Transcript of Andrew Wilson Interview: Joe Rogan Experience #2535

And there’s no room in this country at the current point in time for another party. No one would accept it. We think about other parties like they’re a goof. The Green Party— that’s a protest vote, you know.

ANDREW WILSON: Libertarian Party.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve done a few protest votes back in my day.

The Impossibility of a Third Party

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I was arguing with Rex Jones the other day. It’s Alex Jones’s kid. About this. And I told him, “Look, you don’t have a prayer in starting a third party in time for midterms and then the presidential election that’s coming up in just a couple short years. You’re not going to be able to replace this system. You’re not going to be able to do that.”

JOE ROGAN: Their roots go too deep. They’re too intertwined in power and influence.

ANDREW WILSON: Like, think about the infrastructure. Billions of dollars in NGO funding, all this outreach program just to get on a ballot in a state. Is often a multimillion-dollar thing that you need to have a party apparatus behind.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s kind of nuts, right? Multimillion dollars to spend to get a job that pays you $170,000. You think that f*ing student loans are a scam? That’s a crazy scam.

ANDREW WILSON: I love when these guys come in for their $100,000 a year job, and then they leave and they have $25 million in the bank.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that happens often. I wonder what happens. I wonder where they get all that money.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, they—

Political Corruption and Insider Trading

JOE ROGAN: How about the Ilhan Omar thing? Oh yeah, that one’s wild. Like, they estimated her net worth somewhere in the millions, like $30 million or something crazy, and then she said it was an error. And then it was actually like a lot less than that, like $100,000 or something really reasonable. Like, you imagine if your accountant was so bad, you’re like, “Hey Mike, how much money am I worth?” And he’s like, “I think you’re worth $30 million.” And you’re like, “F* yeah, dude,” thinking about buying a Corvette.

ANDREW WILSON: And you got $3,000 in the bank.

JOE ROGAN: And then you call Mike the next day and you say, “So, $30 million?” “Actually, it was an error.”

ANDREW WILSON: “You’re worth about $100 grand.”

JOE ROGAN: You’d be like, “Hey Mike, I’m going to kill you because you stole $30 million from me.” That doesn’t make any sense.

ANDREW WILSON: 100%. And do you think maybe she strategically started moving some things with her accountant so that—

JOE ROGAN: How about there was a vineyard that they owned that never made a bottle of wine?

ANDREW WILSON: Sounds right.

JOE ROGAN: Is that the case? The case with one of those businesses that closed down? Listen, and pick on her— if you look at the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to insider trading, it’s f*ing everybody. It’s red, blue, red, blue, red, red, blue. This is not a one-party thing. This is why it’s never going to stop. They’re both dipping their toes in. They’re both having fun.

ANDREW WILSON: You basically always have the expectation of corruption. So even if you put your candidates in, you’re trying to get something out of that, right? Some issue that you’re trying to push forward. You almost have to bake into the system that a certain amount of corruption is going to come out of that.

So let me give you a really good example of that. A key wedge issue like abortion. You got Christians who are just adamant, right? “It’s got to stop.” Will they accept, if it’s the case that candidates are really moving the post on that, if they’re really moving legislation against abortion— do you think that they would turn a blind eye to a little bit of corruption? Probably.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s definitely some compromises that get made both on your morals and the way you view financial issues and all kinds of things. I mean, it’s never— especially there’s only 2 parties. Like, you’re with us or against us.

ANDREW WILSON: It has to be us and them.

JOE ROGAN: It’s good and evil. That’s it. In this country, that’s really how people look at it on both sides. It’s good versus evil.

ANDREW WILSON: But you have an alternative there that’s even worse, or can at least sometimes be worse. So let’s go to like the UK or Canada or places like this where they do round voting. Yeah, you have more than 2 parties. That’s true. But do you really want your president to be elected with 10% of the vote?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: 15% of the vote? You want your politicians to be put in with 9% of the vote? Because that can happen. Yeah, that’s crazy. Between these rounds. And so you think about it and you go, “This two-party system sucks.” But then you look at other places that have multiple parties and they do their rounds of voting and you’re like, “Wait, you could get elected with only 14% of the vote.” So everybody else hates you. Yeah.

The Benevolent Dictator Argument

JOE ROGAN: There’s the weird argument of the benevolent dictator. I’m sure you’ve heard this argument, but that a society is best run by a benevolent dictator. Someone who really truly has ultimate power but actually cares. A good person that cares about the people, that really just wants things to be reasonable and have a working meritocracy and have a working economy and have working education and everything work correctly and weed out all of the fraud and corruption because he’s a king and he could just do it, whatever the f* you want, you know.

Look, I have only been to Dubai one time because we had a UFC over there and I had to go to the weigh-ins. The weigh-ins were in Dubai. Saw a lot of f*ing Ferraris and Lamborghinis in 10 minutes. But from what I hear, it’s the most safe place on earth. Like, literally.

ANDREW WILSON: Like Romania under Vlad.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, like, what would you say?

ANDREW WILSON: Like Romania under Vlad the Impaler? How can you hang gold in the street? And he’s like, “Look around.” A bunch of people impaled everywhere.

JOE ROGAN: He would do them in designs. He would do them in geometric patterns, so you would realize he’s being creative with impaling people.

ANDREW WILSON: He wasn’t messing around.

JOE ROGAN: Oh no, no, no. You know the story? Yeah, he was kidnapped when he was a small boy. A lot to that guy and his brother.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, the inter-brother conflict that they had for years and how he got power, lost power— yeah, there’s a tale to be told about Vlad the Impaler for sure, but probably a pretty safe place to live.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, Dubai— like if they catch you with a bag of weed, you’re going to jail for the rest of your life or they’ll kill you.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, you’re done.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they have crazy laws. There was one guy, I think it was Dubai, who had like marijuana seeds in the sole of his shoes or something like that. Like he had stepped on a marijuana seed, maybe in his apartment.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

Dubai’s Strict Laws and the Trade-Off for Safety

JOE ROGAN: And he was— didn’t have any drugs on him, nothing. And they put him in jail for a long time, man. I forget. This was a few years back, but it was a crazy case. There was another lady who got arrested. I forget what happened, but she— lady or a guy tested positive for poppy. Because she had a poppy seed bagel. I don’t know if you know this, but if you’re testing for drugs and you eat a poppy seed bagel, you could pop for heroin.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that. But doesn’t— with modern tests, isn’t it a little bit better now?

JOE ROGAN: I hope so. I don’t know. 2008, this is a British traveler in Dubai was stopped at the airport. Lab found 0.003 grams of cannabis in his shoe sole. Holy f*.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. He received a mandatory 4-year sentence under the UAE’s strict drug laws, though he was later released early. How early is early?

ANDREW WILSON: So the British government came in and tried to barter him out of there, I’m guessing.

JOE ROGAN: I guess. Or the whole world must have been so outraged. I mean, at a certain point in time, they have to say, we run the risk of never having tourists visit us again. And Dubai is a very tourist-central place.

