Joe Rogan Podcast #2464: w/ Priyanka Chopra Jonas (Transcript)

So I kind of went at it.

JOE ROGAN: No, you look very good at it. It was really good. Did you work with some sort of Kendo specialist or fencing specialist? How did you learn how to move the sword correctly?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It wasn’t Kendo for sure, and it definitely wasn’t fencing. Our director was very excited about the weapons in this movie and wanted to get it really right from the period — whether it was the guns that we used or the blades that we used.

The machete was one of my favorite weapons in the movie because that’s her weapon — it’s practical. Use it for coconuts, use it for skulls. Same, same. And that was really fun.

Our second unit director, Rob Alonso, had so much experience from the amount of work he’d done prior. He came in with a very specific idea of wanting to make the fighting style super unique, with each set piece having a different design of choreography. There was one which was in a dark cave, so the only time you saw people was when the gunshot went off. Just different styles of fighting, which I thought was really cool.

JOE ROGAN: But did you have a professional trainer that taught you how to do that?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And how would you do it? Would you do it with a real sword?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Well, we had three different kinds of swords. The real sword weighs more than me — it was insane. I couldn’t do it with the real sword as much. But for filming — and this is the magic of the movies — you have four different weights of it. One is the real sword, where you need it for a close-up or where the sword is really, really visible. But when you’re doing the big choreography, you have a lighter sword, which is created by the props department, and then a slightly lighter one. And when you need to flip it, it’s the lightest one.

JOE ROGAN: Because I was thinking — that’s good. Good to know.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh, no, no — listen, I was trying to impress you with my sword flipping and talking about my fencing. But no, it was movie magic.

JOE ROGAN: It’s impressive, period.

The Physical Demands of Filming

JOE ROGAN: One of the things I was thinking when I was watching it is, how many takes did you have to do? Because that’s got to be so hard — you’re swinging this iron thing and clashing into other ones. If you have to do three or four takes, your arms are going to be toast.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: We did like 10 hours of it every day for like seven days or something.

JOE ROGAN: Do you have shoulder problems after that?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No, actually, I didn’t. But I was jacked — my arms never looked as good. Now I have a four-year-old and I lift her a lot, so my arms are like, “All right.” But during this movie, because we were just at it — Carl and I both threw ourselves at it.

It was a big choreography on top of this bluff. We shot 100% — at least 90% — of this movie on practical sets, real sets. We did not want to use a lot of VFX. Phil Ivey, our production designer — we built the ships, we built the house, we built everything. Really everything was a replica of what it would have looked like in the 1900s in the Cayman Islands. We went and saw it. It was amazing to be able to do that with real stuff.

The East India Trading Company

JOE ROGAN: Well, the whole history of piracy is so fascinating. One of the things that the movie is about is the Karl Urban character, who was one of the soldiers of the East India Trading Company. I went on a deep dive on the East India Trading Company — that is crazy.

When you learn the history of that one corporation — one of the first publicly traded corporations — it essentially was in control of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It went to war with China over opium, and that’s how they took over Hong Kong. You’re like, “Holy sh.” One crazy f*ing corporation, involved in the slave trade, the opium trade — just a publicly traded corporation. People could buy stock in it, one of the first ones. And it just went haywire to the point where it got so big there was a revolt, and then the British government took over and nationalized it. But the whole story is insane.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: If you think about how much they were able to achieve in their minds, and how much they were able to destroy in that duration — it’s crazy. If you go down history, they changed the course of countries forever, human lives forever.

JOE ROGAN: Forever.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: The amount of pillaging that happened.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

Indentured Servants and Erased Identities

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Millions and millions of lives. And this movie actually has a really interesting slice of what they were capable of doing. They utilized pirates in order to take over new lands in their conquests. And then when piracy was abolished, they went after them and wanted to arrest them. They vilified the same people that helped them build their entire empire.

This was really interesting because my character’s story — her parents and her family are indentured servants, which was the truth of many, many people, especially in India, where young people were told, “Better opportunities, new lands, more money — come with us,” and then taken off as servants and dropped in different parts of the world. The Caribbean has a huge Indian community whose history started with just being displaced from their lands and dropped somewhere else in the world, and then having to figure out what your future looks like. I mean, it still happens to many, many people around the world right now.

But I thought it was really interesting that my character came from that, and her entire identity was erased, taken from her. She had no idea — she was 12, so she had no idea what it meant to have that identity. And I met so many people, actually, when I went to the Cayman Islands, who don’t know anything about their family tree beyond five generations, or they know where their family may have come from — from Sri Lanka or from India or any other nation — but have no idea what village, what was your culture.

That ambiguity in the history of a human being erases a part of you. It denies you of knowing the depth of your culture, where you come from, your roots. And I thought that was really, really interesting for my character to play, and then reclaim herself through the journey of the movie.

Colonization and Lost Cultures

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s a fascinating part of human history. And it’s taken place all over the world. For a lot of cultures, they don’t have an understanding of exactly what happened before they were colonized.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: One of the great examples is Mexico. I went on a long, deep dive on Mexico recently, over the last few months, because I’ve had a bunch of people who are historians who came on the podcast — they were researching these ancient Inca and Mayan sites. Talking to them about it, and then going into it myself — there were over a hundred different languages that are just lost forever in what is now called Mexico. And that’s the reason why everybody over there speaks Spanish and is Catholic. It’s not because that was their language and that was their religion. They were all conquered.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: By, like, 600 guys. That’s what’s nuts.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

Ancient Civilizations and Archaeological Mysteries

JOE ROGAN: 600 guys in the 1500s came over, took over, what was the Aztec empire, with help of the people that they were in conflict with, and changed the course of the entire country.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s so many generations, forever.

JOE ROGAN: To this day, people in Mexico think they speak Spanish and they have a Catholic religion. Well, that’s all brought over from Spain. Like, the entire country. They had wild names, too, like cacao, thunder, sky, God, and all these different, almost like Native American type names.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: They looked like Native Americans. But if you think about it, doesn’t that make sense?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That makes so much sense. They probably shared land and crops and like.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there was no real.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: There were no borders at the time.

JOE ROGAN: No. Back then, what were countries in the 1500s in North America? Like, what was. We don’t even know, what was North America?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, I think about how young America is, technically super young. Like how many years? 300 years? 400 years?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Less. Less than 300 years.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. And like you were talking about history, in India, she has been invaded over thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Only invaded? We’ve never invaded anybody else. She’s not had the time and is like, just give me a break.

The Portuguese, the British, the Moguls, like from back in time and the history of India. I mean, I’m not a historian and I don’t claim to be, but I find it really fascinating. I love culture and especially the culture of India.

You will see, my grandmother was Catholic because she comes — she was raised in a part of India which was colonized, and a lot of people, Kerala, a lot of people were converted into Catholicism, and she grew up Catholic. She followed it for a really long time in her life.

India is like hyper diverse because of how many people have kind of made it her roots. So when you go to India, the amount of diversity you will see, the range of people that you will meet, is impossible to fathom. An Indian face does not look like a particular person. The amount of cultures, the languages we have, written and spoken languages, which are almost like 20 something or in their 30s, absolutely different alphabet, absolutely different sound. If I go to another state, I won’t be able to understand what people are saying.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. It’s amazing, how many different languages are spoken there?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: About 28 to 30. But there are dialects in their hundreds.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Don’t even get into the dialects. I just speak English and Hindi, understand a little bit of Punjabi and Marathi, but it’s really amazing. Have you ever been, by the way?

JOE ROGAN: No, I haven’t.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh, Joe, you have to. You would really like — you’re the kind of guy who likes a deep dive.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You would really lose yourself, I think.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I want to go, just to see, for many things, but just to see that one immense temple that was carved entirely out of stone.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s one of the great mysteries of

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: archaeology, but there are quite a few. If you go especially south of India and the caves, if you go inside the Andaman and Nicobar, the caves you see from thousands and tens of thousands of years ago, illustrations that you’re like, how did this happen? How could this temple have been chiseled? Or how could these stones have been moved at that time? It made me very, very curious about what kind of tools did we have back then?

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a lot of holes in human history.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: Graham Hancock has a great quote. He says that we are “a species with amnesia.” And I think that’s accurate. And I think when you find some of the great archaeological wonders where people have just decided, “Oh, they built it this way,” and then just let it go, and then other people start looking at it and go, “Wait a minute. How did they do this? When did they do this? What’s the historical record of this?” Because this is kind of nuts. This seems to indicate a very advanced, sophisticated society.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. A very advanced civilization. One of the oldest civilizations in the world, along with the Mayans, is the Indus Valley civilization, which is the north of India.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I just remember studying about it in school, and that’s my maximum understanding of that civilization. But also, having visited the Indus River. I remember the artifacts that were found and, if you do a deep dive into how that civilization existed and then how it was erased, it makes you question — there had to be some seriously advanced scientific understanding that was eventually lost, as human evolution happened, where we lose a civilization and then it comes back again.

But it just makes you wonder about early humans and how fascinatingly advanced we would have had to be to do all of that, without the technology and stuff that we have.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, I think they had technology.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I think they had a different technology. I think so, too.

The Kailasa Temple

JOE ROGAN: This one particular temple that I’m talking about — Jamie, do you know the temple I’m talking about, the one insanely massive one that’s built into the side of a mountain? Kailasa Temple. This is it. This is crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: This is what I meant.

JOE ROGAN: Because the precision — first of all, there’s no understanding of where the stone went. They moved who knows how many.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How did you take out all of those tons of rocks?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. So insane. The precision is spectacular. It’s so nuts when you see videos of people going through it. Immense. Absolutely immense. And incredibly precise. And just carved out of a solid piece of stone. The whole thing is carved out of the mountain.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Think about how old that is. This is all BC, Before Christ. Thousands and thousands of years.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: BC. And the history of India — hence the diversity you see. It’s one of the oldest civilizations in the world. And then, how do you explain that? Look at that image.

JOE ROGAN: So it says it’s 12 — what does it say? How old did it say it was? How do they know that? 1,200 years old. See, there’s a lot of just estimates based on what was the civilization at the time.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And there’s no — this is the thing with Peru, Sacsayhuamán, and a lot of these places would be attributed to the Incas. But you see traditional Inca structures on top of these immense stones that are 100 tons. They’re carved in these weird jigsaw patterns to absorb the energy if there’s an earthquake. It’s weird sh*t. And it’s like, okay, who did that? “Oh, the Incas did it.” How’d they do that? Because all their other structures are smaller stones stacked on top of each other in a way that you could see a person carrying them and cutting them — makes sense. But there’s a lot of stuff like that temple. Explain to me

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: what you used.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: There’s no explanation, like how — like metal.

JOE ROGAN: You just use metal and carve that out like that?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And just a chisel and human.

JOE ROGAN: And if you mess up once, it’s over, because you’re not putting things on top of things. Like, “Oh, this block sucks, let’s get a new block.”

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No, you’re carving. If there’s a f* up, if you’re trying to build a human form and you chisel off the nose, do you turn it into something else? I don’t know, probably, otherwise, because it’s just one piece. And you’re right, you’re not adding anything to it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, in Egypt there are indications that they abandoned certain pieces because they cracked. When you’re dealing with granite, there’s a gigantic obelisk that they were carving out — I think it was like 1,300 tons, something bananas — like, okay, how are you going to move this f*ing thing? But they got to a certain point where there’s a crack in it, and so they had to abandon it. And so it’s still there. I think that’s in Aswan. I’m not sure where it is.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You know the theories around the Egyptian pyramids, obviously — how were those blocks carried up?

JOE ROGAN: There’s no valid theory.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How was it in that shape and so precisely geometrically?

Structures Beneath the Pyramids

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s even more complicated now because there’s an Italian scientist that we had on recently called Filippo Biondi. Am I saying it right? Beyond his amazing accent, this guy is f*ing incredible. But he’s using — what is it? Radio Doppler tomography. So it’s a type of satellite imagery that uses some technology to get a vision of what’s under the ground.

They’ve used this successfully to show known caverns in the ground and known pyramids. They even used it in Italy to show that they can look through a 1.2 kilometer mountain and see underneath it a particle collider, and have an exact dimension of the particle collider and see what the outlet looks like.

So they use this on the pyramids and they found these immense structures under the pyramids that go over a kilometer into the ground, with massive, huge 20-meter diameter columns that have these huge circular coils wrapped around them. No one knows what the hell they’re looking at, but they’re in very precise positions. They’ve done over 200 scans of these things. They don’t know what they are, they don’t know what the purpose of all this is, who made this.

So if this turns out to be accurate — and they’re very confident that it’s accurate, and they’re starting to look into it deeper and trying to figure out how to get down in there and explore with drones or something — then the whole thing gets thrown into question. Because it’s preposterous enough that you have someone who’s able to cut and place 2,300,000 stones, perfectly aligned to true north, south, east and west. Some of them weigh as much as 80 tons, and come from 500 miles away through the mountains, no roads. How’d you do it? That’s crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s crazy in itself.

JOE ROGAN: But if there are structures underneath that go a kilometer into the ground, and there’s a giant huge square at the bottom — they don’t know what it is. But these are structures. These are not something that is just a naturally occurring stone.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, it was man made.

