Transcript: Chris Williamson on Joe Rogan Podcast #2418

Jamie, I could send you a video of it because I sent Chris a video. It’s, you know, it’s just like, how much attention do you need, lady? Okay, so stop.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sky News Australia refers to her as a Swedish doom goblin.

JOE ROGAN: Sky News is the one that’s weirdly pro Republican American politics. Super right wing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Super right wing.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like who’s funding that? There’s no way that there’s that much of an appetite in Australia for American politics. So that’s what it looks like. That’s disgusting. I was there this summer. It’s f*ing beautiful. It’s so. Venice is so gorgeous and so ancient and so interesting.

And to have this self important twat pour a bunch of green dye into that water. You should go to jail for that. Like, you’re ruining this experience for thousands and thousands of people who don’t. Not just the ones who live in that amazing place, but the ones who get to visit.

I mean, someone figured out a way to make a whole city by shoving pylons into the ground. And they did it a long time ago. It’s all wood. The whole city is stacked up on wood. They take these wood poles, they shove them into the ground. It’s a specific type of wood that doesn’t rot. When it gets wet and waterlogged, it actually hardens. I forget what kind of wood it is. I watched this whole thing on it.

But I mean, it’s very stable. I mean, sometimes they get some flooding. Like one time we were there and like the lobby of this place was flooded. It does flood, but it’s also. It’s so f*ing beautiful. And the architecture is so amazing. It’s such a gorgeous place. And it just relaxes you like instantly when you’re there. Like, wow. I just want to have a espresso and eat some pasta and just summer.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

JOE ROGAN: And this f*ing dummy decides to just pour green dye. And how much green dye did you put in there? And what kind of an effect is that going to have on life?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So they claimed that it was environmentally safe. Rah, rah. I don’t know how environmentally safe anything of that green color can be, but yeah, what was it? 48 hour ban and $170 fine.

JOE ROGAN: That’s it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. I should. You should go to jail for a night.

The Problem with Inflammatory Rhetoric

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think about this a lot, man. In some ways I understand why the rhetoric gets more and more inflammatory. So if you care about an issue, if you really, really think that this issue is important and people don’t listen, you start to shout a bit louder, and then you shout a bit louder, and then you shout a bit louder.

JOE ROGAN: The British are coming.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The British are coming. You know who first said that?

JOE ROGAN: Wasn’t Paul Revere.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bonnie Blue.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s that?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She is the lady that slept with 1,057 men in a day.

JOE ROGAN: Oh poor lady.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, so people don’t listen. Do you ever see Don’t Look Up that movie on Netflix?

JOE ROGAN: Funny, by the way. I missed that joke because I didn’t—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Know Jamie got it.

JOE ROGAN: Who that was Jamie got it from over there. Even with a kind of proud that I can’t recognize her name, though. Honestly, I’ll take that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s probably a good sign. People don’t. So Don’t Look Up. That film with Leonardo DiCaprio a couple of years ago, you remember it was like an asteroid coming in?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a funny movie, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Kind of half funny, but kind of. It’s supposed to be a comment on the impending doom of climate change. And nobody’s listening, right?

Climate Change Science and Data

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They’re not correct. That’s the problem. Who are those two gentlemen that we had in recently? Jamie, the guy from MIT, and the other guy from. Was he from Yale or Stanford? Where was he from?

Anyway, these two brilliant scientists who have analyzed the data, and one of them was going over the actual understanding the equations that you would need to understand in order to really be able to calculate what is having an effect on the climate and what is how many different factors there are. And all of them working synergistically in some weird, unexplainable way.

And then the cold, hard reality of climate data over the past X amount of millions of years, where it’s always done this glaciation, and then the glaciers, they recede, and then you get higher ocean levels. It’s like constant. Every 12,500 plus years, it goes up and down and up and down. And it never stays static, ever. It’s never static. And the real fear is not global warming. The real fear is global cooling.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

JOE ROGAN: Global cooling kills everything. And we got that close at one point in history to having such a low oxygen level on this planet and such a low carbon dioxide level because there was no plant food, right, that these fing plants almost died. We almost lost all life on this planet. We’ve gone like a few degrees from that happening. This is. Glaciers are fing scary. Ice ages are scary.

When it gets warm, you just move. And I know that sucks if you’re living in a city of 20 million people, but it hasn’t happened yet and they’ve been talking about it forever. That fing stupid movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was wrong about everything. He should have to give back every fing penny he made from that movie. You were wrong about everything. You scared the shit out of everybody and you were 100% wrong.

The Problem with Activism Strategies

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of the problems I think people have is if you really care about something and you’re convinced whether your conviction is incorrect or not, you’re convinced by it. So what you do, you say a thing, people don’t listen, right? Say it a bit louder. People still don’t listen. Say it a bit louder. Again, people slant listening.

And the problem is it’s a misunderstanding about what compels and convinces other humans. What we think is if people aren’t listening, if I shout louder, they’re going to pay attention. What we don’t realize is that actually turns everybody off.

Because if you just see someone throwing soup over a Van Gogh painting, turning the canals of Venice green, gluing themselves to the M25 in London, and stopping people from being able to get to work, like it gets attention, but you’re not looking for attention, you’re looking for conviction. You’re trying to compel people to believe the thing that you believe. And I think that it does the opposite.

And I understand why it’s so seductive because you think making it’s cool to your own side to do something. Flaming sword wielding truth teller, I’m going to charge through and look at how cool it is. But making somebody feel stupid or embarrassed or inconvenienced or upset is a really bad way to change minds.

So I think if people really care about changing minds, they need to realize and assuming that they think that they’re correct, they need to realize that like intellectual chasm from where they are and where other people are. And you go, okay, I’m going to take you one step at a time.

So even if you were to accept that the science and all of the stuff that the climate change people believe in is accurate, I still think that the strategies that they’re using aren’t going to be effective because I think it turns more people off, right?

JOE ROGAN: And they’re scolding, they’re shrieking, scolding. And they’re not the type of people that you want to talk to, so you avoid them. Ho ho.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Looking dumb from unhumble. Looking dumb from unhumble. Yeah, it’s my British heritage. It doesn’t cause you to feel inclined to support them.

Climate Activism and Perverse Incentives

JOE ROGAN: The opposite. It causes you to want to burn tires. Yeah, I want to buy spray paint and f*ing hairspray. Just blow it by my car.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you heard of the Cassandra Complex? You know, this is f*ing brilliant, dude. So in ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra is given the gift of being able to see the future by Apollo. And then she rejects his advances, so he curses her and he says that for the rest of time, you’re still going to be able to see the future, but people aren’t going to believe you.

So she foresees the downfall of Troy. She warns everybody. People don’t listen. Troy burns anyway. And it’s basically being right, but early.

So Rachel Carson, she wrote that book, Silent Spring, 1962. It’s about DDT, environmental epidemics. She gets mocked by scientists, castigated by everybody. But her work led to the banning of DDT.

JOE ROGAN: What year was this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 1962.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Ignaz Semmelweis, like 1840s. He realizes that doctors are transmitting childbed fever from corpses to mothers because they’re not washing their hands. So he begs his colleagues to start adopting hand washing. And he gets mocked by academia. He dies in an asylum. He dies in an asylum. That’s how badly he’s treated. Germ theory of disease gets, a couple of decades later, gets proven.

Edward Snowden, who you’ve spoken to, like, some people saw him as a traitor. Some people saw him as a truth teller, but I think everybody had a bit of, really? Is that what’s going on? A few years later, it turns out, yep. The government is spying on you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, 100%.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And this Cassandra complex. So if somebody ever says, “I’m a Cassandra, I’m feeling like Cassandra today. I foresee this thing. You don’t, you’re not listening to me.” It’s a big deal. And the problem is the difference between somebody being a righteous Cassandra with the ability to see the future and just being a crazy person who’s being convinced by bad data or, like, perverse incentives, it’s very hard to work out which one you are.

The Real Environmental Impact

JOE ROGAN: Perverse incentives is the real word. Because here’s the thing, folks, we do have a horrible impact on the environment. It’s factual, it’s measurable. You can go see it. There’s many Third World countries that have rivers that are completely clogged with garbage and plastic. That’s real. If you’re not trying to stop that, but you’re railing about carbon, well, carbon is a weird thing because carbon’s essential to plant life.

There’s more green on Earth today than there was a hundred years ago, and that’s because of our carbon emissions. That is an inconvenient truth. All right, f* Al Gore. That’s an inconvenient truth. So carbon is a part of the equation. Is it good that we’re burning stuff and putting it in the atmosphere? No, I do not think it is. No, I’m not arguing that.

I’m saying that our impact on the environment that is tangible and disgusting is pollution. That’s the impact on the environment. And if you’re really thinking about our carbon footprint and carbon taxes and carbon incentives, you got to follow the money. Like, what is happening here?

Well, there’s a bunch of green initiatives, and those green initiatives get funding, and they get funding to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. And if you know anything about any sort of nonprofit, like someone just pulled up some, there’s a nonprofit about animals, and they just release what a f*ing scam it is. There’s so many of these nonprofits where the vast majority of the money is going to salaries. Like, the most of the money is going to salaries. And there’s a tiny fraction of that money that gets allocated to whatever that—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Cause is, which is why it justifies people who work for the organization to sustain the organization’s existence. 100%.

JOE ROGAN: That’s 100%. But there’s no data. Here’s the thing. All of their predictions, all of the climate change predictions are totally inaccurate. Every single one. By all the doomsayers. So you would think they would course correct. You would think they would say, okay, no one’s arguing that the particulates that get emitted into the atmosphere by coal plants are not terrible for everyone.

No one’s arguing that glyphosate is good for you. No one’s arguing that the poisons we’re putting in rivers and streams, no one’s arguing that’s good for you. The stuff that gets into groundwater, no one says that’s good. That’s our real problem. Our real problem is pollution. It’s f*ing terrible. There’s a real problem with waste. There’s a real problem with landfills. All that’s real.

This carbon thing is a weird one. It’s a weird one to concentrate on solely because it seems to have an effect on the atmosphere. It has an effect on the temperature of Earth, but not what they’re saying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you think of a perverse incentive other than people just want to keep their jobs? Is there something else?

Following the Money

JOE ROGAN: It’s people keeping their jobs. It’s righteousness. It’s virtue signaling. And it’s also the extraordinary amount of money that gets put into green initiatives. It also helps people campaign. When you’re campaigning, if you say “climate change is real, we will follow the science,” oh, thank God. You get my vote. That’s what happens. And these f*ing dumbasses just fall for it every time.

It’s not that it’s a real impending doom scenario. That’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. But what is real is humans’ impact on Earth. So you got to figure out why is this one thing, why are they concentrating so much on carbon when it’s not a measurable thing, it’s not a thing where you’re seeing this hugely detrimental effect by this one action that we have.

Well, because someone’s trying to make money, it’s it. No one’s doing it for your own good. There’s not a fing single person on earth that’s involved in any of these big causes that’s really concerned about us. No, they’re all making money. And they’re all, even if they’re not making money, other than their salary. If your salary is a million dollars a year to run a charity, maybe that charity is fing horseshit, you know, because if you make a million dollars a year, you’re rich as f*.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, the argument would be in order to get somebody of the standard that you need to run this charity at the level that it needs to be run at, you need to give a competitive salary.

JOE ROGAN: What an amazing job they’re doing where 95% of the money goes to overhead. What an amazing job you’ve done in having zero—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Please show me your efficiency plans.

JOE ROGAN: Zero progress in any of your air quotes “science” that you’re pointing to that’s showing these prediction models, all their prediction models are wrong and they always quote things that are wrong. Like storms are stronger, they’re more common. No, you’re just looking at a strong storm. If you look overall, there’s always been strong storms. They’re totally unpredictable.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you had Alex Epstein on? Do you know him? No, I don’t know the case. Have we had him on Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Interesting dude. He has like one of the most interesting stats that I learned from him was climate related deaths have decreased by 98% over the last century. So one of the things that people don’t consider when they look at the cost of energy and energy production is that you need to be able to protect.

More people are killed from heat than are killed from cold and you need to protect from heat by using energy. And if you’re going to produce cheap energy, some byproducts are going to be spat out into the atmosphere. But the impact of the creation of the energy is way more effective at increasing human longevity than the side effect of the energy being made. That makes sense.

JOE ROGAN: Totally rational. Yeah, it seems like that would make sense.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve had Richard Betts, director of the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the show, Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data. Like I’ve really tried to get a good balance on all of this stuff, but Alex’s position in that area, which is it’s a very luxury belief to hold to talk about how green we must be in the west when you have access to unlimited energy.

I think a billion people worldwide don’t have access to reliable electricity. Like half a billion people are still using wood and dung in order to be able to produce their electricity. That was the data that he showed me the last time we spoke. That means if you’ve got a baby that’s on a ventilator in a newborn baby that needs to be put on, that baby dies, that baby dies because that particular country does not have access to clean, to cheap and reliable energy. Cleanness does not matter for these people.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’ve heard that argument that the best result worldwide would be to increase the power supply to all these third world countries. And then you would have this ability to start manufacturing, doing a bunch of different things that we associate with the negative aspects of the West. The negative aspects of the west that cause pollution, that cause all these different things.

Ranking Existential Risks

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The problem is electricity is a real bastard to try and move. I think the entire grid has got 8 minutes of battery backup. 10 minutes of battery backup. It’s so little and it’s so cumbersome and you lose it as you transport it further.

And dude, I get it. I really believe that existential risks, climate change included, are things that humans should pay attention to. But if you were to rank, Toby Ord wrote this great book called The Precipice, and he is from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. He wrote, the best researchers in the world, he got them to rank what are the most dangerous existential risks to humans?

And it’s a 1 in 10,000 chance over the next century coming from climate change. It’s 1 in 6 from AI or 1 in 10 from AI. 1 in 10 from engineered pandemics, like 1 in 30 from natural pandemics. There’s so many other huge issues that are really pressing. I’m not saying that climate change isn’t a priority. I’m saying that if you were to rank the priorities, it actually starts to move pretty far down.

And when you think if people are worried about the future of the world, they have a “worried about the future of the world” budget to spend. Almost all of that is going on climate change. Jamie, can you try and get up? It’s a chart by Toby Ord. It’s just called, if you search, like the Precipice chart, Toby Ord can bring it up and you just think how much attention is being paid to all of these other things.

How much attention is being paid? A nuclear war, I guess gets a little bit of attention, but slightly less so now. But natural pandemics, engineered pandemics, AGI, these are big deals. And I worry that a lot of attention has been focused onto one, actually relatively inconsequential, at least in the immediate term. No, go back. Do a Google search for me. Top left. Yep, that’s it.

So nuclear war, 1 in 1,000. Climate change, 1 in 1,000. Other environmental damage, 1 in 1,000. Engineered pandemics, 1 in 30. Unaligned artificial intelligence, 1 in 10. Total, the total risk is 1 in 6. But climate change is 1 in 1,000. Over the next hundred years, a stellar explosion.

JOE ROGAN: There you go.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 1 in, what’s that? A billion? That’s what we need.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t like that one. That one scares the shit out of me. I remember a documentary I watched back in the day that was about hypernovas. And when they first started measuring these gamma bursts in space, they thought that maybe alien races were at war with each other because there’s this enormous burst of energy and they realize it’s stars going hypernova. And how many of them do it all over the universe? Because the universe is so big and—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s just a single beam of like a death ray that gets sent out across the universe.

JOE ROGAN: Just unimaginable power. And it happens all the time. It’s happening all the time in the sky.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

The Threat of Cosmic Events

JOE ROGAN: And if it happens anywhere near you, it just takes out the whole solar system. Takes out everything. You’re gone. If it happens in neighboring solar systems, it takes us out. Takes out everything. Yeah, you’re f*ed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow. If that’s not a justification for just living your life and getting the f* on with it and not coloring the Venice Canal green, I don’t know why.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s the thing that gets you attention, unfortunately. That’s really what all this is about. Send her back to Israel, they’ll give her attention. They gave her some great attention.

Toxic Compassion and Appearing Good

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, I’m kind of obsessed with this idea of toxic compassion, which I think is what you’re talking about. Yeah, so the prioritization of short term emotional comfort over everything else.

And I remember Elon was talking a couple years ago, someone had accused him of contributing to climate change, so on and so forth, and he says, “I think I’ve done more to reduce climate change than any other human on the planet. That if you look at the EV revolution being started by Tesla, plus everything else from a technology perspective that we’re doing, I think that there’s an argument to be made that I’ve had a more positive impact on the future of the climate than any other human.”

He said, “What I’m interested in is the reality of doing good, not appearing good, and not appearing to do good while doing bad.” And this, the opportunity people have to be able to look like they’re doing good while not doing it is exactly where this toxic compassion thing leaks in.

