN: Because you know what a lion looks like. You don’t really know what a dinosaur looks like, so your brain doesn’t register that. Oh, that looks fake.

CHERYL HINES: Right? Right.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So when you see the T. Rex when he comes over the fence. And also the way they shot it, like, Spielberg is a genius. Yeah. The way they shot it at night, where it’s kind of like, you know, in the jungle, so it’s, like, partially obscured. You ever seen the scene where the T. Rex emerges for the first time when the kids are in the car. Oh, you need to see this.

CHERYL HINES: I have so many things to look up to. I have so many rabbit holes to go down.

JOE ROGAN: How have you not seen this movie?

CHERYL HINES: I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: The original Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies ever.

CHERYL HINES: Okay. I just have to watch it.

Bringing Back Extinct Species

JOE ROGAN: I loved it because it, for me, it, it’s a real potential possibility. I’m friends with the guys over at Colossal. Those are the guys that brought back the dire wolf. Like they have actual dire wolves now.

CHERYL HINES: What is a dire wolf?

JOE ROGAN: A dire wolf is an extinct breed of wolf. And I know there’s geneticists out there that are freaking out. That’s not a dire wolf. It’s not. What they’ve done is just taking the characteristics of a dire wolf and recreated it.

CHERYL HINES: Are they small? Are they very big?

JOE ROGAN: They’re bigger than a regular wolf. And they’re weird looking. Like they have a mane and, you know, they’re all white. Like they’re really cool looking. Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: And they walk on all fours. Oh, yeah, of course, now I’m thinking about your werewolf in London.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he walks on all fours too, does he? But he can go, that’s a direwolf. So that’s Colossal guys. Yeah, they’re, they’re really interesting. It’s really interesting because you see him.

CHERYL HINES: Wow, it’s really pretty.

JOE ROGAN: And when I saw them, it was in the summertime and they, apparently they were about six months old and they’re going to get a lot larger.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, wait, so they came back from extinction?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they, they brought them back from extinction through genetic engineering. They have direwolf DNA. They have direwolf DNA. They mixed it with gray wolf DNA. I don’t know how they did it. They could tell me. I’ll forget five minutes later. But whatever it is, that’s a different thing that ever existed before since the direwolves went extinct.

CHERYL HINES: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So my fear is that these aholes, not these guys, but that someone, some scientific ahole, will make a Jurassic Park, will say, hey, you know, we found an island that we can buy that’s, you know, 50,000 square acres or whatever it is, and we’re going to take and put a few dinosaurs on this island and make it so that people can go visit it. Like that’s possible. People could do that?

CHERYL HINES: Well, it sounds possible, but it doesn’t sound worse than, like, AI. Things that could be done on your computer. And to our brains.

JOE ROGAN: You’re more afraid of AI than you are of dinosaurs. That’s rational because AI is more likely.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, because if somebody said, hey, you could go visit this island that has dinosaurs, at least I’d have a choice. And I’d be like, ah, no, thanks. But like, I will sometimes if you’re just talking about a poncho.

JOE ROGAN: A poncho?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like a.

CHERYL HINES: Like you like a poncho that, you know, like little blanket that has a hole.

JOE ROGAN: Got it.

CHERYL HINES: It’s a word that doesn’t come up much, but when it came up, just talking to my friend about a poncho, and then all of a sudden on my phone, they’re like, ads for ponchos. Yeah. So it’s that to me, I wonder.

JOE ROGAN: If I’m going to get some now.

CHERYL HINES: You are.

JOE ROGAN: Poncho ads.

CHERYL HINES: You’re going to get some poncho ads.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve never had a poncho ad. If I get one right now, I’ll know.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, yeah, I know. We’re all dialed in somehow.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s for sure.

CHERYL HINES: So I would rather be running away from a dinosaur than just go crazy from thoughts of things that have been put into my head from AI. Make sense?

JOE ROGAN: Sort of. I don’t want to die either way.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to die.

CHERYL HINES: Well, if you had to choose.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to die by dinosaur.

CHERYL HINES: If you had to choose one or the other.

The AI Disruption

JOE ROGAN: I really don’t think either one is preferable. I think the dinosaur is more unlikely. The AI one seems very possible. There’s not a real good roadmap that I’ve seen where AI is not completely disruptive in every aspect of our life. And the only people that do provide that roadmap seem to be profiting off of AI.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, some people think it’s going to increase productivity. Like Elon thinks it’s going to increase productivity to the point where no one will have to work anymore, and you’ll have what they call universal high income. That’s what he’s calling it. But then you have this real problem of what do people do with their time?

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: How do so many people really identify with whatever they do as a job?

CHERYL HINES: Right. Right. And it gives you a sense of purpose. Right. Most people need a sense of purpose to feel happy.

JOE ROGAN: They also like providing for themselves. People like the fact that you work all week, you come home, you get your paycheck, and now you can go to the restaurant, and it’s all your money.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You bought it. You worked hard, and now you bought a poncho. You paid for it with your labor.

CHERYL HINES: Show in the world.

JOE ROGAN: People like being good at something. Right. If you’re the guy that, you know, there’s something going on, you need something fixed, and you go to Henry. Henry loves the fact that Cheryl calls him up because she knows that he knows how to fix things.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What do we do with Henry when Henry loses his job? We say, your job’s useless. You’re basically like a guy who owns Blockbuster Video.

Universal High Income and Purpose

CHERYL HINES: Well, is that like very, very wealthy people that are born into money that don’t have to work?

JOE ROGAN: That’s even worse. Right. Because very wealthy people that are born into money have never had to prove themselves. They’ve always been more special than everybody else. If everybody has universal high income, that won’t be a unique thing. It’ll be basic.

So optimistically, I would say the optimistic take on it is, if that was the case, what the real positive aspect is, you wouldn’t have to work for your basic needs. And what you could decide to do instead is pursue something that you’re really interested in. Like maybe become an expert in something. Or study a bunch of different languages all day.

CHERYL HINES: But will people?

JOE ROGAN: Some people will.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But I think that’s always the case.

CHERYL HINES: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Some people would take advantage of a situation. Some people, during COVID, they said, okay, some people just became alcoholics and they lost everything. Some people said, I’m going to start a side business. I’m going to start an online business. Because an online business, they can’t shut down during a pandemic. And a lot of people become very profitable because of that.

It’s like, why do we need to just work all day? If you’re a laborer, is that really the only use of your time? If you’re doing it for food, I get it. You’re doing it for housing. I get it. It’s a good job. It’s a solid, honest way to make a living. But if you don’t have to do that anymore, and then you just get money from the government and from whatever income AI is generating, wouldn’t you rather play soccer or go do this or whatever your thing is? Painting. Whatever thing is.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You know, you could find anything. You could find a thing that gives you meaning other than just your work.

CHERYL HINES: Right. Because if you’re working in a factory and you’re just putting the dial on the box, that’s not fulfilling. And you’re not going anywhere. You’re not doing anything.

JOE ROGAN: That stuff has only been around for a while. A small amount of time, like being a worker in a factory or an office. How long has that even been around? The idea that we can’t exist without that being around is crazy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because for thousands and thousands of years, there was no money. People just hunted and fished and traded things and started raising animals. There’s no money. You basically just tried to stay alive by gathering food.

The Future of Money and Resources

CHERYL HINES: So do you think that if nobody had to work that we could do without money altogether? That the money could disappear?

JOE ROGAN: That’s a scary thing because someone’s going to have it. There’s going to be resources.

CHERYL HINES: But then if there’s no value to it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but there’s always going to be value. This is the scariest.

CHERYL HINES: From country to country or worldwide.

JOE ROGAN: Everything. The control of resources. Resources are always going to be valuable. It’s always going to be valuable to have oil. If you have oil, you can do so many things. You can make gasoline, you could power things, you make plastics. Everything comes out of oil. Everything is petroleum based. Even your medicine is petroleum based.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, but if nobody was paying you to make it.

JOE ROGAN: So everything’s free. That’s the idea. How’s that possible? Because then no one would want to make a Ferrari. The only reason why you would make a Ferrari is because it’s hard to get. So it costs a lot of money.

CHERYL HINES: Well, if AI is taking over and taking all of those jobs in your, you know, and the idea is that nobody’s going to have to work. So if nobody has to work, then the cars are still being made, right?

JOE ROGAN: Maybe. Oh, maybe they decide how many cars get made and how many people can have a car. Yeah. Like Oxford, England, just established this new thing called 15 Minute Cities. They have an area where you’re allowed to travel to. And if you decide to travel outside of that area, you get a certain amount of them per year.

CHERYL HINES: Get a certain amount of what?

Government Control and Congestion Zones

JOE ROGAN: Travel passes to leave your area. It was a congestion zone. Whatever it is. I’m just, that’s what it was. You call it whatever you want, but whatever it is, it’s the government telling you you can’t leave an area. And if you leave that area, it costs you money. So it costs you the equivalent of a hundred dollars a day to leave this area.

CHERYL HINES: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: If you get over a certain number of them, that’s what they did. Similar to what they did in New York City. However they stopped it in New York, remember?

Yeah, well, it’s crazy. That’s why they stopped it because this is the beginning of a terrible trend. So this is the beginning of them telling you where you can go and how often you can go. And this is the government doing it. And the temporary congestion charge bullshit. They’ve been proposing stuff like this. It’s bullshit. They’ve been proposing stuff. They want to control people. They want to be able to tell you where you can and can’t go.

The more they can put restrictions on you, the more they can pass laws that they can profit from, the more they can benefit from whatever control they have over you, the more they can tighten down on it. And England’s a great place to do this because they’ve already gotten things passed through in England. Like England doesn’t have jury trials anymore, except for murder and rape and a few other things. It’s a judge. So all the people that are getting arrested for social media abuses, it’s just one person deciding. No, it’s different judges. It’s wherever you get brought up, wherever you get arrested.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: One judge. Yes.

CHERYL HINES: Just deciding exactly their fate. Whether they like it or not.

JOE ROGAN: Without a doubt, they’re going to go with whatever the government wants. And they’ve arrested 12,000 people over the last year for social media posts just in England.

CHERYL HINES: I know, that’s intense.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s the place where they’re, oh, it’s a congestion zone. F off. They’re controlling. What we don’t know because we’re not there. People will get bused into that area already because it’s already congested as f. I don’t care. I don’t care what’s going on. That’s Bangladesh, okay? That’s New York City. That’s a lot of places. That’s LA.

But you don’t get to control whether or not people can leave an area, period. It doesn’t matter what you call it. But this was because they closed, I don’t care. They closed the road temporarily. And so they had to put up some, it’s a terrible precedent. It’s like what they did with COVID. They shut down for two weeks to stop the spread. And what happened? It lasted a year and a half in LA.

You don’t give them that kind of control. You can’t ever have the control to tell people whether they can or can’t leave an area. F* off. That’s crazy.

CHERYL HINES: Their houses for a while. You weren’t even allowed to go outside. They said, don’t go outside.

COVID Snitching and Control

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Dipshit mayor who was saying, usually snitches get stitches, but now they get rewards. Do you remember that in LA they were telling you to turn your neighbors in?

CHERYL HINES: Oh, I don’t remember it in LA, but I remember it in other states.

JOE ROGAN: In LA. The mayor of LA. What was that kook’s name? It was the mayor of LA. He thought he was on the right side of everything until Black Lives Matter started protesting outside his house every day for like a month. Garcetti.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, Garcetti.

JOE ROGAN: That creep. That guy. Find that thing that snitches usually get stitches, but now they get rewards. He literally said that.

CHERYL HINES: That is so crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Snitches snitching on your neighbor for having too many people over.

CHERYL HINES: That is so crazy.

JOE ROGAN: People were exactly five feet apart from each other. “Continues to let us know where those folks are. If you’ve observed recurring violations of the safer at home order, please continue to let us know at coronavirus.lacity.org business violation. You know the old expression about snitches? Well, in this case, snitches get rewards. We want to thank you for turning folks in and making sure we are all safe.”

It would be cool if that lady who was doing sign language is just fake sometimes.

CHERYL HINES: Sometimes nobody knows he’s done talking and she’s just like, hey, over here.

Fake Sign Language Interpreters

JOE ROGAN: Well, nobody, you know, very few people know American Sign Language. So she could have been faking it. A bunch of people been faking it before and they got caught.

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. There was a guy next to Obama when Obama was giving a speech once, and this guy was completely making it up. Come on, con man.

CHERYL HINES: Come on.