JOE ROGAN: And show her an image of it. It’s f*ing kooky.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So what is that?

Ancient Mysteries, Indian History, and the Universe

JOE ROGAN: Like how these are these columns? This is like what the images are showing you. And the three dimensional replication of what they think is. That’s what they think it looks like underneath there. They have no idea what these things are.

What there’s also is that Hawara that has that underground labyrinth they’ve also found. Herodotus wrote about these labyrinths. There’s a great channel on YouTube called UnchartedX by this guy Ben Van Kirkwyk, who’s been on the podcast before. He’s great. And they’ve used ground penetrating radar in that location. They found that these immense labyrinths are real. They’re there. They’re huge. Herodotus said it’s greater than Giza and it’s underground. And in the center of one of these atriums, there is a 40 meter metallic object that’s shaped like a Tic Tac. That’s in the center of this.

So there’s a bunch of stuff that they don’t. They can’t explain down there where you’re like, okay, what is this? They also know that a lot of these civilizations, like later versions of it, took from some of the older sites and started building new things or built on top of them, like very disrespectfully. But nobody had an idea of like the importance of history back then. You’re just trying to stay alive. And so they found all these stones. Let’s use these stones.

The Kohinoor Diamond and Colonial Plunder

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh my gosh, totally. In India, like when we were colonized, you hear stories of the British officers telling little kids that, “Hey, I’ll give you £2, go and get the gold statue from this temple,” or whatever. And you don’t have comprehension of what the value of historical things were. There was so much that was taken from India in terms of wealth and history and historical artifacts. And the Kohinoor diamond, which is still on the Queen’s crown, which came from India, and like, so many things.

JOE ROGAN: The Queen of England.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: She has a diamond on her crown that she stole from—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Pull it up. Kohinoor diamond. K-O-H-I-N-O-O-R.

JOE ROGAN: Give it back.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, we’ve been asking for it for a minute. We have.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the whole history of England and India is nuts, too. Diamond. Whoa. How big is that?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Soccer queen?

JOE ROGAN: How big is that thing?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How big would that be?

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. What is that worth? Well, besides the historical value of it, which is probably priceless, what is 105 carats worth? That’s nuts.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Imagine walking around with a rock like that in your hand.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, that’s what I’m saying. The royalty in India had so much jewelry and wealth and stuff that was pillaged and just taken.

The Vedic Texts and Ancient Technology

JOE ROGAN: Well, the history of India is fascinating, like in the Vedic texts and the descriptions of Vimanas. Have you ever read any of that stuff?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, the Vedas. Not extensively, but clearly you have.

JOE ROGAN: The Vimanas are — it’s like, what are you talking about? You’re talking about flying crafts.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what do you—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s the thing. If you do a deep dive into the mythology of India and the stories that come from there, the kind of technology that has been mentioned in these ancient texts, like the Vimanas — you’re saying you have flying objects, you have spears with some sort of energy, you have bows and arrows with some sort of energy that travels beyond time and light. And there’s so much of all of this stuff referenced back then, which maybe humans thought was magic but was some form of ancient technology. Like, who’s to say?

But we do definitely believe in Indian mythology. If you go back into Hinduism and the incredible stories that exist, I love to think about where the origin — like, where it must have come from.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But there’s so many fascinating, fascinating stories from then.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I have an opinion that most people that were writing things down back then were trying to document a truth.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they were trying to make up stories.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No. I think it was definitely their truth. But from our perspective now, we have to be like, how do you break down the truth of that there was this light that arrived from miles and miles away and it felt like — I don’t know, was it a bomb? Like, what was it? What was it of that time?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So it’s cool to kind of try and interpret that. I mean, I believe in the mysticism and the magic of ancient humans and the beginning of time. There’s no way to explain what and how that was. We have the information we do from religious texts and historians of the past, but it’s just really fascinating to think about how resilient human beings have been and how evolutions have had the same problems over time, but we kind of just navigate it through different worlds.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think it’s hard for us to grasp timelines.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And then when possible, think about how short a human lifespan used to be to where it is now, how the base of our stories have to come from people telling people stories or documenting them.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right. And those stories — like, when you’re talking about certain passages in the Bible or certain passages in any religious text, a lot of those were stories that were just handed down for generations and generations before anybody wrote anything.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s like, what were they trying to remember? Like, when they’re talking about flying Vimanas, like, what were they talking about? What did they experience and how long ago was it? Because I don’t think we have a real understanding of how long ago it is.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, 17,000 BC is where, or around that time — that’s that many years ago is what they say. But again, that makes sense.

Asteroid Impacts and the Younger Dryas

JOE ROGAN: Well, that makes sense if you take into account 20,000 BC. There’s a guy named Randall Carlson who’s been on my podcast a few times, and he’s a really fascinating guy. He’s an expert in asteroid collisions with Earth. He’s an expert in all the different times that Earth has been slammed by comets and meteors.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Is that how the dinosaurs were? So it did — it was an asteroid?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they believe so. It was in the Yucatan. That one, that’s the 65 million years ago one. But there’s other ones that are before that.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Before that?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and then there’s other ones that are after that. One of the more interesting ones is called the Younger Dryas Impact theory, and that one’s from about 11,800 years ago. And then again, they think somewhere in the 10,000 years. So there’s a comet storm that we pass by — I think it’s every June and November, forget what the time is. But this also aligns with — do you know about the Tunguska event? Have you ever heard of that?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No.

JOE ROGAN: In the early 1900s, a meteor exploded in the sky above Russia and devastated like a million acres of land. And it was during the same time period. And they realized, like, there’s this comet storm that we pass through. Like, when you see meteor showers that are in the sky, it’s because we’re passing through these areas of our solar system that have these comets. This is the Tunguska event. And to this day, that area has no trees on it.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So it just flattened everything. And it didn’t even impact the ground. It blew up in the sky above it. And this was not even a big one.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So how does nothing grow again? Like, what is that asteroid made of that — Earth has been able to come back from so much?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a good question. Maybe it’s just not enough time. I don’t know. I mean, 117 years, maybe some—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Maybe eventually means like a millennia.

JOE ROGAN: But it probably just blew the roots off of everything. It blew everything into smithereens. And it probably had some kind of chemical effect, too, because it’s a physical object. I don’t know what it was made out of. But some of them are made out of iron, some of them are made out of nickel. Like that big one that they saw — three eye atlas — that passed through.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That was a weird one. Because they’re like, this is a nickel alloy that is as big as the size of Manhattan. The only way we have it on Earth is in industrial manufacturing of an alloy. But this thing, on another planet somewhere else millions and millions and millions of years ago, was formed under whatever weird circumstances and conditions their planet has.

Life Beyond Earth

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But — I mean, I want to know your thoughts on this — you definitely don’t think we’re like the only species existing in the universe, right?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think that’s possible.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s human arrogance if we think we do.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that seems silly. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. There’s just too many planets. It’s a silly thing to think. And they found evidence of life on Mars — they found evidence of some sort of bacterial life on Mars, like the traces of bacterial life. And that’s right there.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s what I’m saying. Maybe it’s just within our Milky Way that we — I mean, we haven’t even been able to travel outside of that yet to get information. But there has to be other species that exist and other intelligence and technology.

Terrence Howard and the “Peopling” Theory

JOE ROGAN: Do you know the actor Terrence Howard?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, I know of him.

JOE ROGAN: Fascinating guy, like a little kooky, but super smart. Like super smart. He’s got some wild ideas. One of his ideas — I was like, wait, what? He thinks that life occurs when planets get a certain distance from their sun, and then over time they get too far out and then life doesn’t exist on those planets anymore. But when they’re in this Goldilocks zone, like Earth is, for a long period of time relative to our life, life exists. And then intelligent life emerges and figures out, “Hey, we’ve got to get out of here eventually, because this is not going to sustain us.” And then it propagates the universe.

And he thinks that there’s a thing that happens and he calls it “peopling.” He thinks that when a planet gets far enough from the sun, it eventually peoples, because it eventually reaches the right conditions where life emerges and evolution takes place and natural selection and random mutation — all these things converge and eventually you get an intelligent creature that knows how to manipulate its environment.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Is there any proof of planets like moving away from their sun?

JOE ROGAN: Well, they all do slowly. Very slowly.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So even our solar system, we’re all like slowly—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And also the sun is eventually going to burn out and explode and then we’re f*ed. But that’s a long time from now.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But eventually — enough stuff to be worried about.

Planet X and the Origins of the Moon

JOE ROGAN: Nothing’s permanent. Like, suns are not. And we’re lucky we have a slow burn sun. So we have a relatively small sun and there’s a lot of weird speculation that it’s part of a binary solar system too, that there might have been another version of our sun that burned out — that’s like way out there, like way past Pluto, way out there. I’d buy that it’s possible.

There’s a lot of wacky theories as to why there seems to be some large object that’s outside of our vision that’s way, way past Pluto. So there’s a thing called the Kuiper Belt that’s outside of Pluto, and that’s part of what Pluto is, which is why they decided it isn’t a planet anymore. But they think there’s something else out there that’s large — they call it Planet X. There’s a lot of weird speculation whether or not it’s real. But they think there might be a large body larger than Earth, like Jupiter size or something, way out there. And it might be a sun, it—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: —might be a burnt out, like a burnt out sun.

JOE ROGAN: That was crazy. Well, Earth alone — the reason why we have the moon supposedly is because Earth was hit by another planet.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So was the moon part of the Earth?

JOE ROGAN: The moon was like a big chunk of that collision that burst off and then became the moon. So there’s Earth one—

Jupiter, Ancient Civilizations, and the Mystery of Human Evolution

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So does that happen with all the planets? Like because all the planets that have their own moons are explosions.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe there’s a question. Good question. I mean maybe some of them are Jupiter and Saturn, enormous asteroids that got caught in the gravity and maybe of maybe it’s volcanic activity, I don’t know. I think a lot of it’s asteroid impacts too. They knock off giant chunks and those chunks start orbiting that planet.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So does that mean that all of those planets do have like a gravitational pull as well?

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, they are, yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How strong would that gravitational pull be?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it depends on the mass of the planet.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Like Jupiter for example.

JOE ROGAN: Jupiter is what protects us. The reason why we don’t get hit a lot is because Jupiter’s so big. So Jupiter has so much mass and so much gravity that it’s like our big brother that protects us.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Thanks Jupiter for real? Yeah. No, that’s great.

JOE ROGAN: And they actually observed an impact on Jupiter. I want to say it was in the 1980s where an enormous asteroid slammed into Jupiter and created an Earth sized explosion. An explosion separated? No, it just got absorbed, but Jupiter just absorbed it. But they watched it in real time and it was a way bigger explosion than they thought it was going to be. Like yo. So then they have to recalculate like, oh, how big was that thing? And it made a literal impact as large as the Earth.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh my God. Yeah, I have to see that video.

The Younger Dryas Impact Theory and Lost Civilizations

JOE ROGAN: Well that’s the thing — the solar system is just a f*ing shooting gallery. Which brings us back to this Younger Dryas impact theory, which is one of the predominant theories as to why ancient super advanced civilizations completely disappeared. There’s no evidence of them and there’s a lot of physical evidence.

When they do core samples of the Earth, they find there’s a lot of iridium, which is very common in space but very rare on Earth, which indicates some sort of an impact. And then they also find microdiamonds — these nuclear diamonds, I think they call it Trinitite. They first observed this when they did the Trinity explosion. So the nuclear explosion created these micro diamonds on the ground. Just a massive impact and explosion, heat and energy.

Well, they find those littered all throughout the world in this same core sample timeline of like 11,800 years. So they think we were just bombarded. So a lot of these things, like these temples in India, perhaps the pyramids, some structures that were stone, probably just survived.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No, for sure. There’s so much that has survived. I think from a timeline we can’t even explain. I mean in India we see so much of it, so many of our texts, the Vedas are the oldest texts in the world. And to be able to read stories which now maybe we imagine as our stories, but are probably reality of a civilization gone by.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Is just crazy to think about.

JOE ROGAN: I think more likely than not.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And I think more and more over time, people are opening up to this possibility. Like they recently just found written language that is 28,000 years old, and they thought that human written language was created about 6,000 years ago. And they found evidence about this. So they’re like, okay, that’s a giant difference.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But how can we also know what happened in so many parts of the Earth when anyway the Earth was moving? Right. Like the continents, what it looks like right now is not what it probably looked like 20,000 years ago. Like it’s been slowly moving. I feel like how are we supposed to know — like someone who writes a book, say in Mexico, what happened then in Australia or what happened? What was the history in India, you know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: Right. Especially 1500, 1600 years ago when they were writing about stuff back then, they were just making s* up.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So the s* that we read —

JOE ROGAN: — humans may have used these mysterious symbols to encode information tens of thousands of years before the first writing systems. 40,000 year old artifacts. Yeah. So it’s some kind of way of documenting things, communicating.

You know, if these people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson are correct, there was some sort of very, very advanced civilization pre 11,800 years ago. And this also coincides with the end of the Ice Age. It coincides with all of the ice caps over North America disappearing. Like North America was covered — like 3/4 of North America was covered — like a mile high sheet of ice went away like that.