Sure, but I have a friend who moved over there a while back. He moved back to America recently, but he moved over there and he was like, “Dude, it’s just safe for me. I don’t worry if I go out, someone’s going to like—” He’s a big black guy. He’s like, “I don’t want to get shot. I worry if I go out.” He goes, “Over here there’s nothing like that. There’s no crime. Everything’s nice. Everything’s clean. You can leave a Rolex on the street. They’ll pick it up and turn it into the cops. Nobody steals nothing over there.”

ANDREW WILSON: But there’s a trade-off for that, right? A bit of a trade-off for that.

JOE ROGAN: Let me show you my geometric patterns of dead people on spikes.

ANDREW WILSON: Of dead people everywhere on spikes who we impaled from their buttocks through their throat.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and they don’t die immediately.

ANDREW WILSON: No, they wiggle for a while.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they do that in Dubai, but they let you know. Yeah, you’re not fing around. There’s no fing around. I saw some lady getting in a screaming match. She was trying to do the thing that a lot of people do in America at the airport. And she got in a screaming thing with the lady at the counter, and they’re like, not today.

ANDREW WILSON: Not happening.

JOE ROGAN: They just come over and f*ing cuff you up and take you away. Like, you can’t do that there. You can’t— like, you can’t Spirit Airlines, you know?

ANDREW WILSON: Do you prefer that? Would you prefer that society?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think people should be able to just f*ing scream and yell at people that work behind counters. I don’t think that’s productive. I don’t think smacking them in the head because they can’t get you a flight— we’ve all seen that kind of shit. There should be zero tolerance for that kind of violence.

Dueling, Disorder, and Autonomous Zones

ANDREW WILSON: But what if we tweaked it a different way? Okay, okay. So what if instead of bringing in some crazy Sharia in order to make sure that that happens, you brought back dueling? Like, wouldn’t dueling solve like 95% of this?

JOE ROGAN: Dueling requires people to wait before they turn around and shoot.

ANDREW WILSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not trusting a guy who wants to kill me to not jump the gun.

ANDREW WILSON: But that depends on the rules, right? Like, you could adjust the rules a little bit. If you could call somebody out for smirching you or something like this, right? It’s like, I think people would probably be a lot more polite, wouldn’t they?

JOE ROGAN: They probably would. I think there’s probably a better way than shooting each other in the street.

ANDREW WILSON: Probably, probably. But there’s probably a better way than that.

JOE ROGAN: Even like fistfights. There’s a better way than that too. You don’t have to fistfight. Like, come on.

But, you know, there’s certainly something to be said for a society that is more orderly and people follow the rules, and as long as the rules make sense and these people are friendly and kind and they make for good community members, that they’re not putting up with mentally ill lunatics just walking around causing problems everywhere, which is what American society is now dealing with.

You would— you see what just happened in Wisconsin where they had their own autonomous zone? Oh yeah, it just got broken up today by the cops.

ANDREW WILSON: I didn’t see it got broken up.

JOE ROGAN: It got broken up today. Yeah, see if you can find it, Jamie. There was video footage, just a f*ing army of cops came in, arrested everybody, spray paint all over the streets.

ANDREW WILSON: How do people just get to declare autonomous zones on public— like, what is— remember CHAZ and CHOP? Yes! “We have just declared this an autonomous zone, sorry.”

JOE ROGAN: Madison officials clear Willy Street encampment. Police officers arrest protesters who resist. At Corey Ruiz Memorial Site. I do not know this Corey Ruiz story.

ANDREW WILSON: The Corey Ruiz Memorial. So was it something ICE-related perhaps?

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s what this is, right? Is that what this is, Jamie? Did something happen? Something happened. Someone got shot, right? You don’t know about it either? See, that’s the problem. There’s so many f*ing things in the news that it’s impossible unless you’re a maniac and you’re just online all day. It’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on. You take a couple days off and smell the roses and you get back online. “How come you haven’t commented on— what is it?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

ANDREW WILSON: You gotta catch up for 4 days for 1 day. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Also, like, what hot take? Maybe you shouldn’t have a hot take on everything. Maybe some things you need to let play out in the news, like let people dissect it.

ANDREW WILSON: See, now that I wish that was a message that more people got, that the idea that you don’t have to rush immediately out there to tell everybody your latest hottest take, which is oftentimes, by the way, stupid. Yeah, often it’s a stupid take because you have no information, right? But you’re going to rush out there, you’re going to get those views and clicks quick, but then you’re married to that take.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Yeah. And unless you come back and make another video or make another take and explain why you f*ed it up.

But I think there’s something to be said for— like, there’s a lot of stories that are in the news where I don’t fing know exactly what happened there. Like, let’s let this one play out a little bit. Like, this one seems weird. Like, if I come out with a hot take, who fing knows what’s really going on? There’s so many different stories in the news, it’s impossible.

What’s that, Jamie? “I didn’t find the details, but it is a police killing, it says. Officer-involved shooting of Corey Ruiz.”

ANDREW WILSON: And that’s—

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. I’m looking for evidence and video. I didn’t check Twitter or anything yet. Put it into Perplexity. Ask Perplexity, what is the controversy about the killing of Corey Ruiz?

ANDREW WILSON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t be— we’re not designed to get all the bad news of 8 billion people. We’re just not designed for that. That’s not a normal thing for a person to absorb.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s also driving a lot of people crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

The Conspiracy Mindset and Information Overload

ANDREW WILSON: Driving them to insanity. They think— they start to see conspiracy everywhere. They start to see plots of interest where there aren’t any.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: It starts to actually drive people mad because they can’t disassociate between the fact that there is sensationalism and then there’s reality. And the way that people think, they think in frames.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: So if you think in a conspiratorial frame, you’re usually taking tangential things and piecing them together that don’t belong.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: But then if you think in an autistic frame, as my friend Paul would say, if you think in an autistic frame, you’re going to hone down so deep on one detail that you miss the entirety of the picture.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: So you have to have an idea between these two things. It’s like— conspiracies exist. We know this. Many of them exist. There’s many of them I can state off the top of my head, like MKUltra. That was a conspiracy that existed. Yeah, right. But there’s also a lot that don’t, right? And so how do you disassociate between the two?

JOE ROGAN: And you have to come to the recognition that some of these fake ones were planted to make the real ones look stupid.

ANDREW WILSON: Flooding the zone.

The Killing of Corey Ruiz

JOE ROGAN: Yes, this is a common strategy. What was it, Jamie? You pulled it up?

Controversy centers on whether Madison police needed to use deadly force against 38-year-old Corey Ruiz, a Black man, during a July 2026 arrest, and on the lack of body camera footage. Conflicting narratives about the threat he posed and the broader concerns about racialized policing.

Police responded to reports of a man allegedly looking into parked vehicles and stealing bicycles. During the attempted arrest by 4 officers, a taser was deployed but reportedly failed. Police say Ruiz pulled a knife and injured an officer, after which that officer shot and killed him. Cell phone video recorded by a bystander shows part of the struggle and shooting and quickly went viral, triggering protests and public outcry.