JOE ROGAN: Tricked himself into being three feet from Obama. No security screening because nobody knows how to validate.

CHERYL HINES: I don’t think it was.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t believe it was America. I think it was somewhere else.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: So they left this guy on stage and you can tell he’s just making things up. He’s like doing this.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: He’s like, fake sign. You’ve never seen this?

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: Find the guy’s fake sign language with Obama.

CHERYL HINES: How did they, did he get busted during this sign language, people?

The Fake Sign Language Interpreter

JOE ROGAN: This guy right here. So this guy on the right, yeah, that guy. He’s completely making shit up. So wait for Obama to get, so this is the Mandela memorial. When does Obama come out? There’s one with Obama next to the guy. So that was what it was. So that’s the guy. See, he’s right next to him. He’s completely faking sign language. He was just a kook. He was like, “I could do it. Yeah, I’m good at it. Let me up there.”

CHERYL HINES: That is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: People are nuts.

CHERYL HINES: People are nuts.

JOE ROGAN: You should know that as much as anybody.

CHERYL HINES: Listen, I’ve learned it over and over again, and they’re even nuttier at a level that I didn’t know.

The Reality of Political Campaigns

JOE ROGAN: What was the big turning point for you? Was it just being attached to Bobby and watching all that?

CHERYL HINES: It was Bobby running for president. It’s so crazy. I mean, I really got a crash course in elections. And it is the craziest shit goes on. And everybody, that’s all they think about, you know, the people that are involved. They get up in the morning, “How can I f* this guy over? I’m going to say…”

And they have these people that their only job is to start a rumor, is to say something, put something in the press that doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. If somebody else picks it up, they celebrate for the whole day. And it’s like that story, whatever it was, the thing that they said gets picked up. That is like a day celebration. It’s a celebration from the other camps.

And then it’s like your camp is now trying to figure out what to do about that or what kind of damage it’s going to do and is it worth even fighting or is it better to just let it wither on the vine? It’s just all day, every day, people are trying to find the craziest, craziest. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s about, certainly if it’s about politics or not. It’s more exciting if it’s something personal. “Oh, he’s wearing lifts in his boots. Oh, she’s…” And it’s just…

The Boot Lifts Controversy

JOE ROGAN: But that is an important thing. If someone’s wearing lifts in their boots, like, hey, we’ve…

CHERYL HINES: How are you going to govern this country?

JOE ROGAN: How can you get so tall out of nowhere?

CHERYL HINES: It is.

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird. It’s absurd.

CHERYL HINES: But you don’t like that. Well, who gives a shit? Women wear heels, right?

JOE ROGAN: But if a man does it and he’s lying about it, I think that as a show or…

CHERYL HINES: Did anybody ask?

JOE ROGAN: I think they did. I think they asked. You’re talking about a homeboy from Florida. Yeah, I think they asked. And he denied it. But it was pretty clear. There was like one podcast or one talk show, one of those late night shows where he walked out and I was like, “Why? You’re walking like a horse.” Like you’re clearly on your tippy toes. This is crazy. You’ve added like 5 inches to your height. This is bananas. And it’s all inside your boots.

CHERYL HINES: And then that’s what everybody’s talking about.

JOE ROGAN: But don’t do that. Don’t do that. No one’s going to talk. That’s like a self-inflicted wound.

CHERYL HINES: But then it’s like, “Oh, well, he’s too short to govern the country.”

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. If people think that, that’s there, that’s on them.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, people are crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But they’re not going to think you’re taller than you really are. Like, they’ve seen you for f*ing decades. He’s been in the public eye forever. And then all gains 4 inches. Everybody’s like, “What’s going on?” Like, people know you can’t, they’re scrutinizing everything. You know, you can’t pull the wool over their eyes that hard.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But it also, it shows this weird thing where you’re so worried about what people think about you that you’re willing to wear lifts in your shoes. It’s kind, and again, I say this as a short man, you know, it’s…

CHERYL HINES: Important. You like just being authentic because you’re not being authentic.

JOE ROGAN: That’s who you are.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You’re not going to change people’s opinion of you if you wear a f*ing stilt.

Authenticity vs. Appearance

CHERYL HINES: But what does it matter? Like if a guy had a toupee and he was running for president, would you be like, “Nah,” because it might make him feel better?

JOE ROGAN: F your feelings. Take that fing wig off.

CHERYL HINES: You should run a campaign.

JOE ROGAN: Especially if you weren’t wearing a wig and all of a sudden you put it on and you expect me to ignore it. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. If you’re bald forever and then all of a sudden you…

CHERYL HINES: And then the day that you start wearing it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: There must be a day in somebody’s life when it’s like, “Yeah, I’m just going to go for it and hope nobody…”

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a bunch of really smart people who have them on, which is really weird. It’s like, how can you be so smart and you don’t know that that thing on your head is ridiculous? Like, you were bald and now you’re not. And I’m supposed to just go, “Hey, congratulations on growing all your hair back.” This is f*ing nuts.

CHERYL HINES: So you find it so distracting?

JOE ROGAN: No, I just find it a character flaw.

CHERYL HINES: I see. Right, okay.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like you’re a 60-year-old man and you’re concerned with looking attractive at this stage of your life. Like, come on, let it go. This is a crazy flaw.

CHERYL HINES: Whatever was going to happen should have already happened. And at this point, this is a…

JOE ROGAN: Crazy thing to concentrate on, especially if you want to be taken seriously. You should…

CHERYL HINES: But so what about a guy that’s 25, that’s wearing a toupee?

Hair Loss and Solutions

JOE ROGAN: Look, it’s like male hair loss is devastating. People talking, again, as a bald guy. Yeah, I got hair transplants. I did the whole thing. I tried minoxidil and all the other different things. It’s like, you don’t have any control over it. And apparently now, supposedly UCLA has a new remedy that just grows your hair back. And it’s in tests right now, and they’re going to be able to put it on you. It’s probably going to make a trillion dollars.

CHERYL HINES: Is it like a helmet that you put on?

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no. It’s like some kind of medication that you topically apply and it grows hair. Grows hair on mice. And apparently it’s going to work. I mean, it’s kind of amazing that they haven’t cracked that code yet, but one day they will. And if the UCLA thing, then the wig business goes out of business.

CHERYL HINES: Then would you take it?

JOE ROGAN: No. Even if I did, I would shave my head.

CHERYL HINES: Why?

JOE ROGAN: 100%. I love it. I love having a shaved head. I love not having to talk to a barber. I don’t give a shit what I look like.

CHERYL HINES: I would rather shave your head than have a meaningless conversation for 10 minutes.

JOE ROGAN: 100%.

CHERYL HINES: Do you shave it every day?

JOE ROGAN: No, I shave it every couple. I shaved it this morning, but I shave it every couple days.

CHERYL HINES: So if I said, “If you take this tomorrow you’ll have a full head of hair,” you’d be like, “Not this.”

JOE ROGAN: Maybe I would take it and then just buzz that down and have it really short. But I would have it show everybody I could get my hair back if I wanted to.

CHERYL HINES: I could do it if I wanted to, but I don’t want to do it.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know.

CHERYL HINES: But I could.

JOE ROGAN: But I used to love when I had a full head of hair. I used to love having a crew cut. It was my favorite thing.

CHERYL HINES: Wow. Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I just love the feeling of it. Like, when you rub it and you get all the stubble up there. I like that. I just don’t want to think about it.

CHERYL HINES: Texture. That’s it.

JOE ROGAN: But when I was in television, I thought about it. I was like, “I can’t lose my hair.” That’s why I got a hair transplant. I was like, “I don’t want to, I’m starting to make money.”

CHERYL HINES: But that didn’t work, or you didn’t like it?

Hair Transplants Explained

JOE ROGAN: It works for a little while. But the way I describe it, I was like, you take, it’s like you take people from a neighborhood where everybody’s really healthy, and you move them to a neighborhood where everyone’s dying. So all your neighbors die. So all the other hair that was supposed to fall out, that falls out, and the only stuff that’s left is stuff you put there, and it looks kind of ratty and sparse.

CHERYL HINES: Do you take it from the back?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they take it from the back here.

CHERYL HINES: And then you put it in front?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. A lot of guys go to Turkey, they do it, and they get their whole head redone. But sometimes you get a weird hairline where it’s a little too low and crazy. It’s a little too flat and weird. You’re like, “What’s going on with your hair?”

CHERYL HINES: That’s hard. Yeah. Well, because how do you know? Because you’re under.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you probably think it’s a good idea, and the doctor thinks it’s a good idea, and he convinces you. You’re like, “It’s going to look good.” He’s like, “It’s going to look amazing.” And next thing, you look like a wolf man.

CHERYL HINES: Are you out completely when you have that?

JOE ROGAN: No.

CHERYL HINES: The doctor’s talking to you, and it’s like, “I’m going to put one here.”

JOE ROGAN: They don’t even talk to you. You can watch a movie or something like that. You just sit there and chill. There’s videos of guys doing it online.

CHERYL HINES: I’m not going to watch. Yeah. I wonder why more women don’t do it.

JOE ROGAN: Women do it when women start losing their hair. Yeah. Quite a few of their patients are women because maybe they have alopecia.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They can’t grow it back, so they transplant it. They do.

CHERYL HINES: And you’re okay with that?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’m okay with women wearing wigs, too.

CHERYL HINES: You just don’t like men wearing wigs?

JOE ROGAN: Nope. I don’t like it. I don’t like men wearing…

CHERYL HINES: So interesting.

Gender and Appearance Standards

JOE ROGAN: I don’t like men wearing lipstick either. Unless you’re a singer or someone freaky, some non-binary person.

CHERYL HINES: But you don’t want the guy at the grocery store checking you out.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t care.

CHERYL HINES: It’s okay.

JOE ROGAN: You might be a weirdo. You know, you’re allowed to be a weirdo. I don’t mind anywhere. But if you want me, you want to be, like, if we’re all hanging out and we’re going to go out to dinner and you show up wearing lipstick and eyeshadow. “What’s going on with your face?” Like, if you don’t think I’m going to make fun of that, you’re crazy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, okay, so you just make fun of him all night, but you’re not so mad that you’re not going to go out with him.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s just a nutty choice, but it’s like, I wouldn’t want you being the Treasurer of the United States with lipstick on. You know, it’s like, you remember that guy that was working in the Biden administration? That was a man with lipstick and a shaved head and he was stealing all the women’s clothes. He was stealing women’s clothes from the airport.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what I’m talking about. I mean, listen, that’s a crazy person.

CHERYL HINES: Few.

The Reality of Political Hiring and Qualifications

JOE ROGAN: There was a few. They were hiring them just because they were weird. They were like, this is going to make us look woke. We’re going to hire all the right people. It’s going to be very inclusive. Okay, great. You’re hiring mentally ill people. You’re hiring a man who likes to steal women’s clothes from the airport. Yeah. And you’re putting them in charge of nuclear energy.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, that is. Okay, so this goes back to politics, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: It’s like, so you watch that, and then the next election it’s get a new group of people. And they’re weird.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHERYL HINES: So it’s not like just one side is.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, no, no, no, no. I don’t think. I think that’s a big trap. To think that it’s only the Republicans or only the Democrats that are weird. No, everybody who wants to do that, the vast majority of them are unhinged because that is not a normal job. They’re not good at it. That’s the other thing. They’re not good at talking. They’re not good at public speaking.

Even the best ones are like, that’s why when a guy like Obama or a guy like Clinton comes along like, holy s*. Because they’re, or Trump, it’s so good at, like, talking to large groups of people and being themselves. So when someone’s not good at that, it’s, like, glaringly obvious because most people who are good at that kind of stuff, they don’t want that job.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: That job’s horrible.

CHERYL HINES: Right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: That job is crazy. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Job’s nuts.

The Disconnect Between Campaigning and Governing

CHERYL HINES: But then do you have to be good at talking?

JOE ROGAN: You do. You do. Because it’s part of the campaign trail.

CHERYL HINES: Well, right. But that’s the other thing, too, is running for something. Being part of a campaign is so different than actually doing it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Than being. They’re completely. It’s like auditioning. It’s so much like auditioning, but it’s completely different. It’s a completely different job, different skill set.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CHERYL HINES: So it’s like, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: At least auditioning, you actually acting in the room.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When you’re running for president, you’re not running for president in front of everybody. This is how I’m going to do it. You’re going to pretend to be my chief of staff, you’re going to be the Secretary of Defense, and I’m going to put on a play. So I’m going to show you how I would handle it if I ran across the line.