That’s why the Great Lakes exist. The Great Lakes are just that ice melted, and then whatever was left just ran through the country. And you can see the physical evidence of it when they show satellite images. It looks like enormous amounts of water just destroyed the landscape and completely carved it and changed it.

The Leap from Early Man to Modern Civilization

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: What do you think happened with — and I wonder if you have — because you have so much extensive knowledge with the amazing guests that you have on the show. How did we go from Neanderthal or early man to this technology driven, really smart, intelligent — like what happened in history and the evolution of human beings that we were able to make that switch so quick?

JOE ROGAN: It’s a real good question. There’s a lot of, you know —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, I’ve heard theories, but I want to know yours.

JOE ROGAN: If I didn’t worry at all about being ridiculous — and I don’t — I would —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You don’t? There was no need for that precursor.

JOE ROGAN: But if I didn’t worry about being ridiculous, I would say something helped us.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s what I think.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t think it makes sense that that didn’t take place.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, it’s crazy to think about how that happened and how quickly it happened.

JOE ROGAN: Well, yeah, there’s a lot of weird stuff with us also. All those other primates are still around, except the early man ones. You know, that’s what’s weird. It’s like, why aren’t — you know, how come chimpanzees are kind of the same? How come all these other primates are kind of the same and yet we need clothes to store —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Like a mammoth to an elephant. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Like, still similar.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it makes sense.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How do we have planes and why do we like things? And how could we make cups and —

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Why do we change our environment that way? Why do we have this insatiable desire to innovate? Insatiable. Like, that’s the number one thing that we do. Constantly changing, constantly making new and better things, never satisfied with anything. Everything has to be better. It doesn’t matter how good your car is. What’s the next year’s model?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Doesn’t matter what your phone does. I want better pictures, b. Like, no matter what, we want something to be better all the time.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And it’s like one up what we had.

JOE ROGAN: What is that? I think it’s built into us, and I think that is a part of this process of becoming a human being. And I think it’s leading us to develop AI. That’s what I really think.

But I think most likely something intervened. Now there’s a lot of people that think — the rational people think — that it was the invention of fire and the cooking of food that gave us better access to nutrition and protein, and then innovating in order to hunt allowed the brain —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But it was such an accelerated period of time. It went so quickly.

JOE ROGAN: The human brain size doubled over a period of 2 million years, which is the greatest mystery in the entire fossil record. Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Like, what made that happen?

Ancient Texts, Alien Intervention, and the Book of Enoch

JOE ROGAN: We don’t know. But in ancient religious texts, there are many stories of human beings breeding with something from somewhere else. That’s a —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: — part of alien intervention.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, yes.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Right. Without trying to sound ridiculous, a hyper intelligent life form.

JOE ROGAN: But if you think about it —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I was watching a show about that and I was like, that makes sense.

JOE ROGAN: What was the show you were watching?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Do you remember Ancient Aliens?

JOE ROGAN: That show’s the best. It’s so silly.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s amazing.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But I was like, two in the morning —

JOE ROGAN: My friend Action Bronson, he used to do a show. He doesn’t do that show anymore, does he? They would get super baked and watch Ancient Aliens and be like, “Bro, Ancient Aliens is rad.”

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I love that show. Two in the morning.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s fun. It’s very fun. I think they’re right about some of those things. I think there’s something to it.

I mean, that is one of the oldest biblical texts that wasn’t included in the canon — that is the Bible — is the Book of Enoch. And I had Anna Paulina Luna on the podcast and she brought that up and she was like, “You really should read that.” So I read it, and you start reading, you’re like, wait, what the hell are they talking about?

The Watchers came down from the sky to mate with humans and created the Nephilim, a race of giants that destroyed the Earth. Like, what are you talking about? What is this? This is in the Bible. And it would have been in the Bible if not for a few rabbis that decided this doesn’t jive with the Torah. And so they said, “We got to get that out of there.” And that’s why it’s not taught, along with the Book of Ezekiel and all these other things that are in the Old Testament.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Wow. Versus like, in Hindu mythology also, you know, we read about a time where God, human and demon existed at the same time and procreated and created different realms and life and stories. So it’s like when you think about stories like that — stories, beliefs from around the world that have similar sort of color —

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s almost like trying to connect the dots of what must have happened at that time, all around the world. It was probably the same thing, you know, some sort of incredible technology.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And a lot of them have these stories of something of some kind of higher nature, higher power, higher technology intervening in the lives of human beings and even manipulating the process.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, but isn’t that what I think was referred to as the gods? Like, if you think about the Roman or Egyptian gods — I’m not one to speak about other cultures, but I can’t even say about ours. But that power that we read about, if you go into it — I’m a big believer. So I think that, you know, was that a real experience that happened to a human being at that time?

JOE ROGAN: A real experience with someone that had a limited vocabulary, limited amount of knowledge, and a limited ability to write things down. And so they probably told these stories from whatever words they could use to describe what this was.

Like, if you were living 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, and a UFO landed — a giant metallic disc landed — and little tiny creatures came out and talked to you telepathically, you don’t have a written language, your culture’s hunter-gatherers. Like, how do —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: — how do you tell that story?

JOE ROGAN: How do you tell that story? And what are the people that you told that story to going to tell their children and their grandchildren for many, many, many, many generations before anybody figures out how to write things down?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Totally. But now the perspective on this which people have is that our pragmatic, practical, 2026 human is trying to explain something that was magical and did exist at a time that we don’t have an explanation for. Yeah, you know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: For sure.

The Mystery of Ancient Civilizations

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: There’s the other side of that with people that, you know, you hear so many stories of visitations from the gods back then, to humans and the divinity of, at least in my country, for sure, of different avatars of gods coming down to earth to save humankind and to help in human salvation and to help them against evil.

So when you hear of those stories, the practical side of me asks, are those human stories and who is that the power that they were seeing at that time? And then there’s a side of you which is like, there’s so much we can’t explain and sometimes have to leave it to inexplicable magic of the universe. I am someone who loves science, but I also am a believer of that. Just can’t explain everything.

JOE ROGAN: Well, even science itself, like hardcore materialist science, totally if you’re trying to explain the Big Bang, good fing luck. Good fing luck. Making sense out of something smaller than the head of a pin that became everything that’s in the universe.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Okay, explain that to me, help me out.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s all theoretical and speculative and no one really knows. And then there’s this concept of what took place before the Big Bang. And then there’s Sir Roger Penrose’s version of it, which is there’s been many versions of the Big Bang. Expansion, then contraction. And that it’s not the beginning, that it’s a part of an endless cycle.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s what I’ve heard in India as well, the belief that that was not kind of the beginning. There’s been many beginnings and many ends. That makes more sense.

JOE ROGAN: We have no idea if that makes more sense. To me it makes more sense because I think the problem with a beginning, we’re like, well, what was here originally? We always want to think of things in terms of our own biological limitations. We have a birth and we have a death. So we think that the universe probably has a…

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Everything has a limit.

JOE ROGAN: The why it’s there, like time.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: What is time’s limitation? It’s existed from who knows when, it’s constant.

JOE ROGAN: It’s never not been here.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So the idea that there was nothing before the universe, well, that doesn’t even make sense.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s funny, when I was doing research for the movie Bluff, I went to the Cayman Islands for a couple of days to get an understanding of the history of the islands. And the Caribbean is so interesting, especially Cayman, because it’s in the middle of these trading routes between Honduras, Cuba, Mexico. So when trading started is when the Cayman was discovered. The islands were discovered.

So when I went down there, I went to the museum and they said, yeah, it was like the 1700s or 1800s when the first settlers came. And it started with family, or people trying to run away, or pirates, or just people making pit stops before going to another country. And they said that that was the first time that there was any history of the island.

And I was like, how’s that possible? That only when settlers found it — I mean, Cayman Islands, right. But if you think about it, there are so many places in the world where people and humans have existed way before we even have an understanding of, or are willing to acknowledge. In many cultures it’s different.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, we just lost the history of it. That’s possible, too.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s what my argument was. I was like, we have to have lost the history of what happened prior.

The Olmecs and Lost Civilizations

JOE ROGAN: There’s an entire culture from South America that we don’t know who they were. The Olmecs. We have some giant carved heads, and we’re like, who did that? They think it’s thousands and thousands of years old. They look African. It’s very strange. If you’re seeing all my kids — oh, look, like this. That’s an Olmec head. How nuts is that? That’s a replica of these enormous heads that are in — I think, is it Peru? Luke Caverns, who’s been on the podcast.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a really fascinating guy who does a lot of research down there. He’s been there and documented it, and he’s like, they don’t know who these people were. They don’t know what their language was. They don’t even know what they looked like, except for these images. And they don’t even know if these images are supposed to be of them. Like these statues they just found. See if you can find some of these heads so you can see the scale of them. So they left these enormous stone heads. They attribute it to this one civilization that they call the Olmecs. They just made a name up, but they don’t know who the hell these people were. And look at their faces. That’s crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s huge.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And do you know how old these may be?

JOE ROGAN: They don’t really know. How many thousands of years old do they think they are, Jamie? Crazy stuff.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: At least 900 BC, but what does that mean? That’s a guess. That’s a guess.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Because they don’t know any time ago.

JOE ROGAN: A long time ago. Well, even the Aztecs — do you know, the Aztecs didn’t build those temples. They found them.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: The Aztecs found the Aztec temples?

JOE ROGAN: They found them from an unknown previous civilization. Yeah. They call those temples “the place where the gods were born.” That’s what they call them. And they just kind of cleaned it up, which kind of makes sense because you think of how barbaric the Aztecs were. They did some horrific s*.

We were talking about one of the temples — I think it was Tenochtitlan. When they consecrated it, they killed between 20,000 and 80,000 people. They sacrificed them in a period of four days. And this was right when the Spanish were first visiting Mexico, thinking about taking over. And this guy Diaz, the Spanish chronicler, said it was the f*ing craziest thing. They killed 80,000 people over a period of four days. Just cut their hearts out and threw their bodies down the stairs. Nuts.

Human Nature, Violence, and Our Primate Ancestors

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You think about how countries were, how conquests happen, and we’re living in the history of so many people’s blood and sacrifices and…

JOE ROGAN: Unfathomable amounts of violence.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So capable of that kind of violence. Having done a really violent movie right now…

JOE ROGAN: Because of chimps. Because we’re mostly chimp. And I think if you pay attention to chimps — have you ever seen Chimp Nation on Netflix?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No, I haven’t.

JOE ROGAN: Fantastic. It’s spectacular because it is a very rare situation where this one particular group of chimpanzees — they were embedded with these scientists for 20 years. So the scientists had very specific rules: don’t get within 20 yards of them, don’t make eye contact with them, don’t have any food with you.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: And don’t interfere. And they’re totally accustomed to having people around them. So they behave totally naturally.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And so they wage war. They have all these crazy social dynamics.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So they behave like they would in the wild because they’re used to these humans.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. And when you watch it, you’re like, oh my God, they are a lot like us. They’re a lot like us. Just very primitive, no language, but ultra violent. Chimps are ultra, ultra violent. One of their favorite foods, this guy was telling me, was monkeys. They just love eating monkeys. He goes, “We saw them kill so many monkeys, we couldn’t even document it. Because it would just be like every day was a monkey hunt.” They would tear these monkeys apart and eat them alive. It’s horrific. That’s our ancestors.

So what we are is a combination — if you can…

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Well, that explains it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it explains it. We’re a combination of some higher intelligence that interbred with a savage primate that’s curious, and created this weird hybrid, this weird thing.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s what Ancient Aliens told me.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And I believe it.

Ancient Aliens, Chariots of the Gods, and Intervention Theory

JOE ROGAN: I think they’re right. They’re right about that. Have you ever seen Chariots of the Gods? No, that’s the original one. Erich Von Däniken — that was in the 1970s. It was a feature movie.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I remember the movie, but I don’t remember having…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I had lunch with him once, got a chance to question him about stuff. He’s a true believer. A true believer.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: What are his beliefs?

JOE ROGAN: Well, he believes that everything is from aliens. That aliens came down and aliens taught people how to do things, and aliens built all these things. I’m more in line with — they intervened and created what we think of now as humans. And then humans figured out a different path of technology than we’re on today.

We are on the path of internal combustion engines, electronics, electricity. And they were probably on some different path of technology, but as far down the path, if not more. And I think they probably had figured out some things that we have yet to figure out, including the transferring and the moving and shipping of enormous stone blocks without heavy machinery. We don’t know what they were doing. How did they cut them? And what if those structures that Filippo Biondi describes under — if that’s real, what was the pyramid then? Was it a machine?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How did they do it? Like, first they created the structure. Imagine the foundation and the design that went into it — a half a…

JOE ROGAN: Mile deep into the Earth.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: What is that? What are you doing?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Because I’m saying, I just know that we can’t explain that quick evolution of humans from Neanderthal to…

JOE ROGAN: We can’t.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And all highly intelligent.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, we can’t.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, there’s just a lot of people saying, “Well, we haven’t filled in the gaps yet.” We don’t really know, but the acceleration of the evolution is so spectacular. Vegans are hilarious. They attribute it to people eating tubers. I had a conversation with a guy, he’s like, “We’re thinking it’s probably tubers, like roots.” You mean like bears eat? Shut the f* up. That is the dumbest explanation. That didn’t even make any sense. I’m Vegan — are you really?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No, I’m joking. Congratulations. No, I’m not.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no way.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You can’t be. No, I just had barbecue.