So, for instance, people will proclaim that body weight has no impact on health over a long duration, even if this causes overweight individuals to not take their health as seriously and literally die sooner. But we’re here, Joe, you don’t understand. We’re trying to be inclusive here. We’re trying to be understanding of what’s going on with these people.

If someone was to say that a male athlete has no advantage in a sporting competition. Because, Joe, we’re trying to be inclusive, we’re trying to be empathetic, we care about these people. Well, even if that’s done at the exclusion of female athletes. Right. People are prepared to show they’re prepared to do whatever is needed to appear good.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And the alternative, which makes complete sense, who wants to do good while looking bad?

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s the thing you’re saying is so important. They will sacrifice everything to appear that they’re doing good, because that’s really what they’re worried about. And that is all stemming, at least in part. I should say not stemming, but certainly accentuated by the social media world that we’re living in now, because everyone has this opportunity to appear like they’re something other than they are.

They’re using filters. They’re standing in front of a leased car. There’s all the above. They’re doing things. They’re wearing cheap fake jewelry. They’re trying to look like something they’re not. And there’s a culture of that.

And there’s also a culture that gets, well, I’m not one of those, because I don’t care about material goods, but I’m really interested in climate change. And so then, you know, you join up with whatever f*ing climate change group that’s yelling and shouting and you carry a sign and you do all these things that you’re supposed to do, and you get free water.

The whole thing is just, it’s a psychological game that people are playing with themselves. They try to appear that they’re special and to be in competition or in battle with the other side, you know, but if you’re in battle with people that are saying, hey, none of these models are correct, hey, none of these predictions have come to bear zero. Not a single one where they say, the sea level’s going to rise, there’s going to be no more Miami. Nothing, not a f*ing thing has happened.

Like, you’re wrong, okay? So we need to figure out what’s right. If we can all agree that if we’re doing something bad to the planet and it’s somehow or another avoidable, let’s work towards that. But if you’re telling me we’re doing something bad to the planet, and then when I say, well, show me, and you can’t. Well, what about all these predictions? Well, they’re wrong. Well, what about all that movie that every got everybody? Well, it was totally inaccurate. Okay, well, you can’t use that on your side anymore.

An Inconvenient Truth: Predictions and Reality

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I never saw that movie. What were the claims?

JOE ROGAN: An Inconvenient Truth. Let’s find out. Put into perplexity. What the, incorrect.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was already asking what did it get right? And what did it get wrong?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, what did it say? That’s typing it up right now. I’m a kid’s f*ing. I guarantee you they didn’t get nothing wrong or they didn’t get nothing right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which one you want to start with?

JOE ROGAN: Right or wrong? The predictions for catastrophic events. What did it get wrong about the predictions for catastrophic events? Predictions that were incorrect. Rapid sea level rise 20 feet. The film depicted a potential sea level rise of up to 20 feet, 6 meters in the near future from the collapse of Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets.

While this extreme scenario is considered possible over centuries or millennia, scientific consensus does not support this happening imminently. Current rates are much slower. Even with acceleration, reaching 20 feet would take many centuries.

Another one, Mount Kilimanjaro. Glacier melt caused by global warming goal attributed the shrinking of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers mainly to global warming. But later research points to other major causes like sublimation and reduced snowfall, unrelated primarily to temperature.

Impression of imminent chaos. The film often implies that catastrophic outcomes like rapid ice sheet collapse and dramatic sea level rise might occur within decades, when in reality, such processes are expected to take much longer, often centuries or more.

And then legal findings. A UK court found nine errors of exaggerations in the film, mostly involving a lack of clarity on time scales or oversimplified attributions like Kilimanjaro.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Overall, climate scientists judged An Inconvenient Truth as mostly accurate with its projections, particularly in broad trends, but criticized its presentation for occasionally exaggerating the speed and certainty of some changes. Well, I think this is.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, this is the thing. It’s most. It’s climate scientists judged it. I’d like to keep this climate hustle going on so well. They were mostly accurate. We do have a sincere.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Stop putting your British accent on when you do that. Stop putting your British accent.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not even British. That’s like a fake British guy that’s like a posh shithead from Connecticut.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But no, you’re right. The lack of scrutiny that people have of their behavior. The distance between our opinions and our deeds.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Never been greater. That’s the Internet.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And what it means is you’re allowed to do good while appearing bad and do bad while appearing good. And it’s way easier to do bad or to just not research or. And it’s significantly harder if you’re like, I’m going to go out, try and invent something. Try and push against an idea or an ideology or campaign for a movement that I think is really, really important.

And people are going to say that I’m doing something mean, or people are going to call me names for doing it. There’s no incentive to do it. Why would someone go, why would somebody do that? And I think that’s what Elon’s point is. Right. What I’m interested in is doing good, not the appearance of it. And I see a lot of people who are doing bad while appearing good.

Campus Activism and Tribal Identity

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know, I think it’s no. Through no fault of their own, young people are indoctrinated into this world when they start going to college, that you have to be active and to be an activist is to be a good person. To be involved in these campus activities is a good thing.

And there’s also, there’s a tribal aspect to it. You know, you’re on a tribe of people that are the people that are on the right side of history. These are the people that are kind and compassionate, unless you disagree with them. And these are the people that are, they trust the science and unless it’s inconvenient.

And these are the people that, you know, you want to be in the educated minority. You want to be the people that get it, and you want to, it’s very important that you use your voice, you know, and so they think they’re being good people, and I get that, and I understand that.

But it’s being weaponized against you. And it’s probably not even funded by legitimate people. It’s most likely there’s at least some funding by some foreign entities that are just trying to sow discord and make sure that everybody hates everybody.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’d be a wonderful way to take down any country. Right. To make it feel as if it was coming from inside.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, sure. There’s a lot of that going on. That’s been absolutely proven. There was a thing recently with ChatGPT where they found out that these entities in China were using ChatGPT to argue about USA shutdown. To like, they were just all these social media accounts.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The Twitter account thing, where you can see where the accounts are based.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I know one of the ones that is like a fan account of the JRE. People thought it was me forever. And I was like, I didn’t correct it. It says I made it say parody account. It says either commentary account or parody account or whatever, fan run account. Just so you don’t think it’s me because people do things to me.

It’s in Asia. Someone in Asia is doing that, allegedly. Unless he’s got a VPN.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, you could hardworking Asians supporting the Joe Rogan podcast.

JOE ROGAN: But you could, right? That’s the question. How do they know where you’re from? If you sign up with a VPN and you say, I’m in the South Pacific, how do they know?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know. I don’t know.

The Cassandra Complex and Standing Firm

I certainly know that assuming that you’re on the right side of history, especially if you’re in a big group, is often a bit dangerous position to be in. So that Cassandra complex thing that I was talking about before, sometimes people might say it’s your duty, if you believe in a thing, to stand firm, right? You should make your case known.

You know, you’re Ignaz Semmelweis, you know about the germ theory of disease, you’re Rachel Carson, you know about the impact of DDT, you’re Edward Snowden, you know about the surveillance that’s going on.

So it’s a really wonderful example, the comparison between Copernicus and Galileo. So Copernicus in the 1500s, he begins to realize that the Earth might not be the center of the solar system, let alone the universe. And he has enough evidence to justify it, but he waits until his deathbed to actually sort of whisper out his great work, which is De Revolutionibus, this work that he made.

And he does it on his deathbed, presumably to avoid the wrath of the Church. Now, some sort of hardline freedom fighting, you should do it. Don’t listen to the man. Don’t back down. Like, just stand on your principles. People would say, well, that’s a cowardly thing to do. You knew what the truth was and you didn’t stand by it.

A hundred years later, Galileo comes along. He sees the moons of Jupiter, sees the phases of Venus, sees the pockmarks on the surface of the moon, and he realizes that the heliocentric model, this like Copernican revolution is true. Proclaims it from the rooftops. What happens to him?

JOE ROGAN: House arrest.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He gets put under house arrest. He gets forced to recant under the threat of torture and spends the rest of his life under house arrest.

So what you have here, and I f*ing love this example so much, I think it’s so cool. It’s two guys, hundred years apart with the same realization. And the justification for the first one not saying what he didn’t say loudly, the treatment of the second, I think it’s like just this perfect explanation of irony. You know what I mean? Like, so perfect.

Yeah, you go, well, the main issue that I have with like Cassandra basically being right and early often feels a lot like being wrong. And if you make an example of somebody in that way, it is basically you saying, if you step out of line too far, this is what’s going to happen to you.

And it causes people who are trying to move conceptual inertia forward. We’re trying to do research. I’m trying to assess whether or not this is actually the way that the world should be. It causes them to be more Copernicus, not more Galileo.

And I think that’s, that is not what you would want in a civilization that’s trying to continue to make progress. You would want to be accepting of new ideas and you would want to encourage them as opposed to cascading people.

Social Media’s Impact on Independent Thinking

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that social media and the influence of other people’s opinions makes someone more likely to be able to think for themselves or less likely? Like, more likely to be able to examine preconceived notions, recognize, oh my God, maybe I’m biased, or maybe it’s just like a group bias that I’ve accepted because of all the people around me and I think this is wrong and I think this is what I think is really going on. Or do you think it encourages that kind of thinking or discourages it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think it certainly encourages group think, very much so, but both.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It would open up the opportunity for some people with a very unique psychological profile to be able to step back again.

JOE ROGAN: Black helicopters. Yeah. There’s a few guys out there I can think of.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But I think on average, what you’re seeing is basically this huge, big swath of people. For the first time ever, you’re able to aggregate just how much support or criticism something has.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know, this is what like to dislike ratios are. This is what upvote to downvotes are on Reddit. And I think that that causes people. Most people don’t have to do the thinking of coming up with an original opinion. I’m sure that most of mine aren’t original. But given the fact that doing the original thinking is hard, most of the culture war is actually two armies of puppets being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers.

Most people are just being brought along and pushed along by people who came up with an idea and they’re assuming, well, we’ve done. We know. We know this for a fact. Well, it’s interesting because both sides know for a fact the thing that the other side says is a lie. So that can’t be true. I get the sense that it causes people to adhere to the crowd more than they would have done previously.

The Unprecedented Influence of Screen Time

JOE ROGAN: And you also have to think that if you’re spending that much time on it, like six hours a day, it’s one of the primary influences of your life. Probably more so than any other media in the past because it was very rare as a child that you would listen to six hours of the news. You wouldn’t really be indoctrinated into six hours of whatever the latest cultural dilemma was or the latest social issue was.

You wouldn’t get that much of it. You’d get people talking about it like normal people do during the day. Or maybe you’d be talking about a newspaper article you read, but you’re not getting six hours of it all day long. But now we are at least six hours. I mean, what is the. Let’s find that out. What’s the average number of hours an 18 year old kid is on social media?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I guess at least I would get social media. Maybe four. Their phone.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s just say their phone. Screen time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Screen time. At least six, probably more. Yeah, at least six. Probably more. And the mad thing to consider here is your parasocial relationships. People think about this. People will listen to your show and listen to my show more than they see their parents. By a huge margin.

JOE ROGAN: Huge margin. If you saw your parents that much, it’d be kind of creepy. The average screen time for 18 year olds, 7 to 8 hours of total screen time per day is common, though it varies a lot by person and country. Okay, what country has the least amount of screen usage?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Would you want to discount school time too? Because aren’t they on screens technically in school? You’re asking phone time, I guess, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think it’s personal phones they’re talking.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are they on screens?

JOE ROGAN: Some of them. I mean a lot of kids.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve noticed my laptop open in my screen time because I’m connected to the same iOS system. So I’m getting like 18 hours a day, but I’m not on my phone 18 hours a day.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. So let’s guess like what countries? Well, you’d have to have first world countries for it to count. You know, like if you’re in the Congo, you probably don’t get as much screen time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, you’re busy mining the f*ing raw materials.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re making the phones, not using them.

JOE ROGAN: Which is the craziest thing of all that. But the thing that people virtue signal on the most at the end of the line.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Japan.

JOE ROGAN: Someone pulling it out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lowest global average.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. 3 hours and 56 minutes is still a lot of time. That’s kind of crazy, but they’re probably a little healthier with it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How is 9 hours and 24 minutes less than 10 hours and 56 minutes? How’s that the highest global average? If 10 hours is the.

JOE ROGAN: That’s weird.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t understand.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, close. Contender is more than the highest global average. I don’t get it. But either way, the Philippines. They’re killing the game. 10 hours and 56 minutes.

The UK’s Mental Health Crisis

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dude, there was a 2023 mental health report. The UK came in second most depressed country in the world. Second most depressed country in the world, UK.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. What’s number one?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Uzbekistan. So it’s just above Uzbekistan and just below South Africa.

JOE ROGAN: Did the UK used to rank higher?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes, it’s tracked down over time, but it’s never been superbly. I mean, misery is our, like, melancholy is sort of our personality. It’s our national sport. Right. Being a bit more melancholic, but yet the Ukraine, who are just about to go into their fourth year of war, came in higher. And Yemen, who apparently are going through one of the worst humanitarian crises in human history, also ranked higher than the UK. Second most depressed country in the world.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. That’s a wild number, man. It can’t just be the weather. It has to be like a weather.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Might contribute a little bit.

JOE ROGAN: A little bit. Like Seattle does. Like, people in Seattle are depressed as f*.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Maybe it’s the online safety bill.

JOE ROGAN: Could be. That would get me depressed. I would be so depressed. If I lived in England right now, I’d be like, I’m fed. Like, legitimately fed. Imagine if I was running this podcast the exact same way out of England.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’d get arrested.

JOE ROGAN: I’d get arrested. I saw them. They arrested a teacher because he refused to refer to one of his students as a they. And this is like his second infraction. And so they arrested him for failure to recognize a singular plural.

Britain’s History of Persecution and Apology

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Look, I really don’t like shitting on the UK because it feels like I’m pulling the ladder up after I’ve just got out of it. But it’s just, I don’t know how many more ways you can face plant over and over again. And there’s this strange kind of romanticization of the past of the UK, where we are English common law and we stopped the transatlantic slave trade and we use the navy, and so on and so forth, but we’re really living on borrowed time now as the UK. It’s been a good while since the UK sort of contributed in that sort of a way.

There was a, you know Alan Turing?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So he was the guy that decoded the Indigo machine. So he was gay and he was chemically castrated by the British, despite the fact that he was literally our equivalent of the atomic bomb. Right. He was a very British version as well. It wasn’t kinetic, it was cognitive. So he decodes the machine that the Germans are using to send their secret messages. This means that we’re able to detect exactly where the U boats are going to be.

And it results in some really awkward situations. Before we’re going to use all of our force to try and take Germany down, if we avoid all of their planned bombings, they’re going to guess that we might have the keys to some of their communication. So they had to start making decisions about which boats needed to be let attacked and which boats needed to be saved.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They knew all of the different attacks that were coming, but if they got rid of all of them, if they were safe from all of them, the Germans would start to catch on. So they had this really. So this guy is our equivalent of the atomic bomb, right? He’s our Oppenheimer. He gets chemically castrated just after World War II.

JOE ROGAN: It was in the 50s, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he kills himself. He takes his own life. He puts a cyanide in an apple. Oscar Wilde in the 1800s, one of the greatest writers of all time. He’s jailed and then dies in exile as a peasant in France because he was gay. And then 70 years after Turing, Gordon Brown, it’s like 2008, 2009, publicly apologizes.

They bring out this thing called the Turing Act, which gets rid of the criminal records of all of these people from history, like posthumous. And some of them are probably still alive, actually. Like some of these people that had been convicted of indecent behavior, improper behavior at the time. And then they put Turing on the 50 pound note.

So Britain has, for all that it’s fantastic and I love it. And it’s the country that I came from. It does have a history of f*ing persecuting people for what’s deemed improper behavior at the time and then apologizing for it a couple of decades later. And I think with the online safety bill thing, I think it’s going to be the sort of thing that you look back on and go, that was not in no one’s world. Was that a smart move? I don’t think that it’s helping anybody at all.

The Dangers of Government Control Over Speech

JOE ROGAN: Well, it just appears that they want total, complete control over what people say over there and that they don’t want criticism of the government, criticism about immigration, criticism about, you know, fill in the blank. They don’t want it. And the best way to stop that is to keep everybody scared, make everybody self censor.

What’s the best way to make everybody self censor? Put a bunch of f*ing people in jail. So last year, what was it, 12,000. 12,000 people got arrested for social media posts.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Supposedly more than Russia. Although the Russian stats might not be.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they didn’t arrest him, they just shot him in the face.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They don’t get back gulag for you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they just kill folks over there. But yeah, it’s really bad. It’s really bad. And it just doesn’t seem very progressive. It doesn’t seem like you’re moving towards the future. It’s not progress like this. We figured out a long time ago that free speech is very important to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong.

And when you suppress people’s speech, you can get away with a lot of f*ing horrible things because you stop people from being able to protest it. You know, in a small part, we saw a lot of that during the pandemic. And you know, and you see what the consequences of that are. You can’t trust people that want power. You just can’t.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean?

