Transcript: Joe Rogan Experience #2574 – Francis Foster & Konstantin Kisin 

But they— and then you look underneath and you look at the amount of retweets, you look at the engagement, you go to— you think to yourself, that just can’t be real because that is such a ridiculous take that they’ve just given you, but the engagement is unreal. And then you see it time and time again from the same influencers.

JOE ROGAN: (00:05:07 – 00:05:45) Yeah, well, I think just becoming outrageous is profitable, right? Yeah, that’s the problem. Yeah, so like you could just have a take— like, so let’s take out fake stories. So you could just have a contrarian take that’s preposterous and just gets you angry the moment you read it, and then you see people, ah, f*** you, and then— but that’s That’s engagement. That’s what these people want. And some people on Twitter are— they just didn’t get— exist for engagement. They’re not good faith actors. They’re just weird people that are probably on all sorts of weird drugs and they’re somewhere just f***ing tweeting up a storm.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:05:45 – 00:06:09) Yeah. And it’s also as well because now you can monetize your X. Yeah. That means that that’s incentivized people to create posts that are going to get more engagement. Yeah, and what’s, what’s one really easy way of guaranteeing engagement? It’s negative engagement. If you piss people off, if you say something that’s outrageous, that’s far easier to then get people engaging with you than to do something funny or to—

Good-Faith Conversations vs. the Piers Morgan Model

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:06:09 – 00:07:04) All right, take it easy. That’s been our business model for 8 and a half years. You’re f***ing ruining it. But actually, I mean, we’re joking, obviously. I’m actually really happy we— this— in the last few episodes that we’ve put out on TRIGGERnometry, you’ve got We’ve got David Pakman, who’s a left-wing guy, Dave Smith, who’s like a libertarian guy, and we’ve got Steven Crowder coming out soon. So we actually got to the point where we always wanted to be, where we’re talking to everybody.

It’s what I always really enjoyed about you and the way you do it. You’ve always been able— I actually kind of marveled at how you were able to do it, because when we started, we had a very hard time getting more of the left-leaning guests on. You never seem to have that problem. You just get everybody on and they’re happy to come on and talk. And that’s what actually you need more of in the world.

I think the outrage stuff you’re talking about, it really pushes people apart. We were really interested in how do you bring people together to have one conversation based on an agreed set of facts?

JOE ROGAN: (00:07:04 – 00:10:08) I think as long as you’re getting people that are honest, that are good faith conversationalists, and I think that is an issue. And that’s what I don’t want to do anymore. I don’t want to have on these people that I think are full of shit, that are propagandists, that are— that are loyal to a party to the point where they just distort facts or obfuscate or talk over you when you’re trying to make points.

Like the Piers Morgan model, where you see like someone will be saying something and the other person just chime in and just talk over them to try to disrupt their pattern of thinking. It’s very annoying and stupid, and I’m not interested in that at all. Yeah, and I’m not interested in talking to people that I think are just outright liars. Unless I like, I have some f***ing obligation to expose them, but I don’t, I don’t want to.

I don’t, I don’t want that to be a thing that I want to do all the time, where it’s just bring on people that I know you’re full of shit and like say I’ve got the facts. I like to talk to people that I’m interested in talking to, and that’s my business model. I mean, it’s not a business model, it’s just like, it’s what I started doing and that’s what I want to keep doing.

And if that, I was very interested in talking to Bernie again, I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, but I don’t think he’s a bad person, and I think he He’s an older guy with some ideals that just didn’t pan out. And I think he still believes that there’s a way to do this that’s different and better for the people and for the working people. But I think after a while, you say these words like— you know what it’s like when you have an act and you’ve been doing a bit for a long time and then the bit stops losing meaning?

You just say it the way you’ve always said it. But it doesn’t have any meaning to you anymore, and the bit starts to get stale. It starts to die off. And if you’re smart, you pull it out of the act, you put it on the shelf, and you go, “I gotta rework that thing or something.” It’s like, I don’t— I’m not attached to it anymore. It doesn’t feel real. I’m just saying it to go through the motions.

That’s how I feel like when he starts talking about climate change and stuff like that. Okay, what are we talking about? How much have you looked into it? Because if you really look into climate change, it’s very f***ing confusing. It’s not as simple as— like, there was just an article today that someone sent me that they think that global warming may have stopped an imminent ice age that was coming, which is one of the things that they were talking about during the 1970s.

That was a big thing. It was a big narrative about climate change. That was the big fear, was that a new ice age was coming. In fact, an episode of that Leonard Nimoy show— did you ever watch that, In Search Of? Great f***ing show. It was great because it was a mix of like horseshit, doom and gloom, Bigfoot, UFOs, all kinds of stuff. But it was Leonard Nimoy, Spock from Star Trek.

And he had a whole article about imminent ice age. And that, that’s the thing that we really should be afraid of. It’s a f***ing terrifying proposition that the world freezes over again. Because if it gets hot, you just move to the places that used to be cold and get air conditioning, right? Yeah, and get air conditioning.

Why Britain Doesn’t Have Air Conditioning

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:10:08 – 00:10:09) We don’t have air conditioning, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: (00:10:10 – 00:10:10) In England?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:10:10 – 00:10:11) No, at all. No, no.

JOE ROGAN: (00:10:11 – 00:10:13) Well, that’s why you guys die every year.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:10:13 – 00:10:13) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:10:14 – 00:10:27) More people die in England from— I think this is a fact— I think more people die in— not in England, but in Europe, in all of Europe, from heat stroke during summer than gun violence in the United States.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:10:28 – 00:10:28) Hmm.

JOE ROGAN: (00:10:29 – 00:10:30) I might have made that up.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:10:30 – 00:10:35) Yeah. But actually, there is a serious point.

JOE ROGAN: (00:10:36 – 00:10:38) I think it’s a high number, though.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:10:38 – 00:10:45) I was just going to say, I was just going to say, that That just sounds real. Yeah, that sounds real after the summer we’ve had.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:10:45 – 00:10:48) It must be true. Yeah, well, it sounds real.

JOE ROGAN: (00:10:48 – 00:10:54) I don’t understand why people haven’t adopted air conditioning. Is it a money thing?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:10:54 – 00:11:12) Well, it’s the same green nonsense that you’re talking about. Oh no, because air conditioning consumes a lot of energy and it therefore causes more climate change, quote unquote. Actually, more people die in England from cold in winter than they die from heat.

JOE ROGAN: (00:11:12 – 00:12:13) Here we go. Europe had an est— okay, yes, if you mean deaths attributed to heat rather than specifically heat stroke. European heat death estimates can exceed the total number of U.S. Firearm deaths, but the comparison needs a few qualifications. Same-year comparison: Europe had an estimated 61,672 heat-related deaths during the summer. That’s f***ing crazy. United States recorded more than 48,000 firearm deaths over the entire year, according to CDC. That includes suicides, homicides, and other firearm deaths, not just murders, including also cops shooting bad guys.

So in that year, yes, even Europe’s summer heat death estimate exceeded America’s full firearm death count. Well, heat stroke. We don’t have to say heat stroke. That was maybe a bad terminology, but just from heat. What about from cold? How many— look up how many Europeans die from cold every year. What do you guess? Think it’s more?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:12:15 – 00:12:20) I don’t know about Europeans. In Britain, I know more people die from cold than heat. In Britain specifically.

JOE ROGAN: (00:12:20 – 00:12:22) Wow, that’s crazy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:12:23 – 00:12:25) I imagine in Italy less so.

JOE ROGAN: (00:12:26 – 00:12:27) That’s crazy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:12:27 – 00:12:28) Like in the south.

JOE ROGAN: (00:12:29 – 00:12:31) It’s confused because you spelled year wrong, Jamie.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:12:32 – 00:12:33) There you go, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: (00:12:33 – 00:12:38) 364,000 people a year die from cold.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:12:39 – 00:12:39) Right.

JOE ROGAN: (00:12:39 – 00:12:43) Across 30 European countries according to a 2024 study.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:12:43 – 00:12:44) Wow.

JOE ROGAN: (00:12:45 – 00:12:54) That is an estimated annual average based on 1991 to 2020, not a count for the latest year. That is really crazy though.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:12:55 – 00:13:15) Well, this is what people don’t understand about the climate change agenda is it’s pushed electricity prices up and so, and gas prices, and so energy is much more expensive. So you literally have pensioners freezing to death in winter because they can’t afford to heat their home properly because we’re saving the planet. Anyway, your point I think is we need the Second Amendment and air conditioning in the UK.

JOE ROGAN: (00:13:16 – 00:13:21) That would help a lot. Yeah, that would help you guys a lot. Yeah, a lot of things would change.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:13:22 – 00:13:32) Yeah, yeah. I mean, the fact that we don’t— the majority of places don’t have aircon. If you’re, if you’re dating Joe and you want to bring a lady back to your flat, all you need to say is you’ve got aircon.

JOE ROGAN: (00:13:33 – 00:13:35) So it is available to some.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:13:36 – 00:13:36) Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:13:36 – 00:13:36) Yes.

JOE ROGAN: (00:13:36 – 00:13:44) So like, imagine if you move into a place and it doesn’t have air conditioning. How much hoops and ladders do you have to go through to get air conditioning into your place?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:13:45 – 00:13:48) Well, so now I’m having air conditioning installed in my house right now.

JOE ROGAN: (00:13:48 – 00:13:49) You don’t have it right now?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:13:49 – 00:14:00) I just bought a house that doesn’t have it. But it the climate is not like here in Austin. It is survivable. It’s just hot. It’s hot, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:14:00 – 00:14:00) Right.

JOE ROGAN: (00:14:00 – 00:14:03) Like, what is a— what is a hot Fahrenheit day in England?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:14:03 – 00:14:05) I don’t know what— I don’t know Fahrenheit.

JOE ROGAN: (00:14:05 – 00:14:06) Give me Celsius.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:14:06 – 00:14:10) 30. We’ve had like 37, 38, maybe up to 40 this year.

JOE ROGAN: (00:14:10 – 00:14:12) Okay, so that’s like in the 90s.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:14:12 – 00:14:14) That’s high. Yeah, it’s high.

JOE ROGAN: (00:14:14 – 00:14:20) What is that, Jamie? What is— let’s let’s, let’s say 40. What is 40 Fahrenheit? Or 40 Celsius, rather.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:14:20 – 00:14:28) 40 is probably about 100 degrees because 40 is when you’re having a— if you have— if your body temperature is 40 you’ve got a very bad fever.

JOE ROGAN: (00:14:28 – 00:14:29) 104.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:14:29 – 00:14:34) OK, so you guys have 104 days, like 1 or 2 over the course of a year.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:14:34 – 00:14:34) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:14:34 – 00:14:42) But you’ve got to remember, though, Joe, is like the infrastructure and the houses and the trains and all the public transport, they’re not built for that kind of climate.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:14:42 – 00:14:42) Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:14:42 – 00:14:54) So if you go on holiday in Italy and it’s 40, that’s one thing. If it’s 40 in the UK in houses that are built to keep the heat in during winter, it’s a different conversation.

JOE ROGAN: (00:14:54 – 00:15:00) So the average daytime high in July in August is 70 degrees.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:15:02 – 00:15:05) But we have had very hot days the last couple of summers. Very hot.

The Complexity of Climate Science

JOE ROGAN: (00:15:05 – 00:16:07) Anyway, that’s when people start freaking out about climate change. But that’s just so narrow-minded. And it’s not that we shouldn’t be concerned if the Earth gets warmer. That’s not what I’m saying. But I’m saying it’s never been static. So this idea that, oh my God, this is— we’re doing this. Are we? Do you know? Do you know about the entire history of the world’s temperature? Because it varies insanely. Not only that, there’s been many times in Earth’s history where there was way more carbon in the air and it was way cooler.

Doesn’t make any sense. And if you don’t understand differential equations, you don’t understand like the way the wind blows and solar activity and all these different variables that come into play along with greenhouse gases, along with carbon, there’s so many different variables that come into play like this These narratives are so unscientific for the people that want to say trust the science. Well, the science on climate change is f***ing incredibly complex. Or just climate, period. Forget about the word climate change.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:16:08 – 00:16:34) And it’s so interesting you use the word unscientific because I often think about this. Most of my family are scientists, physicists, biochemical engineers. The thing with, when a normal person hears the word science, what they think is if I pick up this phone and drop it is going to fall at a predictable speed because we understand the rules of gravity. We can calculate it. We can calculate the speed, the acceleration, all that stuff. Climate science is modeling. Modeling.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:16:35 – 00:16:35) Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:16:35 – 00:17:08) That’s not the— I’m not saying it’s not science exactly. But that’s not what we think about as normal, just ordinary people when we think about science. We think about something that’s 100% predictable, measurable, calculable. You can go, if we change this, then this is going to happen. Climate modeling is not like that. It’s an approximation and an estimate based on a lot of assumptions, and we don’t know how accurate those assumptions are. But even if you accept all that, what’s interesting in Britain is, do you know what percentage of global carbon emissions Britain produces?

JOE ROGAN: (00:17:08 – 00:17:10) Oh God, it’s got to be minuscule.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:17:10 – 00:17:41) 1%. Yeah. So if we reduced it to zero, we’d not have any impact on the climate at all while just destroying our economy, killing people. And that’s what we’ve done. We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. That’s why you can’t, you can’t build anything in the UK. You can’t run a business, an industrial business. You can’t make anything. It’s funny, you guys are having this big battle over data centers here. Yeah, we don’t have that because we’re not f***ing building any. Yeah.

Global Greening and the Green Energy Profiteers

JOE ROGAN: (00:17:41 – 00:17:52) The other super inconvenient thing when it comes to carbon is that there’s more vegetation, more leaf coverage in the world now than there has been in a long f***ing time.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:17:52 – 00:17:53) Global greening.

JOE ROGAN: (00:17:53 – 00:19:40) Yeah, it’s because of carbon, because plants actually consume carbon dioxide. It’s like, what are we doing? What are we freaking out about? Well, we’re freaking out about a bunch of people that have engineered a narrative to get us to freak out about it so they can profit off of it. And that’s the reality of it, is that all of these green deals and all this green energy, these people get contracts and these— and then there’s mandates for what you can and can’t use and what you should and shouldn’t do.

And then people profit off of these directions that we go in, and that’s the real problem. It’s not like we’re looking out for the world. Shut the f*** up when people say that we need to look out for the world. None of these people pushing this are looking out for the world, just so you know. You might be, you liberal lady in East Austin with the f***ing science is science bumper sticker on your f***ing Prius.

Maybe, maybe you really are a genuinely good person looking out for the— the people that are pushing that are not. They’re trying to profit. They’re sitting in boardrooms and they’re showing spreadsheets of how much money they’ll make if a certain bill goes through, because if the certain bill restricts one type of energy and promotes their type of energy, even if their type of energy like windmills is terrible for the environment and radically inefficient, They’re going to profit, and that’s what they’re thinking about.

And so then they’re going to pay politicians to push certain narratives. They’re going to fund these people. They’re going to put out advertisements for a greener Texas paid for by a greener Texas. Who’s paying that? Corporations. People making large amounts of money, and they don’t give a f*** about your environment. They want to make money. They’re vampires. They’re vampire people.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:19:40 – 00:19:44) And it’s always been that way, like oil companies funded anti-nuclear.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:19:44 – 00:19:45) Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:19:45 – 00:19:47) It’s just that’s how it works.

JOE ROGAN: (00:19:47 – 00:19:48) That’s how it works.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:19:48 – 00:20:19) In Britain now, so I’m actually going to get an electric car soon, right? And the reason is they’ve created the incentive structures whereby if you get an electric car, especially through your business, you can basically get a car that’s twice as good for the same money because you get so much tax write-off because Like you said, people have created a structure whereby if you encourage people to do this, they save money, right? And who benefits from that? Well, it’s the, it’s the people who, who are producing that type of vehicle.

Texas, Marijuana and Falling Alcohol Sales

JOE ROGAN: (00:20:19 – 00:20:46) 100%. In Texas, we have an issue right now where they’re trying to ban marijuana. And why are they trying to do that? Because alcohol sales are way down, like way down, like disturbingly down. And One factor that a lot of people aren’t taking into consideration is GLP-1s. It’s Ozempic. There are f***ing millions of people on GLP-1 and millions more that are lying about being on them.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:20:47 – 00:20:47) It’s so—

JOE ROGAN: (00:20:47 – 00:21:01) I have a guy that I know is on them. I said, “Dude, you’re looking great. What are you doing?” He’s like, “Oh, calorie restriction.” Well, technically you’re not lying, but you’re lying. You’re on Ozempic, motherf***er. You know what you’re doing.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:21:01 – 00:21:42) Yeah. It’s embarrassing. I always feel like when you talk about any issue, a lot of it just comes down to education. People don’t have a good grasp of actually what’s happening. So what it is that people have inside them is a vacuum. And eventually something has to fill that vacuum, right? Because you can’t operate, particularly now, with it going— when someone asks you about whatever it is, climate change, the Middle East, the war in whatever subject you want to talk about.

Most people simply don’t have the education, the answers, they don’t have their own opinions, so they simply reach for something. And you know what you’re going to reach for? You’re going to reach for a slogan, right? And it’s going to come from the most prominent person there is.

Religion, the Left and the Missing Moral Scaffolding

JOE ROGAN: (00:21:43 – 00:23:40) I have a theory about why the left is so much more loony, in my opinion, currently. I mean, it’s not like the right isn’t loony. The right’s very f***ing loony. But the left is loony in some things that don’t make any sense. And I think it’s because the left is secular, like almost universally. Like when you think about the left, you generally don’t think about like Christianity or any religion really. It’s more of like a science-based, like we’re too smart for that thing.

And I think they’re just lost. There’s no moral scaffolding to hold on to. There’s no Not— and I’m not saying religion is 100% great. But what I am saying is there’s something about having a structure like 10 Commandments or, whatever they have in whatever religion we’re talking about, where there’s rules to abide by because there’s a higher power. And then you worship. And in worshiping, there’s a humility to that and a humbleness to that.

And then there’s this community where everyone’s drawn together and we’re all agreeing on certain rules. I always talk about the church parking lot is proof that Christianity works because everybody’s so nice. They all let you go. You go, you go. It’s all so orderly. Nowhere on earth— I’m like, just that alone proves that Christianity can work and that there’s something to that. I guaran-f***ing-tee you, if you went to some trans rights rally and you parked your car and tried to leave, it would not be so kind.

It would not be the same. It would not, especially if you were in a pickup truck or something with an American flag on it. Right? They’d be rude as f*** to you. Whereas I think a part of what’s wrong with this side of our politics, when you look at the two sides, the left and the right, is that the left is almost like— I would have wanted to know what percentage of people who identify as progressive have any religion.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:23:42 – 00:23:43) We could probably find that out, Jamie.

JOE ROGAN: (00:23:44 – 00:23:44) Yeah, let’s find out.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:23:44 – 00:23:45) That actually would be interesting.