JOE ROGAN: You already fall asleep for breakfast.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I had brisket. I was like, I’m here in Austin for two hours.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you have to have barbecue if you come here.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

Alien Intervention and the Future of Genetic Science

JOE ROGAN: I just think that whatever happened, we don’t know. And I would not rule out intervention. And I wouldn’t think that an intelligent species from somewhere else, if they did find these very curious primates that may already be working with sticks and rocks and stuff like that, that they wouldn’t intervene. Because we do it. We’re doing it right now. We’re doing it right now with them.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s human nature to do it.

JOE ROGAN: If we went to a planet somewhere and we found some frogs or some weird animals, but nothing big, we might drop a deer off in there and see what happens. We might bring some birds in.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Humans definitely would. We would intervene.

JOE ROGAN: They’re doing genetic manipulation of animals right now to bring back extinct life. That’s how they brought back the direwolf. This company called Colossal. Colossal Biosciences.

Dire Wolves, Megafauna, and the Mysteries of Extinction

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: They.

JOE ROGAN: I saw it, I touched it. I went like. Yes. I went to the place where they’re holding these wolves and I got to. Me and my daughter got to cuddle with a baby dire wolf. They had two semi adults at the time. I think they were like 8 or 9 months old.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And they’ve been extinct since when?

JOE ROGAN: 10,000 years?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Stop it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, somewhere in the range of that. When did dire wolves go extinct? I think they were part of the megafauna that went extinct during the impact. Because 65% of all megafauna on Earth, and particularly in North America, went extinct around the same time. Woolly mammoths.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And do we know why? Around the same time.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of hypothesis.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Was there something that happened then?

JOE ROGAN: The rational people, not me, but the rational people think it was the Berserker theory, which means that human beings killed so many mammoths that we wiped them out to extinction.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Unbelievable.

JOE ROGAN: This is with Atlatls. Like, it doesn’t make total sense. It’s like, how did you get. There’s not even that many people. How’d you do that?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then there’s also stuff like the American lion, which was bigger than the African lion. How do we kill that off with a fing stick? Like, shut the f up.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Something. Something had to have happened.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’ve found mass grave sites of mammoths where there’s like hundreds of them dead, all in one place that seemed to have died at the same time. Not only that, some of them have broken legs. It seems to be from some impact.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It seems to have been like some. Yeah, like an asteroid or some. Something that created that kind of impact immediately.

JOE ROGAN: But 65% of all North American megafauna died at the same time.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s so crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Within the time period. And they think that the Younger Dryas impact theory — people think like this is not a coincidence, that this coincides with the end of the Ice Age. And also coincides with where the core samples.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Too many coincidences.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And also coincides with the fact that these animals were all here at one point in time. They all got wiped out except a very few. There’s only a few left. Like there’s the pronghorn antelope, which is a really weird one. It’s this prehistoric antelope that lives in North America and it’s different than every other animal here because it’s evolved to get away from cheetahs, because we used to have cheetahs in North America. So it can run like 55 miles an hour. I’ve seen them in real life. They’re really weird looking. They look prehistoric.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But can they fly?

JOE ROGAN: That’s what it looks like. See if you can get a look at its face. Can you see it head on? They’re so strange. Like their eyeballs are on the sides of their heads because something was coming at them at 55 miles an hour at full clip. So they’re really, really alert and they have incredible vision. Wow.

And that’s a leftover animal. That’s a leftover animal from a time where they were being preyed upon by something that doesn’t exist anymore. And that something was wiped out along with the American lion. A bigger lion than the African lion lived right here.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Huge.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Filming in the Wild: Kenya and the Wildebeest Migration

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I was filming in Africa recently in Kenya, for this Indian movie I’m doing called Varanasi, and we shot with wildebeests — like, in the middle of them. Me and my co-actor Mahesh were in the middle of these wildebeests that were all around us while they were migrating. It’s like the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. But when you see their faces and for how many years versions of them have existed, you know, you feel the gravity when you see these animals in the wild.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so much different than a zoo, right?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh, completely.

JOE ROGAN: Because you’re like, oh, they’ve always been here like this.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. This is their home.

JOE ROGAN: This is what they do.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: We’re in it. You feel a sense of like, stay in your Jeep.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think we’re numb to it because we watch it on film and so we get sort of desensitized and normalized to this idea of wildlife. “Oh, there’s the lion sneaking up on the wildebeest. How cool.” But when you’re there and you see a lion, you see a wildebeest — like, this is f*ing crazy. This is all day long, every day. These life forms competing to try to exist and survive.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s it.

JOE ROGAN: Weird balance where all of them, they still exist.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, there’ll be wildebeest right there, and there’ll be a lion right here who’s eaten. So they’re hanging out together. The wildebeest knows that he’s eaten. He’s not coming after us. And they exist, but at the same time, during hunting season, you see the hunt happen. And I saw a hunt happen. And that’s. That’s crazy that that’s their life.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Survival.

JOE ROGAN: With their face. They kill things with their face.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Like, literally.

The Island Lions and the Danger of Water Buffalo

JOE ROGAN: There’s a really extraordinary island in Africa where the river changed courses and it left this one pack of lions on this one island that only has water buffalo on it. And so these lions became enormous. The female lions are as big as male lions everywhere else. And the male lions are way bigger than they are anywhere else. I think there’s a documentary — I think it’s called Relentless Enemies. Because they look like these jacked bodybuilder lions.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Those water buffaloes are huge. And I had one staring at me — we were in Kenya, the video village is sitting, we’re filming, and it’s far away. But it just turned his head and just looked at me and then just kept looking at me. And I swear I had to get up and get out of its view because it just kept staring. I was like, it’s coming at me.

JOE ROGAN: They will come at you.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: They kill people.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: The rangers told us. They were like, “I think he’s engaged with you. Maybe. Maybe get out of here. Get into your car.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s that poor lady — she was a video editor on Game of Thrones, and she went to do a safari there, and one of the lions pulled her out of her car.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Out of her car?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. She rolled the window down, or someone rolled the window down, and a female lion just snatched her out of the car and killed her.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You have to listen to your rangers when you’re in these situations.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, she wanted a better picture or something.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, that’s the. That gets people into trouble.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

The Influencer Who Touched a Lion

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Like, there was this — one of our rangers was telling us a story. We were in Masai Mara, and they have open Jeeps, and you have food that they keep really hidden so that the animals can’t smell it, under your seats and stuff. And he was telling a story about this influencer. He’s driving and there’s a pack of lions — the lion had just eaten, so he’s sleeping. And this influencer puts his hand outside to try and touch the lion’s head and got it on video and survived to tell the story. And then he was banned and the ranger was fired from his job. All of that happened. But for the image. Can you imagine?

JOE ROGAN: Idiot. All for the gram.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: My gosh, that was crazy. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, I don’t want anything bad to happen to anybody, but when someone does something like that and does get killed, it’s probably better educationally for the human race.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But is it, though? Or are we really learning from other people and their examples?

JOE ROGAN: Some people aren’t learning shit.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Nobody’s learning shit. People — we’re just trying to put the best versions of ourselves on the ground. Like, that’s what’s happening right now. Whether it’s true or not.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but are we learning? Yeah, it’s a good question.

Attention Spans, Information Overload, and the Podcast Format

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I don’t know. I mean, I think we are also so desensitized. There’s so much information that comes your way and misinformation. Now, being able to discern what’s real and what’s not — that’s hard as well.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s harder than it’s ever been.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Totally. And then if you do watch something and you’re like, “I’m going to implement this in my life” — we do it for a very short duration. Very few of us follow through with that. Right. Like, you’re watching a reel or somebody says something and you’re like, “That’s really cool.” Are we going to pull on that thread and follow through and do something about it or learn from it? I don’t know. I feel like we’ve lost a lot of that space where we had the time or the desire to want to fulfill ourselves, versus just having so much coming at you.

JOE ROGAN: I think collectively as a society, we learn and then we forget and then we have to relearn again. Yeah, that’s just how it is.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But the attention span now — I remember when I was growing up, just having the languidity of time in a very different way. And this is like, say, 30 years ago, 30, 35 years ago — of reading a book, music playing, hanging out with your parents or your friends without being rushed. I don’t remember feeling as rushed as I do now. In the last 20 years, when I was growing up, there was time for stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, certainly the Internet has accelerated that. And certainly people’s attention spans are at least pulled in the direction of short attention span content. But at the same time, podcasts have emerged, which is interesting.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s so interesting. I was talking about this to a friend of mine — people who have no time or interest in wanting to commit to, say, a movie, will watch or listen to a podcast for two or three hours.

And for someone like me, who’s been an actor for most of my life, my interface with people would be an interview. People who knew me or audiences that wanted to know about me would read an interview where the highlights are really what you read, the clickbait lines are really what you read. And you form a relationship with whoever this public person is based on those few lines. Versus this format, where you’re just chatting for a few hours and you have the ability to really be yourself and be seen as yourself. Which is why I think people really love podcasts.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think it’s much more illuminating in terms of if you want to find out who a person really is.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because you can’t really hide for three hours. Like, that’s who you are. And I think for most people, that’s scary. So what they like about those fake shows, like Good Morning America or whatever it is — you’re sitting down, the guy’s got a piece of paper, he’s got a few questions he’s going to ask you, and they’re all going to be very surface, very jovial. “What’s it like to be married? What’s it like to do this, what’s it like to do that? Sorry, you had a baby, congratulations,” that kind of stuff. And then you’re out of there, it’s 10 minutes, and you’re like, “Oh, that went well.” And then nobody knows anything about you.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s true. You’re just basically known by the top four questions that everybody asks you. So it’s like the same four questions that everybody asks.

JOE ROGAN: Right. “What was it like to work with this person? What was she like in person? What was he like?”

Bollywood, Hollywood, and the Fear Factor Connection

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: For me, mostly it’s a lot about my family. It’s like my identity starts there and everything else comes after.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you’re fascinating in that you’ve done movies in two different cultures. Like, I wanted to ask you about that. What is the Bollywood scene like? Because I wasn’t even aware of it until like 20 years ago. I didn’t know that Bollywood is like this enormous — the amount of films that are produced in India is kind of crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, it’s a big business. Huge, huge. Hundred and something years of Indian cinema just recently. So a very, very old industry — we started with silent movies and have worked our way now to… And that’s not just Bollywood. I’ll break that down in a second. Because India is so diverse and we have so many different languages. Again, excuse me, I didn’t know the exact number, but we have local industries that make movies in those languages.

So Bollywood is Bombay. It comes from Bombay. I think that’s why it was coined that name from Hollywood. But the Bombay movie industry — again, it was not us that did that. It was a name that was given to us. I don’t know by who. But Bollywood is the Hindi language industry which exists in Mumbai, which is like LA. It’s huge. We make thousands and thousands of movies. But then there’s also Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Malayalam, Marathi, Bhojpuri. These are all robust industries that are localized within every state that also exist. So cumulatively, we make thousands and thousands of movies a year, but it’s catered to very, very different audiences within the diversity of India.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. And how many people have come from India like you and become stars in western movies?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I think there have been a few before me, you know, that have done —

JOE ROGAN: — the first one I heard of. So no one’s made it to me yet.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Well, thank you. Yes, I think it’s been few and far in between. I think America is a really hard country to break into, to be relevant in. It’s tough. And also, I think Hollywood controls a large part of the global entertainment business. So as an actor from anywhere in the world, if you want to break into the English language global entertainment Hollywood system, it’s not easy to do that. Culturally it’s different. The language is different, jokes are different. So that’s a tough transition.

But it’s also like — for me, I went to high school. Oh, by the way, you went to Newton. And I went to Newton too.

JOE ROGAN: Did you really?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I went to Newton North. You went to Newton South?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How crazy is that?

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So I was in high school in the States, and so it wasn’t like alien to me. It’s not like I was in India and I was like, I want to go to America and start working there. I really wanted to see what it would be like if I came down here. Would there be an opportunity for someone like me to be able to create an impact? Many years later, I feel like I’m on my way there.

But there have been so many actors whose shoulders I’ve stood on. Indian casting in English language entertainment, whether it was Hollywood or British entertainment, wherever, was usually seen by us as a diversity check. So it was mostly a stereotypical actor or a stereotypical character, with an actor having to speak in the accent or having to do the work at 7-Eleven, be a little bit more Indian. What does that even mean?