The Power Game and Control

JOE ROGAN: Anybody that wants any kind of control over a group of people, if you want to control what they say, if you want to control where they go, you want to put them in 15-minute cities, you can’t trust that. Because the natural inclination when someone has power is to never let it go and to ramp it up. They’re in the power business.

If you’re in the power business, you don’t want to keep making the same amount of money every year. You don’t want to have the same power every year. That’s boring, right? Like if you’re an insurance salesman, you want to be the f*ing employee of the month, you want to make more money next year, you got your eyes on a new Lexus. You’re trying to make more. You’re not trying to stay maintained. That’s not the game you’re in.

And if you’re in the power game, and if you’re in the game of enacting new laws in order to have—we need safety. Safety. Under the guise of safety, you can get so much evil shit done. And if you start doing that, you’re not going to say, “You know what, guys, we were that safety bill. We were really wrong. And what’s really important is discourse. What’s really important is that maybe I wonder why you think the way you think. And maybe part of this polarization process is not enabling us to see valid points the other side has. Let’s all come together and talk about this as reasonable human beings.”

No, that’s not what they’re going to do. They’re going to come up with more fing reasons to put you in a cage. They want you to shut the f up because they want to make more. They want to have more. They want to get more power. They want to be the best leader. They want to be the most power.

Trajectory vs. Position

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Isn’t that a ruthless part of human nature? That trajectory is more important than position? Jimmy Carr taught me this. So your industry. Imagine that you’re the 250th best comedian in the world. Let’s imagine there’s a ranking. And last year you were the 300th. You were in a more psychologically preferable position than somebody who’s number two in the world. But last year I was number one. This sense that humans have of where am I now compared to where I was previously.

JOE ROGAN: Mm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this forever ago, and I was like, “Dude, you’ve kind of climbed the peak of the mountain of hedonism. Did you ever think that you kind of front-loaded it too much and that it’s going to be really, really difficult for you to ever reset? Like a hedonic reset. How do you go from the most amount of girls and the cars and all the dopamine that the world has to offer, but where do you go from there?”

And he basically said, “Yeah.” He was like, “I’m going to try. I would consider shaving my head and my beard and going and working in an Amazon warehouse for six months to see if I can do a hard reset.” But you always know that you’ve got the get out of jail free card, so it’s not going to be the same. And just the idea as you’re saying somebody has power, they want more power, right? They want more power, they want more control. That sense, that’s the sport they’re playing.

JOE ROGAN: Bingo. Scoring. They’re scoring. You have to keep score.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Greta Thunberg. The same thing. We need more eyeballs. We need bigger. Bigger. Because where do you go after you’ve made the rivers of Venice green?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, you need to do something bigger, something more.

JOE ROGAN: I need more likes. That’s—that didn’t get me enough likes. I need more likes. I need to go viral.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a ruthless—

JOE ROGAN: I’m being shadow banned.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, you’re not. Your content just sucks. Some people get shadow banned, but most people that are shadow banned, they just suck.

Shadow Banning and Twitter’s Transformation

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, most people just don’t understand that they’re not interesting. But there’s definitely real shadow banning going on. One of the things that was interesting is that once Elon purchased Twitter, I gained like 5 million followers over the course of a couple of months. I was like, “What’s going on?” It’s because I was—somehow or another, they had locked my followers down.

I’m not complaining about this, I’m just observing. I know I have a lot of followers. It’s ridiculous. But I started—I think I had 7 million, and I used to go up pretty steady. And then somewhere during the woke days, during the dark days of woke, when it all started happening, which is around, I think, 2014, 15, 16, it started really ramping up.

And then it seems like from 16 on, real censorship started really kicking into high gear, because then they had a reason for it. Donald Trump is our president. We have to make sure this never happens again. In fact, there was a meeting, I believe—I don’t want to say the tech company, because I might be incorrect—but one of the people, one of the main people at this tech company, specifically said at the meeting, “We have to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” as in Trump being president.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They did a f*ing horrendous job there.

JOE ROGAN: They f*ed up. But the point being, imagine you are in control of an enormous platform, an enormous media platform that controls the discourse of untold billions of people in the world. And you have a very specific mandate that you’ve given to the people that work for you. We have to make sure that we control who the king is. Because that’s what you’re saying. Are you saying we got to make sure this doesn’t happen again? Well, how do you do that? How do you do that if 50% of the people don’t agree?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: By force.

JOE ROGAN: There’s only one way. You have to do it by force. Or if you control the narrative, then you just hide information, accelerate information that’s incorrect. You just ban people from communicating. You kick people out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I mean, some people would say that getting to choose who’s king is what you do if you then buy that social media platform.

JOE ROGAN: Sure, there’s an argument for that. Like what Elon did. There’s a real argument for that. But there’s also an argument for don’t you think it’s a good idea if we have at least one of these motherf*ers that’s huge that you can go wild, wild west on and say whatever you want? I think that’s very important.

You don’t have to agree with them. There’s all these tools you can use. One of them is the mute button. You can mute people. Bye bye. I don’t want to hear you anymore. You’re annoying. Or you can ban them. I don’t even want you looking at my page. Get out of here. Those things exist. You can curate who you’re communicating and interacting with.

But if you don’t have one of these groups that’s resistant to intelligence agencies shutting down legitimate voices, including during the COVID times, it was guys like Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, guys from MIT, because they were saying something that didn’t jive with what the agenda that Fauci was pushing through.

The Future of Free Speech

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Where do you think we’re at now? If you were to sort of predict what the trajectory of the speech stuff is online? Talk about America. The UK I think is just a lost cause. Do you think that we’re going to continue on this general path which seems to be a little bit more sanity than the peak?

JOE ROGAN: I think people realize from the peak and most importantly realize from Elon’s purchase of Twitter. When Elon purchased Twitter, and I don’t say this lightly, I think he changed the course of civilization. I really do. I think we were on our way to this weird dystopian censorship complex that was already moving.

We had already had intelligence agencies that were contacting Twitter. We know this through the Twitter files. And they were banning certain people that weren’t saying incorrect things, but they were saying things that were inconvenient and they turned out to all be accurate. All the things that they were warning about, all the things that they were saying all turned out to be accurate.

They stopped the distribution of the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post. The New York Post, the second oldest newspaper in America. It’s a f*ing huge newspaper. To stop that from being able to be distributed on Twitter, which would turn out to be a totally accurate story. And to stop that accurate story is wild. That is scary stuff that if Elon didn’t purchase Twitter, we would have just had to deal with that kind of stuff that would be—and it would accelerate. It wouldn’t stay where it is, it would ramp up, it would get more.

They were starting to use the term malinformation. So there’s misinformation, disinformation, and then malinformation. Malinformation is factual information that might cause harm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you give me an example of malinformation?

JOE ROGAN: Children don’t need a COVID vaccine. That’s malinformation because it is true, statistically speaking. Especially healthy kids, they kick it off like it’s nothing. They don’t need a vaccine for that. But that might cause people to not get vaccinated and that might kill your grandmother. So that’s malinformation.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you think of an example of malinformation where it’s justified in doing that?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I would say if you had some information and you were releasing it online that was an accurate depiction of some things that the federal government is involved with that would compromise national security to achieve people overseas. Yeah. We get people killed, start conflicts.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Here’s another one that I’ve just thought of. How to—you know those desktop DNA printers? This is how to put smallpox together.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Something like that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Something which is true but would be dangerous. And this is the devil’s in the f*ing detail.

JOE ROGAN: 100%.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Stuff like this, it’s net—

JOE ROGAN: It’s never binary. It’s never incorrect.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sometimes it’s binary.

JOE ROGAN: Sometimes I shouldn’t say never.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Some things are binary, sure. Like whether or not you should win a f*ing World’s Woman Strong lifting, Strongman Power woman competition.

The World’s Strongest Woman Controversy

JOE ROGAN: That just happened. I thought we were done with that. It just happened.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Would you know why it was able to happen is because that person lied. That person lied about their sex.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Jamie, can you try and pull up an image of the current 2025 World’s Strongest Woman winner, please, just for clarity? Mitchell Hooper. That is the World’s Strongest Man. Canadian dude. He’s 6’3″, 330. The person who won Woman’s Strongest man is 6’4″ and 400 pounds. She makes the current World’s Strongest man look like an infant.

JOE ROGAN: Oh. World’s Strongest Woman. Woman stripped of title after organizer discovered she was born a man.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That was an hour ago, dude.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so an hour ago they stripped her. Is that the person?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep. Jamie Booker, disqualified.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a man. Are you sure?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It appears the athlete who is biologically male and now identifies as female competed in the Women’s Open category. They were unaware of this fact ahead of the competition and have been urgently investigating. I want to know what urgent investigation is.

JOE ROGAN: They went on Twitter. So that’s a biological male.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s interesting. Correct.

JOE ROGAN: It looks like just a big label.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Had we been aware or had this been declared at any point before or during the competition, this athlete would not have been permitted to compete in the Women’s Open category. The move comes after runner-up Andrea Thompson, British. Hey. Was filmed storming off the podium as she raged about the bullshit decision toward the title. So the other competitors evidently knew.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so Thompson is now the winner. So the UK gets the gold.

The Cost of Stolen Victories

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think about this so much when it comes to sporting competitions, and it’s not just with the trans thing. Although this is a huge deal. And I did think that we kind of got past it.

How horrible is it to be the person who won, but had that moment, the podium moment, stolen from you by somebody? I think there’s a Weightlifting Olympics Weightlifting Championship final, where currently, the 11th place finisher is now first because each person has progressively got popped for PEDs. Number one did, number two did, number three. It’s like 11 people have been popped for PEDs now.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the Tour de France. You know, when they took away Lance Armstrong’s titles, the Tour de France. What, they didn’t tell you that? If you want to go and remove all of the people that have tested positive for something, you got to go down to like, 18th place. For real. For real.

Like, all those guys were doing something. They were all blood doping. They were all taking EPO. They were all putting motors in their f*ing bikes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve seen a video of that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they were. These guys try for f*ing every edge humanly possible. So, you know, he was just a scapegoat. But what he was doing was he was suing people that were saying that he did PEDs.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A smart way to silence them. But, yeah, I mean, sort of thinking about. I’d be really interested to see what the reaction is. That’s hot. F*ing wet clay stuff, right? Hot off the press a couple of hours ago that it’s been recited.

JOE ROGAN: I think we would be more outraged if they accepted this transgender person as a female and then say, oh, a trans woman’s a woman. Let her compete. It seems like this person lied, and so that’s different.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But still identify. So I agree that it’s reassuring to see what the world’s strongest person organization decided that they were going to do in sort of repercussion to it. But you can already predict, both of us can already predict what’s going to happen online, that this person shouldn’t have been stripped of their title. Maybe they lied, but they should be competing inside of this, the side of the aisle. That always agrees with this. Do you not think that they’re going to be pro?

The Shifting Tide of Public Opinion

JOE ROGAN: I think that is slowly but surely losing traction and support. I really believe that. I believe that’s where the rubber meets the road. Because you’re going to lose most women that have ever done a sport.

You know, if you are a sedentary woman that has no interest whatsoever in athletic competition and you think it’s more than a good price to pay to let biological males who identify as women because we want them to be exclusive. It’s more important to recognize and affirm their identity than it is to be fair. You haven’t done any sports, so you’re going to lose. Not just most of the men. You’re going to lose a lot of. You’re going to lose anyone right of center, like libertarian anyone, anyone.

You’re going to not just lose all of the right, you’re going to lose a giant chunk of the center. Because I think the center in this country is probably the most rational of all groups. Those are the people that recognize kind of a little bit of everything here, you know, right of center or left of center. You’re going to lose all those people, and you’re going to lose most women. You’re going to lose most women that have gone to most women that have daughters. You’re going to lose them.

The only ones you’re not going to lose are the fing kooks. The SSRI filled up, anti-anxiety medication, transitioning happy kooks. Those fing kooks that, you know, think that you have a hierarchy of who’s oppressed the most. And trans people are people, trans women are women. And they want to scream it out and yell it. They’re just crazy. You’re going to have those people that are going to be with it no matter what.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Get into the boxing ring with that trans woman who’s a woman, the one.

JOE ROGAN: That was a man that lied, that the Olympic champion, that they just took away his gold medal.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Flip flop, that story. Flip flop, back and forth like 10 times. It was like a Christopher Nolan movie.

The Imane Khelif Controversy

JOE ROGAN: Well, because that person was threatening to sue a bunch of people, right? They were threatening to sue a bunch of people that called them a male.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But they then rescinded it. Made a statement.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s put this through perplexity or something where we can figure out, I want to know what the number is. I want to know what’s true. Because what I think is there was another organization that did a chromosome analysis and found out this person had an XY chromosome. So this is specific type of disease or genetic abnormality where your testicles don’t.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing edge cases again.

JOE ROGAN: Edge cases.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So strange.

JOE ROGAN: Ask it. Did that person get their gold medal taken away and why?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes, they did.

JOE ROGAN: Right? And why? Just see what I know. But let’s see what it says as far in terms of why. Why? Because they’re a man. And how did they find out? Find out how they found out. Because I think the narrative is that there was another boxing organization that had already suspected something was up, did some testing, did some testing, found out this person has an XY chromosome, you know, so won the gold in women’s 66 kilogram boxing event stripped.

Now, a derecognized International Boxing Association previously disqualified Khelif from the 2023 Women’s World Championships after she failed eligibility tests under its own rules. Later claimed those tests showed she was ineligible for women’s competition. Because of these tests, IBA officials, some media and advocacy groups have publicly demanded the IOC strip or reclaim her gold medal, arguing that she could not have been allowed in the women’s, should not have been allowed in the woman’s category.

Like, they’re still saying she. Despite those demands, IOC has defended allowing Khelif to compete in Paris, describing the IBA’s disqualification decision as arbitrary and saying she met the IOC’s eligibility criteria at the time. So what is the IOC’s credit? What is their eligibility criteria?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Boxing must be a f*ing nightmare for this because of all of the different organizations that exist and each one is going to have its own different set. We have a coordination problem here.

JOE ROGAN: Here’s an even more. Here’s a bigger nightmare. Prisons. Prisons have a self-identity thing. In order to be eligible for female prisons. There’s a lot of prisons, including, I believe, New Jersey, California. California has 47 biological males that are housed in women’s prisons.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, at least who runs a prison? Is it the state? Is it an independent organization?

JOE ROGAN: Well, some of them are independent. Some of them are privately owned. Chromosome test results were kept confidential by the IBA, but were leaked after and widely reported. The IOC nonetheless rejected IBA’s findings as arbitrary. Even with the chromosome test, that’s really.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Standing your ground, boy.

JOE ROGAN: You silly gooses.

The Physical Advantage Debate

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let’s see, this was, this is only 2024. So to say that maybe this is the landmark case, maybe it wasn’t Lia Thomas as a swimmer, maybe it was somebody in a physical sport. But I mean, when we’re talking about the strong woman competition, dude, if you’re six, four, I think the next tallest woman was five, eight or five, seven. Think about what you’re doing. You’re wrapping your arms around. You can.

And it always gets slippery, right? Because it’s like, well, there’s not very many of them. So why are we making such a big deal out of it? It’s like, hey, if there’s one rapist in the local community, you don’t go, well, there’s only one of them. Like, what’s the chances that you run into? It’s like, no, no, no, we go, we try and, you know, treat this problem.

So first off, there’s not many of them then. Well, you know, look at what happens when you take these estrogen. You down regulate your testosterone. It’s below this particular level. Therapeutic. Da, da, da, da. And you go, well, yeah, but it’s like being on a heavy course of steroids up until you stopped doing that. And then how much of that does carry over? That gets a bit slippery.

But just the size, the size of the hands of a person who’s 6 foot 4 and 400 pounds compared with a woman who’s probably like 220 and 5 foot 8. Like, grip strength, being able to do like, that’s pretty important in the sport of strong women. All of it is wrapping your arms around an atlas stone.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you could do this forever. It’s all ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. It’s not the same. You know, it doesn’t mean that someone shouldn’t be able to change their name and identify as a woman. It’s just like you can’t dominate women’s sports. Can’t dominate women’s spaces. You can’t. You’re not a woman.

You know, we’ll call you one if we want to be nice. But the reality is there’s a biological. Sex is a real thing. And when it comes to competition, physical competition, there’s a reason we have Title IX in America. There’s a reason why we recognize women’s sports. There’s a reason why you have it set up that women will compete against each other because it’s fair. It’s not fair to make women.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Or else you just have a unisex category.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it would be dominated by men.

The Reality of Competition

JOE ROGAN: Dominated by men. And then girls wouldn’t have this amazing opportunity to get scholarships, which they’re being denied because biological males are winning in their category because they allow them to compete.

And there’s a thing called. This is what people don’t want to believe. But it’s true. It always has existed. No, they’re doing this because they really are a woman. There’s a thing called sandbagging, okay? And sandbagging has always existed.