JOE ROGAN: (00:23:45 – 00:25:05) It’s what you were talking about. With a vacuum. So, I think, this is my belief at 59 years of age, that there’s a part of people that almost like is designed, a part of the human psyche that’s designed for religion. And we have had it for so long. We have had it for so many thousands and thousands and thousands of years. I just think it’s the way the human mind works. And I think in the absence of religion, We find something that— stop that for a second— we find something that does the job of religion, and that thing that does the job of religion is being progressive or being whatever you’re being.

Like, find a cause, find a thing, climate change, whatever it is, find a thing that becomes your religion, and anybody that is confronting that with an alternative perspective is a heretic. That’s a bad person. That’s evil. That’s an infidel. And that’s how they behave. They behave like religious zealots. I’m sure you’ve seen these conversations and you’ve had them with people. You just confront people in the street and start asking them questions.

If you don’t agree with them, even if— like, you, you’re great at it because you’re so calm and rational. You see them just f***ing— they just don’t want to be confronted by alternative perspectives. It’s very much like a religion.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:25:05 – 00:26:15) No, it’s totally. And it’s interesting, we just had Jonathan Haidt back on the show. We haven’t released it yet, but That’s one of the things we talked about. We talked about religion, and he’s not a religious person, but he was like, “I used to be very snooty about it, and now I just go, whatever you believe, it’s a social technology for achieving cohesion within a group and forgiving people.” And on a personal level as well, I think one of the things that Christianity in particular is very, very good at is gratitude, which is just a practice that Forget about God and all the rest of it.

The practice of acknowledging how fortunate you are at any point in your life is something that changes how you experience life. And if you do that every day, I think it’s much, much harder to be a deranged lunatic who thinks that their political— like, there’s political causes I feel very strongly about, but I’m not going to go on the march and scream at people who don’t agree with me. Because I just— that’s not— it’s not coherent to my worldview of what it is to be human. It’s also radically ineffective and completely ineffective.

JOE ROGAN: (00:26:15 – 00:26:17) Never changes anybody’s opinion, right?

Why Polls Can’t Be Trusted

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:26:17 – 00:26:17) Ever.

Why Polls Can’t Be Trusted

JOE ROGAN: (00:26:17 – 00:26:49) Yeah, no one screams in your face, you go, wow, I see your point. What are the stats you were trying to pull up earlier, Jamie? So here we go. Affiliated with a religion: 78% of Republicans, Republican-leaning independents identify with a religion. So with Democrats, it’s about 60%. Wow, interesting. It’s a lot more than I thought. Religiously unaffiliated, about 39%. Did not answer, about 1%. What is that? F*** off. 1% across the board.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:26:49 – 00:26:50) They’re the libertarians.

JOE ROGAN: (00:26:50 – 00:27:07) I’m in that group. That is the most intelligent group on Earth, the about 1%. The 1% that will not answer polls. That was my take on polls always. I was like, Here’s the problem with polls. Most people don’t answer polls. If somebody calls you up and said, “I’d like a few moments of your time to ask you a few questions—”

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:27:07 – 00:27:08) f*** you.

JOE ROGAN: (00:27:09 – 00:27:35) Anybody with a life, anybody that has like a family and stuff to do and hobbies they enjoy, friends they want to hang out with, they don’t sit around answering some f***ing poll. So you’re literally getting the opinion of people so f***ing stupid they answer polls. So add it on to those people, if you’ve— if there’s an issue like 49% agree, that means less than half of the people that are so f***ing stupid they’re answering polls agree with you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:27:35 – 00:27:45) That’s not good, right? Yeah, it’s the same with studies that they do at colleges because they always use college students. So like, you’re getting a very skewed perspective on humanity.

JOE ROGAN: (00:27:45 – 00:27:45) Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:27:46 – 00:27:49) Yeah, that’s how you’re measuring what human beings respond to.

Woke Pastors and the Original Church

JOE ROGAN: (00:27:49 – 00:28:55) Another thing that’s interesting with the religious thing when it comes to the left is there’s been this larger than normal presence of these, LGBT pastors and these people that are promoting a very different Christianity, and they’re talking about things that biblical scholars are like, “Hey, wait, what page is this on? Where does it say abortion’s okay?” How are you getting to that? Where does it say God’s non-binary? There’s a lot of this weirdness that this woke weirdness that sort of entered into religion and some, some pastors are doing it and you go, okay, is that good?

I don’t know if that’s good. I mean, is it? Because you’re not following the original stuff. So if we’re going to not follow the original stuff, shouldn’t we go and take out the slavery part first? Shouldn’t we go and take out the slaughtering of women and children first? Because that’s in there. There’s a lot of stuff that’s in there we should probably concentrate on first. Before we start saying God’s non-binary.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:28:55 – 00:29:14) But you know what I mean? Yeah, it’s true, it’s true. It’s like, because I was raised Catholic and I go to a church— I went once to a couple of times to a Church of England Mass, and it’s like, look, if you’re going to Mass, you want the product, right? You want the, you want the real deal. You want the Marlboro Reds.

JOE ROGAN: (00:29:14 – 00:29:18) You want to hear the Latin. Yeah, you want the good stuff.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:29:19 – 00:29:24) Yeah, you want to sit there and think to yourself F***, I’m going to hell and it’s going to be awful.

JOE ROGAN: (00:29:24 – 00:29:34) We really should get the original, the original version when they would come down the aisle with incense. It was cannabis. They would have these big f***ing like things where they had handle, you know those things?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:29:34 – 00:29:34) They—

JOE ROGAN: (00:29:34 – 00:29:37) yeah, yeah, it was cannabis.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:29:37 – 00:29:39) It was cannabis. What church are you going to?

JOE ROGAN: (00:29:39 – 00:29:42) High as f***. They’re getting everybody high so they get along with everybody.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:29:42 – 00:29:45) No wonder they’re trying to ban it in Texas, man.

Legal Weed, Alcohol and Supplements

JOE ROGAN: (00:29:45 – 00:30:41) The Texas thing is all about the alcohol. It’s all about alcohol. It’s like traceable money to Dan Patrick. And some other people. It’s traceable. You could see how these people support him, and you see that they want this because it’s like it’s hurting their business. And if people can just get high and like, here’s the thing about marijuana. Even if they do what, Colorado did— so Colorado was the first— shout out to Colorado— the first to legalize cannabis.

And one of the things they did is say, we’re going to put a crazy tax on it and just use that tax for f***ing schools and all kinds of stuff. Everybody’d be happy, ’cause you got all this new tax revenue. I think it was like 39%, which is really— and everybody’s like, great, fine, because marijuana is relatively inexpensive. If you go out drinking with some buddies, f***, man, you bring 5 buddies, you’re picking up a tab, they’re picking up a tab, you guys are having fun, you’re drinking, you’re ordering, you have $500, $600 at the end of the night, easy, easy, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:30:41 – 00:30:43) Easy.

JOE ROGAN: (00:30:43 – 00:31:37) Marijuana, $600, you’re dead. $600 worth of weed will f*** you up for a month. You’ll be just lying in your bed going, why did I do that? Yeah, that’s not going to happen. It’s a different thing. It’s like one joint. What is a joint these days, Jamie? You’re a young fella. In California where you can legally buy them, yeah, probably in the range of $15 to $20. Yeah, $15, $20. You’re barbecued for the whole night.

Yeah, especially California cannabis. They’ve got scientists that have been working on this shit for a long time, man. They are not normal joints. Every now and then Ron White will bring one by the mothership. You’re like, get that out of here before everybody dies. They all dust them with kief. They have THC crystals all over them. It’s like they’re going too hard. They sell, they sell some joints that are like guaranteed to f*** you up. They’re like $100.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:31:37 – 00:31:45) And it’s also as well, it’s like young people don’t have the money to go out boozing like we did when we were young, when everything was much cheaper.

JOE ROGAN: (00:31:45 – 00:32:17) Well, there’s also, I think, And this is a positive aspect of the internet and all these health and wellness influencers, is that a lot of people are realizing like, hey, alcohol is actually bad for you. I like it. I took a long time off of it, took like 8 months, which is a long time for me. And I noticed a big difference the moment I stopped drinking. I just felt way better, felt better throughout the day. I felt like my energy levels were much more consistent. I felt better waking up. It’s better. It’s not good to poison yourself all the time, but it’s also fun.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:32:18 – 00:32:41) It’s like all drugs. It’s got good and bad. Yeah, I would say alcohol is kind of a shit drug in terms of the good versus the bad. I’d like a glass, a glass of wine with dinner or something, but beyond that, the trade-offs go way down. Like the second, third, like you’re not— right, right. It’s not improving your enjoyment of the evening. No, it’s very expensive. And you— and at our age, you wake up the next day.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:32:42 – 00:32:42) Oh man.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:32:42 – 00:32:50) After I’m like, after one glass of wine, I wake up the next day. I’m like, oh even one glass of wine. Yeah. Yeah, that’ll do.

JOE ROGAN: (00:32:50 – 00:32:51) I know what’ll help you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:32:52 – 00:32:53) Glutathione.

JOE ROGAN: (00:32:53 – 00:32:54) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:32:54 – 00:32:54) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:32:54 – 00:33:06) Yeah, especially liposomal glutathione. It’s more bioavailable. But glutathione is really good for— take it the night when you’re drinking, take it while you’re drinking, take it before you’re drinking, take it after you’re drinking.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:33:06 – 00:33:08) All right. I’m back on the sauce. Thanks, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: (00:33:08 – 00:33:12) But also, there’s one of the issues with alcohol is dehydration.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:33:12 – 00:33:12) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:33:12 – 00:33:21) And it’s an immunosuppressant. So you should be taking amino acids. You should be taking definitely some electrolytes, but also glutathione.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:33:21 – 00:33:29) It’s a kind of mixed sales pitch. Imagine you were like a rep for an alcohol company. You can have a glass of wine, but you need to take about 5 supplements at the same time.

JOE ROGAN: (00:33:29 – 00:34:08) Well, listen, I think everybody should take supplements anyway. Yeah, I really do. I think there’s a lot of misleading doctors out there that you shouldn’t listen to that’ll tell you— I got a doctor with a potbelly once tell me that you get everything you need from a balanced diet. I’m like, shut the f*** up. You shut the f*** up. I didn’t say that to him, but I really wanted to. I was kind of gentle about it.

I said, “Sir, I have been taking vitamins for a long time, and I notice a marked difference between when I take them and when I don’t take them.” There’s a lot of benefits, and there’s a lot of peer-reviewed studies that show benefits of vitamins. Yeah, so let’s just stop talking about this before I get f***ing angry at you fat f***. Fat f*** giving out health advice.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:34:08 – 00:34:15) Yeah, thanks for looking at me when you said that, Joe. I appreciate it. And then you looked at me while she said that.

JOE ROGAN: (00:34:15 – 00:34:16) Well, I had to look at you. I’m being kind.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:34:16 – 00:34:17) I’m joking.

JOE ROGAN: (00:34:17 – 00:34:18) I’m a polite host.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:34:20 – 00:34:28) But one of my one of my cousins— this is a true story— he was a cardiologist. He used to smoke like 40 a day.

JOE ROGAN: (00:34:28 – 00:34:29) Great.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:34:29 – 00:34:30) Perfect.

JOE ROGAN: (00:34:30 – 00:34:38) He’s probably stressed out. He’s probably got bills to pay and f***ing— I don’t know what you guys have over there because you have— your education isn’t free.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:35:04 – 00:35:09) unless it’s really, really bad, will not be like, I’m suing the f***ing— like, we don’t tend to do that.

JOE ROGAN: (00:35:09 – 00:35:10) Wouldn’t that be nice?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:35:10 – 00:35:10) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:35:10 – 00:35:12) Wouldn’t that be nice?

British Service Culture vs. American Friendliness

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:35:12 – 00:35:20) Wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah, but there’s a trade-off to that, which is like our service culture in the UK is objectively disgusting.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:35:20 – 00:35:34) It’s a lot closer to the Soviet Union than it is to America. In the Soviet Union, when basically if you went to a shop, they would treat you like they were doing you a favor. And Britain is much closer to that than it is to America, where people are like happy to see you.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:35:34 – 00:35:38) I walk into a restaurant in Texas, they’re happy to see.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:35:39 – 00:35:43) I’m like, what the f***? And it takes me like a week to adjust to the fact that people are nice.

JOE ROGAN: (00:35:43 – 00:35:59) Well, people are nice here in general. Yeah, much nicer than California. And I think one of the reasons is there’s less people. I really believe that there’s an effect that it has on humans, no matter who you are, when there’s an enormous number of people surrounding you all the time. I think it’s just—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:36:00 – 00:36:01) I totally agree, man.

JOE ROGAN: (00:36:01 – 00:36:03) I think it’s— this place is only a million people.

The Human Zoo: Why Cities Make Us Miserable

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:36:03 – 00:36:11) Well, there was a guy— I talk about this all the time when we talk about everyone’s concerned about plummeting birth rates and all of that. And a lot of people—

JOE ROGAN: (00:36:11 – 00:36:12) everybody but Elon.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:36:12 – 00:36:15) Yeah, he’s pumping them out, man.

JOE ROGAN: (00:36:16 – 00:36:17) He’s actually concerned.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:36:17 – 00:36:22) That’s why he’s doing something about it. Yeah, I’m at replacement rate with my family now.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:36:22 – 00:36:22) Congratulations.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:36:22 – 00:36:49) Good job. But I think my sense has always been— I read this great book by a guy called Desmond Morris. He was a primatologist. He studied great apes. And he wrote a book called The Human Zoo, which was all about how the city creates in human beings the kind of responses that a zoo creates in animals. Higher rates of interpersonal violence, higher rates of mental illness, lower reproductiveness, higher rates of depression, all of this stuff.

JOE ROGAN: (00:36:49 – 00:36:50) Totally makes sense.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:36:50 – 00:37:09) And I’ve moved out of the small town that I lived in outside, and I already noticed the difference. We went in on a Saturday to do some shopping. And I was like, “Get me the f*** out of here.” After 10 minutes, it was just like too many people, right? Yeah, I only go into London now for work, do the work, come out, and just hide in my house now.

JOE ROGAN: (00:37:09 – 00:37:15) Yeah, so you become accustomed to that buzz of the city. Yeah, but it’s not necessarily good for you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:37:15 – 00:37:17) It’s not good for you. I don’t think it’s good for you.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:37:17 – 00:37:35) I don’t think it is. No, being accustomed to the buzz of the city is like being accustomed to social media. It’s constant dopamine. It’s constant, constant, constant. You are always looking for the next thing. You’re always looking for something to stimulate you. It’s why a lot of people in the city, when things go quiet, they can’t handle it, right?

JOE ROGAN: (00:37:36 – 00:38:06) Yeah, I have a good friend who’s lived in Manhattan for, boy, more than 30 years, and he recently got a place on Fire Island. Not recently, like within the last 10, 15 years. And he said without that place in Fire Island, he wouldn’t even be able to keep his place in Manhattan. He said he can’t deal with it anymore. But Fire Island’s like a small island. I don’t think they even have cars. I think you get there on a ferry and everybody rides bikes, and it’s like And so he goes there, and then he comes back, beep beep, f*** you.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:38:07 – 00:38:07) You—

JOE ROGAN: (00:38:07 – 00:38:10) the contrast of the two of them makes it livable.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:38:10 – 00:38:10) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:38:10 – 00:38:42) Whereas when I first met him, he was like, “I f***ing love it, I love the energy of this city.” And I was there like, I’ve got my own energy, I gotta get the f*** out of here, I don’t like this. I like woods, I like peace, I like to be able to sit on top of a hill and see birds fly overhead. That’s what I like. I like nature. I do not like being in like a cramped F***ing group of all kinds of people stacked, feeling each other’s energy. It’s fun occasionally. New York’s fun to visit, but living there, sleeping there, it pays— you pay a toll.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:38:43 – 00:39:03) You do pay a toll because that city— like, we’ve got a friend who lets us use his apartment, and it’s a beautiful apartment in Manhattan, but you can never really sleep because what you said is like, nah, nah, f*** you, f*** you in the ass. And it’s like, you go, what going on? And it’s like, it’s 3:15, do you know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: (00:39:03 – 00:39:04) Right.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:39:04 – 00:39:08) Yeah. And you’re going, people are insane. They’re driven insane by this.

JOE ROGAN: (00:39:08 – 00:39:42) Well, it’s also a 24-hour city, a legitimate 24-hour city. And when I was single, it was great because pool halls are open in New York City 24 hours a day. So, Chelsea Billiards, which is where we would go, was like this crazy place that was like a playground that was open 24 hours a day. This is nuts. And then you can go to a diner, you can go to— you could get a real meal.

Apparently a lot of this died during COVID but you can get like a steak dinner at 4 a.m., like a nice restaurant. You could sit down like, this is crazy. This place is nuts. It was fun when I was 23.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:39:42 – 00:39:49) It’s fun. It’s fun. New York is a lot of fun. We have a good time. We’re there for a week. We go to our favorite cigar bars. All of that.

JOE ROGAN: (00:39:49 – 00:39:50) It’s fun.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:39:50 – 00:40:00) It’s fun. But I think it’s also once you get married and you have kids, then the calculus changes completely. I would rather spend half an hour with my son walking in the woods.

JOE ROGAN: (00:40:00 – 00:40:00) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:40:00 – 00:40:04) Over, whatever the best New York has to offer. You know what I mean? It’s just—

JOE ROGAN: (00:40:04 – 00:40:21) for sure. Well, it’s for me too. A lot changed as I— when I’m— when I got on— moved to Los Angeles, I started moving further and further away from the city. And as I moved further and further away from the city, I became more and more relaxed. I was like, I think there’s something to this.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:40:21 – 00:40:21) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:40:21 – 00:40:53) And so where I lived most of the time when I was living in, LA was not even in LA County. I was living in the neighborhood county Neighboring county. I had plenty of acres. I had mountain lions and bobcats and all kinds of shit in my neighborhood, deer in my neighborhood. It’s way more relaxed. It was just— I could go outside and just hear birds and see a hawk circling over a canyon looking for a rabbit. It was awesome. I loved it. It was just so much better than just being inundated with sounds, sounds and movement and activity.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:40:53 – 00:41:11) It’s just like when I was teaching, I remember every year, because I was teaching a really rough part of East London, we used to take the kids away for a 1-week residential out in the countryside, and they would do activities and whatever else. And you would literally see a different side to these kids.

JOE ROGAN: (00:41:11 – 00:41:12) 100%.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:41:12 – 00:41:33) You would— when you saw them on the playground, they were surrounded by concrete and just skyscrapers and tower blocks. They— everybody, even when you started the day, everybody— and these were 10, 11-year-old kids. Everybody just felt amped, like they were ready to come for confrontation. They were ready to go. Yeah, after a week in the countryside, you saw a different side to these kids.