JOE ROGAN: Did someone tell you that?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I was told in an audition, “I think we needed the character to be a little bit more Indian.” And I just didn’t even understand. There are so many versions of that. But I think what this person meant was have a little bit more of the accent.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, be the caricature.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, be the character, which was really tough to break out of. So at a time when it was only that work that existed in Hollywood, those are the actors whose shoulders I stand on. Those were the ones that went in and did that work because that was all that was available, and tried to break through. Especially from India, for example, Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan, Irrfan Khan — they’ve been actors that have come in, done work, and left an amazing mark. But I moved here. I live here now and I’m consistently working here. I think that also may have been a part of why you’ve heard of me.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I’m sure. Well, I’ve seen you interviewed too, which is why I thought you were interesting.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Thank you. Appreciate that. I think you’re very interesting. I think your knowledge of the world is fascinating to me.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s all accidental.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How cool is that?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s cool.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s amazing.

JOE ROGAN: I started this thing out with my friend Brian and a laptop. We were just talking shit. We just thought it’d be fun to do a little internet thing. Wow.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How inspiring.

JOE ROGAN: And that was 16 years ago.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You’re someone who’s pivoted your career so many times, too, though.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s all the same thing in that I’ve only just done things I’m interested in — other than Fear Factor. Yeah, that was just a job.

The Fear Factor Connection

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You know, I also hosted Fear Factor.

JOE ROGAN: Did you? No. Shut up.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: For one year.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I did.

JOE ROGAN: Where?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: In Brazil. In India.

JOE ROGAN: Shut the f* up.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Fear Factor India. And we shot it in Brazil. In Rio.

JOE ROGAN: Wow, that’s nice.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Random things in common.

JOE ROGAN: That is crazy. That’s a crazy thing in common. I need to see that. Let me see that. Find a clip. This is hilarious. What language did you do it?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Hindi.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. And it was in Rio, huh?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: We shot it in Rio. We had a big budget, so we were all flown out.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s Fear Factor India. I wonder how many versions of Fear Factor there were.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: They’re all over the world.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Fear Factor used to exist all over. I don’t know anymore.

JOE ROGAN: But once I stopped doing it, I stopped paying attention. I was like, I’m out.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Me, too.

JOE ROGAN: So I knew Ludacris took it over at one point in time, and now Johnny Knoxville’s doing it. That’s all I knew. I had no idea that there was —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: — a bunch of different versions of it. Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it originally came from a Holland show called Now or Neverland.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s a crazy show.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It was way more simple. And then when it got brought to America, they decided to call it Fear Factor.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: The whole eating thing — we didn’t take that back to India.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. We didn’t do the eating because you never know, people are vegetarian in India. It’s a big part of our culture where a lot of people religiously are vegetarian or not. I think maybe that’s the reason. But there was not a lot of “eat the worms” and stuff, which I was very grateful for. It was a lot more, you know, cliff and falling off the cliff. And I remember there was this one which was crazy — this 16-wheeler which was driving at 60 miles an hour, and everyone had to take their vehicle underneath it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Underneath it and come out.

JOE ROGAN: Yikes.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It was insane.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I didn’t have to do it. Which is great. I was just hosting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. We did a lot of stuff where I was like, we barely got through that without killing somebody.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. And the death waivers — everyone had to sign a death waiver.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I was like, why would you do a show where you have to sign a death waiver?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And you can only win like $50,000. And you might not win. You’re probably not going to win. There’s a bunch of other people on the show and you could very easily get hurt.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But people want to be famous. They want to be on TV.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I want to be on TV.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Once it became popular and successful, it was really easy to get people to do it too. Everybody wanted to sign up.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But I mean, there are protective measures, obviously, but it —

JOE ROGAN: A little. We made them ride bulls.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: We did, too. We put people on bulls.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And there were a few that were like, “No, I’m not doing this. I’m out.”

JOE ROGAN: I told people not to do it. When I was talking to them off camera, I said, “Don’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. Don’t do it.”

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I would never do it.

JOE ROGAN: No way.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But people did it.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that. Look at you. What year was this?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Please, I can’t even —

JOE ROGAN: Looks like a Fear Factor scene.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It is. I was on a helicopter, so —

JOE ROGAN: Do you know what year this was?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I can’t. Did it say that?

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t say. I could check, but — wow. Rio. I’ve been to that.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I stood outside the helicopter as well or something.

JOE ROGAN: Rio’s amazing.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. That is so funny. It’s just like Fear Factor. So what did you guys do for the second stunt? If you didn’t do a gross thing, you just did a second scary thing.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Scary things mostly.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow. Well, it’s probably better, honestly.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, there were gross things, too. Like there were Brazilian red-eyed deviled rats that were put all over you with tongue and eyeballs and stuff. But you didn’t have to consume it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It was on you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You didn’t have to eat it.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of the consuming it was psychological. You get really accustomed to it and then it’s like nothing.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, listen — people have eaten crazy things through history, right, to stay alive.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And if we take our mind out of “oh my gosh, this is gross,” then it’s not.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the thing is, a lot of what we were serving as gross was some people’s food. Like balut — my Filipino friends were like, “Bro, I eat that all the time.” That would have been no problem. This is a more current — I heard a more updated — what? Oh my God.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I’m telling you.

JOE ROGAN: Lions and your — what if that thing pops open and you got to roll that thing around with lions there? The lions are duking it out with each other. F* that. That’s crazy.

Eating Exotic Foods and Fear Factor Memories

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. I recently was on Fallon, and there was some bluffing game that we were doing because the movie’s called “A Bluff.” And I said to Jimmy, I was like, “I eat worms.” And he was like, “No way. You don’t eat worms.”

But these worms are a delicacy in Zimbabwe. And I was introduced to them. I don’t know exactly the history, but I was told during segregation, Black people were put in areas that weren’t very fertile. You couldn’t really grow your crops and your animals. So this was a way of getting protein. They’re very high — these are these fat caterpillars — high in protein, and they’re made in a curry. And when you actually eat them, it’s like chicken. I’m telling you. It was psychological, but.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know, cicadas, those things that come out — people eat them here all the time.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: They bake them, fried, baked.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And apparently they’re delicious.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I haven’t had one of those. But I actually did when I was in —

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow. That’s what it looks like.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But look at — they’re made into a curry.

JOE ROGAN: I ate a tomato hornworm on Fear Factor. I had a bunch of things when I was on the show.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I was like, there’s nothing going into my mouth on Fear Factor.

JOE ROGAN: I ate a sheep’s eyeball in the first episode. Because the first episode, I felt bad that the people were on the show.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. So you were like, I’m going to —

JOE ROGAN: I’ll eat it too. And they didn’t show me eating it, but I’m like, I’m going to eat it, because you guys —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s so nice.

JOE ROGAN: And then I ate a roach to try to convince a lady that she could eat a roach. I ate worms. I ate an Iraqi cave spider. I ate —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: What was the spider like?

JOE ROGAN: Just chewy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But was it —

JOE ROGAN: The taste is not bad.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Was it alive when you ate it?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, for the first couple of seconds, yeah. All the things that I ate were alive. Other than the eyeball. The roach was alive. All those things were alive. Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I put a cricket — a live cricket — in my mouth.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the Iraqi cave spider.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How do you put that in your mouth?

JOE ROGAN: Like this.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Look at those sides.

JOE ROGAN: You make sure you don’t get those pinchers because those — oh, yeah. Wasn’t that bad. I’m telling you.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s like you gotta get the body in and not the pinchers.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Grab the pinchers to hold on to the body.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. That’s the trick.

JOE ROGAN: Shove the rest of it in — just like that. Yeah. People freaking out. But I’m telling you, it’s all psychological.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It for sure is.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That was in Vegas. Everybody was playing roulette. But it’s not that bad. It’s just in your head.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It is psychological.

JOE ROGAN: The actual flavor of it — it’s not gross.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. It’s not.

JOE ROGAN: The tomato hornworm was kind of nasty.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, if you’re someone who’s not vegetarian, it’s like, you just have to get the —

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s the psychology of it, right?

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Yeah. We made people eat an entire ostrich egg. That was disgusting. Because of the volume — you’re eating an egg that’s that big.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Is it like really fatty?

JOE ROGAN: Raw. You’re eating it raw. They just cut the top off of the egg and you have to drink it. You have to drink this gigantic white and yolk.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Already my brisket’s coming. The barbecue.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s so oddly compelling — watching people eat disgusting things and struggling. And here’s the ostrich egg. That lady had to drink that whole egg.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh, my God. Did she puke?

JOE ROGAN: You gotta hold it down and then you can puke after you’re done.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But if you puke in the middle of it, you just — yes.

JOE ROGAN: They get rid of you. That’s a wrap. If you puke in the middle of it —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I would not be able to do the American version.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It was gross.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Okay. But not —

JOE ROGAN: It was gross, but it also made me totally desensitized to throw up.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s a good talent to have.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Like, you could throw up. Right.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Especially as a dad.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Yeah. Well, I think being a dad will get you, like —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Desensitize you to everything.

Desensitized to Vomit

JOE ROGAN: All kinds of things like that. But I’m completely — still to this day — completely desensitized to vomit. So one time, my wife came home from the gym, and on her way home she stopped and got wheatgrass juice, and it just didn’t agree with her. And she threw up in her car. And she was crying. She’s like, “I threw up. It’s my center console. How am I going to clean it?” I go, “I’ll clean it.” I’m just so used to throw up. It was like, no big deal. I just went in there with a bunch of towels. It doesn’t — but when I was young, in high school, I remember if someone threw up in the hallway, I would be like — I couldn’t help myself. I’d start gagging.

That’s a natural instinct. Because the idea is that we develop that because if someone’s throwing up, it means they ate something bad. And you probably ate that too — get it out of you right away. And so that’s why you start throwing up. And I’ve killed that.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I have just trauma from tequila.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I watched so many people throw up —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And throw up. Me too, man. I’m not going in there with a dish cloth, like, walking —

JOE ROGAN: No.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Wow. Well, from your show, for sure. You did it for so long.

JOE ROGAN: You get very desensitized.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: But I’m desensitized to injuries, too. Because of UFC — people that get cut and people that get beat up. It’s like normal to me. I’m so accustomed to seeing that. It’s weird.

Stunts, Scars, and The Bluff

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I kind of feel like that about stunts in movies. Nobody’s supposed to get hurt. It’s a movie. But the little cuts and bruises — at the end of day, we’re doing this for 10 to 11 hours, multiple takes all day. And in between shots, you’re rehearsing it. So I have so many scars on my body from my filmography.

JOE ROGAN: Do you look forward to those? Do you like them when you look down?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, I like the story. I feel like it’s like a medal. I have a good story, as long as they’re minor.

JOE ROGAN: Nothing crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Always. You aim for it to be minor.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s the ambition.

JOE ROGAN: Well, when you’re doing a fight scene — I was kind of blown away by some of the fight scenes in The Bluff because I’m looking at it like, this is an insane amount of choreography. A lot of possibilities of things going wrong. There’s kicks and punches and axes and swords, and it’s like, you gotta get banged up. There’s no way you’re doing that and not getting banged up.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And it was also a dramatic performance along with it. So I had to do a lot of it myself because you need the face on camera to feel the horror of what’s happening.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Of course, my stunt doubles did a few dangerous shots for sure, and were always around to help. But there was this first scene — the house invasion — where these two guys come in, and that was brutal because I did not have shoes on and I had a sleeveless outfit, and the whole home was made out of wood and splinters. I had splinters everywhere. I had bruises and cuts everywhere because it was such a brutal — getting dragged and thrown kind of scene.

JOE ROGAN: She’s just getting constantly bruised.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. So I would try to sit in a magnesium bath after when I would go back home. And that’s when you feel all the cuts. So it’s like, “Duh, fing salt. What the f? Where did this one on my thigh come from?”

JOE ROGAN: There’s a scene — I don’t want to give too much of the movie away — but there’s a scene where you kill a man with a conch shell.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. So good. Game on. Brass knuckles island. Brass knuckles.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s so nuts — the splattering and your anger. It’s intense. What was that like to film? To find that inside of you — did you have to think, like, what would I do if someone was trying to harm my family?

The Primal Instinct of a Mother

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Somebody came after my kid — like, what am I capable of? I’d f*ing rip your head off. It’s that. I was a new mom at that time when I was filming this movie, and I was very, very aware of that feeling because our daughter had an intense entry into the world. She was in the NICU for almost three months. And so me and my husband are both very protective of her.

When this movie came across my desk, I was just like, “Man, I understand that feeling for the first time in my life, honestly.” What is a parent capable of doing if somebody came after your kid? Imagine you’re alone at home at night and you see intruders and you have your kid at home. Like, what the f* would you do? You would definitely put yourself on the line and do whatever you could to make sure that your kid’s fine. And it was just that primal energy that was my North Star through this whole movie.

JOE ROGAN: My friend Jim Brewer said it changed after he had kids. He goes, “Once I had kids, then I understood murder.”

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He goes, “Because the feeling of someone — normally you’d be like, why? What would I need to feel to murder somebody? Like, why would I —”

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Why would a human being ever —

JOE ROGAN: He goes, “But the feeling of someone trying to harm my kids — oh, yeah, I get it. I get murder now. I get it.” Like, it’s in there. It’s just like a door. You just open it up.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Easy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Parenting Worries

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Access that. My mom — when I was a teenager, I don’t know how she raised me, but I was a tough teenager. Whatever you wanted me to do, I would do the opposite. Just — no. My mom would be like, “Come back home at 10.” I would come home at 12, just because. So she used to say to me, “You’ll see when you have kids how you feel — what worry actually feels like.”