Sandbagging is, let’s say that you’re going to enter into a jiu jitsu tournament and you’re going into the purple belt division, but you’ve been a purple belt for eight years and you’re supposed to be a brown belt. And they, you know, for whatever reason you. Or you could even. Here’s a worse one. Maybe you’re a black belt in judo, like an elite black belt, and you enter into a jiu jitsu tournament in the white belt division.

And you’re in there with some fing dork who’s a plumber, who’s just started taking classes. I think it’ll be fun to compete. And you fing flip him on his head and break his arm and an arm bar in like 15 seconds, like that’s sandbagging. Because you’re an elite athlete. You’re like a world class judo guy that’s just thought it would be fun to put a white belt on and enter into a jiu jitsu tournament.

There’s people that do that because they just want to win. That’s why people cheat at video games. That’s why people cheat at golf. Right? People cheat because they want to win. They just want to get that W.

And there will be. There’s people that will pretend they’re a woman to beat up women. If you don’t think that’s the case, you haven’t met enough psychos. Because are there people that are in the wrong body? I don’t know. I’ll give them that respect. I’ll give them that dignity.

Are there also people that are out of their f*ing mind and want an excuse to beat up women and pretend they’re a woman? If you tell them they could wear a dress and they could just run past all the ladies and dominate them on the field, yeah, they’re going to do that too. That’s a real type of human being.

And if you don’t have an accurate test for that, if you don’t have a thing, you make them lick. Oh, you’re a f*ing psycho if you don’t have that. Then you have to judge each individual situation based entirely on why would someone do this?

Judo and Jiu Jitsu Crossover

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How much crossover would there be if somebody was a black belt in judo? How much crossover is there to an immense amount.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, an immense. An immense, immense, immense, immense, immense amount. Especially if it’s a GI tournament. Oh, my God. You’re virtually helpless. Helpless.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Even though judo’s primarily done on the feet.

JOE ROGAN: It is. But they do arm bars. They do. We have Ronda Rousey. She’s one of the best arm bars in the history of the sport. Look at Kayla Harrison. Look at all these. Look at Karl Parisyan. There’s elite judo people that were wizards at arm bars, wizards at chokes and leg locks. And of course, they’re submitting each other as well.

It’s not exactly the same. And if they went like GI to GI with, you know, some prime Leo Vieira black belt, you know, GI master, you know, you likely would give the jiu jitsu person a giant advantage because they’d spend way more time submitting people. They’d spend way more time working on submissions.

So judo to jiu jitsu in a tournament, I would say black belt to black belt. They probably have a disadvantage in judo, but a huge advantage over a white belt.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you think about Jake Paul, Anthony Joshua Boy?

Anthony Joshua’s Devastating Power

JOE ROGAN: Well, realistically, it’s one of the craziest propositions of all time. You take a guy who just had a boxing match that looks like a sparring match with 58-year-old Mike Tyson. And then you’re going to fight one of the absolute scariest knockout artists in the heavyweight division.

Maybe we should watch the Francis Ngannou fight so you could. Let’s watch that real quick. Just so you could see what Anthony Joshua is capable if he’s fighting someone that’s not in his league.

Okay, look, Usyk beat him and he beat him twice. And Andy Ruiz caught him in the first fight and dropped him and stopped him. It was spectacular. Andy Ruiz is super f*ing talented. Usyk is perhaps the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time. Maybe one of the greatest of all time in any weight class. Usyk, you know, and Usyk beat him and he beat him twice.

But Francis Ngannou is coming off of this fight with, like, go a little bit before that so we could see this happen. Watch this. So he drops him with a right hand early and this is like two minutes into the first round. And Francis gets up. He survives.

And then Joshua, check out this combination he hits him with. I mean, dude, the speed that he hits him with this, he’s so dangerous, man. It’s like you’re dealing with a guy who’s an Olympic gold medalist. And he’s enormous and he’s got vicious knockout power and he’s got immense amount of experience at world class levels.

Just think about what we said earlier. Fought Usyk twice, fought Andy Ruiz twice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, man.

JOE ROGAN: Bro, the timing in that right hand, just spectacular. Over the top. I mean, that was a full four shot to the temple. I mean, he’s F*sville right now. So they wipe off his gloves, but you look at him like he’s really feeling it right now. I mean, he probably has no idea where he is. And Anthony Joshua, oh my God.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Absolutely folded in half.

JOE ROGAN: Watch. Back that up again. Watch this. I mean, just steps into it with every ounce of his body. Perfect right hand. So the fact that Jake Paul wants to fight that guy. Hey, I’ll watch. I’m going to watch. I’m definitely going to watch.

So you got me there. And if you want to show you’re legit by taking on one of the scariest f*ing heavyweights alive.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can you get the tale of the tape of Paul and Joshua? I was going to say he has to.

JOE ROGAN: They got him to weigh a grade of 245.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s only like seven pounds less.

The Size and Skill Difference

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s nothing. But, and there’s some sort of a rehydration clause. Listen, kids, it ain’t going to matter. You know, there’s not a chance that Anthony Joshua is not going to just lose the weight beforehand. He’s not going to come in drained.

What he’s going to do is just do extra cardio and that’s just going to make him more dangerous. He’s going to be terrifying and he’s going to have a lot to prove. He’s going to be very angry that Jake Paul wants to fight him, very upset that this YouTuber who’s fought Tommy Fury, who’s a legit boxer, and you know, a couple other guys that were legit boxers, that’s it.

Like everyone else he’s fought, he’s fought Ben Askren, who was really a wrestler. You know, he fought Tyron Woodley, who was an elite MMA fighter, but you know, not an elite boxer. He fought Nate Robinson, who was a basketball player. He’s fought these guys. He fought Anderson Silva and he dropped Anderson Silva. And Anderson Silva’s a really good striker, but also in his 40s, you know, different time. It’s, you know, not the same guy he used to be.

This is a 34-year-old Anthony Joshua. This is a terrifying human being. Terrifying again. A guy who survived Usyk twice. You know, you saw what Usyk did to Dubois. You see Usyk take out Dubois. Did you see that? I mean, that’s the Usyk you’re talking about. There’s a Usyk that rocked Tyson Fury, who’s f*ing six, nine.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Jake Paul’s six foot one, six foot six. Anthony Joshua. Jake weighed in for the Tyson fight at 199. Joshua against 252.

JOE ROGAN: Six, six. Just not just six six, but six foot six and knows how to use every fing inch of it. Knows how to keep that stick in your face. He’ll keep that jab in his face and that right hand. If it hits you, you’re fed.

And he’s not worried about you the way he’s worried about Usyk. You can’t move like Usyk. You can’t constantly be frustrating and overloading his nervous system. Usyk is overloading every aspect of your senses at every moment. He’s constantly moving and then punches are coming and he loops punches around your guard and he’s constantly shifting his feet and you think he’s going to be there and he’s over here and it’s like this overload of thinking.

It’s not a casual relaxed fight where you can kind of move around and get your groove and he’s going to stay on the outside and you’re going to. No, it’s just constant. He survived that guy twice. He survived, in my opinion, the most skillful heavyweight of all time. Twice.

And you’re going to go boxing. And the toughest guy you fought before was 40 years old, Anderson Silva. That was the toughest guy so far. You fought, you lost to Tommy Fury, who’s a very good boxer. But this is a giant Olympic gold medalist heavyweight.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, Anthony Joshua’s f*ing nightmares are made of.

JOE ROGAN: And he’s got that one punch, nuclear power. One punch and he’s fast. It’s an explosive, like these certain guys that like in kickboxing, couldn’t translate over to MMA because they didn’t have the kind of speed. Like Peter Aerts is a good example. He was a world class kickboxer, one of the best of all time, but didn’t have the style that would allow him to transition.

But then there was Mirko Cro Cop. Mirko Cro Cop, who was violently explosive, would perfectly transition to MMA because you got to be able to hit people quick. It was like a big part of it is speed. Anthony Joshua has that kind of speed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That is kind of 252 pounds.

JOE ROGAN: If you don’t have the skill to get away from that kind of power, what happens is Francis Ngannou and Anthony Joshua. You have to be a very. You can’t judge that guy based on Dubois, who’s a fing murderer. Daniel Dubois a tank and he took out Joshua. But that guy’s fing terrifying. You’re staring in front of that guy.

But Usyk didn’t stand in front of him. Usyk moved all over the place. Joshua’s, and he’s going to have a lot to prove. He’s going to be very angry.

Questions About the Tyson Fight

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think they’ll let everybody take the brakes off? Because there’s all rumors about Tyson vs. Jake, that both of them were sort of pulling punches and not fully letting it go.

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s a different deal, you know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think there was something probably just below the table?

JOE ROGAN: I do not know. I do not know if it was said. I did not know if it was understood. I do not know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In your professional opinion, based on what you saw, do you think that the people were holding?

JOE ROGAN: It definitely looked like sparring. But it could be that he didn’t want to hurt Mike Tyson because Mike Tyson’s 58 years old. Or it could be that Mike Tyson didn’t want to hurt him because he likes him. I don’t f*ing know, but it wasn’t what I was tuning in for.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It was not for me. I was there. I went to it live.

JOE ROGAN: I was tuning in for Mike Tyson coming, full 1988, Mike Tyson, full chaos. That’s what I was hoping for.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We walked out like that.

JOE ROGAN: It looked like it, yeah. But that’s what everybody signed up for, so they got us. Whatever.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And do you think that this is different?

The Stakes for Anthony Joshua

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think this is that. I don’t think this is that at all. First of all, it can’t be that because Joshua is still competitive in the heavyweight division and he’s only doing this for money. Like, he’s still set up for world title fights.

After he knocked out Ngannou, you could still set him at, like, Joseph Parker just lost. You could set him up with Joseph Parker. You could have up until a year ago. He could fight Deontay Wilder.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re saying that the lineage and the trajectory that Anthony Joshua is on, if he happens to go a little bit too gentle and lose by decision to Jake Paul, it doesn’t exactly look great for his future heavyweight championship.

JOE ROGAN: It f*s up all of his marketing opportunities.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow. So that’s a really. So what we were saying before, the.

JOE ROGAN: Ngannou fight is a godsend to him. Right. The Ngannou fight is like, hey, boxing’s back. This guy knocked down Tyson Fury. This is how it was supposed to go. Anthony Joshua, you carry the torch for the boxing community.

Because I know a lot of, like, straight up boxers and they absolutely felt that way. Like, this is what needed to happen. These guys can’t come over from MMA and think they can box the best.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. You need to put them in their place. It’s what’s great. That loops back to what we were talking about before is incentives. Incentives align the incentives.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like if you’ve got Joshua’s. I mean, this is.

JOE ROGAN: However I should. I should.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Caveat.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, here’s the caveat. This might earn him $200 million. So if it earns him so much money, Joshua or Jake Paul. Joshua. Like, either one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How much money is $100 million?

The Saudi Money Factor

JOE ROGAN: Oh, dude, this is a Saudi organization. Right. This isn’t this that was putting this on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Probably. They seem to own everything. I think they own me now. You and Jamie and Carl.

JOE ROGAN: Netflix. Right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: This is going to be on Netflix. Okay. So I don’t know. Maybe it’s not. Maybe Riyadh season’s not involved, but the money they threw Canelo Alvarez to get him to find Terence Crawford, like, they’re throwing insane money. They’re throwing nutty sums of cash at people to make amazing fights happen.

Like this is, this has always been the hiccup in boxing is that people don’t want to fight certain people because they want to protect their record. The Saudis are like, how much?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Everybody’s got a price.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, everyone’s got a price.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We’ve got the bank account to pay it.

JOE ROGAN: So here it is. The reported total prize purse for Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua is $184 million, with an even split expected, meaning each fighter will earn approximately $92 million. Some reports initially suggest a different figure. 184 is the most frequently cited total from sources like Daily Mail and Wikipedia.

Okay, that doesn’t mean anything. Some have also mentioned Jake Paul’s cryptic $267 million tweet, which may have fueled rumors. Listen, really depends on who’s setting it up. Netflix doesn’t have to tell you how much they’re paying.

But the thing about Anthony Joshua, if he loses this, if he, so let’s say he’s only getting the $92 million, which I bet he’s getting more. Let’s say he’s getting $92 million. If he loses this fight, he misses out on that Saudi money. Because they could set up a Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua fight and each one of them gets $200 million.

You can, you could do a fight like that. The Saudis can do a fight like that. They can do a fight, they have enough resources to throw at boxing where they could change the entire landscape of boxing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you had the guy that stands in between six foot six, 250 pound Anthony Joshua and $200 million. Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think he’s going to lose you on purpose.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t want to be that guy.

Boxing Strategy and Fight Analysis

JOE ROGAN: But I’m not saying that anybody lost to anybody on purpose. I don’t think that’s happened. But what I do think is that people take it easier on people if they like them. And it looked like they were taking it easier on each other than you would expect.

I’ll just say that this is my personal opinion. I don’t think that’s going to happen with this fight. I don’t think there’s any chance in the world knowing what Anthony Joshua is a specialist at. He’s a specialist at putting knuckles through your f*ing brain, you know, and that’s what he’s going to try to do to Jake Paul.

And anything other than that from a 34 year old Anthony Joshua will make us all think it’s a fixed fight. Whether or not Josh can do it, whether or not. I mean, Jake Paul shocks the world and shows us that he really does know how to box really well and moves really good and uses his jab and blows us all away with a strategy and a lot of footwork and movement.

Brings Usyk into his camp. Or Lomachenko’s dad, even better. Who’s the trained? Usyk. He trained Usyk as well. Lomachenko’s father. That’s why they both are the best moving fighters in this generation. By far. By far.

They’re in a group of the greatest of all time, like Willie Pep and Pernell Whitaker. There’s, like, a group of, like, defensive wizards that exist today that they’re in that group, and two of them that exist in that group are trained by the same guy, Lomachenko and Usyk.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t want to be Jake Paul. That’s what I. Yeah, f*. I do not want to be.

JOE ROGAN: What better way to show the world you’re legit? Go get knocked out by Olympic gold medalist, former world heavyweight champion, 6 foot 6, 250 pounds.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I mean, it’s.

JOE ROGAN: Show the world you’re in it to win it.

The Bugsy Malone Story

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re definitely not f*ing about. I had this guy in my podcast, Bugsy Malone. So he’s a British grime artist, and he had this. What’s a grime artist? Like drill rap. Like British rap.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay. Did you know what that means? You did?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Keep up with the times.

JOE ROGAN: I can’t. It’s too late.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I missed it.

JOE ROGAN: I missed everything.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He grows up in the north of the UK in gangs. Manchester. And he’s in juvenile detention. As a teenager, he gets stabbed with a screwdriver. Like, rough stuff, rough northern stuff. But some part of his upbringing just sort of really compels him to try and bring himself out of this situation.

Starts making music, gets super successful. Does this fire in the booth with Charlie Sloth that gets like 35 million plays. And he starts boxing. Boxing is like one of his salvages. It’s one of his safe havens. And it’s one of the things that’s kept him very disciplined throughout his whole life.

He starts accumulating some money. He buys a nice house in Manchester. Very, very nice house. And the local kids nearby sort of starting to take a little bit of notice. Maybe they know who he is as an artist. And word starts to get around that he’s living there. There’d been some concerns, some security concerns for a little while.

And he gets a phone call from his girlfriend at the time. She says, there’s some men here, they’re trying to break in and they’re in a van. And he, as she’s on the phone, he hears the glass shatter of this house. His mum’s in the house and his girlfriend at the time is in the house. He’s driving around, he’s got his sister in the car.

So he drives back in the car. This is a guy who’s like world famous as a rapper. This would be like, it happening to, like, the British 50 Cent or the British Jay Z or P Diddy or something like that. Drives back, getting down the driveway toward this house. There’s a blockade, there’s boulders that have been laid out in front. So he knows that there’s going to be an ambush of some kind.

And he sees this guy in the bushes on the right with a brick. This guy’s hiding in the bushes, waiting, and he thinks he’s going to throw it through the window, but he doesn’t. He wants to hit him with the brick.

So Bugsy stops the car, opens the door, and immediately he’s massively into Jordan Peterson. Personal development, self growth. It’s like an odd blend of rough upbringing, self discipline and sort of transcendent personal growth.

And he gets out of the car and points at the guy and he goes, “No way. Is that you? Is that a blue T shirt?” And the guy’s like. And as he’s doing it, because he’s been training so much, he’s coming toward him, distracting him the same way as I go, “What’s on that T shirt there?” Immediately you go. And before he knew it, Bugsy’s hit him, spun him round, bricks fallen out of his hand because this guy hasn’t set his feet in time.