JOE ROGAN: (00:41:34 – 00:42:31) Yeah, because that’s how people are supposed to live. That’s how we evolved. Just like we evolved with religion, we also evolved in nature. And I think we’re struggling with the absence of both of those things in our society. And the big one to me, the biggest one, is not just nature, but it’s also light pollution. Yeah, we were talking about the other day, Colum Tyrrell, hilarious stand-up comedian, was on, and he was talking about how he goes to Big Bend and goes down to this area of Texas and South Texas that is like one of the best places to see the sky, the night sky, and how f***ing insane it is.

He just— just, you’re confronted by the Milky Way and all these stars. I think that chills people out too. That puts— that puts your place in the universe in perspective. And in the cities, that’s the most absent. You can’t see any stars. So in the cities, everything’s bright. You just see a black sky. Who gives a f*** what’s up there? Let’s go eat. Let’s go do this. Let’s do that. F*** these people.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:42:32 – 00:42:33) You f***ing fascists.

JOE ROGAN: (00:42:33 – 00:42:42) Or whatever it is. It’s like you’re living in this very tiny, blinded world.

Dealing With Lies and Online Criticism

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:42:42 – 00:43:11) I think for people like us as well, who by virtue of what we do are digitally plugged in, like we have to kind of pay attention a little bit to what’s going on. I certainly spend a lot of time on my phone. When, I remember a month or two ago there was some shit going on, people talking shit about, as always, about us on social media or in the papers, whatever. And then I just sit in my garden and I see these 2 giant trees that are like 300 years old. Yeah, who gives a f***? Yeah, when you’re there, you just go, who gives a f***? It’s also the cost of what we do.

JOE ROGAN: (00:43:11 – 00:43:23) Yeah, the cost of what we do is people are going to have opinions. You want them to have opinions. Some of the opinions are going to suck and some of them are going to be completely outrageous and some are going to be just outright lies where they just want to take you down. That’s okay.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:43:23 – 00:43:46) Yeah, the lies piss me off. I’ll be honest, the lies piss me off because I’m like, I am happy to be criticized for mistakes I make. I’m happy to be criticized for things that I said inarticulately. I’m happy to be criticized by people who don’t like my worldview, but don’t f***ing lie about it. Don’t make up bullshit about me and tell other people that that’s what I am. Yeah, that pisses me off.

Parties Defined by Their Craziest Members

JOE ROGAN: (00:43:46 – 00:45:34) That we should reject that from everyone. From both sides. And the problem is, if it aligns with your ideology, you won’t call it out and you accept it and it’s fine. It’s just like, I always say that these parties that unfortunately we only have 2, are defined by the craziest members of those parties. When you think about the left, what do you think about? People that want trans women in sports and communism and an open border.

And then when you think about the right, what do you think about? Like Patriot Front and f***ing religious fundamentalists that want the Bible in every school, and xenophobic people that think this is a white Christian nation and that’s it. It’s just so exhausting. And if you spend enough time absorbing all of this online, it completely warps your worldview instead of just basing your worldview on how you interact with people in real life.

And most people now are tainted by this, so even interacting with them in real life is a problem, especially if you don’t care catch them one-on-one. Yeah, it was 3 of them and one of you, then it’s a problem. Why are you talking to me like this? You would never talk to me like this if it was you and me and we were alone. This is crazy. This is a crazy way to talk to people.

If you have an opinion about something and we both have the time, which is another thing, to actually discuss this— like, this is a time-consuming, nuanced discussion. Let’s— if— which is a beautiful thing, what we’re allowed to do, where we could sit down and have those discussions. And I think it’s super beneficial for other people to be able to listen. Because if someone sees some Twitter hot take on you, they can get a very distorted perception of who you are.

And then they hear you on a podcast, they go, wait a minute, this guy is pretty reasonable. He seems like a nice guy. The f*** is going on in the world?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:45:34 – 00:45:35) Right.

JOE ROGAN: (00:45:35 – 00:45:52) But if you’re only a clips person and you’re only a Twitter person and you’re only a hot take person, you just— and you’re tired, you’re working all day, you have a f***ing whole bunch of obligations. You’re going to like lock into a fake version of the world, and that version of the world is going to give you anxiety.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:45:52 – 00:46:17) But it’s also about incentives, because if you are a hot takes person, if you are a clips person, you actually don’t care about the truth because that’s not what you’re aiming for. What you’re actually aiming for is engagement, it’s views, it’s all the rest of it, it’s money. So unfortunately, as we all know, there’s— the truth is important, but it doesn’t generate, it doesn’t engage people as much as a hot take, as much as something that is potentially divisive.

The Hunger for Real Conversations

JOE ROGAN: (00:46:17 – 00:46:58) Here’s how I push back on that: the success of podcasts like yours and mine. This is the difference, right? It’s like, it’s clear that there’s a thirst for this. There’s a hunger for people having discussions and for people that say, oh, well, I see this point of view, I see why you would think that way, this is what I think, and let’s talk. There’s a hunger for that, obviously. Yeah, it’s not just that the only interaction that humans are having is these bullshit artists that are making these fake posts or these very biased posts just to get engagement because that’s how they make their money, which are— that’s a sizable population online. But there’s also plenty of people that are having real conversations.

Political Attack Ads and the Midterms

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:46:58 – 00:47:40) Yeah. And it’s like you said, I think politics is what changes all of it. And maybe that’s where I acknowledge that we— like when we started the show, we had a rule that we would never have sitting politicians on the show. And then, we got interested in more politics and we had access to more politicians and suddenly we talked to a few of them and then people go, “Oh, okay, so this is like you’re on a team, you’re on the other team, right?”

And now the gloves are off, man. It is crazy. Like we were sitting in Airbnb yesterday preparing for one of our interviews, watching something on YouTube, but because we weren’t logged in with our own account, you get YouTube ads. And right now as we’re recording this, it’s the midterms coming up. And the political attack ads— have you seen this shit?

JOE ROGAN: (00:47:40 – 00:47:42) Oh, I’ve seen a lot of them in America, bro.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:47:43 – 00:47:51) It is— if you show that to a person who’s not used to it is shocking to me. It’s like, “Ken Paxton loves pedophiles.” Whoa, right?

JOE ROGAN: (00:47:52 – 00:47:52) That’s—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:47:52 – 00:47:53) and the other way too.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:47:53 – 00:47:54) Yeah, right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:47:54 – 00:48:03) “James Talarico wants to take your daughter and rape her and then trans her.” Whoa. It’s since— like, imagine, imagine talking about people like that.

JOE ROGAN: (00:48:04 – 00:48:04) Right, right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:48:04 – 00:48:13) Imagine you came on here and you were just like, the Republicans want to trans your kids and the Democrats— oh, the Democrats— no, that would be crazy. The Democrats want to trans your kids.

JOE ROGAN: (00:48:13 – 00:48:16) Well, listen, give it another 30 years, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:48:16 – 00:48:22) It could completely swing. Yeah, when the Republicans are transing your kids, that’s when you know you really are f***ed.

JOE ROGAN: (00:48:22 – 00:48:28) Well, that’s when we know that the world is a changed place, when there’s secretly straight people, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:48:28 – 00:48:28) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:48:28 – 00:48:37) So like there’s someone living a gay lifestyle because it’s super popular, but he’s secretly straight. And we have to like find him, and TMZ catches him making out with a woman.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:48:38 – 00:48:39) Look!

JOE ROGAN: (00:48:39 – 00:48:41) Like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:48:43 – 00:48:45) Somebody gets outed for watching straight porn.

JOE ROGAN: (00:48:46 – 00:48:50) Yeah, one day, one day, one day, if the Democrats have their way.

Illegal Immigration, the Census and Congressional Seats

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:48:50 – 00:49:06) Yeah, but then, but then, like you said, I mean, the stakes— I also see it the other way though, because the stakes are high. If you, if you take illegal immigration, Like that was a real problem in this country under the Democrats. Like gigantic, right? So a lot according to The View, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: (00:49:06 – 00:49:10) The View fact-checked me on that. In fact, the border was closed. That was one of the—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:49:10 – 00:49:11) yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:49:11 – 00:49:46) Oh my God. They did a fact-check of me saying why I voted Republican. And I said there’s— there were so many things that were going the wrong way with the past administration. One of them, you knew that it wasn’t Biden running it. It was whoever was in his cabinet. They were running the country. Wasn’t Biden. He was out of his f***ing mind. We all know that. We accept it. There’s a bunch of people have come out and said that were working there now.

So that was one. The other one was the border was wide open and that people were f***ing coming through. And f***ing Sunny Hostin fact-checked me and actually was saying that Biden told people not to come. Come, but they did.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:49:47 – 00:49:47) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:49:47 – 00:52:46) And yeah, look, Greg Abbott, our governor, did bus people to New York City because like, look, you guys are passing these policies, you want this border wide open, you f***ing handle these people. And that is true, but it was also true that the Red Cross had stations that were set up where people give people maps, tell them how to get in, that once people did get in, they were given plane tickets, they were given EBT cards, they were given cell phones, they were put up in luxury hotels.

All this is true. Not, not just that, but a disproportionate amount of people who moved in, who came here illegally, moved to swing states. Kind of crazy. Seems a little odd. Seems a little odd that you got a large portion of them set up in Ohio and set up in a bunch of these different places, like the Haitians in Ohio. It’s a famous part. But it’s like, there’s clearly an incentive. You know what the incentive is.

The census counts humans. It doesn’t count legal citizens. So if there’s 10 million humans and half of them are illegal, doesn’t matter. That’s— that indicates how many congressional seats you get. That’s real. So if you just flood a place that you’re already in control with illegal immigrants that you’re paying for, this isn’t rocket science. That’s going to help you stay in power. And that’s what was going on. And I felt like that is crazy.

So Kamala Harris was recently talking about how they need to add more people to the Supreme Court, and then they need to turn DC and Puerto Rico into states. And why do you want to do that? Because if you do that, then you have control forever, right? And that’s the reality that I was confronted with the choices between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It’s not that, I looked at this, the Trump administration, and say, well, this is perfect.

This is exactly what we want. I love it when he has a picture of himself as Jesus and he posted up on Truth Social. This is great. I think some of the things he’s done are good for sure. And I think some of the things the FBI has done— this is one of the things that the left does not want to confront— there’s been a significant drop in crime. Significant, significant drop in crime.

Measurable drop in crime because of the FBI under Kash Patel in this new administration. Now, I don’t know why. I don’t know what it means. Some people say it’s because of underreporting, which is an issue because especially places like Los Angeles, no one gives a f*** if you get robbed. No one gives a f*** if your car gets broken into. They’re not going to do anything. So it’s underreported crime. And so they say crime is down, but is it?

No, not if you talk to people. Everybody that I know that lives in Los Angeles says it’s f***ing Gotham City now. It’s f***ing nuts. Whereas it wasn’t 15 years ago. So what happened? What happened was the same policies that you f***ing people keep voting for keep going further and further and further and further down the line. And the further they go, the more things get shitty, and no one wants to change because you’re in a cult.

Venezuelans and the Tren de Aragua Problem

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:52:47 – 00:53:06) Yeah, it’s also worth— people say these policies are kind, that it’s the right thing to do morally. As you know, as somebody who talks to— whenever I see a Venezuelan person, I always want to talk to them because I want to see how they’re doing, how they feel the country is doing, how Venezuela is doing.

JOE ROGAN: (00:53:06 – 00:53:08) Because you’re from Venezuela. People that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:53:08 – 00:54:16) Yeah. And one thing that I remember this conversation I had with an Uber driver, and he was talking to me and he said to me, “Look, when you go on the pods, because I follow your pod and I listen to Joe and I follow all these pods, please tell people that Venezuelan people, we’re not criminals. We’re not people coming here to cause trouble. The vast majority of us only want to come here to work.

And he goes, but those are the people who do it legally. The other people who come in, now I’m sure that some of them just want to come in, a lot of them want to come in just for a better life, but you’re also allowing a portion of people to come in who are criminals, who are going to cause trouble, and that’s going to give a bad reputation to every single Venezuelan person who is here.

Because the moment you hear Venezuelan, you think, oh, Tren de Aragua, which is the very famous gang which is causing huge— which was causing huge amounts of problem in America. Drug runnings, killings, gang activity. So immediately when you think of a Venezuelan, you go, oh, Tren de Aragua. You don’t think of the guy who’s coming along, who’s going to work for you, who’s going to drive your Uber, who’s just doing what he can to make ends meet.”

JOE ROGAN: (00:54:16 – 00:55:09) Now let me ask you this. Do you think that allowing the illegals in and the criminals in— not just the illegal, let’s say, because everyone who comes in that doesn’t do it the right way is an illegal. So allowing criminals to come through as well, knowing that this will increase violent crime— do you think that that is just an unintended side effect of the goal they’re trying to achieve, which is get more congressional seats, control districts, make it so that the other party can’t win?

Or do you think that they have calculated this and said that this would probably be a way that we can institute much more control, like Flock cameras, and have the ability to tap into people’s phones, find out if they’re doing illegal activity, and that people will actually allow us to do this because we’ll do it under the premise that we’re making the streets safe again.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:55:09 – 00:55:15) And it’s probably quite hard to separate the criminals from the non-criminals as well if the border is open and they just come across, right? It’s impossible.

JOE ROGAN: (00:55:15 – 00:55:16) How would you know?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:55:16 – 00:55:38) The other thing, we had Andrew Yang on recently, and this is where it gets even worse, because one of the reasons he left the sort of conventional Republican-Democratic party model was he said, “Actually, neither party wants to solve the problem.” And he was saying some Republicans will deliberately avoid allowing Democrats to close the border because it gives them something to run on.

JOE ROGAN: (00:55:38 – 00:55:39) Of course. Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:55:40 – 00:55:43) And that’s f***ing crazy. Yeah, that is f***ing crazy.

JOE ROGAN: (00:55:43 – 00:55:46) Yeah. And Anna Paulina Luna explained that to me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:55:46 – 00:55:46) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (00:55:46 – 00:55:52) She was like, “There’s a bunch of issues that they don’t want resolved because that’s how they That’s how they raise finances.”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:55:52 – 00:55:53) They can run on it.

JOE ROGAN: (00:55:53 – 00:55:57) They run on them. That’s a campaign talking point. It’s like you got to have it. You got to have it in your bag.

Corporate Greed and the Diffusion of Responsibility

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:55:58 – 00:56:53) See, this is where I think the left has a lot of very good points actually, which is the accumulation of power within big corporations and government. That’s why when I was younger, I always thought of myself, and I haven’t really changed my opinions very much, I thought of myself as being on the left because the more actually we do our show and the more people we speak to who are in positions to know the more I’m just confronted by how much behavior in that part of our society is driven by greed and not morality.

These people are not moral, right? I’m not even saying they’re immoral. I think they’re worse. They’re amoral. They don’t give a f*** as long as they win the election, they make money, they increase their bonus. That’s— that is so scary to me. It’s much scarier actually than people intentionally doing bad things. In a way, and that accumulation of power in the hands of a very small number of people, that’s a real thing, man.

JOE ROGAN: (00:56:53 – 00:58:30) It’s a real thing, and it’s also a part of the culture of those groups of people, right? There’s a diffusion of responsibility aspect of being a part of a corporation that’s doing things that are f***ed up. Say if you’re working for a corporation, they manufacture something, and you find out that these people are dumping some sort of toxic waste in the third world. “Not me. I’m in Dallas. I’m working on— I’m at my desk.

I’m doing spreadsheets.” But you are a part of this corporation, right? But you don’t think, oh my god, I’m a part of an evil movement that’s killing fish in a river somewhere in Cambodia or whatever. That’s not how you think. You are a part of this culture, and you— if you’re a lawyer, hey, I know he’s guilty. I got to get him off. This is the job. If you’re working in a corporation, hey, we’re here to make money.

This is what we do. We have shareholders. We’re working 16 hours a day. We’re on f***ing Adderall. We don’t have time for morals. Okay, maybe one day I’ll be moral, but right now I want a house in the Hamptons. I want a yacht. I want a f***ing jet. And I think I can get there because I know that the guy who used to be the CEO, he left, he got $600 million.

And this is what the culture is. The culture is all about making the most money as possible. And when you’re around a bunch of other people that are doing that, it seems fine. The responsibility of being moral is completely removed. You’re part of a giant machine that you can’t stop. And so listen, we are, Xerox or Raytheon, whatever it is. You don’t think, oh, I can, I can have an effect on the world with my decisions and I should probably do the right thing. There’s none of that going on.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:58:31 – 00:58:41) No. And also as well, the people that do think like that, they’re going to self-select out of that system. Because they’re going to be there going, oh, dude, we’re doing this. I can’t live with this.

JOE ROGAN: (00:58:41 – 00:58:44) They’ll leave. They’ll write an article for The Atlantic. Nobody will read it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:58:45 – 00:58:45) That’s it.

JOE ROGAN: (00:58:45 – 00:58:47) That’s the end of it.

The Responsibility That Comes With a Platform

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:58:47 – 00:59:00) It’s how I think about what we do, though. It’s like I think of TRIGGERnometry as like a family-owned restaurant, right? We’re feeding people information, right? Or conversation or whatever it is. But we are providing something that people ingest.

JOE ROGAN: (00:59:01 – 00:59:01) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:59:02 – 00:59:19) There is a responsibility that comes with that. Right? You shouldn’t put lead and mercury and all kinds of shit in there to make it taste better or make more money on whatever. And we know there’s people we could have on our show that would get 10 times the views, right? But it’s just not— it’s not what we do, right? You know?

JOE ROGAN: (00:59:19 – 00:59:33) Yeah. No, and I respect that. I think it’s clear in your conversations that that’s not what you’re trying to do. You’re not going to play gotcha, whereas no disrespect to Piers Morgan, that’s his business model. His business model is have a bunch of people on, have them f***ing yell at each other.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:59:33 – 00:59:37) Wee! He’s great at it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:59:37 – 00:59:47) It’s also a time thing. I think when people have a very short period of time, it inevitably becomes that. If you ever see Piers doing long-form interviews, some of them are incredible.

JOE ROGAN: (00:59:48 – 00:59:50) Oh sure, I’m not even talking about him. I’m talking about his show.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:59:50 – 00:59:52) Yeah, the model. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I get it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:59:52 – 00:59:54) Yeah, I can slag off Piers.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:59:54 – 00:59:54) There’s no problem.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:59:55 – 01:00:13) You douchebag. I know. Yeah, the model— I agree, that model isn’t— is what it does is it attracts attention. But I think once you’ve watched it, I think it was actually our mutual friend Chris Williamson told me about this. He said there’s a thing, that post-nut clarity. Yes, there’s post-content clarity.

JOE ROGAN: (01:00:13 – 01:00:14) Oh yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:00:14 – 01:00:22) And when you watch something that’s outrage porn, you get that post-content like, why have I spent 15 minutes? Oh yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:00:23 – 01:00:43) Yeah, I try not I do. When I see people like destroyed this guy on this, I don’t want that in my life. I’m not interested. If something’s particularly interesting, someone will send it to me. So this is my filtration system now for online content. If a friend doesn’t send it to me that I think is a cool and interesting friend, I don’t read it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:00:43 – 01:00:43) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:00:44 – 01:00:49) So most of what I get, unless I’m on the toilet, I’m getting from my phone on the toilet. I will just—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:00:49 – 01:00:50) the toilet is where bad things happen.