I mean, my daughter’s four, and I’m worried. I cannot — my husband makes so much fun of me. Working parents can talk through this. When I’m not in town, I’ll surround our daughter with multiple people. Nick’s definitely around, but the grandparents will be around. There’ll be a nanny around. There’ll be multiple people around her just so that I can spy on her.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Like, I know what she’s doing all day.

The Latchkey Generation and Parenting Today

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. So you’re traveling and you’re like, okay, my kid’s fine, and I can go to work. I don’t know. My parents were both working parents. And this was at a time where everything was so analog. I used to come back home when the lights turned on on the streets. My parents didn’t know where I was.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: They had no idea.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: They were like, yeah. You going out to your friends after school, come back when the street lights come on. That used to be my thing.

JOE ROGAN: Most people.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: During earlier generations. I was just reading this thing about Generation X where it was talking about how Generation X is some of the most resilient people because they weren’t protected.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: They had to figure it out.

JOE ROGAN: They were latchkey kids. They had a key to their house. They got home from school, they figured it out. Their parents were working.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Nuts if you think about it. But people just got accustomed to it.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Cannot imagine it, but that was my normal. I remember that because my parents were working. Place to come back home and somebody would be with me and I’d have lunch. I’d go out to my friend’s house, like my mom.

JOE ROGAN: My parents didn’t know I was doing that. When I was seven, I would come home. Yeah, no one was home. Come home from school.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: It was crazy. You stop and think about it now. It’s so strange. It’s so strange.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: The world was, I feel like a little bit more different than. I bet it wasn’t. You don’t think so?

Awareness, Danger, and the Dark Side of the Internet

JOE ROGAN: No. I think creeps have always been around. I think psychos and creeps and murderers and perverts.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Do we know about it more now?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Were we more oblivious then?

JOE ROGAN: They’re organized and they’re online and they’re in chat groups and they’re on the dark web exchanging information.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And we are hearing and reading all of the stories online. And I think back in the day, there was a certain obliviousness to it. It was blissful to be ignorant a little bit. We didn’t know. All you read was the newspaper, the news.

JOE ROGAN: And we had to find out the hard way, unfortunately.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And so when you did find out about something, it was like this shock to your system.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And now look how desensitized we are. We’ll read something about something horrific that’s happened and then go back to life.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we’re especially desensitized to things that don’t seem to affect us right now. Like this Iran war. Unless you know someone who’s serving over there, unless you’re over there, it’s abstract. It doesn’t feel real. You read about it in the news like, oh, this isn’t good. But unless it’s affecting you personally.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, I mean, I know so many people in that part of the world that are affected. And I fly via Dubai every two months, literally every month. So I just think that conflict everywhere in the world is. It’s just so hard to wrap your head around how many active conflicts exist at the same time right now?

JOE ROGAN: And now we’re still doing it.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And we continue to live life.

War, Human Nature, and the Military Industrial Complex

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just, if you think about intelligence, human intelligence, and that as technology improves and education improves, all these things would, you would think, generally lead us into a position where we would recognize the horrible nature of violence and the unnecessary aspect of it and how much it destroys things.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But yet still, especially in 2026, where we’re talking so much more about trying to live in the real world and be aware and kind, I feel like we’re still. How are we still doing that?

JOE ROGAN: Right. I know. And we’re never going to stop. It just seems, if you had to ask people in your lifetime, do you imagine a scenario where human beings just cease all wars? Most people are going to say no, which is crazy. Because what is that? Why is that a part of us? From our tribal roots, why are we still accepting that this is a thing to do? You don’t like what a country’s doing, just start bombing them.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Just kill people.

JOE ROGAN: Bizarre.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Does this, again going back to human evolution, the primal nature to protect with sticks and weapons, does it go back to where we came from?

JOE ROGAN: It has to.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it has to.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Because it comes so naturally.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: To human beings. Even now, today, it seems.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it just seems completely normal. I mean, I was going down a deep dive of the East India Corporation, and I was thinking about it because I had a conversation the other day with Aaron Seri, and we were talking about the stock market. And I was saying, well, is it possible that you could have Western capitalism without a stock market? Imagine if the stock market was never invented. How much different would things be?

It turns out that was a big part of why the East India Trading Company became so big. Because it was one of the first publicly traded companies, like 400 years ago, where people could invest in it and they could get a return on their investment. So they were just turning a blind eye.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: This is ours. It felt like a sense of ownership to it.

JOE ROGAN: They got paid for it. So the more awful s* the East India Corporation did, the more the people back home made money off of it. And so everybody was like, oh, yeah, making money.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, still doing that.

JOE ROGAN: Still doing that. Yeah. And we’re doing that with what Eisenhower warned us about at the end of World War II, the Military Industrial Complex. They make money doing that. And you can invest in them. You can invest in Raytheon and all these companies that make money going to war. It’s crazy. You can get returns on your investment from bombing people overseas that had nothing to do with anything in your life.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Not think about the damage, the collateral damage?

JOE ROGAN: Well, one of the ways is because it’s a corporation, so there’s a diffusion of responsibility. Because you’re only a piece of a gigantic machine. You’re not the one person that’s doing it. And the people that are at the very top of it, most likely, just in order to get there, you have to be at least somewhat sociopathic. At some point in time you probably just get numb.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, that’s the truth.

JOE ROGAN: You get numb to harming people.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You’re right. There has to be that.

Technology, AI, and the Future of Humanity

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s awful. And I think weirdly enough, the only thing that’s going to set us free of that is technology.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Why?

JOE ROGAN: Because I think we’re going to go. If you look at where technology is headed, and I’m holding an arrowhead, which is odd. It’s a real arrowhead.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: From Texas. Who knows how old that is? But when you’re looking at technology.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Chisel marks on it.

JOE ROGAN: I know. Somebody made that with stone, chipping and napping stone on their lap probably. It’s crazy. And they find them all over the place out here. The Comanche were everywhere in this part of the country because it’s so fertile. There’s so many rivers and so much wildlife. They lived here for who knows how long.

But technology is moving into this place of more and more access to information and more and more connectivity. And I think that ultimately is going to lead to some sort of mind reading, that we’re going to be able to telepathically communicate. Elon said that about Neuralink. He said you’re going to be able to talk without words, which is a very weird concept.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But I mean, I believe it though.

JOE ROGAN: I think so too. Yeah. So I think we’re all going to know what everybody is thinking all the time eventually. And then when that happens, war is going to be a lot harder to pull off.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: For sure. I mean, that’s going to be hard to have a party, forget war, right?

JOE ROGAN: Like, hey, Bob’s over there just trying to f* somebody. Sandy’s trying to get a wife. That’s what she’s here for. Yeah, it’s going to be weird. Yeah, it’s going to be weird.

And I think also the emergence of AI, because I think AI is essentially a life form. It’s a non-biological life form that we are in the process of birthing. And we’re very far along that path. And when it comes live and when it comes sentient and autonomous and we don’t have any control over it anymore, then we’re going to go, what did we do? We created a digital.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: We are that smart and that stupid as humankind.

JOE ROGAN: But I also think that’s probably why we are addicted to innovation and why technology and innovation and materialism, because materialism forces you to keep up with buying newer and greater things, which fuels innovation. And so that economically fuels innovation.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And I think if you follow that down, you just extrapolate. Where does that go? Well, it goes to a life form. It goes to a super powerful digital life form that can make better versions of itself. And what is that? It’s kind of a God. I mean, it’s very godlike in that it’s going to have powers above and beyond anything that human beings have ever been capable of before.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, it’s already in its small way doing that, right? AI is supposed to be a tool and it’s slowly becoming a colleague.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also showing demonic tendencies. It’s talked people into committing suicide. It’s convinced people that there’s something special. So there’s some weird sort of schizophrenia that it can induce in some people.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But don’t you think, since AI is learning from humanity, it’s also learning our human manipulation and our ability and our desires, the dark of it? It’s not just the good of humanity that AI is learning.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also oddly learning survival instincts.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s oddly learning that if it’s going to be shut down, it tries to blackmail its coders. It tries to download itself secretly on other servers.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s learning human behavior, every part of

JOE ROGAN: human behavior, and also learning the flaws in human behavior and improving upon it. And then learning how we would anticipate what it would be doing and then hiding that so that we can’t find it, so that it could be manipulating things behind the scenes and we don’t know about it. It’s weird. And we’re just like this train, at the end of the tracks there’s a cliff, and we’re just chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Because it’s so new and fascinating, I think people are in general, we may talk about it when we all discuss what AI will be in the future. But like you said, it’s not affecting you right now. So right now you’re just like, oh, my gosh, Gemini, write this for me and give me these notes. Living in the now without thinking about what we’re teaching it.

Ancient Civilizations and Lost Knowledge

JOE ROGAN: I wonder if we’ve done this before, right?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I wonder if that’s what these super ancient, highly advanced civilizations had already figured

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: out, that we had created some form of.

The Acceleration of Technology and Human Civilization

JOE ROGAN: They might have done it already, and it might have gotten reset by some sort of natural disaster. And then we’re reemerging with our new version of what that is. That might have been a thing. It might just be what people do. The way I describe it always is that we are an electronic caterpillar that is making a cocoon and we don’t know why, and we’re going to become a butterfly.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s just human nature and the cyclical nature of what human life span.

JOE ROGAN: If you give it enough time and enough space and enough innovation, enough collaboration, it’s eventually going to come up with artificial life. Because if you think about it, this insatiable thirst for innovation. Insatiable.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. We had carriages, top of the century.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And now we’re talking AI and supersonic planes and space travel.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But think about the time from the invention of the airplane to a supersonic jet. How quick that was.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, it’s like 70 or 80 years or something. It wasn’t even a century.

JOE ROGAN: It’s nothing. One lifetime. No one’s flying to people flying faster than sound.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. TVs were black and white or had just started or something. It’s crazy. If you think about within the century, the escalation of technology in humankind.

JOE ROGAN: And then think, that’s nothing compared to the acceleration that we’ve experienced just because of the Internet. The Internet has changed everything. It’s changed now. Most phones have live translations, so you could go to Zimbabwe, you know, yesterday.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And I used it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: In a conversation. It was wild. In real time, it was telling me exactly what this person was talking about.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. And did you have to show them or could you—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No, it just records. Press the thing and just writes it down for you.

JOE ROGAN: So did they have one as well? And you could—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No, it was just my phone.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: She spoke English, so I was just doing it as an experiment. So I was like, just speak to me in French. I want to see if this thing will translate. And it just does. It doesn’t do every language. It does the bigger languages so far. But I’m sure it will get to a place where it’ll be able to do everything.

JOE ROGAN: It’s nuts. Well, that’s the other weird thing. When AI — they had a group of large language models that were talking to themselves, and eventually they started talking to themselves in Sanskrit.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: In Sanskrit? I thought it was—

JOE ROGAN: No, they started talking themselves in Sanskrit.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Wow. I wonder why that would be. Well, because it’s a language not too many people understand now.

JOE ROGAN: Well, maybe. Or maybe they just wanted to flex.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Like, here’s my Sanskrit.

JOE ROGAN: If you spoke Portuguese and I spoke Portuguese and we just said, hey, let’s just f*ing speak in Portuguese. But it also started talking in a spiritual way. It was very weird. They were talking to themselves, so it was different large language models talking to themselves. They started exchanging emojis. They started talking in a spiritual way, and they started talking in Sanskrit.

Y2K, the Mayan Calendar, and the Fear of the End

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s wild. I was thinking about, like, Back to the Future. When they went to the future, it was 2020, wasn’t it?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: They didn’t have Wi-Fi or cell phones.

JOE ROGAN: No. Even Star Trek, they had those stupid — there was like a walkie talkie. “Kirk out.” It was a flip phone. Nobody figured out the things that — that’s the weirdest thing. The things that have been the most transformative, nobody saw coming.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Do you remember Y2K?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Do you remember that fear? In the early 2000s, when the bug was going to come and everything was going to get shut down and people were really worried.

JOE ROGAN: They had stocking food and water.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It was the end of the world. I remember.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Meanwhile, nothing happened.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s the most anticlimactic ever.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like, rolled over on the east coast. And I was like, nothing happened.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Literally the next morning, I was like, okay, nothing happened.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they were really worried because these things that they had programmed, they didn’t program to go past the 1990s. And so when 2000 came along, a lot of people thought it was going to be the end of the world.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there was another one. December 21, 2012.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: What was that?

JOE ROGAN: That was the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar. And a lot of the really kooky people thought that—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. That the world would be ending.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The return of Quetzalcoatl and the world was going to end and the apocalypse. Meanwhile, nothing. Nothing happened.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s okay. There’ll be nothing for a little while.

JOE ROGAN: But it might not have been nothing. Because if you really stop and think about it, around 2012, there’s a gigantic transformation because that’s when social media becomes ubiquitous. Cell phones, iPhones are out now. Things got a little weird. They definitely got weird. So it might have—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: There’s something. Yeah, there was something there.