Use of deadly force versus alternatives. Community members and Ruiz’s family questioned why lethal force was used when multiple officers were already restraining him on the ground and a taser had been deployed, arguing that he did not deserve to be shot to death in the street.

Lack of body cameras. None of the officers involved were wearing body-worn cameras, so the only visual recording is bystander video, which fuels distrust and demands for more accountability and measures and technology. We need more flock cameras.

Conflicting narratives about threat. Police emphasized that Ruiz stabbed or injured an officer with a knife, framing the shooting as a response to an immediate threat. Critics and loved ones questioned whether the threat justified shooting a restrained man and whether de-escalation was properly used.

Well, first of all, if he really did stab a police officer, if he’s stabbing a police officer, they are supposed to shoot him. You can’t say someone’s stabbing me, I hope they’re only hurting me.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, right. Or how do you assess the amount of force that you can use back when someone’s stabbing you? I think that that’s responding with lethal force.

JOE ROGAN: What did you say, Jamie? Find the video. Yeah, let’s find the video. But it’s also— how big is this guy if he’s got all these people? And are these like a bunch of shitty untrained police officers who don’t know any martial arts? When you say he’s restrained, like, how restrained was he? You know what I mean? Like, if you got 2 dudes that are built like Tony Hinchcliffe and they’re trying to hold me back from f*ing somebody up, it’s not going to do nothing. You know what I mean?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

Discussing Police Use of Force

JOE ROGAN: It’s like, how big is this guy? What happened? Was he the one that was stealing things, or was he wrongly accused? Does he have a record? Is he a violent person? I don’t know anything. Is he a complete innocent bystander? This is the video. Video contains graphic content. Okay, that’s it. That’s all that one showed. So there’s probably multiple videos.

Yeah, the thing about the tasers is it’s fing weird, man. Tasers on some people, they lock them up and they fing fall down. I’ve seen guys just scream and rip those things off their chest like it’s nothing.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, sometimes those probes don’t penetrate either, right?

JOE ROGAN: Right. I think some of those tasers are bunk too.

ANDREW WILSON: 100%.

JOE ROGAN: Some of the tasers are just shit equipment. I mean, that’s the only thing that makes sense. So these guys—

ANDREW WILSON: Did you ever play with one of the handhelds when you were a kid? Somebody always had a handheld somewhere.

JOE ROGAN: No, I never did. I did touch an electric fence though once.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Oh yeah, that’ll make your teeth clatter.

JOE ROGAN: Holy f*, dude.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s letting go that’s hard.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Disturbing video. Okay. Oh, there’s sound on it. There’s yelling. Put your earphones on.

ANDREW WILSON: We can hear the sound.

JOE ROGAN: There’s the taser. Oh, okay. Hold on, man. Back up. Back up.

ANDREW WILSON: What was he reaching for on the ground?

JOE ROGAN: Is that the girl? The woman shoots him.

ANDREW WILSON: Taser, I think. Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, I can’t tell who shot the gun, but that was— okay, that’s crazy. That does not look justified. That looks like they had control of him unless he had a knife and was stabbing people. But even if he was stabbing, like, how much control do they have on him before she starts shooting him?

ANDREW WILSON: Was it the chick who shot him?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Look, see, she backs away. Watch. They tase him, they get him to the ground, and she shoots him while they’ve got him down on the ground.

ANDREW WILSON: Female cops.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s not good. That’s crazy. Oh, I— again, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if he stabbed one of them, if he really did have a knife and was stabbing him, but it seems like they had him restrained.

ANDREW WILSON: Looks like that’s the guy who shot him. I can’t tell.

JOE ROGAN: But that lady stands back and extends her arms with a gun right there, and he puts his—

ANDREW WILSON: Oh, you’re right, it looked like he shot—

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s the guy who shoots him. Yeah, she had— I think she had the taser. She was shooting him with a taser. Oh, let me see that again.

ANDREW WILSON: What?

JOE ROGAN: God, it’s hard to tell. Is it— so it’s the guy in the back?

ANDREW WILSON: I think it’s the guy in the front. So if you— the dude in the back, you see the guy right next to— yeah, that guy.

JOE ROGAN: That guy shoots him?

ANDREW WILSON: It looks like it. I’m not sure.

JOE ROGAN: That’s really close too. God, it seems like—

ANDREW WILSON: But the second the shots stop, he puts his gun back, right? Makes me think maybe it was him.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. F*, man, that does not look good. That’s not a good one.

ANDREW WILSON: No, no, no. Doesn’t look great.

JOE ROGAN: No.

ANDREW WILSON: That means you have to give us your hot take now, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s my hot take.

ANDREW WILSON: So he can run to Twitter with it.

JOE ROGAN: I need to know, like, did he actually stab one of them? So then it says during a press conference, 2 of the cops were injured in the altercation. Police said the suspect allegedly pulled out a fixed blade knife, to which an officer pulled out a taser. Same officer shot him with a gun. Okay, that’s different.

So if he really pulled out a knife and was trying to stab them and they had him on the ground and they couldn’t totally get control of him, and that guy just decides, “He stabbed me, I’m going to shoot him,” that’s a different thing. I agree, that’s different.

ANDREW WILSON: Also, we didn’t have the front view, right? We see the view from the back.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very blurry, the whole thing. We didn’t even know who shot— we thought the lady shot him. Yeah, it’s hard to tell what the f is going on. You can’t even tell if it’s a taser or a gun in her hand, it’s that blurry. But if he stabbed them and he’s got a knife, that’s a different thing, right? The whole thing is fed though. Like, that is the last thing America needs right now.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, well, I mean, you don’t want another riot season.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, I wonder if people would go right into it the way they did before without USAID’s help. Here’s what a witness said he saw. Witness came flying around on his bicycle. One officer tackled him. 2 other officers kind of rushed over. One of the officers yells, “He has a knife!” One of the officers then draws a taser and yells, “Taser, taser, taser!” He tasers him. So it says he tasers him, but wasn’t that the woman?

ANDREW WILSON: I mean, I’m not sure that she actually tasered him or she just had her weapon on.

JOE ROGAN: She might have just had her weapon out. He tases him and the victim falls to the ground. The 3 continue to struggle for a second or 2, then one of the officers stands just a couple feet above his head shooting— okay, 3 times, 3 times to the head. Holy f*.

ANDREW WILSON: It did look like he was the shooter.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. So that’s what we saw.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. And the tell for that was as soon as he was done, he put it right back in his holster. The other cops weren’t doing this.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Additional video that has not been circulated online is being reviewed. Oh, why don’t they have body cameras? And that’s what I mean. That’s probably part of the whole protest— that their cameras were not on. Or if they didn’t have them, I don’t know. Did they? Let’s find that out. Did they not have them or were they not on? Lack of body cameras. None of the officers involved were wearing body cameras.