It’s the problem of having a big weapon. Bugsy said, like, you need to set yourself and you need to be able to throw it like it’s good because it can hurt someone. But it’s slow and it’s cumbersome and you can’t move as fast. And he’s training every day, every single day, no matter whether he’s rapping, he’s on tour, he’s training and he’s boxing and he’s fighting and he’s sharp, he knows his distance.

Hits this guy, they have a scrap, Bugsy wins, moves the stuff out of the way, gets back in the car, drives in. Jamie, can you just. CCTV. Search, search. Bugsy Malone, CCTV. So there’s footage from his house of one. He pulls up in the Mercedes. Go back, back, back a little bit. Yeah, just to the start.

So this is him pulling in in his car, having just beaten someone up. This is a van filled with guys. Gets out of the car, pulls his top off and then sprints to go and get the rest of the guys that are waiting outside. That is not the behavior of a dude who gives a single f*. This is the British Jay Z ripping his top off and then sprinting out to try and chase people away.

The real kicker of it, there was like tons of guys not in that van, but in some other van behind. The real kicker was the dudes that he fought. They pressed charges. They pressed charges against him because he’s rich. They press charges because he f*ed him up.

JOE ROGAN: And then pressed charges.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They pressed charges.

JOE ROGAN: Did they actually wind up going to court over this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, went to court. And this is. It was so brilliant. He told this story to me and he said it was the middle of COVID and people weren’t sure whether venues were going to be open. And he had this tour. This tour was going on, but it wasn’t selling as well. No tours were selling as well as he would have liked.

So he spoke to his lawyer before his lawyer went to go and do the not guilty verdict and they had two statements that were ready. He came out, he said, “Very pleased to say that Aaron Davies has been acquitted today. He’s not been found guilty. He is now getting back to preparing for his upcoming tour and tickets are available now at.”

His lawyer did a mid roll ad read for his tour as part of his not guilty verdict. Having just beaten up like a van filled with blokes, one of whom looked like a plumber. It was your plumber comment that got me thinking about it. Like just some white belt that decided, you know, some guy that thinks he’s a bit hard, like he’s had a little bit of a throw and this guy’s training every single day, sharpening his skills and he’s been doing it since he was a kid.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hilarious.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He’s dangerous and he’s nasty.

Self-Defense Laws and Appropriate Force

JOE ROGAN: It’s wonderful when a story like that works out in America. People have guns. It’s a different, different sport.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you looked at appropriate force in the UK? Do you know what that is? The use of appropriate force?

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of that in America as well. Depending state, state by state, they have different. There’s different standards the different states impose. Like Florida has stand your ground, Florida you just get away with killing people.

California, it’s very different. They were actually trying to pass a thing in California saying it’s your obligation to leave your house if someone breaks into it. I don’t know if it’s that house, though. It’s your obligation to not shoot them. That you can’t. You can’t harm them because they’re just trying to steal something. They’re not trying to harm you. Like the assumption you should be that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re not trying to harm you.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. I’ve had this conversation with people on the podcast, actually, with Tommy Chong. It was a mind numbing conversation that, you know, you should not think of this person as trying to attack you, that their life is not less valuable than yours. It’s just as valuable as your life. You shouldn’t take their life despite the.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fact that they’re on your property.

JOE ROGAN: Respect the fight that I can’t talk despite the fact rather that historically a lot of people have broken into people’s houses and killed them. It’s happened over and over and over again. You’re just assuming that this time is going to be different because they just want your watch or whatever. Like, f* off. Like, this is. That’s a dumb way to live. Like, you have to be able to protect yourself. There’s crazy people. That’s a real thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I think the appropriate force thing becomes interesting in the UK, where you don’t have as many guns because there’s more levels of weapon in between. Nothing, just hands.

JOE ROGAN: Baseball bat.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This guy’s going to break. Yeah. This guy’s got a brick, so you’re allowed a brick. But if you bring a gun to a knife fight, that’s not appropriate force.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you know, we had a knife.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. So you need it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like, oh, God, I don’t know. It’s very gentlemanly.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God. So stupid.

British Traditions and Archaic Laws

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, the UK’s got like some odd archaic laws. Like the distance between the front benches in the House of Commons is the same as two broadswords held out at arm’s length.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s also why you guys drive on the other side of the road, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

JOE ROGAN: I think you drive on the left side of the road so you can use your right arm to slash each other.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No way.

JOE ROGAN: Sword. Yeah. I believe that’s what it is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What? In case you were jousting in a vehicle, someone.

JOE ROGAN: If you’re on a horse or if you’re in a car, someone’s cut. You want to be able to get them on that side. That’s a strong side. Someone told me that when I was over there. I hope I’m not. I’m not incorrect.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I like it as a story. Whether it’s right or wrong, I don’t care. There’s a reason that women’s shirts button from the left and not the right. Have you ever accidentally put your wife’s hoodie on instead?

JOE ROGAN: It goes in the Middle Ages, you knew you were going to meet when traveling on horseback. Most people are right handed. So if a stranger passed to the right of you, your right hand would be free to use your sword if required. Yeah, that’s why you guys do it with your cars.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, this is the problem. If you don’t have a medieval country like ours, you end up driving on the other side of the road. But yeah. So women’s shirts, if you’ve ever accidentally put your wife’s hoodie on or something, zipped it up. Women’s shirts button from the other side. They button from the left, not the right.

The reason for that is that when buttons were first introduced in the 1700s, they were mostly for the aristocracy. And the aristocratic women were dressed by mostly right handed servants.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So they dressed them this way. So the women’s shirts button. If you put it still to this day, same thing. Dude, I promise you now, anybody that’s watching, any guy that’s watching, go and put your wife’s shirt on. This is how it begins. Go and put your wife’s shirt on. And see, it doesn’t fold that way.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It folds the other way and you have to push the button through with your left hand. How f*ing cool is that?

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it’s the same with hoodies. You know, we zip our hoodies with our right hand. Girls zip their hoodies with their left hand.

JOE ROGAN: Oh wow.

The History Behind Men’s Shirt Buttons

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So f*ing cool. One other element is the gentlemen of the days, they would have a sword on the left hip drawn by the right hand. The way that our shirts are put together at the moment, it can’t get caught in the folds because the left fold is over the top of the right. So as you draw it, there’s no chance that the hilt would get caught.

JOE ROGAN: So if you’re a left handed person, you have to wear women’s clothes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That might actually explain more than you think.

JOE ROGAN: Probably.

Path Dependency and the QWERTY Keyboard

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is an example of path dependency. So what you’re talking about, some sh*t from the past that influences the future. QWERTY keyboards, same thing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I know that one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Typewriters. Yeah. So it was made to be inefficient to slow people down. And if you take a normal typer from a QWERTY keyboard and put them on some other formulation that’s allowed, they’re like 50 to 70% faster.

So we’re still using a designed to be inefficient keyboard because if you type too quickly on a typewriter and you use letters that are close together, the typewriter jams. So the letters that were used most frequently were put out onto the edges, and it was less often that you were going to put two next to each other so they wouldn’t jam.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know a single person who switched to a different type of keyboard, do you?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, no one.

JOE ROGAN: But they do.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lex Friedman’s got some weird, super…

JOE ROGAN: Oh, but his is just separated. He’s just got it separated. It’s still QWERTY.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like this.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. That’s kind of interesting. But that’s not the point. The point is the layout of the keys in a regular keyboard. There’s other layouts. So it’s not just QWERTY’s not available. You can actually buy keyboards that have the most efficient layout. I forget what the name of it is.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think it might be the dactyl thing. Hot Swap Dactyl.

JOE ROGAN: I think that, I think that’s it. I think.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Up and right. Yeah, yeah, Hot Swap Dactyl. It’s still a QWERTY keyboard. I can’t get away from it. So there’s other layouts.

JOE ROGAN: If you could search what styles of key, what is the most efficient layout of keys for typing speed? That’s what I did. Yeah, that’s what.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. This. This what’s coming up. This sh*t is way faster than typing.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. Yeah, right, right, right. But that’s a different, that’s a different thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s fastest Skype, fastest keyboard for typing.

JOE ROGAN: You can type. Hold on, let’s look at that for a second.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You haven’t seen this before.

JOE ROGAN: No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, it’s like.

JOE ROGAN: I’ll show you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Demo.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is crazy.

Alternative Typing Technologies

JOE ROGAN: And each one of those is a letter, and some of them make words real fast. Huh. So this is a, what we’re talking about right here is a totally different device than a keyboard. But what I mean is, there’s another keyboard layout that super nerds use, like a tiny amount. Like the kind of people that have, they have those Google phones that don’t connect to the servers, you know?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Didn’t Eric Prince make those?

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s a different one. He’s got his own.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I just, that path dependency thing, like from the past, that’s still influencing us now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why your shirt is going in the other direction.

JOE ROGAN: That’s pretty crazy. Oh, so here it is. Whoa.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Breathing your keyboard cam. And much more. Whether you’re coding, gaming, designing, or just typing, whatever you do, do it at the speed of thought.

JOE ROGAN: Hmm. I wonder how much of a learning curve there is to figuring out how to type with that thing, because it looks pretty dope. Ooh, they have different ones. Scroll up to that image at the top. That’s a different one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think it’s the same. It’s just.

JOE ROGAN: But shaped different.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, just made out of metal.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But it’s a different shape.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You probably put your hand, well, maybe put your hands on it the same way.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very different. The other one was curved.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The problem that you have is.

JOE ROGAN: Is this the new one? The forge. The master forge. Let me see what you got here.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s not showing any way to use it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how I was trying to find a good way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Using it to show you how they type words really fast.

The Future of Typing and AI

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s a matter of time before you’re typing with your brain anyway. I think this is like learning to code.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Well, I think about this with prompt engineering. If AI gets progressively better and better, the idea of being a prompt engineer, I understand how to get the AI to do what I want is a job that only shortly after it becomes a job, might be made completely obsolete.

JOE ROGAN: 100%. Yeah. Yeah. That, that’s not going to work. That’s like opening up a blockbuster video in 1999. It’s like, it’s too, you know, so little time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, the problem that you have with the QWERTY keyboard thing is it’s a coordination problem. If you want to borrow your friend’s laptop, you’re back. Unless everybody decides we’re going to switch to the better type of keyboard and we’re going to do it now.

JOE ROGAN: There you go. Oh, here he goes. He’s moving.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He’s typing it right there. That’s, he’s typing these words as he’s what, looking at the screen.

JOE ROGAN: How’s he doing that? That guy’s a f*ing genius.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Up to 300 words a minute.

JOE ROGAN: I think people can get to. And, but here’s the question. How do you learn? Do you have to play a game? Do you ever do that? Like Mavis Bacon’s typing? You ever do that? No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What was that?

JOE ROGAN: It’s fun. It’s a game you play. It teaches you how to type.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Teaches you how to do the type.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. You type things that they tell you to type. They time you like a race. It’s fun.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: See, he’s hitting all these letters at once. I think with his fingers. You can see them popping up and then it creates the word. I think it’s a little bit of a mixture of, do you remember the T9 typing you could do on your phone?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And you could, you could hit four numbers and you know what word it would be, and if it wasn’t that word, you’d hit next three times.

JOE ROGAN: If you get really good at that, I think it’s a little.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think it’s predictive.

JOE ROGAN: Could you rewind that again so I could see him doing that? Can you give me some volume so I can hear what he’s saying?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s no question that typing sentences at.

JOE ROGAN: Over 200 words per minute is extremely satisfying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But does typing fast actually transfer to.

JOE ROGAN: Productivity in the real world? That’s the question we’ll be answering together in today’s video.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Does typing speed really matter?

JOE ROGAN: That’s nuts.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: He just did that. Wow. And he made butt large. Yeah, like, he made it all caps.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I suppose this is kind of.

JOE ROGAN: That dude’s Rain Man. I need to ask him some questions about math.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I, it’s mad to think how quickly we can think and how slowly we can communicate that to other people, even with speech.

The Dvorak Keyboard Layout

JOE ROGAN: Can you just please search, is there a more efficient key layout than QWERTY? Because that’s what I’m looking for. Because I know there is, because I remember I went down a rabbit hole with this and I was really thinking about trying it, and then I was like, what are you doing?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’d have to change your phone.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It wasn’t phone days. This was way before phone days. This was the days of just typing. More efficient keyboard layout than query. That’s it. Dvorak. That’s it. Puts about 65 to 70% of keystrokes in the home row versus roughly 30 on QWERTY. So fingers move much less.

So now that we know that, can you search for images of Dvorak keyboard? So that’s what the keys look like right there. Oh, that’s it right there. See how different that is? Wow. Yeah, very different.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How long do you reckon it would take you to write out a short email?

Learning New Techniques vs. Unlearning Bad Habits

JOE ROGAN: It would take forever. My stupid fingers would go right back to where they always go. You know, that was one of the things that I learned really early on from teaching martial arts. I would rather, I would way rather teach someone who didn’t know anything than teach someone who learned things wrong.

Because someone who learned things wrong, it’s very difficult to correct their technique. They have a mode in their mind that they shift to when they’re panicky or when they’re being pressured. They always go back to the bad technique. Always. It’s very hard to get someone to learn technique correctly when they know it incorrectly. You got to reteach them everything.

You see it with pool. There’s certain tendencies that people have with their arm being out. A lot of people just accept the bad relationship between your elbow and your, as long as it’s consistent, even though it’s more inefficient, it’s going to add extra English to the ball and spin and all these different, and probably make you less accurate. Maybe better that than try to make your arm drop down and hang 90% because it’ll feel so alien.

But that’s way less than in martial arts. In martial arts, God, if you learn how to throw a sidekick with your knee down versus your knee up, it’s so hard to do it the other way when you’re being pressured. You’re always going to do it the wrong way and you’re not going to have the correct amount of power and those tendencies that are burned into you.

I’ve been typing for 30 f*ing years. They are, I don’t have to look at a keyboard. I can just talk to you and I can type and I’m not really good, but I’m good enough, you know, I don’t look at the keys. I don’t have to peck. I used to go, it used to drive me crazy watching videos of Hunter Thompson who never learned how to type. He would type like this. He would type with one frame of time. Poke and peck.

I’m like, dude, it would take so little time for you to just put your fing fingers there and learn how to do that. Right? He never did. He poked and pecked his way to some of the greatest fing books ever.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Maybe that was a performance enhancer. But, yeah, I.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he was poking and pecking while he was on coke.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s true. Yeah. It’s probably for the best that he didn’t type more quickly. Imagine the crazy sh*t that would have come out of him now.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Right. Yeah. You ever seen him type? It’s so frustrating.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No. Can we see, is there videos?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, wow.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Typing Style

JOE ROGAN: Find Hunter Thompson typing. Yeah, you’ll see it, it’s pokey pecky. And Johnny Depp actually mimicked it really accurately in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when he was sitting in front of the thing, pecking. Yeah, doing his Hunter Thompson impression.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Doing his Jack Sparrows poking and poking.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, your brain can think at about 4,000 words a minute, and that’s the same rate of fire as an M134 machine.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

Keyboards and Brain-Computer Interfaces

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So anything even. And it’s your point of very soon, I think, that keyboards are going to be obsolete. When you think about how much fing fidelity and speed is lost with you going from brain to thumb. Like, I wonder what another type of keyboard is. And you got to think, okay, how do I convert this into words? Where am I going to go? Open the app. Type the. Oh, crap, man. Fing keyboard. Keyboard.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It is so slow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Compared with when we just get Neuralinked up to each other.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And I’m sure you’ve seen that demonstration where the two guys are sitting across from each other and they have the headsets on. They’re asking each other questions and answering the questions without using words.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, I’ve not seen that.

JOE ROGAN: You haven’t seen that? All right, we’ll show you that next. Show that. Were we just looking up now?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I can’t. I find pictures of him typing, but not video of him typing. Oh, God. Thinking of it from the movie. Let me get the bathroom.

JOE ROGAN: We’ll be right back. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to peek. Where were we?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Somebody typing like a grandma.

Hunter Thompson’s Typing Style

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the Hunter Thompson thing. He couldn’t really find it. You got Johnny Depp doing it. Okay, this is how he typed. This is completely accurate. This is a great video, by the way. You should listen to this. It’s really, it’s an amazing piece. You got to cut it out. Okay, we’ll cut it out. But that’s it. That’s how he poked. He poked and packed like that. So that’s how Hunter Thompson used to type out of his f*ing bird. Just poking.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Telepathic video, too.

Alter Ego: Telepathic Communication Technology

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you found that. Okay, okay, this is the crazy one. The telepathic thing is nuts because they have these headsets on. These guys are laughing because they’re asking each other questions and they’re answering the questions and they hear the answer in their heads. The other person hears the question and then they hear the answer.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So it’s a new…

JOE ROGAN: I think. I don’t know if it’s a product.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Or what, but it’s called Alter Ego. This is the same guy who developed that device where he could look things up without opening his mouth or talking and just sort of mimicking the words in his. We all have moments when inspirations are…

JOE ROGAN: Doing the same thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ll sort of skip past it. So he’s talking. He’s showing it on his own here. The cool part is when he brings in someone else to talk to. And this guy also has it.