CHERYL HINES: I would rather that. Yeah. I would like to see a campaign like that where it’s just a little mini play.

JOE ROGAN: A little mini play?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like a little cabinet situation.

CHERYL HINES: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: A little Cuban missile crisis right in.

CHERYL HINES: Front of everybody’s eyes, and just to see how everyone would handle it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s, well, that’s why when people pretend to be a president in a film, people go, you know what? He would be a great president. Like, people do that all the time.

CHERYL HINES: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how Zelensky became the president of.

CHERYL HINES: Ukraine, because he was a good actor.

JOE ROGAN: He was an actor as a president in a TV show, and that’s why everybody liked him. Did you know that?

CHERYL HINES: I knew that he was an actor, but I didn’t know he was. I didn’t know he was playing the president.

JOE ROGAN: He was playing the president. He was a comedian, and he was playing the president in a television show, and people loved it. And they’re like, he should be the real president. Like, that’s how goofy people are.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. That could definitely happen in this country, don’t you think?

JOE ROGAN: 100%.

CHERYL HINES: Well, all the people that have played the president, people be like, yeah, that 100 percent guy could definitely do it.

JOE ROGAN: Like Martin Sheen.

CHERYL HINES: Martin Sheen. People with a, yeah, he could probably.

JOE ROGAN: Be the president right now if he wanted to.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, if someone like that, like a top notch actor really wanted to campaign, everybody be.

CHERYL HINES: Except for.

JOE ROGAN: Except for they just tear him apart and attack them and make up a bunch of stuff about him and his family and blah, blah.

CHERYL HINES: And actors are, they have thinner skin than politicians.

JOE ROGAN: Some of them do, yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, most of them. Most of them. Because it’s, it’s because as an actor, you’re putting yourself out there all the time and you feel insecure. People are, one person doesn’t like you or says that you’re horrible, then it’s like, oh, my God. But politicians are like, what else you got?

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re just used to being full of s*. They live in it. Well, they’re comfortable in it.

CHERYL HINES: Well, I think that there are some politicians that are true. That are authentic and truly working to make the country better.

JOE ROGAN: Absolutely.

CHERYL HINES: That is one thing that I’ve seen.

JOE ROGAN: I think there are people on death row that are innocent.

CHERYL HINES: They’re just so few and far between.

The Motivations Behind Political Careers

JOE ROGAN: I just don’t think it’s most. I think the reality.

CHERYL HINES: What do you think? Why do you think most, why would most people do it that aren’t interested in truly making the country better or bettering the government?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it all depends upon what’s your motivation, what are you doing it for? And I think most of them are doing it for the same reason why people become famous. They’re doing it because they want to be special and they want to say the things that people want to hear so that people like them and then they can make money. I think that’s why they do it.

And then once you get in, here’s the thing that seems to be pretty apparent is that once you get in, for the most part, you have to adhere to the mindset of all the other people that are in your business. And if you don’t, you get cast like John Fetterman. Like, you get cast out. They hate that guy. Now they’re mad at him because he says, I think you should probably have ID to vote.

CHERYL HINES: I like John Fetterman.

JOE ROGAN: He’s great.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. And he says he’s authentic.

JOE ROGAN: He says, well, that guy genuinely worked in charities for his whole life. Like, he genuinely worked in doing philanthropy work and like real stuff. Like, he’s not a greedy guy. He walks around a Carhartt hoodie and shorts. He went to the f*ing inauguration in shorts and a Carhartt hoodie. And I talked to him when he was there. He’s like, genuinely sweet, like in real life. He’s a nice guy.

CHERYL HINES: He is who he is.

JOE ROGAN: Big Ted Bear. Nice guy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And unfortunately he had that stroke, and so it messes with his ability to recall things. So when you talk to him, like on a show, he’ll have like a little iPad that translates stuff.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just so he can recall the question and do it again. But, you know, he’s a smart guy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He just has a weird problem.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But the thing is, like, you have to adhere. And if you don’t, you’re not allowed to have a deviating opinion. If you do, you get cast out. You know, like Thomas Massie. You see the same thing in the Republicans. Like anybody that has an opinion that doesn’t deviate with the group think you get cast out, they’ll call you a traitor. They’ll say terrible things about you.

CHERYL HINES: There’s a lot of theatrics.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of that. And I think there’s a lot of people that are in that business that start off with really good intentions. And then you see them slowly give in. They slowly succumb to the weight of what that position is.

Congressional Wealth and Insider Trading

CHERYL HINES: But, you know, it’s not like they’re making a lot of money.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, congress people, anything.

CHERYL HINES: They are.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. The way they make money is inside of trading. Cheryl.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, God, I’m so.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s so ubiquitous. That’s the dark, dark secret. But it’s not even a secret.

CHERYL HINES: Is that why they never leave?

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s why Nancy Pelosi’s a thousand years old. She’s worth $400 million and she makes 170 grand a year. Make sense out of that? Yeah, it is a little make sense out of that. First of all, suspicious. If you had $400 million in the bank, would you keep showing up for work? If you’re 85 f*ing years old and you’re in a job that pays 170 grand a year, I’d look at that paycheck every year, every week. I’d be like, I’m good. I’m going to get out of here.

CHERYL HINES: This is going to go relax on an island somewhere.

JOE ROGAN: I’m going fishing.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I’m going to go to Mexico and go fishing. This is nuts. Yeah, I’d be enjoying this money. Why would you, why would you still be working? Because her net worth keeps going up and up and up. You’ve seen Pelosi Tracker dot com.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. My boys talk about it. Yeah. She made.

JOE ROGAN: She’s better at the stock market than Warren Buffett. She’s better at the stock market than George Soros.

CHERYL HINES: But, but is it possible that she thinks she is moving the needle in politics and the right way?

JOE ROGAN: It’s possible, sure. It’s possible that she convinces herself of that. It’s also possible that staying in office is the best way to ensure you’re not prosecuted. Well, yeah, because if somebody goes after you, if that’s not legal and if you really did have insider information and you bought a bunch of stock and something that you knew that I think there’s a real good case that that shouldn’t be legal. It seems like it is legal now. But if you’re involved.

CHERYL HINES: No. Is it legal?

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s a very gray area because the Congress people are allowed to trade and buy stocks and they most certainly have bought stocks when they knew that a certain market is going to be affected by a decision that only they knew was going to be made.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of evidence for that. Like that’s how you make that much money. There’s a lot of them. And it’s not a Republican or a Democrat issue. It’s red, blue, green across the board.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They’re all making crazy loot. Not all of them. Like Tulsi Gabbard didn’t do it. There’s a bunch of people that didn’t do it.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But there’s a lot of them that wind up making a ton of loot and they get super defensive about it.

CHERYL HINES: Nobody wants, nobody wants to say, yeah, I did it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, tell me how you became worth $400 million.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Without providing any product. If you invented some new mouse that’s like better than any other computer mouse, like, I see why you made that money.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Congratulations.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, but what’d you do?

JOE ROGAN: What’d you do? Most people make 170 grand a year are kind of doing well, doing okay. Doing well. Probably have a nice car, probably live in a nice house.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You’re not worth $400 million.

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: That’ll be the rarest of rare people. Imagine if you were making 170 grand and you were working side by side with Bob and all of a sudden Bob’s buying a Ferrari. He’s got his own private jet.

CHERYL HINES: He’s showing up with his driver, Bob.

JOE ROGAN: What are you doing?

Congressional Finances and Transparency

CHERYL HINES: But, and I don’t know the answer to this, but I probably should. Aren’t their finances exposed every year?

JOE ROGAN: No.

CHERYL HINES: Well, just when you run for president. Because that’s…

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. I mean, certainly when you run for president, then they want to see your, they want to audit you or they want to see your tax forms. But when you look at the net worth, and it’s very difficult to find out what someone’s net worth is. But if you look at the net worth of Congress people, a lot of them are millionaires.

CHERYL HINES: But were they millionaires before they went in?

JOE ROGAN: A lot of them weren’t. Well, Ilhan Omar was. She was in debt before she got into office. Now she’s worth millions. Kind of odd. She’s really good at her job.

CHERYL HINES: Got lucky.

JOE ROGAN: She’s really good at her job. She’s really good at her job.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, I am seeing, you know, through the lens which I’m looking, I’ve seen a lot of people come in to the administration that have already had a lot of money, you know, so in that case, it feels like they’re coming in for the right reason.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But when they got in, how much more money did they make once they got in? That’s when things get weird. Did you start your own crypto coin and do a pump and dump? Because, you know, that’s odd. It’s odd that that’s legal, isn’t it?

CHERYL HINES: And I don’t have the answer to this either. You probably would more than anybody. But is there a group out there, watchdog group that’s looking at all of this that’s like, here’s another thing I just discovered about this doc that’s such and such voted for.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of people online that do that. There’s a lot of independent journalists that do that. But the thing is, it never gets covered in mainstream news.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: When was the last time you saw mainstream news doing a deep dive on congresspeople’s income?

CHERYL HINES: Never.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Doesn’t seem like. Because they want to get access to those Congress people.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

Post-Office Profiteering

JOE ROGAN: They want them to come on their shows. You know, it’s a weird business. It’s a weird business because most certainly when people get into office, they profit immensely. You don’t just… So if you’re like, let’s just pretend you’re the president. If you become the president, I think the president gets pretty paid. What do they get paid? Like $450,000 a year or something like that. How much does the president, by the way? Trump doesn’t take that money. He doesn’t take a dime of it. $400,000. But he does that with crypto coin.

But the point is, it’s like, so you make that money and then you’re in office for four years and you go, okay, well, are you going to live like Jimmy Carter? Because Jimmy Carter lived a simple life until he died. He never profited off of the fact that he was the president. Or are you going to be one of those people that give speeches to banks and you inexplicably make like $300,000 to just talk for an hour? Which is bizarre.

That seems like a way they can pay you legally. If I was being cynical, that seems like you did something when you’re in office and they made it kind of…

CHERYL HINES: They were happy. And you’re going to go on your…

JOE ROGAN: Boring a speaking tour and break it in.

CHERYL HINES: And, you know, getting sitting on boards. Right. Makes me think of the opioid situation with what’s their names?

JOE ROGAN: The Sacklers.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah, there’s a lot of that.

The Opioid Crisis and the Sackler Family

CHERYL HINES: The guy from the FDA that approved it and then left, and then they found him. Really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. When that documentary Painkiller came out on Netflix, which is just so good. Peter Berg did that. It’s so good.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Not documentary, documentary. Matthew Broderick plays the Sackler.

CHERYL HINES: It was really good.

JOE ROGAN: Really good. The guy who approved it, apparently he was saying no forever. And then they took him to a hotel for three days, and then he…

CHERYL HINES: The Sackler family.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Took the FDA guy.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, what did they do in that hotel? To be a fly on the…

CHERYL HINES: Wall, close the doors. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know what happened suddenly. And then he got a nice job afterwards where he got paid really well. That’s a gross thing that they do where there’s this revolving door between the FDA and all these other departments and then these other corporations. So you leave and then you get this amazing job working for the very corporation that you were regulating.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: If you were doing a good job, wouldn’t they want to have nothing to do with you?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: This kept us from making billions of dollars.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: We’re going to hire them and give them $2 million in a consulting job. Consulting.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s kind of a way to pay people off. Seems like it. Someone like me on the outside, I’m just looking at it logically, just looking…

CHERYL HINES: At it from my point of view. Yeah, of course.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It seems like it. That’s white and it’s legal. Somehow or another. That’s a weird loophole that should be closed up. You should not be able to regulate an industry and then leave immediately and go work for said industry and make a ton of money.

CHERYL HINES: Well, right. Maybe you guys, somebody is throwing something. We…

JOE ROGAN: Somebody talked.

CHERYL HINES: That’s why a lot of people don’t like Bobby. Bobby’s like, well, he calls people out on that stuff, f*ing around with this.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The Sackler family one is nuts, because it doesn’t seem like they’re in trouble. It doesn’t seem like there… There was a deal, a sweetheart deal, where they were going to give a certain amount of money, a small percentage of the amount that they profited, and then that would also make them immune to prosecution. But then a judge pulled that deal right after the documentary came out or the docu series came out. Came out, but then you never heard another thing about it.