ANDREW WILSON: Hmm. So none of them.

JOE ROGAN: That’s— are they supposed to?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that may not be part of the ordinance.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t know about the city of Madison. How about fix that?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, fix that.

The Toll of Policing

ANDREW WILSON: Cops often are the ones who suggest that. Yeah, for their own safety. They say that they want to wear body cams.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve seen a lot of crazy body cam footage where a guy is pulling someone over and they’re just having a casual conversation. All of a sudden the guy pulls a gun out and starts shooting them.

ANDREW WILSON: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve seen a bunch of those.

ANDREW WILSON: Tons. Especially the routine traffic stops— happens constantly.

JOE ROGAN: You have to always think, like, if you’re in an altercation with a cop, these people are always worried that this is where their life is going to end. They’re always worried that they’re going to get shot. They’ve seen those videos too. So if you start shit with a cop and he freaks out and goes the wrong direction, like, you’re probably dealing with a guy who’s got some serious PTSD.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, he’s seen it before, or his buddy’s gotten plugged, right?

JOE ROGAN: They’ve all seen it. Yeah, I have a friend who spent a lot of time overseas deployed and he’s been in combat, and he said he saw way more as an Austin cop, like way more fed up things, and all the time. Whereas, you know, you’re not in war all the time, you’re not in firefights all the time. He was like, “It’s like every day, every day you’re seeing something fed up that you can’t unsee.”

ANDREW WILSON: And you see it with kids. Things you got to deal with with kids, things you got to deal with with all sorts of things. And it’s like, that is not a fun job.

JOE ROGAN: No, no.

ANDREW WILSON: And I would not want it at all. So I always do tend to cut law enforcement quite a bit of grace until I hear what their side of things are. Yeah, that is a brutal job to have.

I have a buddy of mine who’s a deputy sheriff, and I talked with him. He’s policing a small area and he’s like, “It’s the stuff with the kids that gets him.” He’ll go into a junkie’s house. There’s a 2-year-old there, hasn’t eaten in 4 days. He’s like, “That’s the stuff that really—” he’s like, “I’d rather shoot a person than that.” Which kind of makes sense to me, right?

JOE ROGAN: It does.

ANDREW WILSON: I probably would too.

Freedom, Responsibility, and the Limits of the State

JOE ROGAN: You think about who should be allowed to have kids— like, that’s what’s really crazy about freedom, is that any 2 crackheads with no money at all, just on the side of the road, can create a life. And that life they’re responsible for. And they’re smoking crack and drinking Everclear, and they have a baby growing inside their body, and no one can do anything about it. It’s like there’s no protection for that baby. There’s nothing.

And then if that baby is born, if it does live, like, you know, you talk to people that have actually been in the delivery room with crack babies. It’s like, oh my god, man, the horror stories about a child addicted to drugs coming out of the womb addicted to drugs. Yeah, and detoxing.

ANDREW WILSON: Heavily addicted.

JOE ROGAN: Heavily addicted.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Yeah, so hard. Ghoulish.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so twisted. It’s like people can be so awesome and so shit at the same time, coexisting on the same patch of dirt, and no one devises a legitimate strategy for mitigating the amount of people that suck and the problems with—

ANDREW WILSON: Can it even be done?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. Not with freedom. I mean, this is the Flock camera question. You know, do you want Big Brother looking at your license plate everywhere you go? Well, listen, if someone shoots up— like, this is an argument that Marc Andreessen made on this podcast when he had come here. Right before he had come here, there was a shooting in Austin where some kids just randomly started shooting at people, and then they couldn’t find them in Austin. But as soon as they left Austin city limits, they went into an area that had Flock cameras, and they got them like that. So this was his argument for the benefits of Flock cameras. But I do believe he invests in Flock cameras.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, sure. I mean, but you can make that argument with CCTV as well. You can make that argument with everyone wearing a chip.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, everyone wearing a body camera.

ANDREW WILSON: The thing is, you have to be cautious with the idea of the nanny state for another reason besides just protecting people’s independent privacy. It’s because those things often become money wells for people to steal from the public trough.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah.

The Corruption of Systems and Online Regulation

ANDREW WILSON: And that is the major issue, right? So some of the reasons I tend, even though I’m on the paleo-Christian side, to lean towards a lot of the freedom elements over the not is because of the corruption. The corruption which happens oftentimes when you try to curtail too much, right? That in and of itself creates a system and that system becomes ripe for corruption.

Let me give you an example. Flock cams. Who are we awarding the contracts to? And who’s going to be servicing those contracts? Who’s going to be doing these things? That’s where you start to see with new systems, there becomes new corruption.

So there has to be a way to curtail, but there’s some things that are pretty obvious that you could curtail and who cares if people bitch about it? Let’s take online prostitution for instance. Okay, great. It’s illegal to do OnlyFans, let’s say. How the hell could that possibly be bad for society? Like, what is that going to do? That’s just, oh, we got to have that though, Andrew. We got to, we got to have that. It’s like, I don’t think we do. I don’t think it’s necessary. And if we got rid of it, like, who cares? It seems like it would just be a massive net positive for every human being if that was just done away with altogether.

And it’s like, the systems that come in too though, for policing it are prone to corruption. So you got to be cautious about it, right?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: You got to be cautious about it.

JOE ROGAN: Also, I just don’t like people telling people what to do, even if they shouldn’t be doing it. I don’t like it.

ANDREW WILSON: I mean, to an extent though, right? Like if they’re heroin addicts, you’re going to be like, nah, we got to—

JOE ROGAN: Well, even that, like, I don’t think you should be a heroin addict, but I don’t think I should be the one to tell you not to do heroin. I don’t, because I think it’s a slippery slope, and then it’s don’t smoke cigarettes. And then it’s because cigarettes are killing you. And then it’s don’t drink whiskey because you could be a drunk driver and kill a family of five. Like, it’s all the same s*. It’s like—

Legislating Morality and the Slippery Slope

ANDREW WILSON: But do you think that all those have kind of the same impact on society ultimately? Well, the heroin thing is a weird one because, like, the argument I make would be like the incest argument and be like, look, that’s outlawed for a good reason. But what if you have two people who are totally sterile? Like they can’t have kids, right? What’s the moral argument that can be made? And there people are like, well, there’s— I can’t really make a moral argument. It’s just gross.

JOE ROGAN: You’re f*ing your sister.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, what are you doing? It’s just gross. And it’s like, well, but can we legislate off of “it’s just gross?” And the kind of the libertarian mindset is no, we can’t. And I think, yeah, we can. I’m okay with that. I remember debating with you.

JOE ROGAN: What would you do? Would you arrest some guy and his sister if you found out they were boning each other? Why not arrest them?

ANDREW WILSON: Why not? Like, how would deterring that society-wide ever be a bad idea?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think it is. However, it’s technically a victimless crime, especially under the circumstances that you described, whereas they’re both sterile. I do not think you should be able to do that. No, but I don’t think you should do that, I should say. Yeah, but in the case of Cersei and what’s-his-face, what’s the other dude’s name in Game of Thrones? The brother and sister? Oh yeah, yeah, really seemed like they were in love, dude. Sure.