JOE ROGAN: (01:00:50 – 01:00:56) I will give in and go What are they yelling about? But it’s made my life infinitely better.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:00:56 – 01:01:52) Yeah, infinitely. But the issue is the incentives are baked all the way through. Like when I wrote my book Uneducated, I remember people saying to me, “Oh, are you going to write about the culture wars in education?” Talking about, what the— how the culture wars affected you in your classroom. I was like, “Mate, I was teaching in a, in a f***ing ghetto in East London. We didn’t have time to talk about decolonization because you can’t do it.

You can’t do it. How are you going to talk about decolonization when a kids throwing a chair at your head.” Yeah, you know what I mean? But it would have been— and then when you go and promote the book, people like, “Whoa, did you talk about trans in the classroom?” I’m like, “No, mate, I was trying just to have a lesson.” Yeah, we didn’t have that. Yeah, but the moment you know that by doing that you’re going to forsake a large part of what— of outrage interest in you, in what you do, because you’re not playing that Right, and you’re forsaking the clips for that.

JOE ROGAN: (01:01:52 – 01:01:59) Yeah, but who cares? Yeah, it’s like that’s not what you’re into anyway. It’s like if you run a vegetarian restaurant and you’re— that’s what your thing is.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:01:59 – 01:02:02) I have the look of a man who runs a vegetarian restaurant.

JOE ROGAN: (01:02:03 – 01:02:13) But you don’t get upset if someone else is making money selling steak. That’s what they do. If you want to sell steak, you sell steak. Yeah, not— that’s a bad comparison because what you guys do is better. It’s like you’re the steak.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:02:13 – 01:02:14) We’re the steak.

JOE ROGAN: (01:02:15 – 01:02:18) Yeah, someone’s out there buying vegan burgers and getting really sick.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:02:19 – 01:02:51) No, it’s— and that’s what we try to do. It’s, you realize— I know it sounds kind of hacky, but when your platform goes to a size like we’re about to hit 2 million subscribers now, and you do an interview, you think, oh f***, like we’ve got real responsibility. If somebody says something that is actually, that you think isn’t right, it’s your duty to challenge them. It’s also your duty to make sure that the interview is prepped properly so that when they have their arguments, you can go, well, actually, what about this? What about that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:02:51 – 01:02:52) Right.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:02:52 – 01:03:00) All of these things, because you realize what you’re putting out into the world, it matters. People are going to consume it and they’re going to take it as fact.

JOE ROGAN: (01:03:01 – 01:04:37) Yeah, it does matter. And if you abandon that feeling of responsibility just because you want the outrage clicks, it’s like you’re just a part of the problem. Yeah, I mean, you got to be able to have conversations with people. And this is why I push back against the idea that people have a shorter attention span than ever. It’s like, do they though? I feel like they’re just people. I feel like people are just people.

I don’t think I’m unique. I think I like listening to audiobooks because I think they’re interesting, and I think I’m not alone. I think they’re very popular. They sell a lot of audiobooks. It’s one of the big reasons why Spotify got into podcasts. Interesting is because their audiobook sales— or streams, rather— they were— a lot of people were streaming audiobooks. And like, wow, a lot of people just didn’t— they don’t just want music.

Let’s get into other things. People like to be informed and have their brain excited. It’s good. And you can have it excited in a negative way, like get outraged. That’s a problem. It can hijack your concentration in that way. It can hijack your attention. But also what’s more fulfilling is getting your brain stimulated in a positive way, or at least an intriguing way, something that like really makes you think about things.

I love when I listen to a podcast, I listen to a conversation, and I carry that thought with me. Like I’ll shut the radio off and I’m driving, I’m like, wow, okay. And I’ll just contemplate and think about things. And I think there’s— I’m not alone. This is not a unique thing that I have. I think There’s millions of people out there like that. They’re just— that desire is not being fulfilled, so it gets— their attention gets hijacked by horseshit.

TV vs. YouTube and the Outdoor Boys

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:04:38 – 01:04:56) Hmm. Well, and I think the direction of travel is clear. I mean, a lot of people in our space like to be like, oh, TV’s dead. Well, if you look at the absolute numbers, they are way up here, right? Then collectively, then YouTube and podcasts. But the direction of travel is only one way from here. They’re going to go down. We’re going to go up.

JOE ROGAN: (01:04:56 – 01:05:08) Do you think that the views on television are higher than the views on say, YouTube? I don’t even think that’s interesting. YouTube is infinitely more popular than any television show.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:05:09 – 01:05:22) Yeah, but it’s not all— like, most of the views on YouTube are like guys, kids unboxing toys, and guys going camping. There’s— I discovered this channel the other day called Outdoor Studios. Are you familiar? Or Outdoor Boys?

JOE ROGAN: (01:05:22 – 01:05:24) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he stopped.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:05:25 – 01:05:32) He stopped doing it. I was like, this guy, he— 20 million subscribers, every video is like 90 million views, and he just was like, yeah, I don’t want to do this anymore.

JOE ROGAN: (01:05:33 – 01:05:46) I think the popularity thing is overwhelming, and like fame, it freaks you out. Yeah, I think he probably reads the comments, unfortunately. And he was just a regular guy that’s really into survival. Yeah, stuff.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:05:46 – 01:05:48) And it’s amazing content, really.

JOE ROGAN: (01:05:48 – 01:05:49) And he seems like a really nice guy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:05:49 – 01:06:15) Seems like a lovely guy. I think maybe the one thing that pushed him in that direction, just as just watching it, is he kind of got his family involved. So a lot of it would be like him with the kids going to places. And I imagine if you never fully signed up for 20 million subscriber fame, right, and you’re a 5-year-old or a 10-year-old, or you now you’re an 18-year-old, that’s a whole different ballgame. Yeah, and that’s probably extremely disconcerting and unpleasant.

JOE ROGAN: (01:06:15 – 01:06:23) Well, I don’t think that’s wise. I don’t think that’s wise at all. No, no, no. Yeah, I mean, when I see people getting their children involved in their television shows, I’m like, please don’t do that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:06:23 – 01:06:23) That.

JOE ROGAN: (01:06:24 – 01:06:46) Yeah, there’s— so like, you’re, you didn’t ask them, and they’re going to have to go to school, then deal with the consequences of it and all the bullshit that come. I mean, it’s pretty straightforward show. The guy’s just like camping in a f***ing igloo, no big deal. But even then, you’re still exposing yourself to schizophrenics and crazy people and the world, the whole world out there.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:06:46 – 01:07:11) Yeah. And also as well, number one, they can’t consent because they’re too young, so they don’t understand actually what it means to consent to something like that and what are going to be the long-term implications. But also, it’s just weird. It does get— it takes you a while when people come up to you and they go, “Oh, I feel I know you.” And you go, you obviously don’t. But I, as an adult, I can rationalize that. Imagine what it must be like as a kid.

Why Child Stars Get Messed Up

JOE ROGAN: (01:07:12 – 01:07:57) Well, that’s the real problem with child stars, right? Yeah, they all get f***ed up. I’ve become friends with Zac Efron lately. He’s been coming to the club. Very nice guy, but talks openly about it. Just like becoming famous when you’re young, when you’re really young, you’re a kid, is just so f***ed up for you. I can’t— I liken it to when you make cement and you don’t put all the ingredients in, and then it kind of forms, but you can never fix it.

So it’s never fully formed. And I think this is an issue with— I’ve met a lot of child actors that became adults and every one of them was f***ed up. Macaulay Culkin was probably the least f***ed up, oddly, but he talks openly about the struggles that he’s had.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:07:57 – 01:08:01) And what is it that makes somebody really struggle with life having been famous as a kid?

JOE ROGAN: (01:08:02 – 01:09:13) You get adored for no reason. You’re 6 and everybody loves you. You’re supposed to earn that. You’re supposed to have it from your family, and then the way you behave is supposed to dictate how people treat you in the real world and what you’re good at. Like maybe if you’re good at art or you’re good at music, people like, “Jimmy, I love how you play guitar.” And then so then people like you for that, and then you like, you want more of that, so you work really hard.

And then you go through this whole process of becoming an adult and dating. And girls don’t like you just because you’re on the cover of Teen Beat. They like you because hopefully they think you’re attractive looking, and then they think you’re funny or you’re smart or you’re nice to them. And then you go on and you guys jive, and it’s a learning process. And you don’t go through that at all when you’re a 9-year-old and you’re on the set of a television show that’s in your name, and then everyone around you is catering to you.

Everyone’s kissing your ass. “Tommy, can we get you anything? Would you like a juice? Would you like anything?” Everybody loves you. Nobody is telling you you have to do something. You have to do this, you have to do that. Nobody’s punishing you. Nobody’s— nobody is bullying you at school. It’s like your world is weird.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:09:14 – 01:09:16) And people tolerate your shitty behavior, I imagine.

JOE ROGAN: (01:09:16 – 01:10:04) 100%. You could throw temper tantrums and f***ing smash windows. And I mean, that’s why rock stars f***ing tear apart hotel rooms. Why they do that? Because they can. They go into that hotel room, just f***ing throw a TV through the window. Rock and roll! I mean, it’s in all these movies, right? Why they do that? Because they’re out of their f***ing minds. And because there’s no guardrails. And to have no guardrails as you’re growing up up and to also be completely wealthy by the time you’re 10, you know?

And then usually the parents are involved in some sort of a shitty scenario. I have a friend who’s a— who was a child actor. His parents stole money from him, and he didn’t find out until he’s an adult. Millions of dollars from him. And he’s had like this f***ed up relationship with them anyway. And then he found out that they were mishandling his money and stealing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:10:04 – 01:10:05) That’s got to be so horrible.

JOE ROGAN: (01:10:06 – 01:10:06) He suspected it though.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:10:06 – 01:10:23) He’s like, oh yeah, what It’s one of those things that happens when people see you being successful and you have money, or they think you have money. Suddenly all these people emerge out of everywhere who’ve got these amazing ideas for how to convert your money into their money. Yeah, brilliant ideas for that. And there’s a lot of them.

JOE ROGAN: (01:10:24 – 01:10:35) Yeah, I— yeah, I get confronted all the time with stupid ideas, and I just— I don’t invest in anything. I’m like, that’s the best way for me to just defuse it all. I’m not interested. Yeah, I’m not buying that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:10:36 – 01:10:56) And also with the child star thing is you have all of this success, which is more success than the vast majority of people will ever encounter in their life, and you’re done by the time you’re 16 because you fundamentally change the way you look. So you, you’ve now become an adolescent with all the awkwardness and the horrificness that goes through all of our teenage years.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:10:56 – 01:10:57) Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:10:57 – 01:11:01) Yet you look back at a time when everybody loved you and now no one does.

King Tut: The Boy Pharaoh

JOE ROGAN: (01:11:01 – 01:11:11) Yeah, you peak at 15. But imagine being like Tutankhamun, became the pharaoh of Egypt at 9. Oh, what? You’re running Egypt? What?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:11:12 – 01:11:19) Huh? Yeah, he wasn’t really running. It was like Joe Biden. That was a team, Joe. That was a team.

JOE ROGAN: (01:11:19 – 01:11:22) Yeah, it seemed like he might be inbred.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:11:22 – 01:11:23) Or Tutankhamun?

JOE ROGAN: (01:11:23 – 01:13:18) Yeah, there was something wrong with him. He was very odd. Sorry, I’m choking on something. Yeah, I think analysis of his bones, I think they said that he might have— he might have suffered. I think that’s some speculation. People try not to be offensive when they talk about that, but obviously inbreeding amongst royal families is not a unique thing. It’s not like, what, wait a minute, you know? Yeah, so the possibility that he was inbred Here, one of the most striking things about Tutankhamun was his parentage.

2010 DNA study concluded that his parents were probably brother and sister. The researchers identify his father as most likely Pharaoh Akhenaten and his mother as an unnamed mummy, as an unnamed mummy known as the Younger Lady, and that was probably his sister. The body differed from the idealized royal image. Researchers reported a clubfoot and damage to bones in his foot, suggesting he had difficulty walking. Walking sticks found in his tomb support that interpretation.

These are medical interpretations of ancient remains rather than a complete certain picture of his health. He became king around age 9, died around 18 or 19. Exact cause of death remains uncertain. Researchers detected malaria parasite DNA and proposed that malaria, bone problems, and a fractured leg may have contributed to— not any single cause was conclusively established. Hmm, apparently the reason why they found his tomb versus all the other pharaoh tombs that had long been looted was that he was very disrespected, and that once they buried him and they put him in his tomb, they covered it with rubble so that no one could visit it.

They were like, f*** this guy. Yeah, we did what we had to do, but let’s just cover the whole thing with rubble. That’s one of the pieces of speculation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:13:18 – 01:13:25) That’s so funny. There’s so many guys in history who are like, I’m going to build an empire, I’m going to— no one knows their name. Yeah, it was a shit king.

JOE ROGAN: (01:13:26 – 01:13:35) I know, shit king, 9 years old. And that’s the one that everybody thinks about when you think about an Egyptian pharaoh. You think about King Tut because they found his tomb intact.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:13:35 – 01:13:35) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:13:36 – 01:13:56) So the real question is, what happened to all those other tombs? And is— where is all that gold? Where are all those? I mean, if that guy had such an elaborate burial and he was a shit king. What did Ramses— what did his pharaoh— what did that guy’s burial look like?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:13:57 – 01:14:04) I mean, well, it’s been like 6,000 years, right? Ancient Egypt is 6,000 years ago, at least. At least.

Ancient King Lists and Biblical Lifespans

JOE ROGAN: (01:14:04 – 01:15:14) There’s a lot of real weird stuff when it comes to that. Real weird. There’s also the actual Kings List, the Zep Tepi Kings List in Egypt that— it’s super weird because it goes back 30,000+ years and they want to talk about that as if it’s myth. And then it gets to a certain age where it’s agreed upon that this is the time in which these dynasties existed that people accept. And so, this is very weird stuff and I think you have to really understand hieroglyphs.

To be able to even comment on it, so I’m not going to. But one of the weird things about it is the ages of the older people. The people from 30,000+ years ago, they’re like living 200,000 years, 50,000 years. It’s very odd. They reign for a long time. And that aligns with the Sumerian King List too, which is also super f***ing strange. The Sumerian King List has the same sort of properties where you have accepted historical figures that are later that live a normal life lifespan. But then when you go way, way back, you have kings that are ruling for 35,000 years.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:15:15 – 01:15:24) Isn’t it the same in the Bible where it’s all like way extended? And so, is that maybe just a language thing or like a calculation?

JOE ROGAN: (01:15:24 – 01:16:27) It’s probably a bunch of things, right? The real problem is you have cuneiform, right? So, you have the ancient Sumerian writing. So, there’s not like a language issue then, because you have them detailing the ages of the people that are historically accurate, where we know that they existed. The real problem is like, what were they talking— like in the Bible, like when Noah was 600 years old, well, okay, what is a year to you?

What does that mean, right? Is it every— is every season a year? Is it an actual calendar year? Do you have a Gregorian calendar? What do you— what are you using? Because they used to use a different calendar entirely in ancient history used to use a 13-lunar-cycle calendar. So, it was a 13-month calendar. It was a 28-day calendar, which is 364 days. So, they would have to have a leap year every now and then.

But when you think about that actually kind of makes more sense because that really does align with the cycles. But somewhere along the line, they decided to make it 12 months, and some months are 31 days and some months are 28 days.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:16:27 – 01:16:27) What?

JOE ROGAN: (01:16:28 – 01:16:30) What happened here?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:16:30 – 01:16:31) What?

JOE ROGAN: (01:16:31 – 01:17:03) So it’s like, what do you mean when you say he’s 600 years old? Did you just mean he’s old as f***? You see Noah, that dude’s like a f***ing million years old. You’re like, how old’s my dad? My dad’s 150,000 years old, and he f***ing hates this. Like, you know what I mean? People talk in a certain— it’s like the whole 72 virgins thing, right? When they say you get 72 virgins when you make yourself a martyr?

They don’t mean the number 72. It’s like saying, oh, I got a million friends. It’s just a lot. They’re just saying a lot. It’s like a substitute for a lot.

The Mysteries of Ancient Egyptian Engineering

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:17:03 – 01:17:40) One of the interesting things is when you actually go to Egypt is genuinely how much we don’t know about that, about, about their civilization, the engineering, how they constructed the pyramids. I remember I went to the Temple of Abu Simbel. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this temple. It’s huge. It’s absolutely massive. And there’s a certain point in time during the day where there is a beam of light that comes into the temple and it lights— I think it’s at the altar.

So they did that specifically. That was a choice that they made, and they designed the temple for that to happen. And you go, well, how did they do that?

JOE ROGAN: (01:17:40 – 01:19:36) Yeah, it’s super sophisticated engineering. And it’s also at a scale when you’re dealing with how far they moved the stone, how they quarried the stone, what tools they used. There’s also real clear evidence of ancient tool use, and not just tool use, but high-speed drills, some sort of unknown technology that seems to be able to scoop sections out of rock. It looks like it was moving far quicker than what they would achieve with copper and sand and friction.

And all the different theories that people have proposed to how they did it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense, and I think it’s way older than they think it is. I think it’s way, way, way older. And I think one of the first people to propose that was Dr. Robert Schoch from Boston University. He’s a geologist, and he looked at the weathering of the temple where the Sphinx is carved out of.

And he said this is water erosion, like thousands of years of water erosion has led to these deep fissures on the sides of these walls. And then the furthest back you get where you have rainfall, like heavy rainfall in the Nile Valley, you got to go like 9,000 years. So that’s 9,000 years, and then you have to deal with thousands of years of rainfall to achieve that. So when was it actually built?

It might be 10,000 years old, might be 12,000 years It also might be newer than some of the other stuff that’s there, which is even crazier. And then you have the stuff that’s underground and you go, hey, like what— like the things that they know about, like the labyrinths that they’ve discovered, that there’s these that Herodotus wrote about, that these enormous labyrinths that he said was greater than the spectacle of Giza, like greater than the pyramids. He said underground was even more preposterous.

Manufactured Gods, Constantine and Genghis Khan

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:19:38 – 01:20:13) And going back to our religious conversation, I never knew this. So I went to an exhibition at the British Museum where they were talking about the ancient Greek Empire took over the ancient Egyptian Empire. And there was a fusion of the two. And what they had at one point was the Greeks who were living in Egypt worshipping their gods, and the Egyptians worshipping their gods. And the elites then turned around and went, “You know what, we’ve got a major problem here.

If we don’t actually do something to help bind society together, we’re going to have a civil war.” So they artificially created gods that both sections could worship.