So let’s put this on ice for a little bit and just everybody shut…

CHERYL HINES: The f* up thing I’m going to have…

JOE ROGAN: To look up to everybody shut the f* up. And then it never made it in the news anymore, and it just kind of drifted away. But that family is responsible for the death of who knows how many people.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Ruined who knows how many lives.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Destroyed families, destroyed children. I mean, think about if your dad’s hooked on opiates and you become homeless and you’re a child. What kind of crazy path does your life take where it would never taken that path if your doctor didn’t sell your dad something that completely addicts him to it.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And imprisons him.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Imprisons him in a life of just horrible addiction.

Conspiracy Theories and Truth

CHERYL HINES: Well, that’s why, you know, when people talk about conspiracy theories. Right. It’s a conspiracy theory until it’s proven true. So if that can happen, if people can tell doctors this is not addictive, and doctors believe it, and doctors push it, and then you find out later, oh, yeah, they knew. There we have documents that prove that they knew that it was addictive. They knew how destructive it was, but they did it anyway. It’s like people can believe that, but then they have a hard time believing it about other things they can’t imagine.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they don’t want to seem foolish. And this is the thing about conspiracy theories. They’ve done a really good job of making it seem like you’re a fool if you believe in conspiracy theories. And this is… They did a really good job of that during the Kennedy assassination. That’s when the term conspiracy theorist really became popular. It wasn’t really a thing that people talked about all the time before the Kennedy assassination. And then after that, that became this term that they would use for kooks.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, you’re a label.

JOE ROGAN: Conspiracy theorist. Yeah, they use that for me all the time.

CHERYL HINES: I was about to say, are you…

JOE ROGAN: The king of… I am a conspiracy theorist, yes.

CHERYL HINES: Because, by the way, what is a conspiracy? It’s two or more people working together to do something nefarious.

JOE ROGAN: It’s always happened. It’s been going on forever. There’s a ton of them that I could just rattle off the top of my head. And I’ve had a few conversations with people on the podcast where they’re like, I think most conspiracies can be attributed to ineptitude and this. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not most. A few, some.

But when there’s profit involved, when there’s profit involved, when there’s power involved and there’s control of resources involved, most conspiracies, in fact, turn out to be true. You know, the more you dig deep, the more you realize there’s a concerted effort to make these conspiracies seem ridiculous because you don’t want to be taken as a fool.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I am a fool. So if you take a fool, congratulations, you’re accurate. I’m a foolish person. I’m a professional clown.

CHERYL HINES: But why do you say that?

JOE ROGAN: Because I’m the easiest person to mock of all time. I am a conspiracy theorist who is a cage fighting commentator. Half of the time when I’m working, people are getting kicked in the face. That’s, you know, it’s like that’s brute normal. I mean, but people look at that as like, that’s normal for you. That’s like brutish, barbaric, stupid meathead behavior.

CHERYL HINES: Right, okay, that’s okay.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t care. Okay. Also, I think they faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to get us into Vietnam. Also, production of heroin ramped up to 94% of the world once we had occupied Afghanistan. What? How much of that’s real? All of it. Plus the United States. The CIA rather sold heroin or sold cocaine in LA ghettos to pay for the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. That’s all true too. That’s real. There’s conspiracy theories you can get into that are f*ing real.

Not Caring What People Think

CHERYL HINES: And you don’t mind people. You don’t care what people say about you. Well, I mean, if they say he’s foolish, I am foolish.

JOE ROGAN: I’m a foolish person.

CHERYL HINES: Well, I think that gives you superpower to just say, I don’t care what you think about me. Yes. It’s like doing improv. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, nobody wants people to think badly of them.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want people to think badly of me.

CHERYL HINES: Does it affect your day to day?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t pay attention.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t pay attention to it. It’s not good for you to pay attention.

CHERYL HINES: No. If you see yourself trending on…

JOE ROGAN: I don’t see myself trending.

CHERYL HINES: You don’t ever check it?

JOE ROGAN: Nope. Never? Never.

CHERYL HINES: That is so smart.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not good for you. You don’t change it. You don’t have to change it. Yeah. You just got to keep moving.

CHERYL HINES: And with kids, that’s hard to say. It’s hard to tell. Kids don’t pay attention to…

JOE ROGAN: They’re going to pay attention, you know, but they become more resilient from paying attention. And I hope your kids know who you are. I would hope that they get you.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, and I think my kids get me and my family gets me. Look, I am who I am. I’m a fool, but I’m an honest fool. You know, I’ll tell you what I believe and it might not make any sense to you and you can mock me all day long.

CHERYL HINES: What’s so funny?

JOE ROGAN: I think there’s some things that I’m foolish with, but it’s okay. It doesn’t bother me. I’m nice. I’m a kind person. I try to be. I work hard at it.

CHERYL HINES: Well, you’re smart and you’re curious and you’re kind to people.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s important to do. I think to live a good life, you should have a good community of people that you love and you care for and you should be as nice to them as you can and have some fun in this life. That’s what I. But also, you can’t be scared of people who don’t know you thinking that you’re an idiot if you’re saying something you truly believe in.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So I don’t mind talking about the moon landing hoax or UFOs or I don’t care. All the things that people like, oh, that makes you look like a kook.

CHERYL HINES: Good.

JOE ROGAN: Who cares?

CHERYL HINES: Then don’t listen.

JOE ROGAN: Who cares?

CHERYL HINES: But you don’t have to listen.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But also, I don’t have to audition for something. Right. If I did, then maybe I would change. I know a lot of comedians that kind of changed their act once they started getting on TV.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because they kind of take the edge off their act. They don’t want to be as controversial. Yeah. They’re worried about a bit maybe getting clipped and going viral. Or especially only part of the bit where out of context, doesn’t show the whole bit where, you know.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Out of context.

CHERYL HINES: Yes. Even words. I mean, that goes back to the campaign. It’s like, if any words that come out of your mouth, they can, you said clip, then it’s just gone. And now, do you talk about, oh, you didn’t play the whole thing. You didn’t say this was exhausting.

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t matter.

CHERYL HINES: It doesn’t matter. The words came out of your mouth. It doesn’t matter.

Media Manipulation and Political Discourse

JOE ROGAN: Well, look at Trump’s lawsuit with the BBC. They completely clipped his speech and took 50 minutes of it out and put another thing at the end of it to make it look like he was trying to get people to go and attack the Capitol.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy. And he’s suing them now. And then the head of the BBC had to resign. But it’s like, that is normal. That kind of behavior is normal.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: But what is this election going to look like with AI and it’s just going to be craziness. So crazy. I mean, the last one was crazy. This one’s going to be so, I can’t even imagine what it’s going to look like.

Trump’s Impact on Political Performance

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also, Trump has kind of changed the way people interact in debates and in politics, you know, and there’s people that are trying to emulate his success. Right. Which happens in all art forms. And I think running for president and being an entertainer are kind of connected in the fact that you could almost say that campaigning is kind of a performance art.

CHERYL HINES: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, think of Kamala Harris. She had that one great speech that she did when they announced that she was going to run for president, when she said, “If you’re going to say something, say it to my face.” And everybody went, oh, it’s on. And then she ramped up in the charts. And what was that? Well, that was a great performance. That was a piece of art. Right. If you’re going to be in that, that’s what that is.

So it’s like, this is what these people are doing. And he’s changed the art form in a lot of ways. Like, he is.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, when Elvis Presley came out and started shaking his hips. And everybody’s like, what the f* is going on?

CHERYL HINES: Are we allowed to do that?

JOE ROGAN: Jimi Hendrix lit his guitar on fire. Everybody’s like, what the f*? We can do that.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it’s like someone sometimes comes along that changes the way people do the thing.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And he has unfortunately turned everyone into an insult artist. Whereas you go to the Obama, Mitt Romney thing and if you can find the actual one, not one where people are commenting on it, it’s actually interesting.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: There’s another one that’s the really good one. I think the best one is Clinton when he was running for president. When Clinton was running for president, he was so good. He was so measured.

CHERYL HINES: He’s a great speaker.

Shifting Political Positions

JOE ROGAN: Oh, not only that, if you listen to what he’s saying back then, what’s really crazy is a lot of it are right wing talking points of today. You know, when they talk about immigration, when they talk, it’s right wing talking points of today. It’s looking out for the American middle class.

CHERYL HINES: No, even Hillary, the things that are going around, the things that she says that now people are furious about.

JOE ROGAN: I know when she was running for president in 2008, we’ve played this clip a bunch of times where she’s saying, “If you’re in this country illegally, yeah, first of all, you should have to pay a stiff fine. And if you’ve been arrested for any crime, you get kicked out of the country, no questions asked.” And everybody’s cheering and “You should learn to speak English.” And everybody went nuts.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like that’s so MAGA. It’s so MAGA. It’s more MAGA than JD Vance. Yeah, it really is. It’s crazy.

CHERYL HINES: It is pretty. It is crazy. It’s crazy, but also no self awareness. Some of the Democrats that are watching what’s happening and also I just don’t think anybody capable.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no other than Gavin Newsom, right. Who is the ultimate slick politician guy. And regardless of how the state goes in California, regardless of how the city of San Francisco goes, he keeps winning because he’s really good at being slick and presenting and pretending.

CHERYL HINES: Personable and well, he’s an articulate f*ing.

JOE ROGAN: Politician and he’s a good looking guy and he’s tall and he’s got nice hair and people are dumb and they’re like.

CHERYL HINES: He could be the president. He’s my president. He could definitely play the president on TV 100%.

JOE ROGAN: Right. So that’s all you have to do. You have to just look the part, say it the way we like a president to say it. And it’s crazy because they’re the only people today that are allowed to talk like that and say things that we know aren’t true in a way that is a way that a person talks when they’re running for president, that they never talk in real life.

If someone’s over your house, they start talking like that, you’re like, Steve is crazy. You got to get him out of the house.

CHERYL HINES: He’s very presentational.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so fake.

CHERYL HINES: You’re right. There’s a lot of the shouting and yelling, and it’s weird. It is weird.

JOE ROGAN: And now it’s become insulting, and now it’s a lot of insulting. And Newsom has tried to ape Trump’s behavior patterns.

CHERYL HINES: I hope the pendulum swings back to.

JOE ROGAN: You need a really good candidate.

CHERYL HINES: I don’t know who that’s going to be.

James Talarico and the Future of Politics

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think, I don’t see anybody. That James Talarico guy is kind of interesting. He’s pretty interesting. I’ve had him on the podcast before. He’s a very religious guy and very opposed to them putting the Ten Commandments in schools, public schools in Texas. And you know, his take on it is very measured as a religious person. Very religious person. Like, he’s in seminary right now, and he essentially said that you’re pushing people away from Christianity by doing this.

And then it’s not fair that if you are not a Christian and you go to the school, you have to read the Christian rules. And what about the Buddhist rules? What about the Muslim rules? What about, you know, this? It’s just not right.

CHERYL HINES: And he can talk about it in a calm way.

JOE ROGAN: And he’s also a very religious person.

CHERYL HINES: I’m not very familiar with him at all.

JOE ROGAN: He was a schoolteacher, and he was realizing that cuts to the budgets were directly affecting vulnerable students in his class. And he pointed to this one kid that he had that was doing really well because he was getting counseling and, you know, came from a troubled background, but he was really showing progress.

And then they cut off the funding. He lost his counseling, started falling apart, dropped out of school, and he was like, that is a direct result of this lack of funding for important things that he thinks directly affect people that are vulnerable. And he was coming at it from a very honest and a very moral and ethical place. And when you could talk to him, you could realize.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That I think he’s a good man, and he has a real good chance of being like a.

CHERYL HINES: Is he from Texas?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He also pointed to the fact that.

CHERYL HINES: He’s kind of young, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah, very young. I think he’s like 35 or 36 or something like that. But it’s also, he pointed out that there’s a group of very wealthy oil people in this country, or in this state, rather, that want to turn Texas into a, they want to fund all the religious schools and cut the funding for the public schools. They want to turn it into a theocracy.

You know, they essentially want to turn it into this. They’re what you would call a Christian nationalist, and they really want to push that agenda, and they’re doing it with an enormous amount of money. They have an incredible amount of money, and they’re these evangelical Christians, and they have these very rigid ideas about what people should be able to do in this country. Sketchy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, that’s sketchy.

JOE ROGAN: Very sketchy.

CHERYL HINES: And it also goes back to money.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: So even hearing that, to run for president.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Takes so much money.