ANDREW WILSON: And they had kids, they had like incest babies, right, who went on to rule kingdoms. And they were all like Joffrey. Joffrey probably didn’t want the incest baby in charge of the kingdom. Didn’t work out so well.

JOE ROGAN: The other incest baby was in charge of the kingdom, he jumped off the roof.

ANDREW WILSON: True. And wasn’t Jon Snow technically doing incest as well with the Queen of Dragons? Like, weren’t they both?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they’re related. Yeah, they’re in the basket.

ANDREW WILSON: They were, they were pretty—

JOE ROGAN: Right, something.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, there was a lot of incest in Game of Thrones.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: But the other argument there that’s interesting is it’s like, okay, that’s, you know, fair enough, it’s a victimless crime, but you just kind of extend that. Like, okay, well then why can’t a guy have five wives? Why can’t he have 20? Why can’t 20 gay men all get married and adopt one child? It’s a victimless crime. Yeah, it’s like, so doesn’t the slippery slope kind of go the other way a little bit too?

Polygamy Laws and Mormon History

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it does. It does go the other way. And the multiple wives thing, didn’t they just pass something like that in Toronto? Wasn’t that in Ontario where they’re allowing polygamy now because they have so many Islamic people living there that think that you should be allowed to have— Well, I remember there was big pushes for that in Utah because of the Mormon population.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know, that’s why Mitt Romney’s family moved to Mexico.

ANDREW WILSON: Really? Oh yeah. It was due to the multiple wives? I didn’t know that it was due to the multiple wives.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not specifically, but that sect of Mormonism fled the United States when they passed polygamy laws. And I think there was probably just a broader crackdown on this perceived new cult. They thought of it as a cult. Now it’s just an established religion of really nice people that knock on your door.

ANDREW WILSON: They drive around. I must admit, I have debated many Mormons, and they’re just the nicest people. The nicest people.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the best cult.

ANDREW WILSON: And it makes me— it’s upsetting because I’m like, look, I’m about to expose that your prophet was totally fake, and I’m trying to get people into the debate, and they just end up being like the nicest people, and I go, oh man.

JOE ROGAN: So having multiple wives or spouses is illegal in Canada under Section 293, polygamy, and Section 290, bigamy. What is bigamy?

ANDREW WILSON: Isn’t that— is that the other way? Is bigamy the other way? Polygamy is the man with multiple—

JOE ROGAN: What do you know what it is, Jamie? Do you know what bigamy is? Ever heard of it? I don’t even think I’ve ever seen that written. The act of marrying one person while still legally married. Oh, oh, okay. Oh, a bigamist, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Duh. What?

JOE ROGAN: Was married to four people at once. Sorry, four people at once in some way or another recently, like this year. In America? In Canada. See, Canada. He was married to four women at once? Multiple wives married. So he got multiple marriage licenses and should not have been given them or something. Oh well, he doesn’t look Muslim. That guy looks like he’s just a regular Christian guy. Oh well, he does look Muslim, but I don’t know if it has anything to do— he might not be though. He might just be a baller. He could be a Muslim. Yeah, I don’t know if that has anything to do with religion.

Go back to that case in Canada though. Isn’t there something where they’re trying to pass it in Toronto? I don’t think so. I mean, I typed in Toronto multiple wives. Yeah, no, Toronto, Ontario polygamy. I think they were trying to pass something. I mean, that’s why I went to news to see something, you know, that would have popped up. Was it Ottawa? Maybe it was Ottawa. Yeah. Canada polygamy. No new law in Canada legalizing multiple wives.

ANDREW WILSON: Perhaps proposed law.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, I don’t know. Maybe it is a proposed law. Maybe I just read some horseshit on Twitter, which is very possible. Whoo, I’ve been off Twitter for a few days. I feel pretty good.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s good. It’s good to unplug from Twitter.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, every now and then I just go in and I’m like, God, who are they mad at now? Oh God. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, sure.

Bots, Foreign Manipulation, and Social Media

ANDREW WILSON: If you went into X tomorrow, let’s say, and there was an option there where you could select it and it’s like US accounts only, that’s all you could see. Do you think that 90% of the traffic for people would go away?

JOE ROGAN: A giant percentage.

ANDREW WILSON: Huge percentage.

JOE ROGAN: Huge percentage is people being manipulated into arguments. It is a strategy.

ANDREW WILSON: Foreign assets.

JOE ROGAN: By foreign assets. It is a strategy. Is real. This is not tinfoil hat s*. We brought this up multiple times on the podcast, but I’ll bring it up again just for the sake of this. There was an FBI analyst who took a look at Twitter when Elon was buying it, and he estimated that 80% of the traffic is bots.

ANDREW WILSON: This doesn’t surprise me. Remember, YouTube did an internal audit, and when they did their internal audit— this was a few years back, and when Susan still ran it, I believe— they did an internal audit and found out that most of the people that they had on YouTube were bots. And they did a great purge.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

ANDREW WILSON: Right? That’s where that whole dead internet theory and all that really started to pick up traction was that, hey, look, a lot of this stuff is bots, foreign accounts, people who are manipulating US elections. They’re manipulating various US interests. And this is happening all over the place.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The ActBlue-Funded Campaign Against TPUSA

ANDREW WILSON: Right now you have progressives who are funded by ActBlue, right? And I’ve proven this. We’ve traced all their money. It’s progressives funded by ActBlue who are pushing the same narrative that Candace Owens and others are pushing on the idea of Charlie Kirk’s death and the conspiracy around that. So you have—

JOE ROGAN: So they’re absolutely being paid to push this?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, their stated mission, this particular progressive group, their stated mission was to take down TPUSA. I’ll tell you a story. This is the tale of all tales.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: So Charlie Kirk has this huge outreach program that’s happening through TPUSA on these college campuses. He’s got viral clip after viral clip after viral clip. They are going wild. He’s going campus to campus. He’s doing his thing. He’s being dogged by a progressive organization. This progressive organization shows up at almost all of these TPUSA events with the stated mission of trying to create a counter movement to what TPUSA is doing.

Now, the woman who heads this particular organization received millions of dollars from ActBlue and other progressive organizations for this stated mission. That same woman right this second works with other OPX accounts to push the messaging that Charlie Kirk was assassinated by his own TPUSA insiders. In order to push that narrative forward, because the stated goal still from that organization is to destroy TPUSA.

JOE ROGAN: So they’ve— how do we know that they’ve done this? Is there emails that have been found? Like, how do—

ANDREW WILSON: Well, the stated goal of this particular person is to take down TPUSA, right? Very open about that. And then the way that you know that they are talking to these other accounts is because they do it publicly. Those public accounts will talk to this account, right? Very openly. They reaffirm each other’s posts. They say, “Wow, that’s real interesting,” this kind of thing, all affirming that same conspiracy that TPUSA was the ones who actually set up and murdered Charlie Kirk. And millions of dollars in ActBlue funding going towards this. No joke. Anybody can look it up right now. The organization’s called Unfuck America.