JOE ROGAN: (01:20:14 – 01:20:19) Which gods? I can’t remember the name of the gods, but they’ve made up some gods.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:20:19 – 01:20:19) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:20:19 – 01:20:23) And everybody’s like, oh, yeah, thank God you found the bridge.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:20:23 – 01:20:32) And it’s a kind of a genius-like solution because you could still worship your Greek gods, they could still worship their Egyptian gods, but there was a god in the middle that everyone could worship.

JOE ROGAN: (01:20:32 – 01:20:34) Well, an age-old tactic, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:20:34 – 01:20:35) Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: (01:20:35 – 01:21:00) I mean, this is sort of how Constantine pushed Christianity through Rome. It’s like, got to bring everybody on the same page. So people have always done this, whereas the Mongols had a totally different approach. Genghis Khan said, “I don’t give a f*** what your religion is, come on board, just pay taxes and don’t f*** around.” Pay taxes, don’t f*** around, let’s kill folks. He didn’t give a f***.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:21:00 – 01:21:02) Very tolerant, Genghis Khan.

JOE ROGAN: (01:21:02 – 01:21:37) Yes, very tolerant. It’s really interesting. Dan Carlin had this great take on him where he was, he was saying that if you— historians today talk about Genghis Khan as like Genghis Khan, there was a lot of positive aspects to his empire. And one of the things that he opened up trade to the east. Right. Also kills 10% of the population. It’s kind of crazy that one of the biggest mass murderers in the history of the human race documented is also thought about in the positive impacts that he had on civilization.

Tamerlane’s Tomb and Operation Barbarossa

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:21:37 – 01:22:40) Well, it’s funny, I took my dad to Uzbekistan because my dad grew up in Uzbekistan and I lived in Uzbekistan for 4 years. So we did like a father and son trip there. When you get to Uzbekistan, you get to Tashkent, right in the heart of the city, there’s this giant statue of Tamerlane. Timur the Lame. He— see, most people don’t even know who the guy was. He was basically like a mini Genghis Khan, and they celebrate.

They’re not decolonializing that shit. They’re like, this is what— this is our boy. And by the way, that dude, he was as vicious, and his empire stretched as far as Constantinople on the one side, to China, to Russia, to India at one point. It just didn’t last as long Because he was a badass and most of his descendants were not. But he controlled this giant swathe of Central Asia in particular. And in Samarkand, they still have his tomb.

The tomb is there. And there’s a story. I don’t know if I told you this before. Do you remember about the Soviet— the German invasion of the Soviet Union? Did I tell you this before?

JOE ROGAN: (01:22:40 – 01:22:40) Maybe.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:22:42 – 01:22:59) Basically, Soviet archaeologists were opening, about to open this tomb, and all the locals were like, don’t touch it, don’t touch it, because on the tomb it said, “Whoever opens this tomb will unleash a conqueror greater than I.” They opened it, and the next day Hitler invaded Soviet Russia.

JOE ROGAN: (01:23:00 – 01:23:04) Whoa, the next day?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:23:04 – 01:23:04) The next day.

JOE ROGAN: (01:23:05 – 01:23:06) I think you did tell me this.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:23:06 – 01:24:15) Yeah, I probably did. That’s June 22nd, 1941, Operation Barbarossa. Here’s the interesting bit as well. The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in the war. So Soviet Union— I don’t know if you remember this, but the Soviet Union was basically getting its ass kicked for the first year and a half of the war. Absolutely steamrolled, million-man armies surrendering en masse. The Germans were kicking ass. They got as far as the gates of Moscow.

If you go to Moscow, there’s these 3 giant tank traps outside. That’s how close the Germans came. And a lot of historians actually argue that if Hitler had taken Moscow, which he was very capable of doing if he, if he didn’t make mistakes, that would have been it because Stalin stayed in Moscow. And so Stalin would have been captured, probably killed, and the Soviet Union would have lost the war. Anyway, fast forward to the Battle of Stalingrad.

The archaeologist eventually thought, you know what, we’ve dug this up, we should have opened it. And they gave him a proper Islamic burial, put him back in the tomb, covered everything up. And the next day— that was the pivotal day in the Battle of Stalingrad. And from then on, the Soviet Union basically pushed forward and won the war.

JOE ROGAN: (01:24:16 – 01:24:17) Simulation theory, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:24:17 – 01:24:48) It’s insane, man. But I, you know what, Uzbekistan, you talk about spreading trade and stuff, it was that part of the world at that time. If you go there today, I loved going there as a tourist because it’s kind of like the Muslim Rome. It’s just this like incredibly beautiful testament to the greatness of their civilization at one point. These beautiful madrassas, beautiful mosques, gigantic Absolutely gigantic. People are really friendly. Food is amazing. It was a really cool place to go. I really liked going back there.

The Mongols and the Destruction of Baghdad

JOE ROGAN: (01:24:48 – 01:24:55) Well, I think one of the things that set back the Islamic world in a huge way was Genghis Khan invading Iraq.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:24:56 – 01:24:56) How so?

JOE ROGAN: (01:24:56 – 01:25:00) When he invaded— well, I don’t even think it was Iraq back then. What was it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:25:00 – 01:25:01) Mesopotamia.

JOE ROGAN: (01:25:01 – 01:25:48) Yeah, so Baghdad, they took— the Mongols took Baghdad and the river flowed red with blood the way they describe it. They just slaughtered everybody. They knocked civilizations back to the Stone Age. There’s a famous story that Dan Carlin talks about. It’s one of the scariest ones, of the Shah of Khwarazm sent an envoy to go to visit Jin China. And as he’s making his way to Jin China, they see what they think is a snow-capped mountain in the distance.

That as they get closer, it turns out to be a pile of bones, and that Genghis Khan had arrived before they got there and killed everyone in the town, everyone in the city, and stacked their bones on— over a million people stacked their bones on top of each other.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:25:49 – 01:25:49) Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: (01:25:50 – 01:26:11) And then they had abandoned their carts along the way because the roads had become so degraded from rotting human flesh. So rotting human flesh had turned everything into mud. So there were so many dead rotting bodies in the road that they couldn’t get their carts through. They couldn’t get the wheels to turn through the sludge of dead humans.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:26:13 – 01:26:14) Maybe not that tolerant then.

JOE ROGAN: (01:26:14 – 01:26:16) But he opened up trade to the West.

What History Teaches Us About Today

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:26:19 – 01:26:57) That’s why we love interviewing historians so much on our show, because when you talk to historians, you go, oh, number one, what we’re going through Like, people have been going through this since year dot. Yeah. And you just get to understand so much more, not only about your society, but also about yourself and human nature and who we are as people. We always talk about these are unprecedented times, nothing like this has happened before.

But you go through history and you talk to a historian, and they’re like, well, it’s kind of similar to 1823 when you look about it, because A, B, C, D, E, and F, or whatever it may be, you’re going, all right. And that gives— there’s a calmness that comes from that.

JOE ROGAN: (01:26:57 – 01:28:04) Yeah, people have always been f***ed up. It’s like always. And it’s, I’ve talked about this a bunch of times. I apologize if you guys have heard it. But I’ve been reading this— I finished it— this Alan Watts book called The Wisdom of Insecurity. And it’s about the 1950s. And it’s essentially— he’s talking about how society is changing so quickly because of technology and culture shifting radically, and people are so He’s talking about this in 1952, I believe it was, and you read it and it applies totally today.

And you realize like, oh, there’s never been a time where everybody’s like, life is great. And then we have this nostalgic view back to those days going, “Oh, back in those days when I was a boy, the milkman came and he delivered your milk and everything was beautiful and everybody believed in God and there was no problems.” No, there’s always been problems. People have always been people. People are messy and sloppy and crazy.

Crazy, and they’re always going to cause chaos. And as long as there have been people, there have been problems. And yeah, this is just a much more aware version of society than ever before, and maybe propagandized and maybe confused because of the internet, but also a lot better.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:28:04 – 01:28:18) I mean, if you look at— we can talk about, Gen Z are not as resilient and all of that shit, which is true, but also the way we’re raising children Like when I think about the way my parents and grandparents were raised in the Soviet Union.

JOE ROGAN: (01:28:18 – 01:28:18) Like animals.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:28:19 – 01:28:19) Right.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:28:19 – 01:28:21) Yeah. Right. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:28:21 – 01:28:22) Right. Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:28:22 – 01:28:22) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:28:22 – 01:28:29) Like you, a 5-year-old did something they didn’t know not to do, get a f***ing beating just for that. Right. And that was normal.

JOE ROGAN: (01:28:30 – 01:28:30) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:28:30 – 01:28:57) Completely normal. And think how we understand a lot more about the impact of shit like that now. And that’s why we don’t do it. So the world has improved in so many ways, but we are in the age of anxiety and insecurity because, I mean, you say, Francis all of this has happened before. I think AI is a different level. It’s a different level of challenge to humanity that’s going to hypercharge everything.

Fears of a Renewed War With Iran

JOE ROGAN: (01:28:57 – 01:29:58) Yes, it’s going to be very, very, very, very weird really soon, and maybe sooner than we’d like. Yeah, yeah, I’m a little concerned about what might happen post-midterm. And one of the rumblings that I’m hearing post— is after the midterms, the United States might start attacking Iran again. I don’t know if this is true or if this is just speculation, but good Lord, I hope it’s not true. So I don’t know what it is, but I’m really concerned because this whole Iran thing is like we’re at war but no one talks about it anymore.

It’s been this like stagnated thing in the media. And what is going on with the Strait of Hormuz Like boats are getting through, but they have to be ushered, they have to be guided by battleships and shit. And like, are they fighting off people all the time? I hear they are. I hear people are trying to attack these battleships all the time. It’s like, what happens after the midterms? Because right now, if they did it right now, they’d get crushed in the midterms. And there’s a lot of speculation they’re already going to lose in the midterms.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:29:58 – 01:29:58) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:29:58 – 01:30:04) So if that— if they’re waiting until after that’s over before they do this, things get real ugly.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:30:05 – 01:30:06) Well, you got— sorry, go ahead.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:30:06 – 01:30:26) I was going to say, well, you say that, I take that and I raise what’s happened in the UK. Our defense minister came out and when he was— speech, I can’t remember what the exact context or where the speech was being held, but he was talking about how we need to start— how British people need to start stockpiling.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:30:27 – 01:30:39) He did say, let’s— he said 3 days worth of whatever. But it kind of makes sense because our infrastructure is very vulnerable. And we haven’t built a lot of the shit that we should be— should have been building because we’re very green and all of this other stuff.

JOE ROGAN: (01:30:39 – 01:30:43) But isn’t 3 days the modern version of 2 weeks to stop the spread?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:30:43 – 01:30:44) Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: (01:30:44 – 01:30:44) You know what I mean?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:30:45 – 01:30:48) And Joe, before we do Iran, can I have a piss? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What Geopolitics Really Means

JOE ROGAN: (01:30:48 – 01:30:54) Let’s— we’ll pause. We’ll be right back, ladies and gentlemen. So where were we?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:30:54 – 01:30:54) We were on Iran.

JOE ROGAN: (01:30:54 – 01:30:56) Talking about Iran. Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:30:57 – 01:30:58) Are we back on air now or not?

JOE ROGAN: (01:30:58 – 01:30:58) Yeah, we’re back on.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:30:58 – 01:31:07) Okay. Cool, cool, cool. Let me just do this. I’ve already— I’m doing the triangle, I think.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:31:07 – 01:31:07) Okay.

JOE ROGAN: (01:31:08 – 01:31:12) Nothing like 3 white guys talking about geopolitics.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:31:14 – 01:31:15) Why’d you have to racialize it?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:31:16 – 01:31:18) That’s going to be one of the comments.

JOE ROGAN: (01:31:18 – 01:31:21) You have to today. You have to today. Today it’s very— is that working?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:31:22 – 01:31:22) No, it’s—

JOE ROGAN: (01:31:22 – 01:31:44) I think it’s dead. Yeah, I’m filling the sucker up. I’ll give you a 2 seconds. Geopolitics is actually— that’s not really correct. When I read the original term of geopolitics, sort of widely used to talk about different countries, but it’s really about like resources and geology, which makes sense. What is the actual—

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:31:44 – 01:31:45) pull that up—

JOE ROGAN: (01:31:45 – 01:32:06) what is the actual original term of geopolitics? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t originally about like how countries get along with each other. I think it was about resources and about like geo.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:32:07 – 01:32:11) I mean, you can argue that the resources is how about how countries interact with each other, right?

JOE ROGAN: (01:32:11 – 01:32:23) Study of how geography, right, such as a country’s location, borders, natural resources, and accesses to oceans Ocean influences political power. See, we don’t think about it that way. We think about it as like the relations between countries.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:32:23 – 01:32:33) Yeah, yeah. And actually, I think we, we’re living in a time when people totally forget that geography very much affects— I’ve got it, thanks, brother— geography very much affects how countries behave.

JOE ROGAN: (01:32:34 – 01:32:35) And it’s the real thing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:32:35 – 01:32:36) It’s the real thing.

JOE ROGAN: (01:32:36 – 01:32:42) Why we love Ukraine so much, does it nothing to do with the fact they’re on trillions of dollars in minerals? Yeah, nothing.

Russia, Ukraine and the Geography of Iran

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:32:42 – 01:33:22) Well, and for Russia, the reason they feel so passionate about it is— I think we’ve talked about this before, 80% of all the shit that matters in Russia is in the westernmost 20% of the country. So Russia always tries to expand westwards to expand its buffer zone. And that’s basically what has historically happened every time they’ve been strong. So invading Ukraine is a kind of expected thing for them to do as well.

But coming back to Iran, I mean, the geography of Iran is what this is all about. Because it seems like from the conversations we’ve had with people, the administration got a little carried away here. They—

JOE ROGAN: (01:33:23 – 01:33:24) The American administration?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:33:24 – 01:33:24) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:33:24 – 01:33:28) How dare you come to my country and tell us we’re doing things wrong? F*** you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:33:28 – 01:33:32) I’m not sure about wrong, but the—

JOE ROGAN: (01:33:32 – 01:33:35) Yeah, I think they thought it was going to be like Venezuela.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:33:35 – 01:33:36) That’s exactly what they thought.

JOE ROGAN: (01:33:36 – 01:34:10) This is the same mistake they made from Operation Desert Storm. To when, when we went in the 1990s in Iraq, it was quick and easy. Bang bang, got it done, kick some ass. So when the 2000s came around after 9/11 and we went back into Iraq, I don’t think anybody expected it was going to be this prolonged shit show that it became. I think the people supported it because they thought, yeah, well, they’re doing it, that’s how 9/11 happened, let’s go in there and kick some ass. And then it’s like, oh my God, we’re there 20 years later. What the f*** is this?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:34:10 – 01:34:33) But it’s also this idea that you could bring democracy to Iraq a country that has never had democracy, that doesn’t understand it. Yeah. And even in our own countries, like the UK, it took a long time for us to get democracy. What, you think we’re so special that we’re going to go over there and go, hey guys, we got this magic system? Everyone’s going to go, yeah, that’s great. And then what, we’re going to— they’re all going to live in paradise?

JOE ROGAN: (01:34:33 – 01:34:42) And definitely there won’t be any corruption. That’s really important. When a country comes in and f***ing hangs your leader on television afterwards everybody’s cool.

Robert Pape and the Escalation Trap

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:34:43 – 01:35:05) Well, this is an interesting thing with Iran, right? Because there were people— so last time we were here, it was right around the time that the war started. Yeah. And then we had this guy called Robert Pape on the show. I don’t know if you’ve seen his stuff. He’s a military air power analyst. And he basically said exactly how it was going to go.

JOE ROGAN: (01:35:05 – 01:35:07) This is before the invasion.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:35:07 – 01:35:37) Yeah. Yeah. And we just had him on just now to talk about it. And he calls it the escalation trap. And he talks about how effectively America trapped itself in this situation, particularly with the Strait of Hormuz. And actually, his argument is, now, look, I can’t judge whether it’s true or false, but so far everything he said to us worked out. Is this has put Iran on the path to become a regional hegemon. They are now going to be in a position where they’re way more powerful than they were before this conflict started.

JOE ROGAN: (01:35:37 – 01:35:38) How so?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:35:39 – 01:38:07) Because they are— they have been given the legitimacy to block the Strait of Hormuz and they are now becoming more powerful against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, who are their primary opponents, and also Israel. They control a lot of the oil. And where that goes. And the Houthis as well. The problem is the Saudis have this pipeline that goes to the Red Sea. So the idea is you don’t need the Strait of Hormuz, you can go around it.

But the Houthis are bombing the shit out of that pipeline right now. So it’s a trap. It was a trap, according to his analysis. And that’s why, coming back to your point, the war isn’t over. And you have to find a way to resolve it. And his argument was you got to get out of this as quickly as possible or it’s going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. And you see that now where Iran is in a position— they’ve basically got a— like, they’ve got the global economy in a rear naked choke.

That’s what— that’s why your gas prices are what they are. That’s what diesel prices are what they are. It’s why, Trump talks about, oh, Zelensky is— it’s not Zelensky bombing Russian refineries that’s causing the diesel price to get to this point. The war in Ukraine’s been going on for 4 years, but the price started really going up when the war in Iran started. And this is where all these problems are coming from.

And Iran can do this as long as they want. It hurts them too. But his argument is they can carry on doing this because for them it’s about survival. It’s like Russia in 1941. You’re taking casualties, millions of people being captured, but for you, this is about survival. You know Trump’s got the midterms to worry about. You know after the midterms he’s not going to have the House, may not have the Senate.

He’s going to be up to his eyeballs in investigations, congressional committees, impeachment proceedings, all of that shit. So this war has now put America in a weaker position, or its leaders, maybe not America, but its leaders in a weaker position. That means you’ve got more leverage. And you can see in the rhetoric Now, with, like I said, the Zelensky thing and all the rest of it, there’s a lot of flailing about.

There’s a lot of flailing about trying desperately to get gas prices down. And Iran knows this. They’re not dumb. They’re watching this and going, every day that this goes on, we’ve got more leverage. And it’s in their interest to carry on that until they get the deal they want, which is get American bases out of the Middle East entirely.

Drone Warfare Has Changed Everything

JOE ROGAN: (01:38:08 – 01:38:13) Well, they’ve already f***ed up the American bases in the Middle East to a point where it’s going to take decades to fix ’em.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:38:13 – 01:38:13) Right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:38:13 – 01:38:14) Is that right?

JOE ROGAN: (01:38:14 – 01:39:26) So we were reading— I don’t know, what do I know— but they have bombed bases where American troops have— it’s more than 20 of them. We pulled it up, the number, the other day. It was a— it’s a large number. And you got to think how much destruction. We’re not seeing videos where they’re detailing all the different things that happen. And from what I hear, it’s pretty extensive. And the problem with this, these— this asymmetrical warfare The problem with drone bombing, the problem with all this stuff is that it’s like regular countermeasures don’t seem to work.

Like what they figured out in Ukraine where they’re using the monofilament line to control these drones, so you can’t even use anti-drone weapons. It’s like you’re almost exposed. And so if you have an airbase and like the attack that the Ukrainians did on the Russians where they blew up all those planes, Like, that’s kind of wild that you can go in there and do billions of dollars worth of damage in one night.