Money and Political Reality

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. A lot of money. But if people think you could win, they might get on board.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s where things get interesting. If you think someone can win, how much are you willing to ignore just because this guy will get in? And then once he gets in. That’s the dirty part. Once they get in, very rarely do they do what they said they were going to do. Yeah, very rarely.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, very rarely. Well, and do you think it’s because it’s so hard to make change, or you think once they get in, they’re like, I don’t care. I’m just going to do.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think if you want to be really cynical, I think they say a lot of things that they don’t mean in order to get elected.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They say the things that the people want to hear in order to get elected. And then I think once they get elected, then it’s like the Bill Hicks bit. There’s a Bill Hicks bit where he’s like, I think they take you into a dark, smoky room and they show you an angle of the Kennedy assassination that you’ve never seen before. And then they say, “Any questions?” And they’re like, “Yeah, I just want to know what my agenda is.”

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, I think there’s a little bit of that, too.

CHERYL HINES: Well, no, you’re right. I mean, not about that specifically, but definitely when you get in, you see things that are just, well, this is bigger. Yeah, bigger has been happening for a long time. And you’re just a little, little tiny piece. That’s not going to change that.

The Deep State and Political Power

JOE ROGAN: The deep state is real. And if you want a conspiracy theory that a lot of people like to dismiss, just think about it logically. If there are a bunch of people that are in charge of enormous organizations, and these enormous organizations exist regardless of who the president is, and they are in office for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, whatever it is, acquiring power, using their influence, enormous amount of support from enormous corporations. That’s real. That’s always been real.

And you have to contend with that if you want to enact meaningful change as a politician in this country. And good luck. Yeah, good luck fighting that battle.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. And when you do get in as president, there are so many jobs that you have to fill, like thousands in days, weeks, months, thousands and thousands. So you have all of these thousands of new employees that are ready to work. They have to be organized now. They’re organizing with the people, like you said, that are politicals that have been there or their career, people that have been there through it all through different.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re going to be there when you’re gone.

CHERYL HINES: And they’re going to be there when you’re gone.

JOE ROGAN: So they’ll hit the brakes every time they can.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, they’re like, that’s not how we do it.

JOE ROGAN: Wrench into the gears, slow things down, make backdoor deals.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, it’s just crazy.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve talked to Tulsi about it and she’s like, it’s so nuts. There’s people that are in charge of these certain offices and they just stop you from doing what you want to do.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then you have to try to figure out how to get around. Try to figure out how to get. And then you have to wash their back so they wash yours.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s just a lot of every day trying to friggin. And I’m sure it gets frustrating. And I’m sure there are days when you’re like, I know I told the people I was going to do that one thing when I can’t have that one thing. I can’t even get people to change their mind about what they’re going to eat for lunch.

AI and Government Efficiency

JOE ROGAN: That’s the real scary thing about it. AI said. AI is going to come along and be logical and say, let us handle this. You guys aren’t good at this.

CHERYL HINES: I think they’re doing that now. Don’t you think they’re doing that now?

JOE ROGAN: Corruption, all this corruption. We could put a stop through it. Yeah. We can make things very efficient.

CHERYL HINES: By the way, you don’t think AI could weed out the people in Congress and wherever that have been, of course, that have been making money on. Interesting. Yeah. Right.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they’re doing anything illegal currently. I think it’s very questionable whether or not it’s an ethical thing to do. I don’t think it is. But I think as far as the legality of it, it’s not.

CHERYL HINES: It’s not illegal to invest in a company.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s not. You ever seen Nancy Pelosi when she got asked about that? It’s hilarious. It’s so funny. Like they caught her off guard. And do you think. I think they should be on participate. And then she pushes the microphone away and it gets out of there. You never seen it. It’s really.

CHERYL HINES: So maybe I am. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Did I pull that up? It’s a fun clip because, like, look, she’s been running it look like a G. Respect.

CHERYL HINES: Seriously, she’s been in for a long time. She’s got a down pat, man. She’s got it.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a photo of her when she was a young girl standing next to Kennedy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

JOE ROGAN: She’s been in this game forever.

CHERYL HINES: She knows what she’s doing.

JOE ROGAN: Forever.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

The Kente Cloth Controversy

JOE ROGAN: And you want to know who she is? Her and Chuck Schumer, when they put on the African garb and they got down on one knee for Black Lives Matter. And it turns out that the colors that they were wearing were from a specific tribe that was responsible for a lot of the slavery. They were the people that were enslaving people and then selling them. Nobody told her that. And she just wanted to look cool.

CHERYL HINES: We told her that. That’s a tough one.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Make sure that’s true. I’m pretty sure it is. I’m pretty sure it is. What? You didn’t listen. Sorry. That Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, when they got down on one knee with their African garb on, the garb that they are wearing is from this one particular tribe that was responsible for a lot of the slave trade.

CHERYL HINES: And by the way, that also speaks to how some things are just random done by an assistant somewhere. That’s like, I need to have something to put on. And then now they’re, now it looks like they’ve made a big statement and it’s, you know, it’s like oh, no, I didn’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s just kooky to do. It’s just kooky to do in the first place. I mean, just like, what do you, why are you doing that? Well, how about just say I feel very strongly about this particular social issue and we need, you know.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Less racism and we need to be more equal in this country.

CHERYL HINES: No, but it’s about the photo op.

JOE ROGAN: You’re getting on one knee.

CHERYL HINES: Well, sometimes accurate, sometimes if we go to.

JOE ROGAN: I’m trying to figure out what they’re saying about it. There’s a picture, but. Okay. Yeah. We’re just mad that they were wearing stuff to begin with. I don’t know. Right. It’s called kente cloth. So was the kente cloth. Did it have anything to do with the people that were involved in the slave trade? Did they wear it? Because that’s what I had read online. But again, who knows how much of that’s real? That’s the problem. You read things and it could be horseshit. Yeah. Fact check. Yes. Go back. It said fact check. Yeah. It didn’t say yes. Yes says yes. First word. Kente cloths were historically worn by empire involved in West African slave trade. Yeah. So that’s true.

CHERYL HINES: Well, it’s funny because when Bobby and I travel internationally and we might, we might be somewhere where they wear specific clothing. Garments. Right. And it looks cool, and it’s like we’re supposed to go to a event or a function, and I will think, oh, well, why don’t we wear what, you know they’re wearing? Bobby’s like, calm down. Just wear your own clothes. Don’t, don’t. Just don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Just don’t.

CHERYL HINES: And I’m like, are you sure? Because I, everybody’s girl, bring it down.

JOE ROGAN: And definitely don’t take a picture with their stuff on. Theo Vaughn did that. He went to Qatar and took a picture with it, like, wearing their outfits. And everybody’s like, you’re bought and paid for. Settle down. You got the Nancy Pelosi video? No, no, I was. Man. There’s multiple versions of it, and it’s, most of things I’m finding are people commenting on it again. Oh. Because that’s where it exists. I’m sure you’ll find it. It’s out there. Yeah. It’s fun.

CHERYL HINES: I’m sure there are.

JOE ROGAN: This was not it. It’s on it. No, this is Yahoo Finance talking about it. And it shows 10 seconds of it, but it doesn’t show her walking away like you wanted to kind of find what you wanted to see?

CHERYL HINES: Let me hear.

JOE ROGAN: Back it up a little.

CHERYL HINES: And she’s tough.

Congressional Stock Trading

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Government should be trading. Take a listen. Insider just completed a five month investigation finding that 49 members of Congress and 182 senior congressional staffers have violated the Stock Act, Inside trading law. I’m wondering if you have any reaction to that. And secondly, should members of Congress and their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving in Congress?

NANCY PELOSI: No, I don’t know. To the second one. Any. We have a responsibility to report in the stock. On the stock. But I don’t, I’m not familiar with that five month review. But if people aren’t reporting, they should be.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

JOE ROGAN: Look how nervous she looks.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

NANCY PELOSI: This is a free market and people, we have a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

CHERYL HINES: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Right. So I guess there is some law.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there is some law that they were talking about.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. You can’t know about a decision that’s going to be made and somehow have invested.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But there’s a lot of evidence that they do. And again, right and left. It’s a lot.

CHERYL HINES: No, it’s definitely not one group.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not. Well, she’s the scapegoat because she’s the best at it. She’s the G. She’s top dog. I don’t even think she’s made the most money. I think someone else had made more money. Right. Wasn’t it? It’s like 10th on the list or something. Who’s the, who’s the, who’s the top dog? They’re the one throwing her under the bus. Put Nancy in front of the camera.

CHERYL HINES: She likes Nancy.

JOE ROGAN: She likes the camera. Get her out there. They’re hiding.

CHERYL HINES: Nancy’s like, well, yeah, there’s some guy.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s like middle of North Dakota, some.

CHERYL HINES: Just taking it easy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Just on his ranch, that guy Dave Rouser.

CHERYL HINES: Look at that.

JOE ROGAN: 149%.

CHERYL HINES: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. But that’s, it says stock value, portfolio value, but it doesn’t say the numbers. Yeah, I mean, that’s right. You know what I mean? It’s like if, so if their portfolio goes up 149, but they only have 50 grand in it, as opposed to what Nancy has in it. Hers only went up 70%. You imagine if you, if you went to a f*ing guy and he said he can get you a 70% return on your money, you’d be like, what’s your name?

CHERYL HINES: How do you know that?

JOE ROGAN: What is your name so I can Google you? Mr. Madoff, please.

CHERYL HINES: Right, Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. How are you doing that? How are you making that much money? That’s crazy.

CHERYL HINES: How about 150%? That was like, the top one.

JOE ROGAN: That guy’s doing good.

CHERYL HINES: That guy’s doing okay.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But maybe he’s smart. He only invests a little bit. Just a touch. Just a little bit. Just for funsies in AI. Yeah. I mean, if you put in 20 bucks and, you know, you come back with 150% of 20 bucks, no one’s going to get. Gamble me. Yeah, no, but I will.

CHERYL HINES: You mean you’re ready to start?

Gambling and UFC Fights

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t gamble on, like, cards and stuff like that. I used to gamble on fights. I used to bet on fights, but then I really decided at a certain point in time, I probably shouldn’t be doing this. That was a long time ago, though, before the UFC recently made it illegal. Not illegal, but they passed a rule saying that the people that work for the UFC can’t gamble on the fights because there was a scandal involved with fixed fights where it looks like somebody took a dive for money.

And then it turns out many fighters have been approached and asked to take dives. And so there’s a current investigation going on.

CHERYL HINES: Just like basketball.

JOE ROGAN: Like everything.

CHERYL HINES: The basketball thing, just.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, I’m sure it’s not new.

JOE ROGAN: Especially when money’s involved, if you get gambling, but my thought was, like, I don’t have any power in affecting whether or not the fight goes one way or the other. I just insight.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

Understanding MMA Betting and Fighter Analysis

JOE ROGAN: In terms of what, I think I have a more educated idea of what a fighter’s capable of than a person who doesn’t watch fights constantly. So I had, and also in the beginning, the early days, I had a giant advantage in that I was a huge fan of these overseas organizations like Pride and Strike Force. Or not Strike Force, but Ryzen, a lot of these companies were bringing fighters over, and these bookmakers didn’t know about these fighters. And I knew a lot about them.

I’m like, this guy’s going to f everybody up. Like, whatever this line is. I would tell people, like, when Anderson Silva came to the UFC, I told all my friends, I said, bet the house. Bet everything on this guy. I go, this guy’s going to f everybody up. He’s going to be the champion inside of me here. I was like, there’s no one to stop him. And he did.

CHERYL HINES: And he was.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I was like, he’s too good.

CHERYL HINES: But you, but you don’t want to bet on, like, football or something that you’re not sort of.

JOE ROGAN: I would. I bet a little bit.

CHERYL HINES: I really want you to gamble for some reason.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not scared of gambling, but I do know that it ruins some people’s lives. Yeah, but so do cheeseburgers.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Some people, they ruin their life with Pop Tarts and Mountain Dew.

CHERYL HINES: It’s true. It’s going to be. If it’s going to be something.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: But it doesn’t have to be, is what we’re saying.

The New Food Pyramid and Health Policy

JOE ROGAN: Right. It’s the same thing as junk food. Like, I don’t think junk food should be illegal. But I think what Bobby’s doing with junk food is really important. And what he’s also doing with just educating people. Like, hey, like the new food pyramid.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Finally it’s aligned with all the real legitimate health experts.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Instead of this nonsense that you’re supposed to mostly be eating grain like you’re a f*ing cow.