JOE ROGAN: So they’re communicating. “Where do you want to get lunch after this?” He’s saying this for the demo. They hooked it up to audio so that the video could hear it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “Typhoon could be good.”

JOE ROGAN: So they’re laughing because they’re…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “It could be a noisy environment.”

JOE ROGAN: So would they hear having direct conversations?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “It could be a noisy environment or a quiet office.”

JOE ROGAN: Having a direct conversation is possible without saying a word.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “The signals Alter Ego detects aren’t affected by environmental noise. So even if you’re walking past a wind tunnel or a construction zone, what you want to say will always get across. It’s like having infinite noise cancellation.”

JOE ROGAN: This is exactly what people say happens when they encounter aliens. Exactly. Exactly. Someone’s talking in your head and you hear it. So imagine this technology scaled out a thousand years, and they probably don’t need the other person to have a headset anymore.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And they just would make for an interesting podcast.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I guess.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And you could just tune in and nobody needs to actually listen to anything. So where’s the sound? Are they hearing the sound in a set of headphones?

JOE ROGAN: It’s hard. Not headphones. They know it, right? They’re not hearing it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s not like I understand how. I don’t understand, but if it was…

JOE ROGAN: Really loud, then you wouldn’t be able to hear it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So, yeah, for the demo we just watched, they have hooked up to a…

JOE ROGAN: Speaker so we can hear what they’re hearing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But I think if anything, it’s got to be some sort of jaw induction. But I don’t know that for sure.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s weird earphones that you could put on that don’t go in your ear. They go behind your ear and they send the sound into your dome.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: People use that for running, right? So they can still hear the sound that’s going on.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing creeps hiding in the bushes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They can hear the creeps so they can get ready for them.

Mountain Lion Encounters

JOE ROGAN: You know Cam Haynes, right? My buddy Cam, his brother almost got killed by a mountain lion. Crazy story. He put it on his Instagram the day, the next day. He talked about the story, what happened. He was running and there was a mountain lion in the bushes. And at first he thought it was a coyote. He just saw the eyes. He yelled and then stood up and he realized it was a cat and it started running after him.

And he’s running at night in California. And he kicked rocks at it, he screamed at it. And ultimately there’s some dogs barking. And he thinks maybe the dogs barking scared the mountain lion off. But he said it was like, I couldn’t have used this quote. He said “I couldn’t have used bear spray even if I had it because it would have got on me.” That’s how close it was. Said it was right there, right on him. So it’s the most scary he’s ever been in his life.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve seen that video of the guy tracking backward.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As it’s coming toward him.

JOE ROGAN: Hey.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, hey, hey.

JOE ROGAN: The only thing that gives me comfort about that video if I was there is that thing just wants to scare me. It’s not trying to kill me, it wants to scare me. That’s a mother that’s trying to get you away from the cubs. Because the way it’s doing it, it’s throwing its arms in the air in a very intimidating way. If an animal is trying to kill you, it wouldn’t do that. It’d be running full clip at you and just dive on your neck.

That’s the difference between a cat that wants to kill you and something that’s trying to scare you off. So he was, the problem is you’re backing up, right? And the instincts of these predators, if you throw a ball of yarn by a kitten, they dive on that ball of yarn. They can’t help themselves. And that’s the thing about you backing up or even you running, it’s exciting their prey drive.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. They’re going to keep tracking you.

JOE ROGAN: Right. So they tell you to stand tall and be loud and make a lot of noise, but there’s a fine line between you being a threat and then them being scared off. You being something they have to deal with depending upon the distance between each other.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That makes so much sense. Have you ever had any run-ins?

JOE ROGAN: I have never had an encounter like that, but I did in the wild see an enormous mountain lion once. But fortunately it was from inside of a truck. Yeah, me and my friend Colton, we were in Utah, we were taking this turn and it was at dusk, so the sun was setting and he stops the truck and he goes, “Look at that cat.”

And we, I go “Where?” and we look over and I see the glowing eyes from the setting sun. The glowing eyes are reflecting underneath this tree and it’s got this pumpkin head, this big fing, these mandible muscles that just crush things and these massive forearms and it’s just sitting. It’s a big cat, man. I’ve seen two other mountain lions before but they were small, they were dog-sized. This thing was fing big.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You reckon you’d be able to take a dog-sized mountain lion or are you still dead?

JOE ROGAN: You’re dead. Yeah. I mean a cat-sized cat might f you up. A house cat might f you up. A bobcat might f* you up. A mountain lion will kill you. You have to be an extraordinary person with weapons to survive a mountain lion hand-to-hand fight. You’d have to be an extraordinary person who’s really fighting to survive. And you won’t, you don’t panic at all. You have to be willing to stay calm. This thing’s going to tear your arms apart. It might tear your face apart.

Hunting Safety and Wildlife Encounters

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are the basic, I mean you must, you hunt all the time and you do. Was it end of September you went and did another big one last year?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Elk hunting. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You must have been given whatever the safety briefing that you have at the start of an aircraft taking off is of, hey man, if you see this, if you see this or if you see this, these are the ways that you’re supposed to behave.

JOE ROGAN: No, we don’t get any safety briefings.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But you must have learned it in the past as a part of…

JOE ROGAN: Carry a gun, bring a gun with you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Point at big scary things.

JOE ROGAN: Even if you’re bowhunting, carry a pistol. Especially if you’re in bear country. If you’re in bear country, you can’t depend on this mist making their eyes hurt, keeping them off of you because it might not work.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’ll just run through it.

Bear Spray Effectiveness

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There was a recent case in B.C. where a bear mauled 11 people and they used bear spray on it. It didn’t work. I think it was a teacher protecting his students. So shout out to that teacher. He got f*ed up. But they tried bear spray. Bear spray is not effective. My friend John who lives up in Alberta, he used bear spray on a grizzly once. He said it walked right through. It was nothing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is bear spray basically hardcore pepper spray?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s vicious pepper spray but you’re just going to get a mad bear.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why don’t they make more hardcore bear spray then?

JOE ROGAN: It’s as hardcore as it gets without killing you. If it gets on you, if it’s…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That noxious, it’s just supposed to be a deterrent.

JOE ROGAN: And sometimes it can work. Sometimes maybe they’re just curious and you spray them and they’re like, “F this guy” and they get out of there. But maybe sometimes no, because it’s like tasing a guy. You ever see a guy get tased and they just fing run through it? There’s guys that get tased and they just go stiff and they fall down. And I’ve seen other guys get tased where they rip it right out of their arm.

“Four people, including children, were hospitalized. A teacher on crutches, second adult with a second adult with bear spray, and a third person who punched and kicked a grizzly, despite serious injuries, are being praised for their actions. Saved a school group attacked by a bear near Bella Coola, British Columbia. Four people, including children, were hospitalized Thursday after a bear attack on students and teachers in the Nux Walk First Nation while out on a school trip near the boy.” I’m going to f* this up. “School east of the remote community.” Oh, so it was a very remote place. Yeah.

Bear spray didn’t do anything, man. He said, “Look, nothing phased it. Didn’t do anything to the bear.” Two cans of spray in the eyes of the animal. Look at that. This said the teacher unloaded two cans of bear spray into the eyes of the animal and it didn’t do anything.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It blows my mind that people who have been through something that scary when…

JOE ROGAN: The kids are getting attacked. “One of my cousins who had his skull ripped ran towards the bear and jumped on it with his bare hands.” Holy shit.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s pretty hardcore.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hardcore. Well, that’s primal life, you know, that’s survival in a real situation where your language goes away.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A teacher with crutches was whacking it, hitting it in the eyes, the face, the head for minutes. And then the bear finally. Imagine being on crutches.

The Unreliability of Memory Under Stress

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God, you have crutch. Well, you just. It’s just survival. It’s so reptilian. It’s like savage, savage moment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s what blows my mind about these situations where emotions are running so high, how people are able to come back with any kind of memory at all.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Because that’s true. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Amount of adrenaline just completely warps people’s memories. I was learning about this case from Australia in the 70s. This lady gets attacked inside of a home. So guy breaks into the house and assaults her inside of her home. And she identifies this TV psychologist, this guy called Donald Thompson. Says it was, this was the person who assaulted me.

JOE ROGAN: The TV psychologist.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: TV psychologist, yeah. So she knew this guy from the TV. He was the guy that assaulted me that night. The police go and they arrest Donald Thompson, take him in. The next day, there’s a lineup, and the woman positively identifies him. And Donald Thompson’s like, that couldn’t have been me because I was actually on television in front of a live audience at the time.

The arresting officer scoffs at him and basically says, you might as well have Jesus and the Queen of England as your alibis as well. Like, this is ridiculous. We know that she’s been assaulted. We’ve got photographic evidence of the marks on her. We’ve done a DNA test, which is going to come back soon. She’s positively identified you from the lineup. And she called you out before you were in the lineup as well. Like you’re banged around.

But there was a wrinkle that when they actually looked at the timing, he was on TV at the time that this was happening. And what had occurred was the woman had had that television program on while the attacker broke in and sexually assaulted her.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. And it imprinted that guy’s face in her memory.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bingo. Wow. Blended the attacker’s identity with what she was seeing on TV while it happened.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And the kicker, Donald Thompson was on TV to discuss an area of psychological specialty that he had, which was the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Whoa, dude.

The Power of Hypnosis and Suggestion

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. Did you see that? There’s someone sent me this video. Give me pause this for a second. Darren Brown, the psychic. Have you seen the one? Yes. Have you seen the one where he got a guy to assassinate Stephen Fry?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. F*, yeah. Like, got, like, MK Ultra, the guy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To take out an assassin called the Jump or something. Or the Push.

JOE ROGAN: Push.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Was it the Push?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t remember, but I watched a clip of it the other day. I’m like, this is so crazy that you can actually do this to someone. And the point of the article that I was reading on or the post on X was, you’re telling me that MK ULTRA has not figured out a way to do this. You can get a guy to do it with cameras to do it on Stephen Fry, the comedian. And obviously he didn’t really kill him.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But I had a. Oh, yeah, here it is.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So the assassin with Stephen Fry. So he somehow or another gets this guy to do it. I guess we can’t play it. Yeah, but.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The point is. Fake gun.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t remember what he did.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, shit. They acted it all out, too. That is so crazy. That’s so crazy. So that guy really thought he killed Stephen Fry?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Imagine being in the crowd.

JOE ROGAN: How about those people next to him who didn’t even flinch? I’d be like, what kind of psychos?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Am I the one whispering to watch? She whispered. She’s like, good job. I think she’s the one who set him off.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, she’s in on it now. Here’s the question. Is this, can anybody, yeah, can anybody fall into that kind of hypnosis? Is that only certain people that are suggestible?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s high, medium and low suggestibility people. And there’s a couple of tests. Dr. David Spiegel from Stanford, he’s like one of the world leaders in hypnosis. And he explained some people are more susceptible to hypnosis than others. I have to assume that Darren will have done a profile and this guy is really, really susceptible.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, what’s that about?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why is that around susceptibility to hypnosis?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So I think that dopamine plays a big part of it. And if you process dopamine more quickly, you are more susceptible. I process dopamine really slowly. I know that from doing some genetic tests. So I know that my susceptibility to hypnosis would be lower.

There’s some personality traits that make you more or less likely as well. I think agreeableness versus disagreeableness is one of them. I think there’ll be a sex difference, too. I don’t know why it’s there. It’s kind of the same as saying, like, why are some people taller than others? Like, they just are. And there’s a byproduct that comes along for the ride.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s a weird thing to be able to manipulate a person’s mind and to have it so clearly. I mean, this is the clearest example of it you’re ever going to see. He just shot a famous person in a room full of people.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It does feel like a weird backdoor.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. Like, it’s like those voting systems that can be hacked, or like those cell phone towers they buy from China that turned out to be transportation.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Everything back to China, I think.

JOE ROGAN: Why does it exist?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That David Spiegel guy taught me that 25% of people that do a single session intervention for smoking cessation, quit for life from hypnosis, one session, 25%. Get this. And I think if you do a couple of sessions, that number starts to go up and go up. So hypnosis is this really weird backdoor into the human psyche.

But yeah, the memory thing is f*ing crazy when you think about what do I actually know? Like how do I know that this thing happened in the past?

Memory Failures and Inaccuracies

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So most people understand there’s like two types of memory failure. One is I can’t remember that thing. And the other is I remember it, but I remember it incorrectly. That’s broadly two categories. I think people are really happy with the first one because there’s ton of shit that has happened to you and you go, yeah, I forget my memory or whatever, whatever.

But your experience of your own memory is your only experience of your own memory. So for you to be able to say my recollection is wrong, what does that mean? That’s like saying this dimension that I’m in is wrong.

So a lot of the time I think people struggle to understand how often their memory of a thing is present but inaccurate. So for instance, there’s only 17 colors that we remember on average. We don’t remember. Like if I asked you what color is a tomato?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I would say red, but really it’s not.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If it’s heirloom, typically red, but it’s like a reddish orange sort of color.

JOE ROGAN: Sure, but those are the bullshit tomatoes. Like a real heirloom tomatoes, sort of tomato. That’s a real tomato though. That’s what a tomato really looks like.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sorry, I know.

JOE ROGAN: Supermarket tomato kind of reddish, reddish, reddish orangish.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But most people would default to the red thing.

JOE ROGAN: Right, but not really.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, but it’s not. And we sort of, we adjust.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So if you’re like, we’re white people.

JOE ROGAN: But we’re not really white.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I mean, you’re a bit flush.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we’re not white. You know, I’m saying like comparatively white. My friend Jamie, not this one, but another one, he’s from England and he’s white like paper. And when my daughter first met him, that’s what she said. She goes, mommy, he’s so white. And she goes, yeah, he’s white. And she goes, no, no, he’s white like paper.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, if you live in England, you will be referred to as white like paper. Yeah, if you’ve got. I mean this must be the same with fighters. Even if you forget the TBI head trauma stuff. Just the dump of adrenaline from going through. I mean, you must have done this when you’ve done your biggest shows and.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t remember much.

Flow State and Performance Memory

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You come back and you’re like, I’ve worked my whole life to get to the stage where I can achieve this thing. And in the achievement of this thing, I kind of wasn’t really that. Well, I was there for it. But in retrospect, I can’t really recall where I was. It’s this odd duality that you want to be in a flow state.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because it’s very fulfilling. It’s where you’re at your best. This words just coming out of you perfectly. And when you look back, you’re like, I don’t know if I was there fully. I feel like I was kind of absent.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s not that you’re absent, but that you’re empty. You empty out all your expectations and you’re on it for the ride. You’re not really piloting it as much as you’re just making sure it doesn’t hit the rocks. You’re there for the ride. The thing takes over.

And I think that’s the case with everything. That’s the case when you’re in the flow state of anything you’re doing. When you’re really like, you’re. The more you think about you being there, which is what you have to do. If you’re there, you’re thinking about you. So it’s like wasted resources.

You’re better off being empty and just like being a vessel and just like taking this thing like you’ve done the work already, like, take it along for the ride. Just go. Go for the ride. That’s what it is.

And so the problem with that is if you don’t record your set, sometimes you’ll say things that you don’t remember. Like, they were really funny and you’re like, oh, I had a totally different point that I went off and it really worked. But I don’t remember what it was. If you don’t record it, you’re f*ed.

The only way you can get it back is you have to get back to that exact spot and hope it’s still there for the next show. Sometimes it will be. Sometimes it will be.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sometimes it’s waiting for you with a little gift.

JOE ROGAN: Sometimes that angle pops up again. You’re like, oh, yeah, but why are we doing this?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I almost forgot it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That must be a nightmare, or must have been a nightmare before you could record sets.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but you’ve always been able to record sets. That’s one of the things I learned really early on from this guy, Mike Donovan, who was one of the big comics in Boston. He goes, always record your sets, because you never know when you’re going to say something, and you’ll, it’ll be lost forever if you don’t have a recording.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There was a Scotty Scheffler, golfer. He won. Jamie, you’ll have seen this video. Yeah, can we get the, that. It’s a, there’s a New York sports video cut. He does this. It’s such a f*ing cool explanation of what somebody who’s got to the peak of their sport, the absolute pinnacle, like, in the moments of winning, and he just breaks the fourth wall open about kind of the hollowness of what this is really. Yeah, it’s really fascinating. What’s the point? That thing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s just, it’s just such a great explainer because we always assume. Here we go.

JOE ROGAN: Let me hear this.

The Fleeting Nature of Success

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He might have just won the US Open here, too, by the way. Just like, the biggest event of the year. Playing life, it’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of, like, the deepest places of your heart.

I think it’s kind of funny. I think I said something after the Byron this year about, like, it feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for, like, a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling. To win the Byron Nelson Championship at home, I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf, to have an opportunity to win that tournament.