It’s like, this is a different world we’re living in. We’re not living in a world where it’s just you have to launch missiles, they see the missiles coming, they shoot them out of the sky with the Iron Dome. That’s not the— it’s not the same thing anymore. Drone technology has changed everything.

Can Airstrikes Achieve Regime Change?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:39:26 – 01:40:21) One of the things that I love about our job is that we get to meet so many interesting people, either because they’ve been on the show or just because their friends are friends. I was talking to an ex-Special Forces guy. And I said to him, “Could we put— I said, I don’t agree with this, but could we put boots on the ground in Iran?” And he just laughed. He went, “Let’s take all the politics out of it.

He goes, nobody would agree to that because the terrain is so mountainous. How are you going to achieve that? It’s impossible. You’re not going to do that.” And he also said to me, and I think Robert Pape echoed this. There has never been a regime change achieved solely through airstrikes. It doesn’t happen. So you go, well, how is this going to evolve? How is this going to actually evolve? Does anybody know? Is this just vibes? Is there a bigger plan? What’s going to happen? Because we can buy—

JOE ROGAN: (01:40:21 – 01:40:21) is it just vibes?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:40:22 – 01:40:44) Is it by vibes? It’s like, did they actually think this through? Did they think, if this actually happened, A could happen, B could happen, C could happen, and if A could happen, what’s our strategy for A? If B could happen, what’s our strategy for B? If C could happen, what’s— or were they just like basically high off Venezuela and they were like, hey, we smashed Maduro, let’s go in?

JOE ROGAN: (01:40:44 – 01:40:53) Well, it’s also how much does Trump know about how this all could possibly play out if they started bombing Iran? And what was he told?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:40:54 – 01:41:01) And what did he— how did he manage the information that he got, or how did the people get access to him or not get access to him?

JOE ROGAN: (01:41:01 – 01:41:01) Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:41:02 – 01:42:05) Because that’s also part of this conversation. It’s the same with— this is why Vladimir Putin is 4 years deep into a 3-day special military operation in Ukraine, right? Because he was told, you’re going to go in there, we’re going to get Zelensky out, we’re going to land paratroopers in Hostomel land all our shit, everybody’s— and the people are going to rise up and support us, which is exactly what they said about Iran, by the way, right?

Take out the leader, the people will rise up, take over, and whatever. And it seems to be that that’s not how it works. And quite often you get these situations, from what we are told, where not all of the information is presented equally. There is not the process of deliberation that I think we’d all hope there is for decisions of this magnitude. It’s more like Francis said, Venezuela went very well. We’re on a roll.

What’s next? And that sounds shocking and simplistic and whatever, but that is literally what people we have spoken to who are close to the decision-making process have told us.

JOE ROGAN: (01:42:06 – 01:42:40) Well, it’s also very enticing if you’re a guy who wants to leave his mark on history to be the guy who took down the evil Iranian regime. We took down Venezuela, you can go in there and have that too as your list of accomplishments. And if someone’s blowing enough smoke up your ass, and if you believe it— and we all know that Israel tried to get a bunch of different presidents to try to do the same thing.

I mean, they tried to do it with the Obama administration. They tried to do a lot of administrations why don’t we do this? And they were like, I don’t like it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:42:40 – 01:42:49) Which, which is, for me, that’s why the ultimate responsibility rests with the people who pull the trigger, right? Because 100% everyone’s going to present you with all kinds of information. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:42:50 – 01:42:55) And it’s within, Israel’s interest to do it. I mean, they would like us to do that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:42:56 – 01:43:13) Yeah, yeah, I think, I think that’s true. And I think that’s where there’s a divergence between the foreign policy interests of Israel and the foreign policy interests of the United States and the world. The world, right? And everybody— I understand why different countries pursue their own interests, but it’s the job of the American presidential administration to do what’s right for America.

JOE ROGAN: (01:43:14 – 01:43:17) Yeah. How crazy. What a wild thought. Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:43:18 – 01:44:00) So it’s complicated, but it’s having a massive impact economically across the world. And as bad as it is in the US, you are actually way more insulated from the consequences of this war than we are the rest of the world. In Europe, I have friends who are like farmers in Australia. They are really struggling to get diesel. And same with the European situation. Most countries have a lot of supply for like a year’s worth.

The UK has 2 months’ worth of diesel supply. Oh, God. Yeah. So it’s been a big problem. And the reason you say they might strike again is ‘Cause what else do you do? What else?

JOE ROGAN: (01:44:00 – 01:44:03) Right, do you just let it keep stagnating?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:44:04 – 01:44:04) Well—

JOE ROGAN: (01:44:04 – 01:44:04) What do you do?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:44:05 – 01:44:28) Well, you— or you have to— I mean, I thought the best way out here was for Trump to do what Trump does, which is to sell, to sell a deal that he did with Iran, and that deal probably would have been worse than what was in place before, ’cause you just bombed the shit out of their country, their angry, a little bit unhappy about that. But you do a deal with them and then you just go, “This is the greatest deal ever.”

JOE ROGAN: (01:44:28 – 01:44:30) Right, right, right. Yeah, that would be nice.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:44:30 – 01:44:31) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:44:31 – 01:44:37) Trump, if you’re listening, that’s the move. Just say you won. Well, we’ll all go with you. We just don’t want this to escalate.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:44:37 – 01:44:38) Yeah, yeah.

Can Iran Be Stopped From Getting a Nuclear Weapon?

JOE ROGAN: (01:44:38 – 01:44:58) And then the narrative is always they can’t— we can’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. It’s okay. I agree with that. Doesn’t seem like it’d be a good idea to have a regime that kills their own citizens if they protest. It doesn’t seem like they would be the kind of people that you would want to be able to just kill enormous groups of people with one missile.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:44:59 – 01:45:10) And that’s really the question, because I understand that logic, which is why I understand the Israeli position, which is like, these guys want to kill us, we can’t have them have a nuclear weapon. And I understand a lot of Americans would also agree with that.

JOE ROGAN: (01:45:10 – 01:45:10) Of course.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:45:11 – 01:45:15) The question is, though, was this the right strategy to achieve that outcome?

JOE ROGAN: (01:45:15 – 01:45:25) Also, was the question— the question is, were they really capable of doing that? And were they— they definitely were enriching uranium past the point they needed for energy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:45:25 – 01:45:25) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:45:25 – 01:45:49) Right. But they weren’t at the point where they needed it for nuclear weapons. And then converting it into nuclear weapons is a completely different ballgame. And Scott Horton laid that out on my podcast, and I’ll butcher it if I try to repeat it. But it was pretty complex and pretty— and he was pretty clear that they were nowhere near doing that. Also, hadn’t the Ayatollah issued like a fatwa against the construction of nuclear weapons?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:45:50 – 01:45:51) Yeah, but the question is—

JOE ROGAN: (01:45:51 – 01:45:52) What was that like?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:45:52 – 01:46:01) Well, right, how much do you trust the Ayatollah? I mean, stereotypically speaking, they don’t seem to be entirely consistent in what they say. My understanding is different on the nuclear weapons thing.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:46:01 – 01:46:02) I mean, with some things they are.

JOE ROGAN: (01:46:04 – 01:46:06) Yeah, beheading you for dancing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:46:08 – 01:46:28) Very consistent on that. But my understanding on how easy it is to get— I remember talking to my granddad who was an astrophysicist about this. It’s not that hard to get from you’ve got enriched material to you’ve got a nuclear weapon. It doesn’t take that long in today’s world. The first one, that took a lot of effort with the Manhattan Project. But now that everybody knows how to do it—

JOE ROGAN: (01:46:28 – 01:46:37) Well, this is why India and Pakistan got nuclear weapons, right? All right. It wasn’t— they— we thought that you’d have nuclear power, great. And they’re like, look what we figured out.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:46:37 – 01:46:56) Yeah, miraculously. So I totally understand the concern. I haven’t heard a great explanation of how this conflict was supposed to achieve that. This is why the 12-Day War made perfect sense to me. You bomb their nuclear facilities, you see if you get it. That’s the percentage play, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:46:56 – 01:46:56) Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:46:57 – 01:47:24) But this just— I doesn’t seem— I, I— no one ever explained how one would lead to the other, how doing this conflict this way would achieve non-nuclear Iran. In fact, it seems to me now inevitably, if you’re Iran, you do everything you can to survive, and then you do everything you possibly can to get a nuke as quickly as possible so that this can never happen again. Right?

JOE ROGAN: (01:47:24 – 01:47:24) Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:47:24 – 01:47:26) If you were Iran, that’s what you would do.

JOE ROGAN: (01:47:26 – 01:47:26) Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:47:27 – 01:47:46) So there’s been a miscalculation, it feels like to me here. And I’m not sure that when people say, well, you’ve got to deal with Iran’s nuclear threat, I agree with them. I’m just not sure this was the right way to do it. And it became very quickly apparent to us early on in this conflict that that was going to be the case.

JOE ROGAN: (01:47:46 – 01:47:48) What do you think could have been the right way to do it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:47:49 – 01:48:50) If you ask Robert Pape, he says something like you’ve got to have regional balancing. So you’ve got to strengthen Saudi Arabia and the UAE so there’s some kind of balance in the region, and no one wants to escalate the whole region to nuclear level. I don’t know enough to say whether that’s right or wrong. And I think that’s the real big question here, is how are you supposed to get Iran to not have nuclear weapons?

And maybe the truth here is, Joe, once this thing has been invented, eventually people are going to get it. Iran is not— they’re not some shitty little country in the middle of nowhere. It’s a giant country which has control over a huge amount of its own natural resources, but also then one of the biggest arteries in the world for energy and fertilizer and gas and plastic and all of that stuff. Maybe the reality here is that there’s no way that you can maybe extend it.

You can do deals, but ultimately they are going to get them. And that’s a terrible outcome. But I haven’t heard anyone convincingly explain how you avoid that.

JOE ROGAN: (01:48:51 – 01:48:52) Yeah, yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:48:52 – 01:49:26) And one of the things that’s interesting as well is that you look at countries that have had an empire, they still have this sense of pride and honor in themselves. You look at the Russians the Russians have had a great empire. You look at the Persians, I mean, you don’t need to be a historian to look and the Persian Empire was once very, very, very powerful. So there is still something in their psyche where if they feel that they’re being pushed around, it’s not like a smaller country, country.

But they did— there’s still a— how dare you! This is the Persian Empire. This is where we came from. This is who we are, and we are going to fight you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:49:26 – 01:49:29) Yeah, it’s 90 million people. It’s a bigger country than Britain.

JOE ROGAN: (01:49:30 – 01:49:31) That’s crazy.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:49:31 – 01:49:33) Oh, and probably bigger though.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:49:34 – 01:49:35) That it was.

A Heightened Threat Environment at Home

JOE ROGAN: (01:49:35 – 01:49:44) Yeah, it’s disturbing to think that this could pop off after the midterms. It really is. It’s been bothering me a lot the last few days.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:49:44 – 01:49:45) Why does it bother you so much, Joe?

JOE ROGAN: (01:49:46 – 01:50:03) Because I have a feeling that this preparing for having food and water is— there’s a real concern. I have a feeling there’s a real concern. And if the power grid does get attacked, and if cities do get bombed, it could get really f***ing crazy in this country.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:50:04 – 01:50:09) I don’t think Iran is in a position to bomb America, though. I think that’s probably—

JOE ROGAN: (01:50:09 – 01:50:31) well, cyberattacks. Yeah, with the grid, but sleeper cells. Yeah, we really have no idea how many people came in over the last 4 years and how many of them are in a terrorist cell. And it’s— this is not right-wing speculation. You’re just dealing with a number that is— it’s so massive, right? So the low-end number is 10 million.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:50:31 – 01:50:33) That’s the low end in 4 years.

JOE ROGAN: (01:50:33 – 01:50:50) In 4 years. And so some Republicans think the high end is over 20. We don’t know. It’s just pure speculation. Either there’s the ones that they’ve counted. Secret Service cites heightened threat environment as air defense systems deployed at Mar-a-Lago and airport. This today?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:50:50 – 01:50:50) Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (01:50:51 – 01:51:34) Surface-to-air missile systems have been deployed at Mar-a-Lago and Donald Trump International Airport at the request of the U.S. Secret Service. I didn’t even know there was a Donald Trump International Airport. The spokesperson said the agency is operating in a heightened threat environment. Right. So I think something’s about to go down. And I mean, all the— when you go super kooky, tighten up that tinfoil hat, people think that it’s a false flag and that we, this is so we will support this and that.

And I don’t know, but I do know that if you keep f***ing around, one day you find out. And it seems like we’ve been f***ing around, and it seems like they’re telling us, hey, you might want to store some food in case we have to find out.

Paid Protesters and the Missing Anti-War Protests

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:51:35 – 01:52:13) What’s fascinating to me is how— because we don’t live in the US, so we come here a couple of times a year. We see you, we do a bunch of interviews. I remember being here 2 years ago on the eve of the presidential election, and everybody in Austin was like, “You guys are going to LA next? F*** no, no, there’s going to be riots, it’s going to be crazy. What are you doing?”

And we get there, the election happens, And it was so overwhelming because it was the presidency, the House, the Senate, the college, the Electoral College, the popular vote. There was nothing in LA. Everybody was chill because like America voted for this. That’s what America did.

JOE ROGAN: (01:52:13 – 01:52:19) Well, people were very upset, but I think one of the real issues in America when it comes to protests is they’re organized and paid for.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:52:19 – 01:52:21) Yeah. No question.

JOE ROGAN: (01:52:22 – 01:52:27) And there was nothing to be gained by tearing up Los Angeles after the presidential election.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:52:28 – 01:52:29) That’s a good point.

JOE ROGAN: (01:52:29 – 01:52:48) They’re like, listen, where’s the protests about us bombing Iran? Where are those? If protests are organic, most people are very unhappy with us going into Iran, but where are the protests? Well, there’s no one organizing and paying for those protests, so they don’t exist.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:52:48 – 01:52:54) That’s interesting. Interesting. Yeah, that, that’s— I hadn’t thought about that. Is actually legitimately a very good point.

JOE ROGAN: (01:52:54 – 01:53:26) It’s so hard for people on the left to accept this, and I have friends that are very left, and I talk to them about paid protesters and they push back. And I’m like, listen, man, you just got to understand, when you see those vans pull up and you see those signs come out, and those signs are already printed out in advance, and this is about an event that just happened 24 hours ago, what’s the odds that someone’s not paying for all this?

And then when you talk to people that actually say they are paid to protest, yeah, and there’s people that show up at every protest, and those people make a living protesting.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:53:26 – 01:53:27) A career now.

JOE ROGAN: (01:53:27 – 01:53:46) This is a career. This is a real job. If you’re a ne’er-do-well and you’re also like sort of peripherally political, yeah, man, f*** the fascists, you can— you don’t have to work. You could just go to protest and scream and yell, and they give you a sign And now you have a job, and it’s a great place to meet girls, which I imagine.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:53:46 – 01:53:57) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not for the long term. Mental instability? Who isn’t?

JOE ROGAN: (01:53:57 – 01:54:13) But what is this, Jamie? I just googled protests about it, and there was an article in Reuters about, about the bombing in Iran. Yeah, lots of protests. Lots of people died in other countries about it, right? But in America, 140 35 different cities, right? What kind of demonstrations did they have? I didn’t see any of them. I certainly didn’t see them on the news.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:54:14 – 01:54:14) No.

JOE ROGAN: (01:54:14 – 01:54:18) Were they small demonstrations? How many people were in these demonstrations?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:54:19 – 01:54:21) Oh, you had a map there, Jamie. Would you mind scrolling back up?

JOE ROGAN: (01:54:21 – 01:54:23) Well, there’s maps on this about a bunch of stuff.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:54:23 – 01:54:25) Oh, right, right, right.

JOE ROGAN: (01:54:25 – 01:54:46) But it’s interesting. Okay, so here’s ones with big signs that were printed out in advance, clearly. Look at all the signs, all uniform. Who Who got who made the signs? How’d you get them? United States flag upside down. That’s interesting. So I was wrong. It just hasn’t been in the news. But I think the No Kings protests were huge.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:54:47 – 01:54:53) Well, this is your point about scale, right? Like you’re not seeing it overwhelm the country in the same way like you had in 2020, for example.

JOE ROGAN: (01:54:53 – 01:54:54) Right, right, right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:54:54 – 01:55:24) That’s but coming back to my point about going to LA two years ago, I remember the mood. We had Rob Schneider on the show like the day after the election. He was like really happy. The mood was different. And I just wonder, in an alternative reality, if Trump does Venezuela and then doesn’t do this, or does Cuba next, and it’s like Venezuela, and it’s just like you lock down your hemisphere, you get the easy wins. It’s a whole different legacy.

Trump’s Legacy: Blair Without Iraq?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:55:24 – 01:55:28) Right. Yeah. It’s basically Blair without Iraq.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:55:29 – 01:55:38) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know how much sense that’ll make to Americans, but it’s like like you came in, you closed the border, because you got to give credit where it’s due, right? He’s closed the border, right?

JOE ROGAN: (01:55:38 – 01:55:40) It was the Iran decision that f***ed everything.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:55:40 – 01:55:41) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ICE and the Precedent of a Masked Police Force

JOE ROGAN: (01:55:41 – 01:56:49) Because even the ICE stuff— look, most people in this country don’t like the idea of a militarized police force with no identification just pulling people over. It opens up a world of problems. It sets terrible precedents. And this is what people that are pro-ICE don’t seem to understand. They could use that in another way. Now we’ve set a precedent. You’re allowed to have a militarized police force with masks on, and they don’t have any identification, and they’re snatching up people, and some of them happen to be American citizens.

If you’re supporting this, you gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet. Okay, well, you just opened up the f***ing henhouse, and now the chickens are running all over the place. You could do whatever you want now. If you’re allowing that and that’s normalized in society, that’s not good. But on this, at the same point, you do have a bunch of very dangerous criminals, the Tren de Aragua people. There’s a lot of different gangs that have gotten in and they’re setting up illegal activities and kidnappings and all kinds of shit, cartel violence inside American borders. That’s real too. So like support of ICE to go after that is pretty strong.

No Forever Wars and the Disenfranchised Voter

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:56:49 – 01:58:10) But it’s also as well what it does to your democratic process. Because one of people— part of Trump’s appeal, as we all know, is that he marketed himself as the outsider. I’m not part of the political system, right? You’re going to get a radically different presidency with me. I’m not going to be the other ones. And one of the promises was— here you go, Joe. One of the promises was like, no forever wars.

We’re not going to go around, we’re not going to do these wars. I’m going to put America first. It’s going to prioritize American people because we’ve got real issues in this country that we need to sort out. And the problem is, when you do Iran, what you say to people is, it’s just more of the same. It doesn’t matter who you vote for. You’re still going to get these types of wars.