JOE ROGAN: So how do they think that his organization did this? That they convinced Tyler Robinson to do it, or did they talk someone else into it?

ANDREW WILSON: I don’t think that the progressive organization does believe that TPUSA did this. I think that what they want to do is—

JOE ROGAN: Oh no, I understand that, but I mean, what are they trying to say?

ANDREW WILSON: Oh, well, here’s what the theory is. So take Ian Carroll. Within 24 hours after Kirk’s death, blames Israel. Within 24 hours, he says Israel killed Kirk. That was his tweet, went mega viral. What the conspiracy is on that side is that Israel, along with Erika Kirk and TPUSA insiders, got together with elements of the US government to murder Charlie Kirk because he was going to leave the, quote, “pro-Israel cause.” That’s what the theory is, right.

And that he was either murdered — some of them say with a microphone exploding, some of them say with a— there was a second shooter and Robinson’s a patsy. It all depends on which theorist you’re talking to, but they all work together in the same unison from a single camp, which is interesting.

The Trump Assassination Attempt: Conspiracy Theories and Evidence

JOE ROGAN: Well, a lot of people had takes on the shooting, and the microphone one was the weirdest one to me. It’s weird because there’s no— like, yeah, the shirt is moving, but also a bullet is going like how many feet per second whizzing through the air? Like, do you understand?

ANDREW WILSON: So where’s the air going to go?

JOE ROGAN: People don’t understand that.

ANDREW WILSON: You know what got me though? So I went back and looked because they say that it’s the same explosive which was used inside the Israeli pagers. Now, that was very real. Israel sent these pagers all over.

JOE ROGAN: That would be an explosion. That’s my take. My point is like, there’s no indication that there’s an ignition.

ANDREW WILSON: There is worse. There’s no smoke, right? There’s not. Now, all the Israeli— if you pull up, if you pulled up right now one of these Israeli pagers going, because there’s tons of videos of them.

JOE ROGAN: Oh really? Oh yeah. Let me see some Israeli.

ANDREW WILSON: You’re going to see smoke blowing off. There’s smoke.

JOE ROGAN: Is there a dude like where it’s on his hip?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Yep. There’s one where it’s on his hip and gets him. And you can see the cloud of smoke coming off because of the specific type of ignition, right?

JOE ROGAN: But is it possible that this pager thing is different than whatever they think this microphone thing is? This microphone thing has some sort of a different kind of propellant. No, then again, you’d have to like, okay, let’s imagine what kind of propellant exists, right? Compressed air. There’s not enough room in that microphone to get enough compressed air to blow a hole in your neck and kill you instantly.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, they claim that it’s—

JOE ROGAN: Unless it’s something else, it’s this—

ANDREW WILSON: What is it— PETN explosive. This is the particular type that had to be used for the size of the microphone. But you have another problem. The mic’s on the wrong side of where the wound is, right? The other is there’s no burn marks, there’s no smoke, there’s nothing. There’s like— there’s nothing to confirm this theory at all.

JOE ROGAN: You’d have to guess where that mic is because he’s moving around too. You have to guess where that mic is pointing. You could take someone out. I found 2 videos.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, this one’s great.

JOE ROGAN: One that goes— I’ll show you. This happens again here.

ANDREW WILSON: Watch the smoke right here. See all that smoke?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, let me see that again.

ANDREW WILSON: Watch all those.

JOE ROGAN: Just chilling and boom. Look at all that blew up in his bag though. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of them like they didn’t die. They go to the hospital and they’re just like, you know, hurt. Probably because they had it in their bag or something. I found a couple— one other video here. Well, these guys are going to be carrying around like armored satchels. Well, yeah, you get like a couple of them. Were on bikes and stuff when it happened. Like, that guy f*ed up.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, he got messed up real bad.

JOE ROGAN: Or they give you the illusion they did by blurring out his head. That’s the other part. I mean, not that these are fake, but yes, only 11 were killed by the pagers. Still pretty slick.

ANDREW WILSON: That was extremely strange.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, crazy. They sent them off to them years ago.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s some CIA s*, man. Like, that’s some deep state massage shit.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s crazy. That’s probably where the CIA learned it. But that’s an explosion, right? And yeah, you see smoke, but is there some kind of a propellant that would be lethal from a short distance with some sort of a projectile? It’s possible, but it would also like have to be like, how are you aiming it? You’re not even aiming it. It’s sitting up here, right?

So if it’s sitting here and he’s doing all this and moving around, like, it might take his ear off, it might zip, whiz to the side and shoot somebody else if he leans over. Sure. Unless they planned exactly when it’s going to go off and it’s pointing towards his neck. Like, which— yeah, it seems like a gunshot wound. It’s just hard to imagine that it’s a .30-06. That’s my issue with it.

I look at it and, you know, I’ve seen takes from guys that are gun experts and they have a problem with it too. The thing about guns though is weird stuff happens when you shoot bones. Like, it is possible that you wouldn’t get a pass-through depending on how it squared the spinal column, depending on how it hit, and depending on what kind of bullet it is. I forget the type.

ANDREW WILSON: These are 150-grain Core-Lokt soft tips.

JOE ROGAN: That’s right.

ANDREW WILSON: And they’re soft tip, right? So they only have enough of a jacket to keep the bullet together, right?

JOE ROGAN: The idea is that expands inside the body causing massive trauma, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Right. So why I use them for hunting, and probably you have too.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. No, I haven’t used that particular round, but it just seems like it’s a lot of fing— a lot of energy coming towards your neck. It’s hard to believe that it wouldn’t blow a hole through the neck and leave a big fing— just take a chunk out, that it would just make a round hole. But that’s beside the point, you know.

There’s other weird stuff with like the video. I don’t like— there’s a lot of people saying that the video is super clear, that you’re seeing 4K footage, it’s clearly Thomas Matthew Crooks on the roof. No, it’s not.

ANDREW WILSON: Jack Posobiec and Benny Johnson.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy that they said that. That is not clear. That is a blurry figure. You could barely ascertain as to whether or not there’s a recoil when someone takes the shot. So it does seem like the guy on the roof gets in a prone position, and it looks like something that might be a rifle, right? It’s blurry as f*.

ANDREW WILSON: It also does look like there’s kickback on the right leg.

JOE ROGAN: It looks like there might be some recoil. It’s hard, but it’s not clear. Like, for them to say it’s crystal clear, it’s Thomas Matthew Crooks, it’s on the roof, it’s like—

Eyewitness Accounts and Courtroom Footage

ANDREW WILSON: Well, it’s interesting. When Posobiec came out and said that, and Benny Johnson— there was another guy who was there who I know, his name’s Kai Schwemmer. And Kai put out a tweet. He said, look, they might have sensationalized this just a bit. He said, but the video that we did see in the courtroom was actually much clearer.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay.