And you win it, you celebrate. Get to hug my family. My sister’s there. It’s such an amazing moment. And then it’s like, okay, now what are we going to eat for dinner? Life goes on.

It’s great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf. I mean, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about, because it’s literally worked my entire life to become good at this sport and to have that kind of sense of accomplishment. I think that’s a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special.

But at the end of the day, it’s like, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m not here to inspire somebody else to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of, like, the deepest places of your heart.

There’s a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life. And then you get there, and all of a sudden you get to number one in the world, and then they’re like, what’s the point? And I really do believe that because, what is the point? Like, why do I want to win this tournament so bad? That’s something that I wrestle with on a daily basis.

It’s like showing up at the Masters every year. It’s like, why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win the Open Championship so badly? I don’t know. Because if I win, it’s going to be awesome for about two minutes, and then we’re going to get to the next week, and it’s going to be like, hey, you won two majors this year. How important is it for you to win the FedEx cup playoffs?

And it’s just like, we’re back here again. We really do work so hard for such little moments. I’m kind of a sicko. I love putting in the work. I love being able to practice. I love getting out to live out my dreams. But at the end of the day, sometimes I just don’t understand the point.

The Honesty of Excellence

JOE ROGAN: That’s honest. That’s what that is. That’s why he’s so good. Guarantee you that’s why he’s so good. Because I guarantee you that guy has to be that honest with himself about everything. Otherwise, you’d never fix the hitch in your swing.

You have to be honest about every single thing. You have to be aware of all of it. Every little weird f*ing thing you do. Why am I doing this? Like, what is the point of this? And then when you’re done, like, yeah, I did it. And then it’s going to creep right back in. Creep right back in.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Nike did a Back to Work commercial after that, and it’s him with his son, sort of kneeling down on the green, and it says, “You’ve already won.” And then I think the next slide is, “But let’s get another one.” And it’s so f*ing cool, dude. There it is. You’ve already won. But another major never hurt. That was a bro.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Sacrificing Happiness for Success

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing unbelievable. So I think I kind of become obsessed with people sacrificing what they want, which is happiness, for the thing that’s supposed to get it, which is success. So they sacrifice the thing that they want, being happy in the moment. They make themselves miserable in order to be able to achieve a thing, so that when they finally have sufficient success, they will allow themselves to be happy.

It’s like, very strange trade. Imagine if you had some simultaneous equation and you just crossed off success from both sides. You would sort of be left with happiness. I think that’s unrealistic, right? Because we need social validation from people and we want to be recognized. We want to do stuff, and we’ve got to put food on the table and social creatures and all the rest of it.

But I think videos like that are really important for people to see when they look up to someone about how much there is there at the end of the rainbow. Like, Elon was on Lex’s show a couple of years ago, and I think Lex asked him some question, like, how are you doing? He replied and he said, “People think they want to be me. They do not want to be me. They don’t know. They don’t understand. My mind is a storm.” I’m like, that’s the price you need to pay to be Elon Musk.

JOE ROGAN: I think that was on this podcast.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Was it this one?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Because I asked him, like, what is it like to be like. He’s like, you wouldn’t want to do it. You wouldn’t want to be me. And you could tell, like, when you’re in his eyes, like, there’s, it’s not a normal thought process. It’s like this chaotic tornado of ideas that’s running around in his head. And sometimes he spits them out on Twitter and they’re not good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like, the problem when you own the platform, right? It’s kind of, I can say what I want. It’s my own house.

The Mind of a Genius

JOE ROGAN: Well, he can, though. But he’s like that all the time. He’s fun. He’s like, what I would want to see from a guy who’s a super genius, like, a playful guy who wants to go to Mars, who’s making. Jamie and I went on tour of Starship Starbase. What is it? SpaceX? Starbase, whatever the f it is. We saw the launch, we went to the SpaceX launch, and so we got a tour of the rocket factory, which is fing insane.

It’s so much more insane than I thought I was going to be. It’s, I mean, I can’t really, I don’t know how much we could even say, but it is nuts. It’s nuts. And the sheer quantity of rockets that they’re making is mind blowing. Like, you’re like, I had no, I thought they had a couple rockets, you know, just a couple rockets laying around. They’re just making rockets.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m pretty sure they’ve put more stuff into space, just that one company, than like, the entirety of the load that’s being transported into space globally up until now.

JOE ROGAN: They put stuff in space for their competitors. Yeah. They use their space rockets to put stuff in space for people that they’re in competition with. Yeah. They take the money.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Show me the color.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we know how to do it. We’re better at it than you, so we’ll do it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing unbelievable, dude.

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of nuts, I think about.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That, like, the sort of person you need to be to drive that, though.

The Pressure of Competition

JOE ROGAN: It’s a different kind of person. Right. Like, that’s what he wants to do. That’s what he desires to do. And this gentleman talking about golf, like, this is a different, this is, that’s a totally different thing because he’s in a competition all the time.

And it’s really hard to just enjoy the process when you’re in this competition where, especially if your livelihood depends upon a very specific result, like, you have to be better at this thing than everybody else. Not just do the best yourself, but better than the other people that are also doing their best. So you’re in this constant, just ever escaping this pressure.

Fighters feel that, I think, more than anybody, because it’s like an actual physical person coming to harm you all the time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And you’re very outcome focused.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And so it’s all well and good, him saying, I love the process. I’m a bit of a sicko. I like my training, so on and so forth. But it’s very different saying, I enjoy the process of training when you’ve just won, than I enjoy the process of training when you’ve just come second or fifth or 20th. Right. And especially if you’re laid out flat on the canvas.

The Physical Cost of Combat Sports

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, especially that humiliation. There’s also the damage that was just done to you where you might not really, might not be the same again. There’s certain fighters that you could point to one fight and they never recovered from it.

Meldrick Taylor vs Julio Cesar Chavez is my personal one that I always point to because Julio Cesar Chavez knocked him out with like, I think it was like a couple seconds left in the last round, stopped him. And it was a fight that Meldrick Taylor was winning, a decision. But Julio Cesar Chavez was wearing him down. He was one of the greatest of all time, just ripping the body, constantly attacking him, and eventually broke him down.

Had him in a corner, boom, dropped him with a right hand and he got up and the referee called the fight with like a couple of seconds to go. And it was a hugely controversial call. But then when Meldrick Taylor returned, he was never the same again. He started slurring his words really badly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So it’s physical issues.

JOE ROGAN: He’s getting knocked out easily, he’s getting dropped easily. He was just, it was gone. It was all gone. That fight just took it all out of him. You see that? So there’s that too. It’s not just you’re going to lose a golf tournament, like you might get your brains punched in. Physical repercussions, huge physical repercussions for a vicious knockout.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Huge.

JOE ROGAN: Some guys are never the same again and much more likely to get knocked out again once they get knocked out really badly.

Finding Balance Between Success and Happiness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Who do you think of all of the people that, you know has got the right balance of, is successful and is also having fun at the same time? Because it seems like that’s a trade that a lot of people can make where they are successful, but they sacrifice their happiness or they’re kind of happy, but they’re not pursuing external successes in the same way.

JOE ROGAN: I would say comedians, I would say Chappelle. Chappelle is probably the most successful guy that’s genuinely happy. I mean, he certainly has a lot of moments in deep thought. But when you’re hanging around with him, he’s a lovely person. He’s a happy, lovely guy.

He’s so sweet and so smart and so, so like self deprecating and interesting and so great at what he does. But when you’re hanging out with him, it’s just, it’s just a hang. It’s just, he’s just having fun, laughing a lot, got a great crew. We always, you know, stays, keeps his circle tight, cool people and just has a great time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you deconstructed what that is like, what the contributing elements are?

Dave Chappelle’s Unconventional Path

JOE ROGAN: I think he just, he’s doing it well. He’s a very unusual person. Right, so you’re talking about Dave Chappelle. When Chappelle’s show was the number one comedy in the country, it was the greatest sketch show. I think it was the greatest sketch show of all time. And it was only two seasons, right?

And then they offered him an enormous amount of money. I think it was $50 million. And they wanted to change a bunch of stuff. They wanted him to stop saying certain words. They wanted him to stop doing this, stop doing that. And he didn’t like it. And he said, I quit. And he went to Africa and just f*ing hung out in Africa and then came back.

When he came back, he stopped doing standup. He would do standup. I remember one time he did stand up in a park in Seattle. So he showed up, he had little speakers with him and a microphone and just did stand up for free to these people. Just hung out in Seattle, just did stand up. And he would do stuff like that. Show up places and just do stand up occasionally. I mean, for 10 f*ing years he was like a monk on a walkabout.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How did he stay sharp?

The Craft Over Commerce

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t think he ever stopped thinking about things the same way. And he wasn’t as sharp when he came back. There’s one famous video from him in Hartford, Connecticut, where he bombed. I always tell people, stay out of Connecticut, but that’s not the point. You know, you think England’s depressed. But the point was then eventually he started touring regularly, got it all back, plus then some, and then is now widely regarded as if not the greatest of all time, he’s in the consideration.

There’s like Pryor, him, Murphy, Kinison, Lenny Bruce, Carlin for some. There’s a bunch of different people that you put into the greatest of all time. And Dave is certainly in that group, but he’s very happy. He’s a happy guy. I mean, certainly there’s cultural issues that trouble him and life issues that everybody goes through that trouble him. But genuinely a pretty balanced guy for someone who’s ultra successful.

But he’s not stepping outside of his lane either. What he’s really concentrating on, and almost exclusively concentrating on, is doing stand up comedy. And he will travel. He would get in a jet and fly to New York unannounced and just show up at clubs and start doing stand up. And he’s done this forever.

One time I was in Colorado and I’ve known Dave forever. I met Dave when he was like 19 and I was like, I guess I was like 23 or 24. We were both very young. And even back then I was like, this kid is so talented. It was remarkable how poised he was on stage as a 19 year old kid. He will just show up places.

I was in Colorado doing stand up. I was at the Comedy Works. I get off stage, it was on a Friday night. I go into the green room and Dave’s there. He doesn’t live in Colorado. He just flew to Colorado because he knew I was going to be there and he wanted to do comedy. And so I go, do you want to do a set? He goes, should I? I go, yes. I go, hold on.

So I went back on stage, the show was over. I go, everybody yell at the people that are on the stairs to come back. Dave Chappelle is here. And half the crowd had already got up and left. They all come back, everyone tells everyone, they’re yelling it up the stairs. Dave Chappelle’s here, come back. I bring him on stage, everybody goes crazy. And he does like 45 minutes just f*ing around.

It was back in the “grab him by the pussy” days. So he had this whole bit, he said, “grab him by the pussy.” This whole bit, it just happened that week. And he had this giant, and he just wanted to just go places and do comedy. So he’s not doing it for money, right? He’s not getting paid to do this show. He would show up in New York. He’s not getting paid to do the stand or wherever these clubs that he just shows up in. He’s just working. He’s just working on the craft of comedy.

So his mindset is not try to make the most amount of money with stand up, because if he was doing that, he would do an arena every night, right? But he could do an arena every night of the week, all over the world and make way more money. But that’s not what he’s doing. What he’s doing is working on the craft of comedy.

He has plenty of money, right? He has all this money from all these Netflix specials. They pay him an exorbitant amount of money and he makes all this money when he does do the big show. So he’s got plenty of money. So it’s not money, it’s just the craft, it’s just the art. The new set, the new bits, the new thing.

He has a guy who films all of his sets. So he’s got a guy there filming every one of his sets. And then they break them down, this rant, that rant. Because he’ll ask questions to people in the audience. He’ll do like an hour and a half on stage, just f*ing around with a small crowd somewhere. But there’s a gem in there somewhere. And then they take that gem and then it expands upon it. He’ll go over it and break it down.

So his process is all just about the art. I think because of that, the love of the art is what keeps him happy. I think if it’s just the love of the money and you’re constantly keeping score, who’s the number one touring act? And you’re looking at the f*ing Ticketmaster. Oh, Jesus Christ. Kevin Hart’s got me beat. Son of a bitch. I got to do two shows a night now.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s matinee.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. People get nutty. They get nutty and they really do get themselves. You see it in the podcast world as well. People really get obsessed with the number of the rankings and who’s making more and who’s doing this and…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just…

JOE ROGAN: Do what you do.

The Shame of Simple Pleasures

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, the problem that you’re going to come up against there is you are going to try and trade the outcome that you’re looking for for the fuel that gets you there. The fuel that gets you there is how much you love what you’re doing. So I’ve been thinking that’s what gets…

JOE ROGAN: You to the dance.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. I’ve been thinking so much about the shame of simple pleasures. So there’s this quote from a guy called Visakhan Barasami that says, “I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things.” And I just love the idea of it, that most of us are kind of terrible accountants of our own joy, that we only accept deposits when the transaction’s large enough. Right?

The day that we get married or the night that we play the main stage at Glastonbury or sell out the arena. Anything less than that and it doesn’t even make the ledger. So we treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. And we think we have a kind of not disgust, but rejection of, oh, that small thing made your week, that tiny incident made your day. You must not have a lot going on. How weak and how small must your life be that seeing a cute golden retriever this afternoon was a f*ing sick part of your day?

I think about Scotty Scheffler as a good example, him making it all the way to the top. And if all that you were doing was waiting for that final moment, for this main stage at Glastonbury, day that I get married, sell the business for $500 million, whatever, you are forgetting almost all of the journey and then just cashing in at the destination.

And as the guy that’s just won everything in all of f*ing golf, the goat of right now is saying it’s fleeting, it’s really, really short, it’s not going to last for very long. And that shame that people have, I certainly know that I do as well, that it almost feels like a reflection on the smallness of my life if I take pleasure in little things.

But when you take pleasure in little things, you don’t just get more of them. You get them right now. You don’t need to wait, you don’t need to be a f*ing world champion at winning the marshmallow test. Just delaying gratification so long that you never actually end up getting any gratification.

Madness and Greatness

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The problem with that thought process is to achieve true greatness, you must be mad. Madness and greatness are inextricably connected. You can’t separate them. To get true greatness, there has to be some demons. There has to be a mad struggle in your mind. And you have to want it so badly. You have to want that result so badly that you are willing to put in more time, more effort, more focus, more hours and just…

You don’t get to smell the roses, man. You don’t. You don’t get to pet the puppies. You do, but you don’t. You’re petting the puppy thinking about the thing that you do, thinking about getting better because you need those resources.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like a demon that sort of climbs inside of you and wears you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You know who Ronnie O’Sullivan is?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. The snooker player.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The greatest of all time. There’s certain people in certain sports. I’m going to send you something, Jamie. So you see what a wizard this guy is. I’m actually in the middle of his book. My friend Billy Thorpe, who’s a top flight pool player, recommended this book. Oh, no, I’m sorry. Tyler Styler, who’s another top flight pool player, world class pool player, recommended this book.

And I started the book and I can’t stop it. It’s so good. I think it’s fairly recent because it’s post Covid. I thought it was going, he recommended it because of the way Ronnie describes picking the perfect cue, the relationship that he has with the cue. But it is so eloquent and so… But the story, the whole story, the whole book, rather the story of his life is really more of, it’s an exercise in him trying to explain what it’s like to be this good and this mad. He’s a madman. Watch this, watch this. Watch what he does here. This is performance here from O’Sullivan.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sullivan.

JOE ROGAN: Now, if you don’t know how difficult it is to make these balls, he doesn’t give a s* that that guy’s in front of him, that the referee’s in front of him. Watch how quickly he does this. I mean, he’s making the audience laugh. He’s moving around that guy. He can’t miss. This is the zone personified.

He gets to a point in this where he’s feeling so good, he decides to start shooting things one handed. Watch this, watch this. One handed, one handed. These are tiny little pockets. He’s shooting one handed with English and getting position. Everyone’s going crazy. I mean, that’s how f*ing good Ronnie O’Sullivan was.

But the book is really about managing madness. It’s about him being sober and now he’s taken a lot of that insane competitive drive. Now he runs, he’s a runner, he runs long distances and he talks about that, meets up with his running club and they all get together and go on runs together. But it’s just managing, whatever the f* that…

And he’s also describing, even in his prime, he was saying he was thinking he’s worthless. He’s thinking he’s not good enough, he’s going to fall apart, he’s going to choke, he’s going to this. He’s like all these demons are popping up and meanwhile he’s just… Everybody’s terrified of him. He shows up, it’s like, oh, gee, the genius is here because he’s a genius. He’s a snooker playing genius. There’s something about what he does, it’s just different than everybody else.

But the book is, it’s not just about picking the perfect cue. It’s really about managing madness. And everyone who’s great is f*ing crazy. But you can, I think, like Chappelle does, you can take that greatness and just throw it into the thing you do and love it while you’re doing it. You can’t… It doesn’t have to be a demon, doesn’t have to be an adversary. It could be just this romantic affair of you being so fortunate to be able to pursue this thing, but maintaining that same level of enthusiasm.