And so, what happens is that people then feel more and more disenfranchised, that they’re not connected, that it doesn’t matter who they vote for. You’re undermining democracy. Yeah. And that’s a really dangerous place to be because once people feel that democracy doesn’t represent them, then they start disengaging. And again, it goes back to that argument about vacuums. That power vacuum still needs to be filled. And then you have people going, well, what we actually need is a king, or what we really need is to do our own thing. And that’s how the fractures appear within society.

Revolution vs. War of Independence

JOE ROGAN: (01:58:10 – 01:58:24) And you got those weird kids today that think we should burn it all down and start from scratch. It’s like, okay, show me your plan. What’s your f***ing plan? What’s your burn it all down long-range strategy?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:58:24 – 02:00:02) Well, that’s why I always— look, I’m not a historian, but it’s something I’ve always thought about. I think calling the American Revolution a revolution is inaccurate, and that leads to a lot of confusion because it wasn’t a revolution. To me, a revolution is when you overthrow the existing regime in your country, right? The Russian Revolution, right? You have the Tsar, and then the Bolsheviks come in, they overthrow the Tsar, they install a new government, right?

In the French Revolution, you have a monarchy, the revolutionaries come in, they execute the aristocracy and the king, they institute a new government. The American Revolution is really a war of independence. It’s you guys saying we’re going to separate away from And in our part of the world, we’re going to have our own government. You guys do whatever you want. So America was not actually created in a revolution. It’s just people seeking independence.

It’s like if Scotland broke off from the United Kingdom, right? And that, I think, changes the mentality because revolutions actually usually end very badly. It’s a very bad thing that happens. They’re very violent. Lots of people get killed. The people who did the revolution usually get killed off first, then they kill off the people who came. This is what Stalin did. I mean, his purges were just about you’ve— the revolution has happened, and now you’ve got all of these psychotic revolutionaries who don’t know how to build anything.

They just want to tear everything down because that’s what revolutionaries do. And now we’ve got to get rid of them. The revolutions are generally not the sort of thing you want to be around for. When they happen. And so yeah, the tearing— tear it all down thing, that doesn’t appeal to me at all.

JOE ROGAN: (02:00:03 – 02:00:41) Well, it’s just young kids that are saying this. It’s like, this is— these are the young Democrat socialists and Marxists. They want to tear it all down. It’s a great message that resonates without actually having thought it through. It’s like, you see that guy’s pissing you off? Go punch him in the face. Okay, what if he punches you back? What if his friends show up? What if, what if there’s a guy in a car across the street who sees it and he grabs you and throws you into traffic?

There’s a lot that can happen. Let’s play this out. Let’s think this through. If you f***ing destroy America, what takes its place? Where does the money go? Where does your money go? Where— who takes care of the streets?

Talk to a Cuban: The Reality of Communism

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:00:42 – 02:00:48) And I always say to these people who are like, “I’m a socialist,” I’ll go, “You ever talk to a Cuban?”

JOE ROGAN: (02:00:49 – 02:00:50) Talk to a Cuban, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:00:50 – 02:00:55) Talk to a Venezuelan. Talk to a Russian. If it— oh, talk to anybody from Eastern Europe.

JOE ROGAN: (02:00:56 – 02:01:00) Anybody who’s really experienced actual communism, they’re not fond of it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:01:00 – 02:02:35) No, no, they’re not. I remember I used to go to the coffee shop, when I was doing— when I was writing for stand-up, and I got a, I had a— I got to know a guy who ran the coffee shop. He was a Cuban guy, and we used to talk about Communism all the time. It’s one way to pass the day. And he actually said something to me. He goes, and because I was getting very frustrated at this point, that around about 2018, 2019, this, the talk of socialism came back, and it was very triggering to me on a personal level.

And I was very upset. And I was saying to him, he was getting really f***ing pissed. And it was, and I said to him how do I, how do you fight write this. And he goes, “You can’t.” And I go, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Look, Francis, when you argue with somebody from the West who has grown up surrounded by this, and you’re saying about communism, they can’t understand it, they can’t comprehend it.

It’s like saying to a really rich kid, look, don’t walk down that alley, don’t walk down it at night because something bad’s going to happen to you. He goes, the only way they will ever truly understand is if they walk down the They get hit on the back of the head. They feel the taste of blood in their mouth. That’s when they get it. Until then, I hate to break it to you, but you’re fighting a losing battle.

And I’m talking as someone who grew up in Cuba, whose most of their family is Cuban, and have tried this time and time again. There is a part of me that is slightly fatalistic that goes, sometimes people need to see the mistakes for themselves.”

JOE ROGAN: (02:02:35 – 02:02:40) You have to fall down. You have to hurt your knees to realize, oh, don’t do that.

Locked Out: Young People and the Fairness of Society

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:02:40 – 02:05:06) I also think we have to be honest and say that there is a thing going on in a lot of Western societies where if you had assets in 2006 before the great financial crash, you’ve done very well for the last 20 years. But if you didn’t, your ability to buy a house, to pay off your student loans, all of that, it’s become more difficult. And it’s why that portion of society who feel that they’ve been locked out are feeling like they don’t have a stake because they don’t have a stake in society.

And that’s when this kind of thing happens. And I think that’s something people, people on the right and people like us who, who— I mean, I think communism is the most evil ideology that’s ever been tried, just numerically speaking. It’s a fact, right? But you have to make sure that it’s not looking after people, because what we do in Britain, we just go, here’s a handout, you don’t need to work, just here’s some money, shut the f*** up, right?

That doesn’t work. But what you have to do is make sure that society feels fair to everybody, or to as great a number of people as possible, and that there’s opportunity to advance. And for our generation, we are in our early 40s now, I— for our generation, I’ll be like Joe, if we hadn’t started TRIGGERnometry and haven’t had the amazing success that we’ve had, that we’re so grateful for, we’d be in that same boat.

We’d be in the exactly same boat, and we’d be struggling going like, this thing, it doesn’t work anymore. And I think that’s where a lot of this stuff is coming from. So yes, it’s one of the things that I think people in the AI world don’t really think about enough. What happens when, even if we don’t, even if we accept that actually in the long run, jobs aren’t going to all disappear.

And like all technology, you create new jobs with it and In the interim, it’s going to get very disruptive. And in that time, I really think Andrew Yang was onto something when he talked about the need to find a way. Yes, you’re creating all this beautiful wealth. These 5 companies are creating all the wealth, but you’ve got to find a way that the rest of society feels like they’ve got a shot as well.

They’ve got an opportunity. And unless we do that, I think this path down to where a lot of people feel really locked out and angry and frustrated and betrayed. I think that it’s understandable that they feel that way.

JOE ROGAN: (02:05:06 – 02:05:09) It’s totally understandable. That’s why the movie The Joker resonated so well.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:05:09 – 02:05:36) Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was. And I always say this, it’s like, society is basically a game. And, you follow the rules, you do what you have to do, and you will get the rewards at the end of it. The problem is if for young people, which is very, very true, they feel they’re not getting the rewards and everybody else is, and they’re working just as hard, if not harder than everyone else, eventually they’re going to go, “You know what, f*** your game.”

JOE ROGAN: (02:05:37 – 02:05:37) Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:05:38 – 02:05:42) And the board goes up in the air. And that’s what I think what we’re seeing with young people.

JOE ROGAN: (02:05:42 – 02:05:45) Sure. That’s why they cheered when Luigi shot that UnitedHealthcare guy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:05:46 – 02:05:49) And that’s crazy to me. But that’s where it’s coming from.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:05:49 – 02:05:49) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:05:49 – 02:05:50) That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: (02:05:50 – 02:05:58) Makes sense. And it’s also, that’s the narrative that’s been being promoted in universities. That kind of thinking, that revolutionary thinking, making it sexy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:05:59 – 02:06:09) Yeah, yeah. And so when you, when you combine that and also the other things they’ve been taught for generations now is to hate their own society, its history, its culture, you put all that together, it’s a dangerous mix.

JOE ROGAN: (02:06:09 – 02:06:10) Fun times.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:06:10 – 02:06:14) So, but I really think that there is a way to address it.

JOE ROGAN: (02:06:14 – 02:06:15) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:06:15 – 02:06:24) Which is that we have to think This is coming. People are locked out. How do we make sure they are included again?

Universal High Income and Alaska’s Oil Dividend

JOE ROGAN: (02:06:25 – 02:06:56) Yeah, well, if you ask the AI people, it’s going to get super weird because the universal high-income thing that you hear Elon talk about, that would be that every citizen of the United States would have a stake in artificial intelligence and that you would get just like if you live in Alaska, you get money from the oil companies. You get a check. People— maybe people don’t know this, but if you live in Alaska, you just— you get a check. And when—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:06:56 – 02:06:59) when you’re born, or— no, you get like every, every month.

JOE ROGAN: (02:06:59 – 02:07:00) Yeah, you get a— you get an income.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:07:01 – 02:07:01) Wow.

JOE ROGAN: (02:07:01 – 02:07:09) Let’s find out how many people in Alaska get it and what’s the parameters. If you live on Native American reservations, they get checks.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:07:09 – 02:07:10) Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: (02:07:10 – 02:08:26) If you’re Native American, you can get a check if you’re a part of a tribe that has a casino. You get a piece of the casino. And this is kind of what’s going on with the United States when it comes to the consequences of AI and taking over automation, taking over jobs, taking over shipping, taking over commercial truck driving. You already see it all over Austin. You see these Waymos and Cybercabs.

It’s kind of nuts. I mean, I see as many of them sometimes as I do regular cars. It’s really nuts how many Waymos you see. So those jobs are gone. They’re taking jobs and this is just the beginning of the storm. These are the first raindrops of the storm that is the consequences of AI completely taking over every aspect of society, which it’ll probably do and do much better than what humans do.

Then there becomes a problem of your identity. How do you think of yourself as a person who works and are you proud of that? Is that who you— you’re proud to be useful and you’re, you get great satisfaction out of your occupation. If all of a sudden your occupation is automated and you don’t exist anymore, massive amounts of depression, massive amounts of drug addiction, and then you just give them a check. I don’t know if that’s going to be enough.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:08:26 – 02:08:32) Well, to your point about Native American reservations, from what I understand, the kind of social outcomes of that are not great.

JOE ROGAN: (02:08:32 – 02:09:30) So here it is. No, not— well, the Native American one’s particularly bleak, but we can get into that. Alaska pays eligible residents an annual dividend. Called the Permanent Fund Dividend. For 2026, it’s $1,200 per eligible person, including a $200 energy relief payment. So it’s $1,400 a year. That’s not much. No, but it’s a little something per— what’s that, Jamie? Oh, per eligible person. Oh, oh, sorry, includes a $200— including a $200 energy relief payment.

So it’s just $1,200. Yeah, so if there’s 2 people in your household that are eligible well, how many— how old do you have to be to be eligible? Who receives it? Is it a certain age? There’s an age requirement, or is it all citizens, or is it like voting citizens? Either way, it’s not enough.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:09:30 – 02:09:31) No.

JOE ROGAN: (02:09:31 – 02:09:52) Now the real question is, when you’re dealing with AI and this infinite amount of wealth it’s going to generate, how much is enough? When Elon says universal high income, what are we talking about here? What does that mean? Are you saying you’re going to give everybody $500,000 a year? I’m on board. Okay, so then what happens?

Meaning, Purpose and Feeling Useful

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:09:52 – 02:10:03) Are you, Joe? Because this is the flip side of this conversation, which is you mentioned the Native American situation. It’s like, you know yourself, you take a lot of meaning from the things that you do.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:10:04 – 02:10:04) Mm-hmm.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:10:05 – 02:10:06) So just getting money—

JOE ROGAN: (02:10:06 – 02:10:10) it’s a Dire Straits song, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:10:10 – 02:10:12) Money for nothing. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (02:10:12 – 02:10:13) And the chicks for free.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:10:14 – 02:10:17) I’m not sure they asked— well, though, with AI girlfriends, maybe you’re going to get the chicks.

JOE ROGAN: (02:10:17 – 02:10:22) They were talking about guys complaining about people on MTV, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:10:22 – 02:10:50) Right, right. Know. But I guess I think what I’m saying is there’s a difference from saying, hey, I’m, Mark, or I am Elon, or I am Sam, and I’ve taken your job. And I’m Elon, I’m Mark, I’m Sam, I’ve taken your job, here’s $10,000 a month. There’s a big difference there. Yeah. And unless that problem— unless we as a society work out a way to do that, you don’t have to be a genius to work out that’s not a recipe for a stable, healthy society.

JOE ROGAN: (02:10:51 – 02:10:51) Society.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:10:52 – 02:12:07) Oh, so I’ll give you an— I’ll give you an example of something. So when I was teaching, I taught a kid, he was very low ability, he really struggled academically. So we— I gave him work which was which was less challenging than other kids. Sometimes he would be okay, sometimes he would play up because he understandably had self-esteem issues. One day he was playing up really, really badly. And I said, “Chris, look, you’re going to be in detention.”

And I wanted to— I never believed in just detention, getting kids to be bored. I wanted him to be useful. And I was giving him what I thought was a punishment. I said, “Chris, you see all the pencils in the classroom? Every single pencil. I’m talking about colored pencils. I’m talking about ordinary. I want them sharpened. And I want them perfect because we’ve got an art lesson after lunch.” He went and did it.

And when he brought the pencils back to me, he was so happy. He was so proud of it because he felt useful, because he felt useful. And he said— and I saw a side of him that I’d never seen before, because finally he got given a job that he could do. He could do to a very high standard, and he was useful and part of something. And he said something to me that actually kind of teared me up. He went, “Can I come back tomorrow and do more?”

Teaching Purpose in a Post-Work World

JOE ROGAN: (02:12:08 – 02:14:19) Mm, so he felt good. He felt good that he was useful, and I think most people do. Yeah, the real question is it possible to teach people differently in school? So instead of teaching people facts that they need to memorize and having to sit in a chair and making sure that you’re doing everything that you’re told because someday you’re going to have to have a job and that’s— you’re going to have to learn how to behave this way.

Is it possible that you could teach people, listen, Listen, money is not the problem anymore. Resources in terms of like your ability to feed yourself and put a roof over your head, that’s not an issue anymore. Now your life is about pursuing your interests. But we have to teach people that from the jump. We have to teach people that from the time they’re very young. The older people that are set in their ways, they’re going to have a very difficult time changing and adapting.

But— and then also people are going to have a very hard time having the same kind of motivation that people have when they grow up poor. That’s a superpower. Growing up poor is a superpower because it gives you a motivation, like a drive that I don’t think you get if you’re a trust fund kid and your parents are worth a lot of money. So we’re going to have to teach people to have internal motivation instead of external motivation, and we’re going to have to teach people that there is a great benefit to doing things that you don’t want to do and then seeing the result, to just putting off any sort of enjoyment that you might possibly have in the present time so that you can have more enjoyment in the future because you did that, you sacrificed, and you figured something out.

We have to teach them how to— that way of thinking. If you could teach them that, listen, man, you don’t have to worry about money anymore, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about life. There’s a lot of cool things that you can find that you can do with your life. But now do those things and get a sense of purpose from you learning about yourself while you’re pursuing whatever it is, whether it’s becoming an author or whether it’s, whatever, making things, whatever it is.

Find a thing that you like and then teach people how to find the thing that interests them rather than finding just some menial bullshit job that’s going to keep them depressed and just barely pay their bills.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:14:20 – 02:14:28) I noticed this with my son. The thing he loves to do with me the most is like paint the fence. To him, that’s like the happiest time that we have together.

JOE ROGAN: (02:14:28 – 02:14:29) See progress.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:14:29 – 02:14:42) We go and do something together that he feels is valuable. He’s learning, he’s doing it with me. Obviously father and son time as well. But he would much rather paint a fence with me than he would play a game. Much rather.

JOE ROGAN: (02:14:43 – 02:14:43) Interesting.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:14:43 – 02:14:45) It’s more, it’s more meaningful for him, right?

JOE ROGAN: (02:14:45 – 02:14:46) He’s accomplishing something.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:14:46 – 02:14:47) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:14:47 – 02:14:49) And learning a skill. Yeah. Like you said.

Happy People in the Siberian Taiga

JOE ROGAN: (02:14:49 – 02:15:25) Yeah, there’s stuff that people can do. We have only been doing this thing, this show up at a job and doing working in an office and going to a city. This is super f***ing recent in human history. It’s one of the reasons why subsistence tribes are so much happier than us, because we’ve been doing that forever. And the human reward systems are structured in a way that like if you hunt and fish and grow your own food, that’s normal. You’re— you’ve very little anxiety. That’s that— the great Werner Herzog documentary Happy People. That documentary about the people who live in Siberia? I haven’t seen it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:15:25 – 02:15:25) Tell me about it.

JOE ROGAN: (02:15:25 – 02:17:59) Oh, it’s called Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, and it’s all about these fishermen and trappers and hunters that live in Siberia that have like no mental illness. They’re all just happy, and they live a completely subsistence lifestyle in one of the most brutal climates on earth. F***ing Siberia. And they, they’re fine. They’re having a good time. We’re f***ed up and we think, oh my God, I could never live like that.

But you’re not happy, but they are happy. What is our goal? Is our goal to be happy? Because this thing that we’ve created, these jobs in corporations and in cubicles, and this thing that is normal for us is not really normal for us. And we’ve kind of decided somewhere along the way that this is the only way, that you have to have a job. Without a job, what do we do? What about the idea that something that the human race has created no longer makes it necessary for you to do a job anymore?

Now, instead of worrying about hunting and gathering food, the next stage of being a human is pursuing interests. I mean, it could be a gigantic explosion of creativity and of innovation and art and who knows what people can do, especially with the access to technology that we have today and all the different things that people can— we’re just assuming that this way that we live that sucks, that everybody hates, is the only way to live.

And I just don’t buy that. I mean, clearly I’m biased because clearly I went through all those processes of being poor and struggling and figuring out a way in life and then trying a bunch of very difficult things that other people avoided and finding a path. But I don’t know if that’s the only way to live, and I don’t think it is. I think there’s a competitive drive in people that exists no matter what.

And if we’re not competing over finances anymore, maybe we’ll compete over art or accomplishments or creativity or fill in the blank, like whatever you decide to pursue. And of course, you’re probably going to make more money doing that on top of the money you already get. It’s not like we’re going to go into a full communist state where the entire population only get $500,000 a year. We take from the billionaires, we distribute evenly.

No, that’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying like you start out with the $500,000, whatever it is— I don’t know what the number is going to be— start out with that, and then you can still make money on top of that if you want. But do you have the drive to live a special life, to live a fulfilled and interesting life?

Danny Drinkwater and the Status Game

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:17:59 – 02:18:57) Well, there’s a soccer player, former soccer player called Danny Drinkwater, and he, it is a name. He won the Premier League with Leicester City, which is a very, very small team. It was one of the biggest surprises in football that no one ever predicted that this team would win. And he went on to have an amazing career. And towards the end of his career, he was struggling. He became— he was struggling with alcohol.