ANDREW WILSON: So I DM’d him and I DM’d Jack Posobiec and I DM’d— well, I couldn’t get ahold of Benny, but I DM’d Jack Posobiec and I said, just be straight with me. Like, did you try to oversensationalize this thing for clicks? Like, what’s the deal? He said, no, listen, the footage we did see inside the courtroom was actually a lot clearer than anything that the public has seen so far. That’s their claim.

Kai Schwemmer — now, I wouldn’t just take Posobiec’s word, but Kai Schwemmer, he’s a Mormon kid, not very prone to tall tales. In fact, he was the first one who came out and said, look, I was there, and you’re kind of oversensationalizing it. It is a lot clearer. But it’s not showing everything that you’re claiming it’s showing.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s clearer, but it’s not clear enough. It’s not like 4K close-up, clearly his face. The other thing that was weird was the guy in the crowd that jumped up and said, “I killed him.”

ANDREW WILSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: That’s weird. And that guy, wasn’t he at the Boston bombing as well?

ANDREW WILSON: So he’s a professional agitator who’s been at tons and tons of these events. Later he’s found, I believe, with kiddie porn, right? How convenient.

JOE ROGAN: Well, also maybe that’s the kind of guy—

ANDREW WILSON: That’s the kind of guy though, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: And so his— he has been at tons of events agitating, and he is well known to law enforcement for doing this. So that’s kind of what they’re stating for him.

The— if you’re looking at this from a broad view, if you’re looking at the conspiracy side versus what they call the fed slop side, let’s say, it makes sense for them to say, hey, wait a second, that’s really weird. This guy jumps up and says, “I did it,” right? That makes him— he’s a patsy distraction, something like this. So you look into the guy, right? And the guy is a lunatic who’s been at many of these events, doing crazy stuff like this.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the thing, is both things can be true. Like, MKUltra is real. Also, that guy might just be a kook who was in the crowd who took advantage of a situation because he’s literally insane and he’s in the kiddie porn.

Examining the Conspiracy Narrative

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, both. Well, there’s no doubt one of the biggest kind of false narratives that comes out of this— and when I do debates, one of the things I’m trying to structure around is like, I know that we’re coming in with a narrative, but I need to understand yours and you need to understand mine so we can get somewhere towards what the truth is here, right?

Because you’re going to have a frame of which you’re viewing the world, a worldview, and so am I. And so everybody has a worldview. We have to figure each other’s out to get somewhere. Here with this, one of the most disturbing aspects of it is they— the people who promote this actually don’t want their worldview or their positions to be examined. They only want to examine the evidence from the state.

It’s like, that would be fine, I think, if it was the case that you made no claims past that, right? So if you just only say, hey, you know, I’m not really sure what happened and I want to really kind of review the evidence, and that’s that, I don’t really have a problem with that. I think that that’s probably healthy. The issue that I run into is when people make claims past that. “Oh, it was an exploding mic.”

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: It was 2 different shooters. It was a folding rifle. It was a— .30-06 couldn’t do this. And even though the US Army— remember, the .30-06 used in the M1 Garand was used in World War II, and then it was used in Korea. Before that, we had the .03 Springfield. It was used heavily in World War I, World War II, and again in Korea.

The US Army has studied .30-06 entry wounds in depth and produced many manuals on it explaining how cavitation works with .30-06 and that the bullet doesn’t always penetrate. And that’s with full metal jacket rounds that are designed for maximum penetration, not 150-grain Core-Lokt coming out of an antique rifle, essentially. It could easily split up very quickly.

And that’s why they ended up pulling fragments out of Trump. It wouldn’t surprise me if when we have all the data from the coroner report that he has tons of shards all throughout his chest, all throughout his entire— because they were saying that there’s trauma inside the chest, which would make sense if the bullet split up here, right? It would create all sorts of fragments down in the chest, right?

JOE ROGAN: That, that is an important distinction about the type of bullet.

The JFK Assassination: Bullet Trajectory and Wound Ballistics

ANDREW WILSON: Huge distinction. The FMJ especially, because that’s what the Army was using, is FMJ ball ammunition. It’s cheap to produce, right? So they’re using it in all these different wars, and the amount of people shot with that caliber between World War I, II, and Korea is astronomical. They even used the .30-06 in Vietnam in limited capacity, especially the ’03 Springfield. It was still in service by Special Forces.

So the question becomes like, the US Army has studied this in depth, and I went back and I pulled all their manuals, and I’ve even put them out, and several people have done the exact same thing and put them out explaining how cavitation works. And they’re saying, look, the energy dissipation, the second it hits a human body, it dissipates very, very, very quickly with the resistance. So it doesn’t always go through. Now, oftentimes it does with the FMJ, but even then, it didn’t always go through.

Another one would be Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King gets hit through the jaw, ends up here. Well, if it’s just going to blow through all bone, why did it stop in him? Well, it’s because the second it has impact, it begins to slow down, and then it impacts something else, slows down even more. So it’s totally possible that this guy was hit with a .30-06. I don’t know why that would be in the realm of impossibility. We have enough data on the ammo to know that, yeah, it’s very possible this happened.

JOE ROGAN: It is definitely possible. There’s a lot of people that think that the sound was not— they think the sound indicated that it was a closer shot than where it was. And I’ve heard a lot of people say, well, there’s also an issue with it being supersonic ammo, so you’re getting two sounds. You’re getting a sound of the bullet actually breaking the air and you’re also getting the sound of the rifle going off. I don’t understand it.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it’s difficult there when you’re making the judgments on the sound because there are people who have run experiments saying right down to the second this meets up with a shot placement, and then there’s people who say no, that experiment is bogus due to the controls for this or that. The problem is, is that most of these people don’t have any expertise in this arena at all.

JOE ROGAN: They’re just yapping and they’re just—

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they’re just trying to, you know, and I get it, you’re trying to figure it out.

Charlie Kirk, Israel, and Donor Pressure

JOE ROGAN: I understand the Israel thing. There was some text messages back and forth where Charlie was talking about getting out of the Israel business, and there was this position that he had where he did not want us to go to war with Iran.

ANDREW WILSON: All true.

JOE ROGAN: And he had a lot of influence. And then there was also that Israel supposedly had offered him $150 million to be more pro-Israel.

ANDREW WILSON: That is the problem that we’ve run into, is like, I’ve never been able to verify that was the case. And I—

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so where does that claim come from?

ANDREW WILSON: This claim basically comes from this camp without anything to substantiate it.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s the same people that are pushing this thing at Turning Point, kill them.

ANDREW WILSON: What’s interesting about this is like, it is indeed true. It does appear that Charlie Kirk was extremely pissed off at some of his donors because they were trying to control who he was platforming. They were upset that he had platformed Tucker Carlson. They were upset that he had platformed Candace Owens. And why? Well, it’s because Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, they were very anti, or at least had a somewhat anti-Israel message at the time. Carlson, I think a bit more than Candace, or maybe it could be the reverse, but I don’t think that that matters too much.