CHERYL HINES: This is, by the way, you know, Bobby’s job as secretary of HHS. Even something like the food pyramid, which is, I don’t know how you can argue with it, but people will find a reason to be mad about it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: And it’s no matter what he says or sometimes the president says, even if it’s something great, like favored nations, drug prices, where they’re saying for the first time, America is not going to pay more than other countries for drugs, pharmaceutical drugs. Somehow there are people out there that would be mad about it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: They’re not going to take it well.

Paid Influencers and Pharmaceutical Interests

JOE ROGAN: They’re furious, outraged. A lot of them are probably paid off. They’re paid off to be. There’s a lot of paid influencers. That’s one thing to take into consideration when it comes to anything. Not like foreign policy issues, pharmaceutical drug issues. There’s a lot of people that are paid to have certain opinions. That’s fact.

CHERYL HINES: And get it out there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You get it out there and, you know, someone takes advantage of the fact that this person has a large platform, and then they say, hey, you know, this f*ing drug price thing is wrong. We’re doing something terrible. These pharmaceutical drugs, how much money they have to spend in order. We have to make sure they’re profitable.

CHERYL HINES: Hard on them as a crime.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, crime. To make it cheaper for everybody else. Like, they need all the money.

CHERYL HINES: Do you think that, like, influencers that are just, you know, the people that are showing you how to do an exercise or how to do your makeup, you think those guys, yeah, somehow they get involved. Right.

JOE ROGAN: It depends on who they are and how influential they are. But I know that happened during COVID. They paid a lot of people to promote the vaccines.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They paid people.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: To promote the vaccines, which is just people. That’s crazy. Like, if the medicine’s good, you shouldn’t have to pay people to promote it.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When was the last time you saw an influencer getting paid to promote penicillin?

CHERYL HINES: I’ve never.

JOE ROGAN: Never. Why? Because it works. It’s good. You don’t have to do that.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: If you need it, you should go to the doctor and get penicillin. It’s like tried and proven medication.

CHERYL HINES: That was a weird.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a weird time. Weird, super weird time. But it opened up a lot of people’s eyes and, you know, air quotes, red pilled a lot of people.

Red Pill, Blue Pill, and The Matrix

CHERYL HINES: I hear that term a lot. Is there a term black pilled?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, never saw it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you never saw the Matrix, but.

CHERYL HINES: I see you’re inactive. I’ve seen him, like, going backwards. And the bullet, it’s like, okay, I get it. I got the thing. Oh, wait. So red pill.

JOE ROGAN: So Morpheus presents.

CHERYL HINES: Is that Keanu Reeves?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Well, Morpheus is Laurence Fishburne. Laurence Fishburne presents Keanu Reeves with two pills, okay? One of them is the blue pill. If he takes his blue pill, he stays in the Matrix and he has no knowledge of what reality is all about. If he takes the red pill, the red pill’s reality, and he gets to see. So he takes the red pill. The red pill is reality.

And so there’s a lot of people that took that blue pill. And, you know, and they can’t tell you what a woman is.

CHERYL HINES: That’s an interesting conversation when you hear that.

JOE ROGAN: A great example of someone who took the blue pill. When you just say, like in these congressional hearings, like Josh Hawley, or these people say, what is a woman? And, like, someone who identifies as a woman. Okay. What are they identifying as? And it’s like this weird circular logic, and they just keep going and they don’t have anything. Can men get pregnant? Yes. Some men can get pregnant. Yes. Some men can have babies. Yes. Some men menstruate. And you’re like, do you have a PhD? Are you really a teacher? This is crazy.

CHERYL HINES: It is.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s blue pill. They took blue pill.

CHERYL HINES: Is there such thing as a black pill?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHERYL HINES: What is the black pill?

JOE ROGAN: We’re doomed and we’re f*ed and everything’s. They think it’s all pedophiles and Satanists are running the government. And then the white pill, people think everything’s going to be great.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, can I get the white one? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The white pill would be a good thing to take, but I don’t think it’s accurate. I think you want a gray pill. If they just have a gray pill that gets you, like, hey, there probably are a bunch of Satanists and pedophiles in positions of high power. And then there’s also probably a real good chance that we’ll pull through this and we’ll be better than we’ve ever been before. That’s possible.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of exciting possibility about the future of human beings. And I think the good thing and the bad thing about the Internet is the free distribution of information. There’s a good thing about it that I try to focus on is that more people have an understanding of how things are really working than ever before.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

The Epstein Files and Dark Revelations

JOE ROGAN: Like this Epstein file thing. Right. That was a big eye opener for a lot of people. When you see how many people, people after 2008, after he was arrested, after he went to jail, were actively taking money from him, MIT took money from him and tried to hide it and said, make sure that any donations from Jeffrey are listed as anonymous. So you find out, like, people are like, they referred to him as Voldemort. Like, you couldn’t say his name.

CHERYL HINES: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: They, there was a lot of people that met with him and did business with him and traveled with him after he was arrested, after he went to jail.

CHERYL HINES: Do you spend a lot of time reading, reading them?

JOE ROGAN: No, I try not to. I try to have experts come on. I try to read. You just, you can’t change it.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it’ll f* with your head.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. It’s toxic.

JOE ROGAN: You will really get.

CHERYL HINES: It’ll stick with you. And I know. I’ve tried not to.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: I haven’t read any of them. I do see things on the news, and I’m not saying, oh, if I don’t hear it, that means it didn’t happen. But it’s just, it is such a toxic situation that I think it would be hard to.

JOE ROGAN: It seems very dark.

CHERYL HINES: Very dark.

JOE ROGAN: Because it seems like it was this bizarre blackmail influence thing that was going on for a long time.

CHERYL HINES: So long. Through different administrations. That’s what’s so unbelievable about it, how long it was going on.

JOE ROGAN: I’m in the files for not going. Huh? Yeah. I’m in the files for not going because Jeffrey Epstein was trying to meet with me.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, I did see that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And I was like, what?

CHERYL HINES: No, thanks. Yeah, aren’t you glad?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But I would have never went anyway. It’s like, it’s not even a possibility that I would have went, especially after I’d gone Googled them. I was like, what the f are you talking about? This is, like, 2017. One of my guests was trying to get me to meet him. I was like, are you high? What the f are you talking about?

CHERYL HINES: For what reason would you, what would be.

JOE ROGAN: If I was a guy who is, like, sucking up to the rich and powerful, if I was really interested in hanging out with rich and powerful people.

CHERYL HINES: You know, it’s crazy. It’s so, that’s so crazy. But, yeah, some people.

The Allure of Power and Influence

JOE ROGAN: Some people get intoxicated by being in a circle of rich and powerful people, even if they’re not. Like, they don’t even have any ambitions of being one of those people. They just want to be around them. They want to be around Nobel Prize winners. And because this guy was, what he was doing was very clever in that he was getting all of these very powerful and very respected people together.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And you would figure, like, oh, if that guy there.

CHERYL HINES: That lady’s here, this is fine.

JOE ROGAN: How could this be bad? Yeah, look, it’s Steven Pinker. How could this be bad?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, you know, he’s.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a genius. Like, and so you would go. I would imagine you would go to these, because I, like, there’s people that went to these. Like, he had parties in New York. Like, he brought in celebrities and comedians. Didn’t Lewis Black get involved to one of those? I think he’s talked about it. I know Chelsea Handler went to one of them.

It’s like, like, he would bring all these people in, and he liked to be around famous people and entertainers and a lot of intellectuals and professors, and Noam Chomsky was famously deeply involved. So it’s like, you would go, I guess, to these places, and that was how he would convince everybody that everything’s going to be fine. Like, have you ever been invited to a party and someone tell you, hey, you should go to this party, Brad Pitt’s going to be there. Like, they’ll tell you that to try to get you to go.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Tell you about the famous people that are going to be there.

CHERYL HINES: Like, oh, oh, oh, I should go.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah, you know?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Yeah. It is weird. Some people are really driven by that, really love the parties and the invitations.

and blindly ambitious. They’re willing to put aside all the possibilities of what could be awful about these people and get together with them without any, even a cursory Google search as to who you’re hanging out with.

CHERYL HINES: Can’t have your assistant Google something.

JOE ROGAN: How about you just do it?

CHERYL HINES: Just go. It doesn’t take long.

JOE ROGAN: Hey, look what I just found out. This is kind of crazy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just, but it’s, what’s more bizarre are, is that there’s probably in this, I talked to Mike Benz about this. He was explaining how this guy rose to prominence and how he got this kind of influence that he had. And he was like, there’s probably a bunch of those going on right now that we don’t know about.

CHERYL HINES: What people that are like that.

JOE ROGAN: Like the same sort of Jeffrey Epstein type situation. Just someone else and somewhere else, and they just haven’t been caught yet.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like if he didn’t get arrested. Let’s think about this.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because his particular perversion, the darkness of it, was that he was into underage girls. He was into young girls. Imagine if he wasn’t. What was he? What if he was only into girls that are in their 30s? Like, you’d have never heard anything about it. What if he just hired these adult ladies to come to these parties that were already sex workers? Would you have heard anything about this? And that’s the thing. Like, is that happening right now?

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Did you hear about how this started in 2005? I think this is.

CHERYL HINES: No, but I was. It’s.

JOE ROGAN: It’s.

CHERYL HINES: I’m glad you’re saying that because I’m.

The High School Fight That Exposed Epstein

JOE ROGAN: This is crazy. Two girls fighting. So it started between a fight between two teenage girls at Royal Palm Beach High School in Florida. Here are the details of how the event triggered the investigation. Early 2005, two girls, Royal Palm Beach High School got into a fight during which one girl repeatedly called the other girl a prostitute or hooker.

Following the fight, school administrations and parents investigated, searching one of the girls’ purses and finding $300 in cash. The confession, the student initially claimed the money was from working at a fast food restaurant, but later revealed she had been paid for massages by a wealthy man, later identified as Jeffrey Epstein.

This revelation led to a police investigation in March of 2005 when the stepmother, one of the girls, reported the molestation to the Palm Beach police. Wow.

CHERYL HINES: Wow, that’s in 2005.

JOE ROGAN: That was the first arrest. And now listen to this. It says they identify the, what the Royal Palm Beach High was identified as a focal point for recruitment, where, according to investigations, at least 15 students were lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach home. Holy.

CHERYL HINES: That’s so crazy. 2005, Magic Souls.

JOE ROGAN: Girl didn’t get in that fight. Imagine if that didn’t happen. Yeah, it’s dark.

CHERYL HINES: It’s dark.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but if that guy was not into that, if he was not into high school girls.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Like, if he was just into grown women who were sex workers and he ran the same operation exactly the same way, it could probably go on to this day.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if everybody kept their mouth shut. If all these guys, you know.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. I mean, look at, look at some people that are in the.

JOE ROGAN: There was nothing going on, so. Oh. FBI concluded Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t running a sex trafficking ring for powerful men. File show. So there you go. Oh, there you go. Who says that? What’s that source? It’s going around the. I just found the place that was showing the headline. I was going around the Internet today.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, today.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the AP. Is the AP reporting it?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, today. Oh, I thought that was. I thought that was from 2005. This is like the FBI saying. I was like, oh.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the gaslightiest, gaslighting s* I’ve ever heard in my life.

CHERYL HINES: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: What do they think is going on? Just a bunch of fun. Bunch of guys hanging out. That is being fellas, having cocktails, talking about science. Still looking into it, but they don’t have any evidence. Look into it, maybe see, Get Eddie Bravo on the case.

CHERYL HINES: Looking into it. That is the name of his show.

JOE ROGAN: Look into it. It’s so crazy. It’s, it’s. But there’s probably a lot of that. That’s gone forever. And it’s also probably a way that they can secure business deals and make sure that people do things they want to do. They have a little something over them. They do a little of this, do a little bit of that.

CHERYL HINES: For sure. This is what. This is what. Yeah. I mean, that’s what Epstein was all about, was manipulating people and, you know, holding it over their head and getting them to do something.

JOE ROGAN: Allegedly.

CHERYL HINES: Allegedly.

JOE ROGAN: Allegedly. It certainly seems like that. Certainly seems like that was a big part of it.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, is it possible that people didn’t know what was going on?

JOE ROGAN: Maybe initially?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, if someone got lured in, like, they tried to lure me in and they didn’t do a Google search. And also they’re meeting with this eccentric billionaire, supposedly, who’s just not, not politically correct. Oh, he’s a wild guy, by the way.

CHERYL HINES: Who cares?