And then all these pictures started to emerge of him after he finished his career on a building site, and people were taking the piss out of him, going, “Look how far Danny’s fallen. He was a Premier League champion. Now he’s working on a building site.” And there was an interview where he was like, “I love my life. I’m training to be an electrician. I love doing this. I get a sense of achievement out of it.

I get the same camaraderie that I got in the dressing room with the boys on the building site. I’m actually happy. This is what I want to do.” Because he realized that he still needed something.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:18:58 – 02:18:58) Mm-hmm.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:18:58 – 02:19:13) He still needed to achieve something. But because in our own kind of f***ed up way we see playing elite sport as somehow less than building something, that it’s lesser than— but he’s actually found the purpose by doing that.

JOE ROGAN: (02:19:13 – 02:20:08) Well, it’s interesting that you would never go up to someone who’s working as an electrician, go, look at you, f***ing loser, working as an electrician. But if that person had been a movie star and then stopped doing movies and said, I think I’d rather be an electrician, then you’re allowed to talk shit about them. But it’s just shitty humans. One of the biggest problems we have is we’re not teaching people how to think.

Or not— I don’t want to say teaching people how to think, but informing them on the more beneficial ways to construct your life through thoughts. And instead, we’re allowing these stupid kind of be like that, kind of like tear them all down behavior, to go unchecked. You really— you know how transparently, pathetically jealous that is? To want to go up to a guy who is like an elite soccer player and you’re upset because he has a job that’s like yours? You know how f***ing nuts that is? That’s nuts.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:20:08 – 02:20:14) It’s a status thing, I think. We had this great guy on called Will Storr. He wrote a book called The Status Game. Are you familiar with it? Yes.

JOE ROGAN: (02:20:14 – 02:20:15) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:20:15 – 02:20:38) Yes. This is the— this is The reason people do this, I think, is it’s a status thing. So Premier League footballer, high status. Electrician, low status. And also, let’s be honest, if you haven’t got to where you’ve got to, where you wanted to in life, and you haven’t got the status that you want, it’s kind of satisfying for some people to see someone else fall down.

JOE ROGAN: (02:20:38 – 02:20:38) Oh yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:20:39 – 02:20:40) And then you go, oh, I’m not the only one.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:20:41 – 02:20:41) Sure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:20:42 – 02:21:16) It’s actually one of the things I do do really like about America, you have a kind of failure is just the step to the next success attitude here. A lot of people have that here. So it’s very normal for people to start a business, business doesn’t work, they start the next one, doesn’t work, start the next one, it pops. And actually I was seeing stats, I can’t remember where I got it, so I hope this isn’t BS, maybe Jamie can check, but I think with every business you start and fail, it increases your chance of succeeding.

Well, not it increases But if you start, by the time you start the third business, your chance of that business being successful is significantly higher than the first one.

JOE ROGAN: (02:21:16 – 02:21:27) I think this is Elizabeth Holmes’ strategy when she gets out of jail. By the way, her husband lives in town, lives in Austin. So we might be seeing her at the mothership one day.

Learning From Failure: Lessons From Jiu-Jitsu

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:21:32 – 02:22:10) But I think it’s a really important thing that, and I think we should all do it. We should all talk about our failures more. Because it’s part of the journey. Yeah, if success isn’t as sweet when you get it first time round because you don’t appreciate it, but if you fail and fail and fail again, and finally something works, you just— number one, what that teaches you is gratitude. Number two is it shows other people, oh shit, if he’s failed and failed and failed and then made it, maybe I can do that. Maybe not in the same field, but maybe my journey is going to be like that in a different way.

JOE ROGAN: (02:22:10 – 02:23:21) It’s one of the main things that I think a lot of people can get out of jiu-jitsu other than self-defense, is that everybody starts out terrible. You, I mean, you have a little bit of an advantage if you’re strong, you have a little bit of an advantage if you’ve maybe done some other martial art before, but not much. I mean, even me, I’d started out out. I had years of taekwondo and kickboxing and all.

I got mauled, just mauled. I mean, I was— it was so humiliating but humbling in a great way where I was like, wow, I had no idea I was that vulnerable. I was walking around all delusional thinking that shit’s not going to work on me. Meanwhile, it worked great. But everybody who you train with, if they stick it out, you see them growing and getting better and we all— you all go on this path together where then all of a sudden I’ve seen guys that they started out, they were terrible, and then a couple years later I see them rolling with the new guys and manhandling them.

I go, this is amazing. Look at this guy. Now he’s like tapping people out that are new. And then you see the look in his face like, why?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:23:21 – 02:23:21) I can—

JOE ROGAN: (02:23:21 – 02:24:15) this is real. I learned. I got better. Better at something that I thought was impossible. In the beginning, you’re so— the mountain is so high f***. You take one step, you fall down, you’re like, this is terrible. And for a lot of people, their self-esteem can’t handle it, and they never go through that process. But if you could force yourself to go through that process, it’s one of the very best processes of a failure and then learning from failure, and then you get a little bit better, and then more failure, and then learning, and then a little bit, and you keep going, and you realize like, oh, this is a And along this journey, I can apply these same principles to essentially anything in my life and get better.

Just even about just being a human, just better at being a human, realizing the dumb shit that you do that sabotages your life or f***s up your diet or gets you drinking again, whatever it is. You can apply the same strategy that you learn to get good at jiu-jitsu to anything in life.

“No Laughs Eddie”: Eddie Izzard’s Journey

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:24:15 – 02:24:39) I remember when I was Nearly 10 years ago, I was opening for Eddie Izzard on his European tour. And I remember people go to me like, “Who’s like one of your biggest influences?” And Eddie was that person. Because when Eddie started out doing comedy in London way back when, like late ’80s, early ’90s, you know what his nickname was on the circuit?

JOE ROGAN: (02:24:40 – 02:24:40) What?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:24:40 – 02:24:47) “No Laughs Eddie.” That’s what it was like. He would come on and everyone’s like, oh my God, it’s this guy.

JOE ROGAN: (02:24:48 – 02:24:53) F***, was that before or after he started dressing like a chick?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:24:53 – 02:24:54) That was before.

JOE ROGAN: (02:24:54 – 02:24:56) So did the dressing like the chick turn it all around?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:24:56 – 02:25:18) No, no, I think what actually turned it around is that he was just— and when I spoke to him, he was like, “Look, I was relentlessly driven and focused. I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I knew that this is what I wanted to achieve. And what was happening is that at the beginning, it wasn’t working for me. So I needed to change in order to get to where I wanted to go.”

JOE ROGAN: (02:25:19 – 02:25:55) But I know he likes dressing like a woman, so maybe that— I love that guy, but it’s weird because he is a guy. He’s— I think now maybe he’s changed, but he told me he likes women, and I’m like, cool, you know? He came on the podcast, he was great. I’ve done a couple podcasts with him, but the point is, that is what he enjoys doing, and to stop him from doing that in the past past maybe allowed him to be freer on stage, which allowed him to be better on stage.

Because it is a journey of self-discovery when you try to figure out what is it about your act that doesn’t work, what is it about this that the people are not buying. And maybe that was a part of it for him.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:25:55 – 02:26:46) Maybe it was a part, but he was also trying to do something radically different at the time that nobody else was doing. But once he nailed it, he kind of— he just exploded for him. But I always remember that lesson that I took from him, which was, you’ve got to go through the shit. You have to. That’s just part of the process. And you’ve also, as much as possible, not got to take it personally.

Because you’ve got to accept that this is what life is teaching you. If you want to do that, you’ve got to take the hits, and you’ve got to accept failure. Most of life is failure. Most of the time you do things, it’s not going to work out in quite the way you want. But then you take the lessons from it, and then you move on. And it’s not like we all want to be the guy who steps on stage, gets on a soccer field, touches the ball, everyone goes, wow, what a genius! 99.99999% of us ain’t like that.

JOE ROGAN: (02:26:46 – 02:27:15) Yeah, and even the 1% are probably the point, whatever it is, 1%, they’re not either. Yeah, it’s all bullshit. It’s 100%. There’s like some people have a better start than others, but everybody has to learn and grow along the way. And it’s interesting with Eddie, he applied that same sort of grinding strategy to a lot of the crazy physical feats that he did. Like when he ran around the entire UK and he didn’t train for it. Have you seen that documentary?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:27:15 – 02:27:17) No, no, I remember the story.

JOE ROGAN: (02:27:17 – 02:28:24) Insane. It was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen because literally the skin on his feet were falling off. He had to take a couple of days off. He’s running a marathon a day with no training. Training, and, he had to take some days off because his feet were so destroyed he couldn’t stand on them. Never forget about running 26 miles. I mean, you’re seeing the raw open skin. It’s horrible.

And he’s got a doctor or a nurse tending to his wounds. It’s terrible. I mean, just like raw, torn apart feet. Next day, 26 miles. Took a day off, maybe 2, maybe 2 days off in the entire time he did it. It was nuts. And so it’s like that same thing just keep going, you can do it. And in this TikTok generation where everybody wants everything to happen really quickly— you want to be an influencer, you want to get famous, you want to get this, you want to get that— I don’t want to get fat, oh, take a pill, bang, whatever it is, or Ozempic— there’s this desire to have something happen to you very quickly versus the satisfaction that you get from knowing the jiu-jitsu mountain. Look, I started down there, I started down there, now I’m all the way the f*** up here, right?

Comfort Is the Enemy

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:28:24 – 02:28:32) And that process just makes you into the person you’re actually supposed to be. Yeah, it’s the process that makes you into the person you’re supposed to be.

JOE ROGAN: (02:28:32 – 02:28:34) Yeah, and anything difficult—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:28:34 – 02:28:53) we often, we often talk about this with our show, because sometimes we’re doing interviews with people where like, this is a serious thing that we’re doing here, serious person, this is going to be big, it’s important we get it right. If you had catapulted us when we started the show into the position of interviewing that person, we wouldn’t know what the f*** to do, and we would screw it up very badly.

JOE ROGAN: (02:28:54 – 02:28:54) Oh, for sure.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:28:55 – 02:30:03) It’s the process that gets you to the point where you’re actually able to have a conversation on a high level. And it’s different things. Sometimes it’s about being prepared to challenge people, call out certain facts. Sometimes it’s just about like the conversation’s dying out a little bit, but where do we go to? All of that stuff you learn along the way. And if you haven’t got the miles on the clock up till that point, being parachuted into that position— this is why it’s actually probably very, very hard to like start a TV show and get the right talent or whatever, because they haven’t got the miles on the clock to actually be able to do the job.

And it’s that process that gives you the ability to actually perform at a high level, because because you’ve been there, you f***ed up, you’ve made mistakes, you’ve learned from them, you’ve grown as a person, you’ve become more humble. The process of doing stuff humbles you, like you said, because no doubt you go, oh wait, I had this idea and it totally didn’t work. Maybe I need to revise how I think about this.

And I think life is just this one long lesson in what you talked about, which is deferred gratification. I’m going to give up pleasure or comfort, and comfort’s a big one, Joe. It’s not even pleasure, is it? Right, it’s Comfort.

JOE ROGAN: (02:30:03 – 02:30:03) It’s comfort.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:30:03 – 02:30:17) That’s what kills you. You get comfortable, and it’s a lot more comfortable to sit at home on the sofa. It’s terrible for you, but it’s comfortable. And it’s overcoming that and learning to get out of your comfort zone. Like all the good stuff, it’s on the other side of that.

Universal Income and Frozen Adolescence

JOE ROGAN: (02:30:17 – 02:30:31) That’s going to be the real problem with giving people universal high income, right? Is that like people don’t like to just leave comfort, and they’re not going to want to do anything other than just take the money that they get and then, I don’t know, party.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:30:32 – 02:31:27) I think so. But I also think we’ve all been— I don’t know, we’ve never talked about it. But I imagine there’s been times when your life— in your life, when you’ve gone down that route, you’ve taken some time to just veg, and you do it for a bit. And it, you play a video game for a week nonstop, and you’re just immersed in that and whatever. And then you realize it sucks.

The first day you do it is kind of fun, the second day is fun, but eventually you get to the point where you realize this sucks. And I think with having this universal high income or universal basic income or whatever, people will get to the point where they go, actually, this has been fun. It’s like partying. A lot of people spend their 20s doing that. Eventually you grow out of it. 99% of people do. Yeah, you’ve met a lot of people who haven’t grown out of it. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (02:31:27 – 02:31:32) Well, especially me, because I know a lot of comedians that are basically like 45-year-old boys.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:31:33 – 02:31:33) Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: (02:31:34 – 02:31:58) Because especially if you don’t have any responsibility other than getting on stage at night comics have the most open-ended schedules, and a lot of them have zero discipline, and they don’t have to. They could play video games all day. They work at a comedy club for a weekend, they make enough money to pay their bills for month. They don’t have to worry. And so they just— they’re childlike, and they just drink at night and f***ing eat terrible food and play video games.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:31:59 – 02:32:01) Do they eventually though get married and have kids and settle down?

JOE ROGAN: (02:32:02 – 02:32:07) Some of them do. Yeah, some of them don’t. Yeah, it’s a weird sort of frozen adolescence.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:32:07 – 02:32:16) I think once you get to the kids thing— and we see it with people that work with us— you start, you get a serious girlfriend, suddenly the attitude shifts. They get a little bit more serious.

JOE ROGAN: (02:32:17 – 02:32:23) Children’s the big one. Yeah, yeah, it just lets you go, oh boy, I have to take care of a tiny little person. This is not the same fun and games anymore.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:32:24 – 02:32:31) And set an example. Yes, because they don’t learn from what you tell them, they learn from what they see, right? And so if Daddy’s sitting on the sofa, what are they learning?

Could Universal Income Reduce Crime?

JOE ROGAN: (02:32:31 – 02:33:11) Well, hopefully the world will learn, right, in that regard. So if universal income becomes a thing, well, I think there’s a lot of pros that come out of it. Here’s the pros: starvation The depression ends, goes away. The lack of food ends, goes away. The struggling to pay your bills ends. So all that stress ends. So how much crime do we lose because of that? I bet we lose a lot. I bet there’s a long transitional period because people have been ingrained to certain types of behaviors and actions and they have personality flaws they’ve developed over the years, but once society settles into the concept, crime radically gets reduced.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:33:11 – 02:33:14) You mean like acquisitive crime, stealing? Crime becomes a necessity.

JOE ROGAN: (02:33:14 – 02:33:24) Yeah, because they’re— I mean, like the silly one was the AOC one where they’re stealing stuff from stores. They just need bread for their family. Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:33:24 – 02:33:26) That’s why they’ve got the Lacoste trainers.

JOE ROGAN: (02:33:26 – 02:34:10) Yeah, right. No, that’s not necessarily what’s going on, right? But once society settles and then there’s not a haves and have-nots situation at the same extreme that we have today. Because the extreme that we have today, not as much in this country because it’s kind of thought of as the land of opportunity, but there’s a lot of countries where like if you don’t have, you will never have, and this is just how it goes.

If that becomes something that’s adopted and employed by all nations, is that the amount of wealth it generates is so f***ing extreme that— and jobs are gone and that people now have money, but you never have to worry about working. So the fear and the anger at least gets significantly mitigated.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:34:11 – 02:34:14) I mean, that’s the hope. That’s the real hope.

JOE ROGAN: (02:34:14 – 02:34:35) And if they just want to play Call of Duty all day who f***ing cares? As long as they like their life. It’s like, but it’s like we need to train people to enjoy their life and not think that your life is just a thing you do that sucks so you can make money so that you can buy stuff so it makes you feel good about doing the thing that you do that sucks. And then one day you die.

Adapting to the AI Transition

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:34:36 – 02:35:30) The encouraging thing about human beings is I think we are very adaptable. We are very adaptable. And I think the things that matter to us are the things that have always mattered to us. It’s family, it’s human connection, it’s meaningful work, or meaningful activity at least. It might not be work, it might just be activity. I love chopping wood. I could buy wood, but I don’t. I buy wood that I have to chop because I like chopping the wood.

You know what I mean? I like— and I like doing it with my son, and I like teaching him how to do it. I could pay a guy to paint the fence. I could pay a guy to paint the wall. But if there’s little things that I can do with him, or I can do myself, I actually prefer to do that. And I think it’s a— it’s actually some— so we will— I think we will find a way to adapt because it’s what we’ve always done. That’s, I think, the big hope. But I do think the transition is going to be a big challenge.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:35:30 – 02:35:30) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:35:30 – 02:35:50) And I think— I really hope the people who are doing this AI stuff think about this a lot. I think it’s going to be them who’s going to have to think about this a lot. And if I were them, I’d be thinking, how do I give as much of this away as I can can so that everybody feels included in this thing.

JOE ROGAN: (02:35:50 – 02:35:50) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:35:51 – 02:36:03) Otherwise, there’s not enough robot defenders in the world who are going to guard your mansion, right? Is what— how I think about it. And, yeah, I think we’ll get to that. I think people will realize that’s the reality of this.

JOE ROGAN: (02:36:03 – 02:36:04) I hope so.

The Odyssey and Our Shared Humanity

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:36:04 – 02:37:36) Do you know what always gives me hope is that when every time I taught Greek mythology to the kids and we did the Odyssey, everybody got locked in. And I taught in a place where most kids were first or second generation immigrants. We didn’t have shared culture, vastly different experiences, some of whom were incredibly poor. But you taught like The Odyssey, boom, they were all locked in. And why is that so special?

It’s so special because it talks about the human condition. It talks about struggle. It talks about overcoming. And I think one of the things, particularly nowadays, is we all think we’re so incredibly different. Yeah, when Christopher Nolan does a retread of The Odyssey and puts it on the big screen, people flock. And I— people talk about, oh, it’s an anti-woke movie, or it’s this or it’s that. No, because it’s a story about a man confronting his own demons and overcoming them and the importance of family.

And I think we— that’s a really important bit. That’s a really important bit. The things that, as Konstantin says, that matters have always mattered. And this idea that we’re more divided than ever and that we hate each other, and we’ve got to believe that we can overcome that. We really do. Because if we just see each other as an enemy or as an avatar, we’re never going to be able to transcend.

But if we see the humanity in each other, and actually left, right, most people just want a fairer, better world. We’ve just got different ways of approaching it.

JOE ROGAN: (02:37:36 – 02:37:37) Hear, hear.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:37:38 – 02:37:39) And on that note, we solved everything.

JOE ROGAN: (02:37:39 – 02:37:44) Joe solved it all. Yeah, Francis Foster for president.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:37:44 – 02:37:46) No, you don’t want that, trust me.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:37:46 – 02:37:50) We were ending on such a nice thought and you had to ruin it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (02:37:51 – 02:37:52) Cut to me getting executed.

JOE ROGAN: (02:37:52 – 02:37:57) It’s always fun talking to you guys. I really appreciate it. Love your show. You guys are cool as f***. It’s always fun.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:37:58 – 02:38:01) Great to see you, brother.

JOE ROGAN: (02:38:01 – 02:38:05) Thanks, man. It’s always a pleasure, mate. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

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