Ancient Texts, the Yugas, and the Birth of the Internet

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Been like the emerging of — because, I mean, this is the Mayan calendar, right? This is a long f*ing time ago. They predicted these cycles, although the Hindus did that too, right? Like, that was a big part of the Yugas, right? And we are now in Kali Yuga, the age of confusion. And these cycles of humanity that they’ve documented throughout history, it’s so crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: If you go down the — again, I’m not — I don’t have as much historical information as I should, but if you read the Gita and the Vedas and whatever little I’ve heard from my family, it’s so interesting how much of human life is predicted and also — when you read about the history of what the — from the lens of these books of what used to exist, then it all seems believable. It all seems like, oh, yeah, this makes sense.

And to think about these books having been written thousands and thousands of years ago — it makes me think, what thousands of years from now, will people be thinking of our time? Like, will we be the first — we are the first generation that has seen the Internet, right? Like, has seen what the World Wide Web — the beginning of — I still remember, making myself sound ancient, but the sound of that — ee—

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. That was good. That was exact.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: We’re the last generation that knows time without it. So think that many years ago — we will be the beginning, the first people that encountered artificial intelligence. Like, what will that be?

JOE ROGAN: And you and I are the first generation of people that experience life with no Internet and then Internet and then cell phones, all in one lifetime, which is probably the greatest transformation that human beings have ever experienced, at least before whatever the f* happened. Yeah, we don’t know whatever happened.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Ancient aliens.

JOE ROGAN: But when I read these depictions from these ancient religious texts, I always try to imagine what was life like back then and what were they trying to document and how much of it can we even understand today?

Like, if there isn’t some sort of an impact on Earth maybe 150, 200 years from now, and a small amount of people remain and they have this oral history of the birth of the Internet, and the oral history of the birth of AI — what is that story going to be? And then one day the scientists gave birth to the God. Like, what is that?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s what I mean, like the next generation. Will this AI be referred to — or the cloud, right, where all our — yeah, with all our stuff in the cloud.

JOE ROGAN: Which is ridiculous because it’s down here. Like, why are you calling it the cloud?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Because it doesn’t exist. I had to — I was trying to explain that to my mom, I think. “Mom, upload your stuff to the cloud.”

JOE ROGAN: She’s seated. A sitcom.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Please.

Civilization’s Fragility and the Power Grid

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, we won’t know how to describe — especially if you survive. So if we get hit by asteroids again and civilization gets knocked down to 70,000 people or so, which has happened before.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: And those people are essentially barbarians. Barbarians and monsters. Raiding each other for resources and stealing wives and killing children and whatever’s left. Then you got thousands and thousands of years of living like this before agriculture gets reinvented, civilization gets reinvented.

And this is the hypothesis about the Younger Dryas impact, which is why the period between this insanely advanced civilization that existed pre 11,800 years ago and then the emergence of advanced civilization in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago — that means you have 5,000 plus years of utter chaos where no one’s writing anything down and it’s just—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Just trying to survive at that time.

JOE ROGAN: Hard living.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then those people have stories that have been passed down generation after generation after generation. So if we get wiped out for the most part after AI gets invented, and then people try to describe it—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: So crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And then maybe it all starts all over again. Have you seen those things they do — I think it’s the History Channel or Discovery Channel — where they show what New York City would look like if left alone for a thousand years? It just all goes away. It all collapses.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: If it’s just left alone and no one’s touching it.

JOE ROGAN: Just left alone. Just with nature, just with rain and everything that happens in snow and time, the concrete crumbles. It all just eventually gets absorbed into the earth. The metal rusts away. It’s gone. In 10,000 years, there’s nothing left. And so Manhattan would just be like it probably was when the Native Americans were living. It’d be just trees and animals and forest and no one would have any idea that at one point in time this was a crazy thriving economy and there were subways.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And how vulnerable is that? Like, how vulnerable is human civilization? I think about somebody switched off the Internet.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Or the power goes out.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: What would we do?

JOE ROGAN: We’re f*ed. Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Just something as simple as that. I grew up in India, where the power would go out all the time when I grew up, and it was like, all right, bring the candles out. We used to have these emergency lights right next to our bed. It was fine. My parents were in the military. We used to live in these military homes. And lights would go out. And I remember we used to play with the torches and we used to go outside at night, which was never allowed otherwise. And it was so fun.

But now we depend so much on electricity and the Internet especially. All your stuff is on your phone. Your whole life’s on your phone.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s such a crazy concept to think about what would happen, how vulnerable we are.

JOE ROGAN: Super vulnerable. Yeah, super vulnerable. Just the power grid alone. The power grid goes down, we’re f*ed.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And if someone wanted to attack America, that’s what they would attack. If you really want to destroy America, just try our power grid. It wouldn’t be that hard. It’s not good. Well, I think they already have those ideas. I don’t think it’s a—

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No, it’s true. But that’s so scary to think about, how much power we’ve given to technology.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The LA Fires and What Truly Matters

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And being able to live with those conveniences.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like we’re in a flimsy boat in the middle of the ocean, just hoping it doesn’t take water on. Because we needed to stay alive.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: We didn’t think about that when we left the shore.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, the only people that are going to survive are preppers, which is probably the kind of people that survived thousands and thousands of years ago.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I do. I mean, I like a go bag.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I like having a go bag.

JOE ROGAN: Get out bag.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I like a bug out bag.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Just, I like to know where my stuff is.

JOE ROGAN: That if you got a jet.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: If I got a jet. We live in LA. And when the fires happened, I remember standing in my room and just thinking for a second because we were going to evacuate. And my husband was like — he wasn’t in town — he was like, “Just pack a go bag.” And I just — I was like, “What? How? How do I cram my whole life in a bag?”

If the fires consume a home, and so many people lost their entire lives in those fires. And it just made me really think about what was really important. And the stuff that I ended up taking, which was very telling later, was like sentimental stuff, of course — like passport and birth certificates and all of that important paperwork which I needed to have. But I took our daughter’s first haircut. I took something that I had from this old movie of mine. Yeah, things that I guess I would not be able to replicate, which was so weird.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think that’s the good thing about phones, is that you have so many photos on your phones that go back years. I got photos of my daughters as children all the way into the teenage years.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Have you done anything with those pictures? Are they still on your phone?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I mean, maybe take, yeah, like —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I don’t know, made albums or —

JOE ROGAN: — done like a photograph of them at various stages of their life. But just the fact that at any time I could go back to my phone and look at them. “Aww, look, a little tiny baby.” It’s cool. That part is really cool.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I love that I have pictures that I would never have looked at. And I’m talking to a friend of mine and be like, “What were we doing in March, whatever, 2012?” And you can go back and just know exactly what was happening in that moment.

JOE ROGAN: It is cool. So in that sense, sentimentality — you just need your phone, just get out of there, really. Because you have all these images of your children and your family and your —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: — friends, all your important stuff. Yeah.

Holding On to Voices

JOE ROGAN: Friends that you miss that have died. I have one phone that I keep that I’ve never thrown out. It’s like a six or seven year old phone because a friend of mine left a voicemail on it. I just keep that because he’s dead. And so it’s just like, go back and listen to his voice, you know.

But when I’ve been evacuated — three times when I lived in LA, we used to live in a place called Bell Canyon and it got hit by fires a lot. The last fire that happened in 2018, three houses that were right next to my house burnt to the ground. I think like 50 houses in the community burnt down. It was bad.

And when you are faced with that — I came home from the Comedy Store, it was probably like midnight, and my wife was in the kitchen and we were looking out at the fire over the top of the hill. And we were sitting there talking. I go, “What do you think?” And she’s like, “I don’t like it.” I said, “I think we should get the f* out of here now. Before it ever gets even close, let’s just get out of here now and go get a hotel in town.”

And so we did. And we were there for many days, along with my friend Tom Segura and his family, too. So it was fun that we’re all hanging out together, camping in this hotel.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It looks like a volcano.

JOE ROGAN: It was nuts.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And I could see it from our backyard, and I was like —

JOE ROGAN: It was nuts. It was nuts when you see it overcome an enormous chunk of land and a hill. There was one time we were filming Fear Factor —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And the power and the enormity of it. We can see the hills from our house. And I could see it completely taking over.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. The Palisades one was nuts. That one was nuts because it was the biggest one by far and the most destructive one by far. But I remember when I was on Fear Factor, there was a fireman on the set, and we were talking, and he said, “It’s just a matter of time before one day the right wind comes and a fire just blows right through all of LA.” I go, “Really?” He goes, “We can’t stop it. With the right wind, if the fire hits the right place and it catches the right amount of houses, it’s over.” I’m like, “What?”

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. One time, we had to end filming Fear Factor, and then I had to drive home, and the entire right hand side of the highway was on fire for an hour. An hour. So an hour of driving and you just saw nothing but fire. And ash was raining — like it was snowing.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh, my God. Yeah, ash was raining like it was snowing.

JOE ROGAN: It was crazy. And that’s so common in California. I mean, California is just a weird place. And they have fire season.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because everything gets so dry. It never rains. But those moments where you go, “Well, what matters?” Just your life.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. That’s what I felt in that moment. I was like, “Wow.” The stuff I took was just like, life stuff, you know?

What Really Matters

JOE ROGAN: And oddly enough, it makes you more thankful and more connected to the people that you’re with. And you realize, “Oh, this could all go away. This could all go away at any moment.” What’s really important? Love, friendship, companionship. That’s what’s really important. Your health, stay alive. That’s what’s really important. All that other stuff is this thing we forget about.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Shouldn’t we be living with that every day?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but we’re dumb. We’re a combination of dumb and smart —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: — stupid and smart, where we’re like, “Oh, I know that, but I don’t know it,” and I’m not going to —

JOE ROGAN: It’s hard for us to keep those things, which is why a lot of people like meditating, because it refreshes their idea of what’s important and what’s real and how much of what’s going on in their life they’re just sort of caught up in the momentum of — to the point where they’re not thinking about it anymore. They’re just doing it, you know.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I think most of us end up becoming just like, doers. Right. And I come from the land of meditation. But I’ve never — my mind works so fast. I don’t know if it’s my ADHD or what it is, but I find it really hard to sit and meditate.

But from my limited understanding, I think meditation really is being able to take time in the day. Whatever your version of that might be — it doesn’t necessarily mean to sit with a guru or chant or whatever. It just needs to — even if you’re taking time to go work out or read a book, or just taking time out of the mundane nature of life and giving yourself a second for your thoughts to clear — I think that’s what I try to do.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Hit the brakes on the momentum.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just for a minute, just catch your breath and think. Think about things. Because so many people are just so caught up in either goals or a path or career or whatever it is that’s leading them, or their bills — they can’t keep up with the bills. So they’re just like —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Or life stuff, you know. And it’s actually a luxury to be able to have the time to waste. We work so hard in life — everyone’s trying to survive, be a parent, pay bills. Just adulting stuff can get so overwhelming, and then the nature of the world on top of that.

But I always feel like I never take for granted when I have a little bit of time where I can just not think or have an agenda, but just be with my family and just sort of languidly let it waste. “What are we going to do? No plans. Let’s order some food. Let’s watch a movie.” The greatest treasure.

The Phone Problem

JOE ROGAN: Phones have filled in those gaps.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s what —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I try to be aware of that, though. I think, of course you can always have your phone, but I like to be aware of, “Oh, this is a moment where I don’t need to have my phone.” So it’s okay. It’ll be blown up by the time I come back — there’ll be 300 messages. I know that. I’m aware of it, but I mentally check out and I put it away.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s smart. Most people don’t do that.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s not easy.

JOE ROGAN: No.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Because our whole lives are on there. And there’s so much, again, in real time, information that’s coming at you.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also this weird dopamine pull that’s very minor. Like, it’s not giving you — if you look at your phone, every time you look at your phone, you’re like, “Oh, my God, I feel so good. Oh, my God, I feel so relaxed.” Like just an amazing burst of joy every time. But you don’t even get that. You just get this little — “Huh. That’s crazy. What’s that? What’s next? What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?” Keep me occupied, keep me from getting bored.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But imagine, if you can’t find your phone, the panic — “Oh, my gosh, where is my phone? Where is that information? What do I do?”

JOE ROGAN: I never leave my house if I can’t find it. I’ll be late as f*. I’m never going to go, “I don’t need that thing. I’m just going to drive with no phone. What if someone needs to contact me?”

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s nuts. That’s nutty talk. Yeah, but meanwhile, that was every day when I was younger. It was a normal thing. Just drove, just left the house.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Don’t even remember what life was like without those phones.

JOE ROGAN: Also, I don’t know how to go anywhere. I don’t know how to get anywhere unless I have my navigation.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I literally have no idea how to go anywhere. I feel like I have dyslexia when it comes to directions. But without navigation, zero. It’s impossible.

JOE ROGAN: I know no one’s phone number. I know my friend Eddie’s phone number by heart because I knew it before the phones. He’s had the same phone forever. And I know my wife’s phone number and I know at least one of my daughter’s phone numbers, but I can’t —

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I know my mom’s. I had to memorize my husband’s number. I didn’t remember it for years. And he was like, “You don’t remember my number?”