The Allure of Power and Fame

JOE ROGAN: People care. Weirdly, people care about billionaires. They want access. I think somehow or another it’s going to rub off on them and they’re going to be rich too.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, listen, I see that. Well, you see it with celebrities, of course.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

CHERYL HINES: Everybody wants to be around that. I see it with Bobby. People want to be around him. They want to access. They want to tell them something. They want to talk to him. They want to. And it’s like. Well, it’s intense.

JOE ROGAN: Gets really weird. Yeah, it’s real weird. It’s a. I think it’s a natural human inclination. You know, it’s. I think it goes back to the tribal days. You want to be around the chief of the tribe. You know, I just think it’s a normal primate behavior.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. And it makes sense that you wouldn’t be around people that sort of lift you up and give you ideas, show you something that you wouldn’t otherwise see.

JOE ROGAN: That in the best case scenario.

CHERYL HINES: In the best case scenario.

JOE ROGAN: In the best case scenario, you want to be around good people because you want to be around a good person. If you meet someone who’s really cool, like, wow, that guy’s really cool. I love being around that person. Everybody loves them. How does it realize. Look at his behavior. He’s such a nice guy. Like, you know, and then, you know, that’s good. Rubs off on everybody.

But also for some people, it’s just like they, they see someone who’s very important and they want to be important. And they think being next to that.

CHERYL HINES: Person, just being next to them makes them important. Just being next to them is going to do something.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s why people name drop, right. Name dropping might be the worst strategy that’s ever been conceived. That doesn’t work. And yet people do it all the time. Like, it never works. Nobody ever said, well, was over at Leonardo DiCaprio’s house the other day. You know, Leo and I are close. Nobody goes, wow, you’re so cool. You’re friends with Leo. No, they go, listen to this motherf*er. Name dropping.

CHERYL HINES: Right, right. Weird.

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird, but people still do it.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. It’s like I was just telling my niece. It’s like, oh, you just name dropped your niece. I didn’t see your name. But I was saying, was he like a woman who has a bumper sticker that says “classy lady”? I don’t think you are. Yeah, it’s like, if you have to tell me, you got to tell people. It’s like, I don’t think so.

JOE ROGAN: Classy ladies don’t have bumper stickers. First of all, what are you doing in your car? What are you doing to your car? Your poor car?

CHERYL HINES: Is it hard? Is it hard for you to go out? Can you go out or people.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a struggle.

CHERYL HINES: You are so famous that it’s. There’s, there’s fame, you know, where people are. Some people come up and go, oh, hi, or I like the thing that you did or the thing that you do. And then there’s super famous where it’s. Everybody knows you and it’s probably. It’s got to keep you from actually doing normal things.

JOE ROGAN: I would think it’s definitely a problem. Yeah, it gets in the way, but that’s what you sign up for.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, I didn’t necessarily sign up for it, but it became what it is. Like when I first started doing this podcast, I never would have, never would. If someone told me it was going to be what it was, what it became, I might go, not ready for that. I don’t know if I want to do that.

CHERYL HINES: That’s a lot.

JOE ROGAN: I like to just be like a B list sort of weird guy on the outside. It’s like kind of keeps working, but that’s it.

CHERYL HINES: You’re the first person that I’ve ever talked to that’s like, yeah, I just want to be B list.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, B list is sweet.

CHERYL HINES: It’s good. It’s sweet.

JOE ROGAN: Makes funny. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody cares.

CHERYL HINES: You can go to the movies.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, nobody cares. If they see you, they say, hi. That’s it.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, that’s it.

JOE ROGAN: Hey, aren’t you that guy that was on that show? Yeah, Hi. Yeah, that’s it. Nice.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, that’s nice. Perfect. Yeah, you can go to Disney World.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You get to a certain level, you can’t go anywhere. No, that’s where you know you f*ed up.

CHERYL HINES: Well, don’t run for president, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: No chance. Not a chance in hell.

CHERYL HINES: No, Never.

JOE ROGAN: Never. Not a chance in hell. Never. Not a chance in hell. Zero political aspirations. Don’t listen to me. If I run, don’t vote for me. Don’t do it. I don’t want that job. I wouldn’t be good at it. I’m not designed for it. No.

CHERYL HINES: That’s a tough job.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a crazy job. That made sense when there was 150 people and they all had muskets. It doesn’t make any sense that one alpha should be involved in controlling 350 million people. Yeah, that’s nuts. That’s a crazy job.

The Insanity of Elections

CHERYL HINES: It’s all a crazy set up. And by the way, elections are hell, they’re. The way they’re set up is crazy. Yeah, There’s. If you, when you’re in it and you start seeing, oh, this is what you have to do, especially running as an independent, this is what you have to do for each state. It’s different for each state.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Just like, who made up these rules?

JOE ROGAN: People that were trying to make sure that it was really hard to win.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. To make sure an independent.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a thing where people are not allowed to question that. If you question, you call the fool or you call the conspiracy theorists. Like, hey, I think there’s some election fraud. How much do you think there is? Like, when people say, I don’t think the election in 2020 was rigged, I go, well, I don’t have any evidence. I don’t know.

But if I had to ask you what percentage of, of election fraud is real, I don’t think you would say zero. Yeah, I don’t think anybody would say zero. Well, I mean, right. Do you think, like, there’s a woman in California that recently registered her dog and used a mail in ballot and voted for her dog to expose the fact that you could do this? And you know, California famously doesn’t allow you to show ID when you vote, which is crazy.

CHERYL HINES: That’s pretty crazy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. Crazy. Like you’re not allowed to. Not only you not asking, you’re not allowed.

CHERYL HINES: You’re not allowed to show it.

JOE ROGAN: That seems like if I was being super charitable, I can’t find a reason why that makes sense. And if I’ve ever seen Kamala explain that, like, people in poor places, they can’t go to Kinko’s and they can’t get their ID, I haven’t seen that.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, something to see.

JOE ROGAN: Nuts. It’s like the most rambly cockeyed answer for, like, it doesn’t. There’s no answer that makes any sense. Like, why shouldn’t you have voter ID?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Unless you’re trying to cheat. So then the question is, okay, let’s say they’re not trying to cheat. They just want to make it easy for people that don’t have ID to vote. How much of those people are voting that shouldn’t be voting? It’s not zero.

CHERYL HINES: It’s not zero.

JOE ROGAN: So how much of an effect did it have on the election? I don’t know. But here’s the thing. Democrats, if that’s a fact, and it happened in 2020, and maybe it happened in 2024, we don’t know. Maybe it’ll happen again in 2028. Maybe the Republicans will lock it down.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And they’ll rig the elections. Do you think that’s okay? I don’t think that’s okay.

CHERYL HINES: Right. Well, by the way, remember Bush v. Gore?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

CHERYL HINES: I mean, that’s when things turned for me, where I was like, I’m out. I’m not. It was so shady and it was so dramatic.

JOE ROGAN: Weeks to figure out who the president is. Remember that?

CHERYL HINES: I do, Yeah, I do.

JOE ROGAN: Do you remember Hacking Democracy, the documentary on HBO?

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: Ooh. It was really good because it was all about the Diebold systems. And they showed in this documentary that these systems have third party input. So the idea was that these systems were owned by some large contributor to the Republican Party. And these machines that were in place, supposedly on this show, on this, if I remember correct, they showed that they can affect the election. They could show they could change the numbers with third party input, and they did it on the show.

So on this. And so at that time, that was supposed to be evidence that the Republicans were capable of rigging the election. And so everyone was supposed to be outraged, oh, my God, they’ve hijacked our election process and stolen it. But then in 2020, because it was Trump and he’s such a polarizing character, that when he said that the election was stolen, everybody was like, this is an affront to our democracy. Never has a problem. President said that the elections weren’t fair. That’s not even true, because Hillary did it in 2016. She said that he wasn’t the rightful president, that Russia helped him win.

Election Integrity and Public Outrage

CHERYL HINES: I mean, it’s been going on. I think every, almost every election, I think there are people. And just like Gore v. Bush, it was like people were so outraged. And it was, we’re not going to take this. This cannot be how our elections are held. And for a moment in time, it felt like, oh, my gosh, they’re really going to redo it, all that. It’s every year, nothing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Every year it’s people are outraged.

JOE ROGAN: It seems like it escalates.

CHERYL HINES: People love to be outraged.

JOE ROGAN: They do.

CHERYL HINES: It makes them feel like they’re doing something.

JOE ROGAN: They enjoy it. They seem to enjoy it.

CHERYL HINES: They do.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, it gives you a purpose.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s part of the thing of being, if you think you’re an activist, air quotes, you think you’re out there affecting things and you’re out there chanting and screaming and carrying the signs that the NGOs had print up. And you’re out there and you’ve got a purpose because otherwise you’d just be sitting at home watching TikTok.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Instead you’re out here saving the world.

CHERYL HINES: And people can see it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: But, yeah, maybe organize a group to help people get their citizenship. To help people. Yeah, organize together to move things forward.

Immigration and Border Policy

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the help people would be nice, but the citizenship thing is kind of crazy because the borders were wide open for four years and they just, they invited people into the country, essentially helped them get in, gave them aid, and then once they’re in, now the new administration is trying to arrest them and capture them. So both things are crazy. It’s crazy that you did this and that you just let these people and told them, you can have a better life. Come to America. And then it’s also crazy that now you’ve got armed mask people running up to people asking for your ID to check to see if you’re an American.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, both things are crazy.

CHERYL HINES: Both things are crazy.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s just, there’s no pathway. Even if you’ve been here. Like, if you came over here 25 years ago and you’ve been a great person and you pay your taxes and you raise a family and like, there’s no pathway. You have to go back to Mexico or go back to Guatemala or wherever you’re from. The only way to apply, to do it the right way is you have to leave the country, which also seems kind of crazy. Like you’ve built a life here.

CHERYL HINES: Like, right.

JOE ROGAN: Should be some kind of amnesty. Now, I’m not saying that for people that are criminals or people that, like, just got here, like, there should be some amnesty. No, like, no. Like if you were one of the people that just recently snuck across the border, like, no. Like, this is crazy. You haven’t built a life here.

CHERYL HINES: This is, this is going to be hard to. That’s a tough system. Yeah, right. If some, some people. Yes. And some people know and.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s a tough system. It’s definitely a tough system. It’s tough. The whole thing is tough. No, because we’re a country that’s established by immigrants.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. It feels impossible.

JOE ROGAN: But you can’t have an open border. You can’t just have anybody come through because there’s going to be a bunch of criminals that come through. And you don’t want that. You don’t want your country to be more crime infested. You don’t want your country to have murderers and, cartel members just coming into the country and now getting citizenship and being able to vote and organizing. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. That’s a good way to destroy your country.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You have to have some way to vet whether or not people are good people. Yeah. But when you just let everybody in and you let 10 million people in, how do you. Unless they get arrested while they’re here.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: What do you do? And even then, like a lot of them during the Biden administration, they were getting let go. Sanctuary cities were letting people go. They weren’t.

CHERYL HINES: They were overcrowded.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just crazy. The whole thing is crazy because it’s become a part of a political pawn because they just want a bunch of people in these swing states for the census so they get more congressional seats. And if they get these people and give them the ability to vote now you have a built in voter base and you can just rig the election. You could rig it that way.

CHERYL HINES: I need the white pill. Yeah. Or the grayish white pill.

JOE ROGAN: I’m handing out gray pills. We might be okay.

CHERYL HINES: That being said, we might be okay. Things are headed in a pretty good direction.

JOE ROGAN: Possible that we could be okay. But there’s a bunch of things that have to happen. But a bunch of things have happened that allowed us to understand how f*ed we are, which is the first step towards fixing it.

CHERYL HINES: Admitting you have a problem.

The Twitter Files and Government Censorship

JOE ROGAN: The big one was Elon buying Twitter. That was one of the biggest ones of all time. The problem, no, the big solution there was we found out when he bought Twitter that the government had been censoring people’s speech.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, you can talk to Bobby about that.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

CHERYL HINES: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy. Censoring accurate speech by experts from Stanford, MIT, these people that were experts in their fields that say this data does not align with what you’re saying, does not align with the truth. And this is what I think. And these people were silenced. They were kicked off Twitter. They lost their careers. It was crazy. And the government orchestrated it. That’s not good. We wouldn’t have known that if Elon didn’t buy Twitter.

CHERYL HINES: And you think people would be outraged by that? You think a lot of people would be outraged on both sides of the aisle. On both sides of the aisle. They should be about free speech being shut down.