I don’t know if the same level of enthusiasm, though, can be maintained in something that has a winner and a loser. Like a game where there’s so much riding on each outcome. Yes, versus art, which is like Dave goes to, he’s already won the show. Sold out. He knows how to do comedy. He gets out there, they all cheer. He’s got great material. He can’t wait to make them laugh. He already won.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, that’s the problem with turning the art into the competition.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: She said there, right? The rankings. Well, that means that even if I did it and enjoyed it, but I’m number three or whatever. Yeah, that’s horrendous. That’s not good. Yeah, I…

Gaming the System

JOE ROGAN: There’s podcasts that game the system. So there’s podcasts that release multiple episodes a day, and they’re short podcasts, so they have more downloads than everybody else. And so because downloads, relatively speaking, you know this. So it’s a scam. And so they’ll be very highly ranked, but no one’s ever watched it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Or heard of it, I think.

JOE ROGAN: But they’ll get quoted in magazines as being the number two podcast in the world. But that’s really what it is. It’s you figured out a way, which is, nothing wrong with that. If you want to do that, you can game the system, but it doesn’t matter. What are you doing? Are you doing something that you’re putting out?

I don’t talk to anybody that I’m not interested in talking to. That’s it. It’s the only reason why I do this. I talk to people that I think will be fun and I look forward to it, and I still do. That’s why I do it. That’s why, you know, it continues to work. Because I do it the same way I’ve always done it. I just talk to people that I like to talk to. No, oh, if I got that guy on, he’s super famous.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’ll get a big data in the system.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s a lot of famous people that I’ve said no to because I’m just not interested. I’m like, yeah, maybe that’ll get a lot of people. But I don’t do that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What I found the single best determinant for when I know that Modern Wisdom is going well, is if I wake up on the morning of the episode and I can’t wait for it to be 2:00pm. I’m like, f, yes. I get to speak to such and such today. And I finish up and I go, I learned something that was fing cool. Like, that was a good one, two, three, four hours. That was a good day.

Then there’s other days when I wake up and I just think I should have thought a little bit more about it. I’m like, I’m looking forward to this, but I’m not super fired up. And the more that you push away from that instinct with whatever you’re doing, because your instinct is ultimately your only competitive advantage that you have, because it’s the most non-fungible thing that you’ve got.

So Douglas Murray told me this story, really fascinating one, about this guy. When Douglas was first on the scene, this guy that was the head of the paper that he was at accumulated all of the fans and all of the foes that you would in an industry like that over the space of a couple of decades. And he decides that he’s going to release a West End show about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets.

What? Okay, do you trust him? This guy, this illustrious history, so on. And so he must know what he’s doing. And by the opening night interval, there is nobody left in the entire auditorium, including the cast. Everybody’s left. And this guy is dejected. And all of the people, all of the enemies that he’s accumulated throughout his career, they start sharpening the knives and they come out and he’s just despondent, like, so, so sad.

Douglas sees him a couple of weeks later and he goes, f*ing West End show about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets. What were you thinking? He said, “Douglas, I followed my instincts.” And the thing is, instincts, they may sometimes lead you wrong, but they’re the only thing that’s ever led you right.

I thought that’s such a cool insight about, yes, you’re going to make some errors if you follow that. And maybe you need a team around you or a friend to go, ah, not with that one. But you just going, I think this guy’s interesting. I think this girl’s interesting. I think this topic’s important and I’m going to talk about it.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe he just did a bad job. Like, look at Hamilton. They did a rap about Alexander Hamilton. It’s f*ing huge.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. Yes, the delivery is wrong. Yeah, that’s an interesting one.

JOE ROGAN: Totally. If you think about Hamilton, like, Hamilton is a great example. That play is gigantic.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s on Netflix now and it keeps on crushing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s killing it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s so preposterous if you think about it. They’re talking in modern language about a guy who lived hundreds of years ago. Like, that doesn’t even make any sense. They have black people playing white people. Like, this is going to be weird. It’s great. It’s f*ing great.

Following Your Instincts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Where do you think that drive comes from in people? You know, that demon thing. Is there a common thread that you’ve seen with the people that have got it?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, most of them had unhappy childhoods. It’s very rare that someone has the best in the world demon and their childhood was awesome. It’s very rare. Generally speaking, there’s something there. Some loss, some trauma, something not good, some lack of what you needed when you were young, you didn’t get it, and then you’re like, I’m going to f*ing show everybody.

Like Mike Tyson, maybe the best example of that ever. For a period of time, the scariest heavyweight that ever walked the face of the planet and redefined the heavyweight division in modern boxing. And, you know, he was 13 years old when Cus D’Amato had adopted him. And his life was hell before that, it was hell. It was no love, it was crime and being around the worst people.

And then all of a sudden, he’s in the Catskills with this guy who’s a psychologist and one of the greatest boxing coaches of all time and also a hypnotist and is hypnotizing him on a regular basis when he’s 13 years old and teaches him to be the best. And so then he’s got this, “I will show you that I’m worth something. I will show you that I’m special.” This one thing that I’m good at, and that is separating men from their consciousness, finding a way to get in touch with them, finding, get close enough at launching bombs and watching them drop. And he was the best at it.

And it was, I think, the drive to be the best, it has to come from some, there’s got to be something wrong where you have that fire inside of you.

The Parental Attribution Error

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I love thinking about this. I think it’s been the question that I’ve probably been the most obsessed by since doing the show. The price that people pay to be somebody that you admire. And I think it’s just endlessly interesting.

So one thing that comes to mind there is, do you know what the fundamental attribution error is? It’s like we attribute to other people motive for their action. It’s like their character, but for us, it’s situation. So, for instance, I cut you off in traffic because I’m late for work. You cut me off in traffic because you’re a dick.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So we have this asymmetry in how we judge other people’s behaviors as opposed to our own. I think that there’s an equivalent here when we think about our parents. So you could call it the fundamental parental attribution error, maybe, which would be we attribute to our parents our shortcomings, but not necessarily our strengths.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So we’re very happy. Like modern pop psychology, it’s like a rite of passage to lay at the feet of our parents. “I’ve got anxious attachment because nobody ever came to look after me.” They go, yeah, maybe. But also, isn’t this the reason that your hyper-vigilance means that no one ever gets to take advantage of you?

It’s like, “I am unable to relax and chill out because love was always predicated on me performing.” It’s like, yes, but also, it’s driven you to be an incredibly successful person. And I think we should just be a little bit cautious when laying at the feet of our parents only our shortcomings. They can either have, you can either say that my strengths and my shortcomings come from my parents, or my strengths and my shortcomings come from my own agency. But you can’t say I authored the things that I like about myself, but the things that I don’t like about myself came from some past situation.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Victim mentality.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And also bad things that happened to you when you’re a kid, being bullied. Being bullied is terrible at the time, but it leads many a person to say, “I’ll f*ing show you.” And then you get this incredible result. But then the thing is, are you happy? That’s the real dance. The dance is between success and happiness. And a lot of people have achieved success but have not achieved happiness, and they’ll die a loser.

Success vs. Happiness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, that’s you sacrificing the thing you want for the thing that’s supposed to get it. And that’s why, like, okay, what’s your definition of success? Interesting question. Would you just want to be the best in the world?

JOE ROGAN: Mm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like, that’s not bad. That’s not a bad…

JOE ROGAN: But it’s this thing we talked about before, too, that just because something’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s good. And there’s a lot of things that you do that are very difficult to do. And then you see other people have achieved them. You say, that must be really worthwhile. And then you do it and you realize, like, oh, this isn’t worth anything. This is just hard to do. This sucks.

That’s often the case with success because if you become incredibly successful and then you have all these haters and, you know, like the guy who wrote the shitty play, they come for you and they want to chop you down. And that’s part of the game that you’re playing. And if you don’t like that, if you don’t like that, but then you’ve gotten trapped in it and you’re constantly being attacked and you listen to it and you pay attention to it.

So you see with successful people, you see really with famous people, especially young people, they have no history with this. And then all of a sudden it’s just thrown at them. And then they are both the thing they wanted and something they would never want, which is to be constantly under attack.

The Lewis Capaldi Story

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve thought about how brutal it must be to have the talent, but not the constitution to be able to handle success and fame. So I don’t know whether you’ve been tracking Lewis Capaldi, the Scottish singer. So there’s a great documentary on Netflix. You’ve got to watch it. “How I’m Feeling Now.” It’s a bit old now. It’s like maybe four or five years old.

Lewis Capaldi breaks onto the scene. Unbelievable voice. He’s been playing working men’s pubs around Scotland and is just a f*ing phenom. Billions of streams, billions and billions of plays. Arena tour, global tour, all the rest of it. COVID happens. He’s back in his mum and dad’s house near Glasgow in Scotland, and he’s in the hut out the back trying to do the difficult second album.

And there’s the pressure of the world on him now. He’s got the talent. But the pressure from agencies, from record label, from fans, from himself, from his parents, from his peers, from everybody starts to get on him. It weighs on him so heavily that he develops a tick.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Jesus.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like Tourette’s. It turns out he’s always had Tourette’s, but the pressure has caused him to, like, he can’t perform. And toward the end of the documentary, he goes back out on stage at the O2 in London, does the thing, walks out on stage, and he’s still doing this. And he tracked this whole journey. This is toward the end, and he can’t get his words out.

This is his calling in life. This is what he was built to do. This is what he was made for. And his talent has been taken away from him by the pressure of trying to do the thing, not by his inability to do the thing. And this is such a f*ing unique kind of hell. Like think about that.

I think about fighters that have performance anxiety that just can’t get themselves into the octagon with the lights on them. Put them in the training camp, they’re sparring, there’s not that same amount of pressure. Not yet. And they’re unbelievable. And Lewis Capaldi did Glastonbury, I think two years ago, and the same thing happened. Comes out on stage and basically I can’t sing. He can’t. You’re hearing these little croaks and squeaks come out of him.

And then this year he comes back out. He’s done a ton of mindfulness, got his health in order. Mental health, work therapy comes out and f*ing destroys it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow, dude.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like, it makes the hairs on my arms stand up. It’s so f*ing cool.

JOE ROGAN: Wow, that’s awesome. That’s a great story. That’s what I like to see. I like to see someone who f*s their whole life up and gets back together again. I love that, I really do. Because I think that’s what people really root for. They really root for you to get it back together again. What they don’t root for is once you’re on top, like staying on top, they like you to fall. Yeah, that’s a little too much.

Redemption Stories

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think, especially with what most people feel. They want to see a little bit of themselves in that story and they want to see a little bit of struggle.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And they also know that they fed up their life because everybody’s fed up their life at some point.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Redemption.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If this person can be there and lose it and then come back, maybe…

JOE ROGAN: I can get my shit together.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s the problem.

JOE ROGAN: As a 42-year-old alcoholic, you’re…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not going to be Lewis Capaldi, but maybe you are.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe you’re Oliver Anthony.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know, Churchill didn’t get into power until he was 65.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So all of my life up until now would be less than two-thirds of the warm-up set for Churchill starting his thing.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

The Value of Authenticity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So I just, you never know sort of when this stuff’s going to come along. I do love though, the idea of watching somebody climb to the top, lose it and then turn it back around again. I think it’s just such a f*ing wonderful idea.

JOE ROGAN: We all love that. But I think it’s because we try to see some of our self in someone, which is why we don’t like things that are created by a corporation where they put together a band like the Monkeys or something like that and fake nepotism.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Silver spoon, baby.

JOE ROGAN: We hate all of that. We hate all of that. We hate all the people handed their life silver platter if it feels like.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Somebody didn’t earn it. Yeah, yeah. I worry about where motivation comes from for people. In a way, if you are able to game the system, which people are now, they can speed run relatability and authenticity. But you don’t know if this is some K pop thing, that’s some industry plant style scenario that’s just been placed together to try and get this, give you a sense of resonance with this person that doesn’t deserve it.

They didn’t actually struggle in that sort of a way, but they can construct the narrative that they did. And I think in a world that’s become increasingly prefabricated, people are looking, they’re scrutinizing very aggressively. Is this person who they say they are? This is the hypocrisy that points out that they’re right.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that’s where you get performative vulnerability. Oh, woe is me. They pretend to not pretend to have Tourette’s, although I’m sure some people do.

JOE ROGAN: They pretend they’re struggling.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because I need the sympathy vote.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The Problem with Deception

JOE ROGAN: Well, the real problem was when someone pretends and you catch them pretending like that, then you’re never going to trust them again. You could fail. You can fail and f up. You could think you got it right and you got it wrong and you just, ugh, f. But if you pretend, if you lie, if you show deception, if you pretend you’re something that you’re not and they find out, like Ellen, you know, she’s a nice lady, she’s all dancing. Meanwhile, she’s f*ing screaming at people and mean. You know, that’s like, oh, you were lying.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That is f*ing catnip to people.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, they love it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Well, there’s nothing that the Internet wants more than to find somebody that’s a hypocrite.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. Because the Internet is basically one big spot the difference competition. You said this thing here, you behave this way here.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I can compare the two. You have fallen short, and the f*ing jury comes down and smashes you in the head.

Craving Authenticity

JOE ROGAN: It’s also because we crave authenticity. We wish we had it. We crave it in other people. We want, we’re all trying to, we’re watching all these different people like this guy play golf and that guy play music. And watching all these people do all these different things and we’re getting something out of it. There’s a reason why you like that thing on Netflix. It’s like the, there’s, it fuels the human condition. It gives you happiness.

There’s some, in a genuine moment like that, it’s a very special element that it adds to your life, and we crave that. And it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not real. That’s why people get mad at me when I say I like AI music. I know it’s not realistic, but I don’t like it the same way I like listening to Johnny Cash sing “Hurt.” You know what I mean? It’s like there’s an authenticity to that. There’s a real thing to that. That’s very tangible. It’s different.

AI and the Music Industry

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s an upper bound on it. I certainly think I’m friends with a lot of musicians and one of the issues I think that they have with the AI revolution, apart from the fact that they’re coming for our jobs, which is obvious, is that learning a musical instrument is really f*ing hard and it takes a very long time.

I think that the revolution for podcasting has made it f*ing fantastic for people to feel less lonely and have exposure to conversations and information they never would have done, but anybody that sticks a microphone in front of them can record a podcast. It may be a totally shit podcast, but if you give me a guitar, I can’t make notes come out of it.

So the bar that you need to get over to just be acceptably proficient enough to be able to do, to have the conversation. Right. Everybody does what is equivalent of a, everybody that has never recorded a podcast has had a great conversation over dinner and gone, dude, if we recorded that, that would have got millions of plays on YouTube. Right. So everyone is a little bit closer to this.

And I think that one of the issues that the music industry or musicians within the industry have is that AI feels like it’s allowing people to leapfrog the first very long, very boring, very grindy stage of, well, this is where your f*ing fingers need to go on the saxophone. Or this is how you need to pick the strings in order to make the sound come out of the guitar.

And if you leapfrog it, that feels like a little bit like a technology enabled nepotism. In a way. You’ve got yourself toward the end. You shouldn’t be able to make this. This is a guarded and highly invested, I mean, you guys see this in comedy. In comedy, you’re like, dude, until you’re eight, the first seven years, they’re just you earning your keep. And then you’re right, whatever it is, it’s a thousand shows. And once you’ve done a thousand spots, then you can say that you’ve started doing comedy or whatever it is.

For podcasting, I think it’s like 150 episodes before anyone that asks me, I’m beginning my podcast and what’s your advice? And I’m like, once episode 150 starts, you have begun doing a podcast. Up until then, it’s basically a warm up. And I think with music, because it’s such a high investment that people need to have at the very, very beginning, this sense that there is a shortcut that allows people who haven’t earned their way to get there. It would be like if you were using AI to write comedy sets.

The Future of AI Entertainment

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And I think you’re correct. But I also think that’s probably what lions felt when people invented guns. Like, this is bullshit. I’ve been chasing you motherf*ers down and eating you for thousands of years. Now all of a sudden you just squeeze your little finger and instantaneously. That’s bullshit.

It’s coming, it’s coming. It’s coming in all forms of entertainment. It’s going to, they’ve figured out what you like. They’ve got a giant catalog of billions of hours of human beings paying attention to things. And it’s coming, it’s coming. It’s going to overwhelm you and it’s going to be indiscernible from reality. Eventually. It’s going to be something you physically experience as well as visual audio. You’re going to have the whole experience.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We’d better enjoy ourselves while we can.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, have fun while you can. Chris, I appreciate you very much. It’s always awesome talking to you. Your podcast is excellent. Tell everybody where they can get it, where they can find you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Modern Wisdom on Apple podcasts and Spotify, Chris Williamson on YouTube, etc, etc. I appreciate the f* out of you, man.

JOE ROGAN: I appreciate the f* out of you too, brother. It’s always good talking, it’s always fun. Goodbye, everybody. Peace.

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