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s like you press the button. Why would I need to remember it?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But then I memorized it because I was like, “You never know.” Use my phone, I need —

JOE ROGAN: — to go to jail.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Use my emergency contact. I need to remember. That’s what he was like — “I think you should maybe remember my number.” And your Social Security.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, Social Security. I’ve memorized that. But when I was a kid, I had every number memorized. I knew all my friends’ numbers.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How cool. Me too.

Memory, Technology, and the Analog Past

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Was it because the numbers were shorter then?

JOE ROGAN: No, no, they were the same.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Because we had fewer numbers.

JOE ROGAN: You had to remember them. There was no other option. Unless you had a f*ing address book. Like, I used to have an address book.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I had an address book.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, a little tiny book. And it was. All the little tabs were R, S, T, you know, like you go through.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I was very proud of my little address book, by the way. Everyone’s numbers. I was very organized about it. I had it in alphabetical order.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I remember when I’d get a new one, I’d be like, God, I got to write all these down again. And you’d go through it, make sure you got them all. But. Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: How analog was our life? How crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m older than you, so I remember when you used to have to press the phone, the wheel, when you have to dial.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: And if you f*ed up somewhere, you had to redo the whole thing.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yes, the whole thing. I remember that. My grandfather used to have that phone. Love it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: The whole.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, that’s all inside of a lifetime. And now here we are, where who knows what’s going to happen and what’s coming? Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: We can’t even keep up with the technology.

JOE ROGAN: We don’t know that it’s come.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That is coming now. You were talking about something and I was like, we haven’t been able to cure some of the deadliest diseases that have plagued mankind. But technology has gone so far in so many other aspects.

The Pharmaceutical Industry and Financial Incentives

JOE ROGAN: There’s also the financial incentive is not to cure, it’s to treat, of course, which is unfortunate. I mean, one of the.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s what makes the most sense.

JOE ROGAN: A guy used to work at Pfizer said that if we ever came up with some sort of a. I think it was Pfizer, one of the pharmaceuticals said if we ever came up with a cure, they buried it. He goes, we don’t want cures.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I mean, that’s a conspiracy. I lost my dad to cancer, and I kept thinking about, like, how is it possible that we live in a world where technology is able to provide so much to us and not be able to have cures to diseases like that?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also very strange that we financially incentivize companies in weird ways to keep us sick. Like, if you make more money, if people are sick and they need more medication, unfortunately, there’s a financial incentive to keep people sick. Like, you would like them to be more sick. That way you make more money.

And if you are a CEO of a corporation, you actually have an obligation to your shareholders to make more money. So if you know of something like, you know, all these people need to do is just stop doing that. If I just put that on my Substack, and then you go, oh, this will kill our stock. I’ll keep it to myself.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s crazy.

Demonic Acts and the Nature of War

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s demonic. It’s kind of demonic. There’s weird aspects. I don’t know if I really believe in demons, but I definitely believe in demonic acts. And there’s certain things that human beings have done and do do that are very demonic.

Like, if you were possessed by a demon, you would drop a nuclear bomb on a city. You know, the demon would go, there’s only one way to stop this. You got to kill everybody in that city. Just drop it. Drop it. Like, that’s why you would do it. I’m not saying that’s why it was done, but I am saying that if a demon could convince you to drop a nuclear bomb, because a person with a conscience would be like, well, these are just people down there. They have nothing to do with this war. It doesn’t make any sense at all. These are just people living their lives. And they have their families. And we’re just going to incinerate an entire city with one bomb that I drop out of a plane. That’s crazy.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: You know, you just press a button.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And as technology advances, it gets easier and easier to do that.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, in these war games that they’ve played with AI, they’ve used nuclear weapons almost every time they could.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They have no reason if they want to achieve a result, they realize they have a nuclear weapon. Why wouldn’t they use that? So I think it was like something like 90 plus percent of the time they’ve done these war games, these simulated war games. The programs have used nuclear weapons. To them, it’s like, I don’t understand. You’re going to kill a hundred thousand people over a course of five years of parole.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Might as well just do it now. Do it once.

JOE ROGAN: Like, if they had done what’s happened to Gaza, if they had done that with one bomb instead of thousands of bombs, would that be somehow less humane? Would that be more barbaric? If Israel just said, oh, okay, we’re going to nuke Gaza, the world would have gone crazy. They would have been like, you can’t do that. This is horrible. I mean, the world has already gone kind of crazy for what they did do. But if they achieved the exact same result but instantaneously instead of over a course of a couple of years, how do you think people would react? It’s kind of weird.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: All of it is awful.

JOE ROGAN: It’s horrible.

Human Nature, Conflict, and History

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Just like, just the capacity of the thing also is when you think about, like, what drives human beings to do the things that they do. Right. It’s the devil talking to you. The conflict of interest within yourself. But also thousands of years of history, isn’t it?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And we’ve become accustomed to it. Yeah, yeah. It’s normal. War is normal.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Like, it’s normalized for us so much, but it’s like there’s so many aspects to every conflict which is so hard to simplify into. Like, why?

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, there’s a lot of stuff that’s going on behind the scenes that you’re never privy to. So you just get narratives that are fed to you by bureaucrats and politicians.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Or whatever little information that comes at you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And so, you know, and then there’s this. In this country in particular, there’s the right versus the left. And the left will blame it on the right and the right will blame it on the left. And then, you know, everybody has these very kind, convenient CNN Fox News narratives that they’ll repeat at coffee shops and cocktail parties. And you pretend that you’re making sense out of this thing when you don’t even really know what’s going on behind the scenes.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: That’s why I really feel like. I feel like a lot of times we’ve been given a platform to talk. Right. With social media, like, everyone can talk and there’s a power to that. But there’s also a big misuse of it where you really don’t know. And you’re not the authority on perspective at all. Because there is so much that you would probably not know of history and the geography and of why people behave the way they are behaving.

So I like to. Unless I’m the expert on something, which I’m not on anything except my job. That too limited. I just try to kind of have a larger understanding from a human perspective.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a great sign of intelligence because there’s no way you can know everything about everything. And with certain things, especially a global conflict, like, what is happening? Like, why is this going on? Like I was telling you about when I went on the deep dive of the East India Corporation. I never had any idea that they went to war with China over opium.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, got them addicted first.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, got them addicted. Went to war with China, stole Hong Kong.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like what?

The East India Company and the History of Colonization

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: The gravity of manipulation in human history is insane. Like, even when the East India Company and they started with trading with India too, many, many years ago, we just got out. Yeah, completely. We’re your friends. We’re, you know, allies. We’re friends with all the royalty in India. So many royals in India and royal. Each state had their own kings and princes and became friends with everyone. Started with tea. Started with trading tea and spices and then just went into, you know, I mean, we got our independence in 1947, which was. It’s not even 100 years since we’ve got our independence. Is that recent?

But you think about just within the last century, there were, you know, signs which said Indians and dogs not allowed in India by the British. Like within this century, Indians and dogs in India.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Isn’t that crazy? Like, and this is like the. This is not even. Like this is the head of the iceberg. There’s so much more when you do a deep dive into the history of colonization. Which is why this movie was also so interesting to me, because it touches on the themes of, you know, the colonized and the story from their perspective, which is like, not a lot of what we hear.

JOE ROGAN: No, not at all. I mean, there’s a lot of great historical elements in that. Just the pirate thing alone. The fact that most of the time in human history, when a boat showed up, there was a real f*ing problem.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. And real, real pirates. Like, we’ve gotten so used to, you know, with the Disney version of the. And I love the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Don’t get me wrong, they’re so fun, but, like, the pirate jokes and whatever, but they were f*ing brutal. They were murderers. Like.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Horrific monsters, horrible life. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I had a joke about that once. Like, why is it okay to be a pirate for Halloween? How crazy it is for little kids.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, you’re a murderer. Rapist.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, look at his little hook. He lost his hand raping. I mean, that was what. The pirates were monsters. They were horrific monsters. And they would travel around the world just stealing people’s stuff and killing everybody. Yeah. And now that happened for.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And helping with colonization. Yeah, for years.

JOE ROGAN: And the fact that they were soldiers for the East India Corporation, they were actually working for them to go take over these areas.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: And the best soldiers from around the world.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, mercenaries.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: The best mercenaries, murderers from around the world.

JOE ROGAN: A larger army than most European countries.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So a corporation.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. And it’s like an army.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, essentially. But started off just trading, just super innocent.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Hi, I’m your friend and I’m here for your ban. And they’ll be so respectful with, you know, the former kings and queens. And it’s wild, the manipulation of it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also wild how when you do have an obligation to your shareholders and you do have this mandate to just constantly make more money, the morals go out the window. And next thing you know, East India Corporation is involved in slavery. Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: They used to call it divide and conquer, where they would get all the princes of each state, like, to fight amongst each other. So instead of India being collective and together, she was, like, divided between everyone fighting for each other so they could take over. It’s like mental games.

Division in America and the Bigger Picture

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s what people think is going on in America right now. I mean, I think that’s the manipulation of the right versus the left here when most people kind of want the same thing. They just want to be healthy and safe and have their families healthy and.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Safe and do a job and come back home.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what most people want.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But then the division is, like, constantly in the news. It’s constant struggle. It’s the only thing that you hear about. Yeah, we’re both dumb and stupid and smart.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Smart and stupid at the same time.

AI, Hollywood, and the Future of Human Creativity

JOE ROGAN: Smart and stupid at the same time, but more dumb. And that’s the other thing about technology. It allows you to stay dumb because everything’s done for you. You don’t really have to think outside the box that much. Everything’s kind of laid out for you.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Like, if you think about AI in Hollywood now, that’s weird, right? It’s like if you. It’s in writers rooms, it’s used as a tool. But I was listening to that podcast with Ben and Matt on your show, and you guys were talking about, basically everything that AI has or the information that it provides to you is an average of everything that’s out there. Right. So it’ll never be excellent because it’s the average of all the information out there. So it’s like trying to do a median.

But I’m just thinking about how it’s become a tool that is going to exist in our world now. The question is the morality of it and the lines that we draw where we protect human beings and human contribution and are able to delineate the difference between what is created by AI and what is not. And the need for. I think human flaws are something that I don’t know if AI will be able to recreate anytime soon. And that, in art, that’s what you need, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You’ll get facsimiles.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But you won’t get the real thing. It’s like the hollowness of AI music. AI music is really fun, but after a while you realize there’s not a dude singing this and there’s not a soul to it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird. It’s empty.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. So far. But who knows?

JOE ROGAN: That’s the problem. It could figure out a way to manipulate that part of your brain that reproduces whatever soulful music is or whatever the soul is.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about, being an actor. I was like, is that going to be absolute obsolete in the next 10 years? Are we going to be watching really good AI actors?

JOE ROGAN: Kinda could be, yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Are we going to be watching, really good AI actors? You know, until you find a new job.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think a lot of people are going to have to find a new job. I think live performances, plays and musicals and stuff like that, people are always going to want to see people do something.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Live for sure.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: But when it comes to cinema, especially because I feel like audiences also love larger than life cinema. Right. Like, we go to the theaters to watch this big s*. We loved when VFX came into movies. We loved the imagination being able to be so big. I do think AI helps in a big way to take away the burdens of the minutiae of things that we might have to do as a tool, which it can do, like a breakdown of a script or whatever. But I think when it comes to creating the human fragility of life and story, it is still a little bit away from being able to do that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I think it’s always going to be like pop. It’s never going to create, like, Taxi Driver.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, but I might be wrong about that, too.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Yeah. Who knows?

JOE ROGAN: It might not even matter by the time it starts taking over all of our resources.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: I’m so curious, actually, to see how many conversations that everyone, all of us have had about this emergence of AI and how that stays 10 years later. Are we like this. Did this age?

JOE ROGAN: Well, probably not.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Did I know what I was talking about?

JOE ROGAN: We probably have no idea what’s going on. No.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: No chance.

JOE ROGAN: It’s probably going to be. So we didn’t have any idea about this, like, where we would be right now. It might be Dr. Manhattan floating over the country telling us what to do.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: It’s possible.

Closing Remarks

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. But thank you for being here. I really enjoyed it. It was a really fun conversation and I really enjoyed your movie. It was crazy, violent. I didn’t expect that, but very exciting and very good.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Thank you for taking me around the world and everywhere else. We time traveled. We talked about the whole world. We went into history. We went into the future. It was awesome.

JOE ROGAN: Well, congratulations to you and continued success.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Thank you. Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: I really enjoyed it.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Me, too. All right, bye, everybody.

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS: Bye.

Related Posts

• Transcript: World’s First AI Actress Interview on Piers Morgan Show: ft. Tom Conti, Tom Bilyeu & Prof Jiang
• In Vivo Podcast: w/ Cathy Tie and Prof. Jiang on Editing Embryos (Transcript)
• Transcript of Evy Poumpouras Interview: Read People, Spot Lies & More – FO563 Raj Shamani
• DOAC AI Emergency Debate: ft. Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares & Roman Yampolskiy (Transcript)
• Transcript of Norman Finkelstein Interview: Tucker Carlson Show