JOE ROGAN: But people were happy with them doing it as long as it aligned with their values.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s not good. Yeah, that’s not good. None of it’s good.

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s like we’ve got to have some rock solid ethics and morals. And if we don’t have that, where.

CHERYL HINES: Do we get those?

JOE ROGAN: Jesus. Jesus has to come back.

CHERYL HINES: Please.

JOE ROGAN: If you’re going to come back, Jesus, now’s a good time. But if he came back, everybody like, it’s f*ing AI. They think we’re dopes. Jesus hovering over the Pentagon, please stop with this war. They’re like, this is.

CHERYL HINES: Nobody believes it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’d be the real problem. That’s going to be the conundrum. Jesus is going to come back. When AI hits its full peak, no one’s going to believe. They’re going to go, what?

CHERYL HINES: There’ll be a few, but then that’ll be really divided. Like three people in the rest of the world.

JOE ROGAN: It’ll be the people that see, like the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich. Those people.

CHERYL HINES: Which, by the way, I’ve seen pictures.

JOE ROGAN: You never know. What a crazy thing. If that’s how the Virgin Mary wanted to give you a sign. Right. On a grilled cheese sandwich.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Let you know God is real.

CHERYL HINES: I’m here. Oh, I was hungry. Wanted to eat that. But now what do you do with it? Put it in a baggie.

JOE ROGAN: You got to save it. You can’t just eat it. That’s crazy.

CHERYL HINES: But then what happens? And keep it. Show relatives. Keep it in the freezer.

Unity and Division

JOE ROGAN: I think we’re going to need something. Something that happens. I hope it’s not something bad, because one of the things when something bad happens is it unites us.

CHERYL HINES: Like 9/11.

JOE ROGAN: 9/11 united us. It did for a small amount of time. People were pretty awesome to each other. And we realized that we’re really together. We’re supposed to be one group of people. Yeah. I just hope it doesn’t take something like that for us to snap out of this crazy right versus left thing. Because people just pick a side and adopt their pattern of thinking. They adopt their, whatever their values are, whatever their opinions are. They just adopt a conglomeration of other people’s opinions rather than forming their own. And you can’t question anything because if you do get cast out and you.

CHERYL HINES: Have to make clear that the other side is really wrong.

JOE ROGAN: And the other side’s evil. And you’re good. Yes, it’s good versus evil.

CHERYL HINES: It is good versus evil.

JOE ROGAN: And with every election, this could be the end of democracy.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, every time democracy is on the line. This is the. Yeah, I get sick of that one.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oprah said that when she was running for Commonwealth, this might be the last time you’re ever allowed to vote. Like.

CHERYL HINES: Is that on the table?

JOE ROGAN: Do you think people are going to tolerate that? That for real Trump’s going to be an emperor?

CHERYL HINES: Okay, I know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: What?

JOE ROGAN: I know it’s weird, but that’s how they get people riled up and get people to vote. You got to use hyperbole.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: You have to make people mad.

Running for President Again

JOE ROGAN: If Bobby tried to run for president again, would you tell him there’s no way? Would you say, look, we did this rodeo enough, dude?

CHERYL HINES: He’s not going to run again. But baby Jesus, if he did, once again, I’m saying he’s not running. But I do feel like it would be different, because before I knew it was going to be crazy. I didn’t know why. It’s kind of like having a baby. You know it’s going to be hard, but you’re not sure why until you have a baby. And then you’re like, every night you’re hoping your baby lives till tomorrow. And it’s a different kind of stress that you had no idea existed.

But with Bobby, I know now. I know what they’re all up to. I’ve heard all of the stuff that comes out, the people that come out, and they spend all day and night going to events, trying to get him, attack him, expose him, paint him as this or that. And it was a lot. That was a lot.

And at the same time, it’s so much bullshit that I know now what to expect. Just a lot of bullshit all day, every day. And I would know more what to pay attention to and what to concern myself with. Because before, it was all coming at you every day, all day. And also my own career, my own friends, my decisions got lumped in with that. So everything changed. Everything was changing all day, every day.

And I feel like the changes that have been made wouldn’t have to. Things have already changed. Some things have changed. So it wouldn’t be in that state of chaos every day.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHERYL HINES: It would be a different type of chaos.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, definitely.

CHERYL HINES: I see why people run again. Because before, when I watched people run again, you’re watching it, and it’s just like a dumpster fire. You’re thinking, there’s no way that guy is going to run again. That had to be the worst four years. Hillary, there’s no way she can run again. That had to be the worst time of her life. And then they run again.

And it’s that you feel like, oh, now I understand why. Because there’s almost that idea of, like, that’s all you had. You gave your best shot. You pulled out all the stops from 1989 to, so like, they can’t say the same bullshit over and over.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHERYL HINES: So there’s that part of it that’s like, okay. And I’m sure it’s intoxicating for some people.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, people like winning, too.

CHERYL HINES: People like winning.

JOE ROGAN: So they want to be the person that’s on the TV that says the new President of the United States. They want to be that person. I won. That’s why people want to win an Oscar. That’s why people want to win everything. They want to win. They want to be the person on TV. Everybody says they’re a winner.

CHERYL HINES: What about all the presidents before TV? They didn’t care. Or, I mean, I don’t know.

Eisenhower’s Warning About the Military Industrial Complex

JOE ROGAN: I mean, one of the weirder presidents that was on TV was Eisenhower, because when he was leaving office, he told everybody to be careful of the military industrial complex. He warned them on television. His speech to the union. You ever seen that?

CHERYL HINES: No.

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of crazy because this guy’s, you know, decorated former president. I mean, he’s leaving office, and as he’s leaving, he’s telling people to be careful, that you have to be very wary that the military industrial complex wants to go to war and that we have to be very wary about their influence. This is a sitting president.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s announcing it to the nation. And I think people are probably like, wait, what? And what was that? I feel like that was in the late 50s. When did Eisenhower give that famous speech? 1961 Farewell address. It’s crazy. Want to see it? Yeah, let’s play that. And we’ll leave with this, because this is kind of nuts, because if this aired on television back then, and obviously back then, there’s no Internet, there’s no VCRs, there’s no nothing. So you saw it or you didn’t see it.

CHERYL HINES: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And that was then.

CHERYL HINES: You heard it secondhand. And whatever opinions you get about it are from your neighbors, and that’s it.

JOE ROGAN: And everybody shared their opinions and it just got washed away. And no one really thought about it until the Internet came around and people were allowed to review it. So this is Eisenhower in 1961.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known of any of my predecessors in peacetime or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

CHERYL HINES: It is crazy. Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: So basically he was predicting exactly what we were dealing with right now.

CHERYL HINES: Which is just like the president should be responsible for keeping our country out of war.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And, well, also that there’s a machine that wants to go to war because that’s how they make money. Because there’s more money involved in that than anything.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, I’ve learned a lot about that too.

JOE ROGAN: That’s scary.

CHERYL HINES: And that’s pretty crazy.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that.

CHERYL HINES: No, no. I’ve seen some things.

JOE ROGAN: I bet you have.

CHERYL HINES: Like, stuff I don’t want to know.

The Most Disturbing Parts of the Campaign

JOE ROGAN: What was the most disturbing thing for you personally? Going through all of it.

CHERYL HINES: Oh, for me?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: I think, well, definitely I was worried about Bobby’s safety. Just watching him.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Especially. Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: So that. And then for me, everything changed. And a lot of, I don’t know, people just have, it was interesting to watch people change their attitude about me or that I’m not the person they thought I was type of feeling. Which is strange because I’m still the same person. So that was really, and still is too, very strange.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But you find out who’s real.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, you do.

JOE ROGAN: That’s probably a good thing. It’s good.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It is good for someone to betray you like that. Look at you, sweetie.

CHERYL HINES: See who rises to the top.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. It’s true. It’s hard. It’s painful, though.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It sucks if you really like that person. And all of a sudden.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. And also just people that don’t know you that they assume things that aren’t true. I mean, I sound ridiculous. It’s like, okay, get in line. But it was different. I just did not expect politics to be such a part of my life.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: I’m still shocked, but everything’s good now. But it was, there were times and there still are times, but really, Bobby’s safety was the most stressful. Every day, all day. Now he travels with the marshals. And even when he was running, that’s why I do write in my book “Unscripted,” that he was trying to get Secret Service protection for so long and was denied, which is also right.

JOE ROGAN: While he was running. Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Which is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It was crazy. Yeah. The Biden administration’s like, nope, no. Yeah. Everybody else can have it, but not you. Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: So crazy. And then he did get Secret Service after the assassination attempt on President Trump, but it wasn’t for very long because the election was close anyway. But just having Secret Service and security around you all the time is crazy. And you learn, and also, you know what’s disturbing? You learn what to look for and what to do in an emergency and things that you would never, really, things that you wouldn’t think about.

But then now you walk into a room and you look at people and you’re like, okay, that guy’s sweating a lot for no reason. You look to see what’s suspicious, what’s going on. And you see things differently. And it’s just like, you have to.

JOE ROGAN: Have your guard up for the kooks.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. A lot of kooks. There are a lot of kooks.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And you know, this is a conversation we had recently. I think they’ve weaponized those kooks. They make these people think that they’re doing something important. And there was a lot of talk like that, like someone needs to step up and do something. Like what, what are you saying? Like, what the f* are you saying?

CHERYL HINES: Right, right. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like imagine advocating for that and thinking you’re on the good side.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. You should do something.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Someone needs to take matters into their own hands. Someone needs to do that. Yeah.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. I’m glad we’re leaving this on a high note.

The Importance of Uncensored Discourse

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, it is an undeniably bizarre time. This is a bizarre time. And again, I think it’s uniquely bizarre today because we know more about what’s really going on than ever before.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: We know more about the behind the scenes stuff than ever before. And just there’s.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah, but it’s about who do you believe? That’s the thing. Well, once again, that’s why people really like your show because you’re not trying to win anything. You’re not trying to get anything. That’s why people really respond to it.

JOE ROGAN: I think people need some kind of uncensored, uncontrolled discourse.

CHERYL HINES: There’s hardly any out there.

JOE ROGAN: No. Most of it is controlled by advertisers.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And that’s just not good.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: All my friends who do shows where they’re on some sort of a show like you, you have to, you get notes, people come in. You got to cut this out. Can’t talk about that. Don’t bring this up. This is going to piss off that company. This is going to do this.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not good for us.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

The Power of the Internet and Truth

JOE ROGAN: And that’s the beautiful thing about the Internet. Like, this is a thing that they never saw coming. And this is what’s so important about Elon owning Twitter. He just turned it into the wild west, like go crazy.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what we need. That’s the only. You get a lot of bullshit. There’s a lot of. Everyone’s going to get tricked a few times, but for the most part, reality resurfaces. So that’s our way forward.

CHERYL HINES: I’m going to try to remember that. For the most part, reality resurfaces.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. When you try to squash it for a long time. No matter what, eventually it pops up.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Go. Oh, this is real.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Because there’s only one truth. Right. There are a lot of different lies. Lies, lies. But then one truth, and if it, like you’re saying, keeps coming up, it’s really hard to deny.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The problem is, like, with government, the truth is so difficult to understand. There’s so much going on. There’s so many moving pieces. You’re like, okay, well, why is that happening? Well, who’s doing that? Why is that?

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Why’d they make that decision in the first place? Well, what happened to that ruler? How did he get kicked out of office? We funded that, like. Oh, God.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s just so. The rabbit hole goes so deep.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s one of the reasons why people get so obsessed with all this stuff, because you could lose your mind just chasing down every single story.

CHERYL HINES: Yeah. Or just make a new one.

JOE ROGAN: Make your own.

CHERYL HINES: It’s easy. It’s easier for them. Just make a new one.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You can do it.

CHERYL HINES: You don’t have to, like, worry about the facts of what’s real.

Unscripted

JOE ROGAN: She’s like, oh, did you hear about unscripted? You did the audio for it.

CHERYL HINES: I did. My sister says to play it, like, at least one speed faster.

JOE ROGAN: Your sister’s telling you that’s like, a subtle way of her saying, you’re boring.

CHERYL HINES: Why are you talking so slowly?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s funny.

CHERYL HINES: But, yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I think it. Of course, I hope. I think gets interesting because I wrote a. But yeah, there’s definitely stuff about curb. Stuff about the Bobby. The politics. Bobby before politics, Bobby after politics. It’s great. It’s a wild ride.

JOE ROGAN: All right, well, thank you very much, Cheryl. I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Bye. Bye.

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