The donors were pissed off. Many of them were pro-Israel, and some of these donors were applying pressure. So Kirk was lamenting inside of his text messages about this pressure he was experiencing from some of his donors about who he could or couldn’t platform. And so as a negotiating piece, he said, well, I’ll leave the pro-Israeli cause if you’re going to try to tell me who I can and can’t platform. And that was kind of what his position was.

Now that seems like platforming. I don’t know, even on Twitch politics or YouTube politics with smaller channels, smaller streamers, they argue about platforming all the time, responsible platforming. Is it responsible for you to platform this guy? Is it responsible for you to platform this terrorist? And they’re endlessly fighting about it. So this actually doesn’t surprise me a bit that these guys are fighting over who you can or can’t platform. If you’re giving your money to an NGO for the purpose of giving the pro-cause and that NGO is saying, wait a second, I’m going to platform people who are against your cause, of course the donor’s going to get pissed.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the platforming thing I think is just gatekeeping. If you’re upset that someone is having a conversation or debate with someone that you don’t agree with, you’re supposed to hear that person’s perspective. You’re supposed to hear them challenged. You’re supposed to hear them allowed to flesh out the full point of view. Not like in weird clip form, but go ahead, tell me what you really think. And I’m going to tell you why I disagree with that. Yeah, that’s healthy. It’s supposed to be what we do.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s basically reciting what Kirk’s position was.

Charlie Kirk: Context, Clips, and Misrepresentation

JOE ROGAN: Yes, and what he was always really good at. Yeah, unfortunately, there’s a few clips. There’s the clips thing with Charlie where he’s saying things and people think it’s racist. He’s saying things and it’s like, you have to understand the context of what he was saying. And I’ve had conversations with black friends who think like he was saying, “If I see a black pilot on a plane, I get worried. Is he qualified?”

The reason why he’s saying that is because there are specific laws that were designed to hire people just based on their race and not on their competency. He wasn’t saying that black people weren’t competent as pilots. What he’s worried about is that in the rush to meet these quotas, they’re going to hire people who are not competent just because they’re black. Just like if they wanted to hire old white guys, they can hire a bunch of old white guys who suck if they just want to fill a quota of old white guys. It just happens at this particular time where he’s talking about black people. And it seems like if you just look at the clip, this racist piece of sh*t doesn’t think black people can fly a plane.

And that’s the unfortunate thing about thinking out loud, right? Which is what we do. We think out loud in public. And when you think out loud in public, someone can take what you’re saying and take a clip of it completely out of context, it looks bad.

ANDREW WILSON: Happens to me all the time.

JOE ROGAN: It happens to me. Sure. But I’ve had that conversation with people about Charlie, and I’m like, I don’t agree with Charlie Kirk. I didn’t agree with Charlie Kirk on everything. I met him once. He was a very nice guy. I met him at a gun range. I met him at Taran Tactical in LA. It’s a place where you learn like serious gun shooting. This is where Keanu Reeves learned for John Wick and a bunch of us.

ANDREW WILSON: Is that where all those videos are from? Where Keanu Reeves is going between shotgun to 3-gun and that kind of thing?

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. That’s where I met Charlie.

ANDREW WILSON: He’s really good at that, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, he is really good.

Keanu Reeves and the John Wick Training

ANDREW WILSON: He’s f*ing dedicated, man. When he was practicing— I mean, I talked to Taran about it— when he was practicing for John Wick, I mean, he was obsessive. He was obsessive. And you know that whole magazine thing he does, the flick? He invented that. That’s not something that’s like a standard thing. Most of the time people just hit the release, drop the mag, pop the new mag in. He decided to do this jazzy flick thing, and now people do it all the time. Yeah, it’s kind of funny.

JOE ROGAN: I never put that together. I guess I haven’t actually seen that before.

ANDREW WILSON: No, before the— I think it’s him. I think it’s the Wick flick. I think—

JOE ROGAN: I think—

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I think Keanu— at least this is the people that were—

JOE ROGAN: But even the way he reloads the shotgun is interesting.

ANDREW WILSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, right, the way that he’ll actually hold it up as he’s going in. Mm-hmm. And in between a few shots, he’s loading again.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s like—

JOE ROGAN: And fast. Yeah, that’s not the thing that you usually see in movies. Usually in movies, it’s like you have way more rounds than you should have to compensate for how bad the actor is at gun handling.

ANDREW WILSON: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: For him, it’s like the opposite.

ANDREW WILSON: I do that in movies. I’m like, why is he shooting still? He’s out of bullets. Oh yeah, he’s out of bullets. 29 shots, he’s out of bullets.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever see The Walking Dead? You remember the famous scene where Hershel’s in the front and he’s got the pump-action shotgun? It’s just unlimited ammo. Unlimited ammo. I was like, he found Solid Snake’s unlimited ammo bandana and put it on, and he is just— I mean, 100 rounds with this pump-action shotgun.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s just—

JOE ROGAN: He just never stops.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s so crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And I get pissed. I’ll be sitting there watching it with my wife, and I’ll be like, when’s he going to reload? When’s he going to— this is bullsh*t.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, the reason why it was so good was Taran. Like, Taran is really meticulous, and he’s a multiple-time world champion shooter. You know, he does those competitions. “Shooter ready? Beep.” And he’s like super in the spectrum, so he f*ing just sees things differently. He doesn’t miss. He’s crazy good.

JOE ROGAN: So Charlie was training under him, huh?

ANDREW WILSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, we were both there at the same time.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

Remembering Charlie Kirk

ANDREW WILSON: Just randomly ran into him there. Actually, anyway, very nice guy. And the point is, like, people think that he was like this mean, shitty conservative. He wasn’t mean. He was very kind. And the way he would talk to people, if you see enough of these, not the clips, but enough of these conversations with people, it depended entirely on how the person approached him. And when people were respectful and reasonable with him, he was very kind and respectful and reasonable back. I think he was a good man. I really do. And he was a young man too.

JOE ROGAN: He was.

ANDREW WILSON: He was a young man that was getting an enormous amount of attention at a very young age and was handling it very well. It is not easy to do.

JOE ROGAN: Especially think about where he was going. This guy’s going into— it’s like conservatives have wanted this my whole life. We’ve got to get into those institutions, the college institutions that progressives have a stranglehold. Jordan Peterson talked a lot about this.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I think Crowder did it first.

JOE ROGAN: He did. He had the Change My Mind series.

ANDREW WILSON: Yes. And he’s great at those.

JOE ROGAN: He is.

ANDREW WILSON: I mean, but those also, there’s clips where, look, you’re in these agitated environments and people are yelling at you and you’re yelling back and, you know, just get a clip of that. It’s like, “Oh, this guy comes to harass kids.” Like, that’s— it’s— you should welcome discourse and it should be something where everybody can do peacefully. It shouldn’t be where these people speak and you hit the fire alarm because you don’t want them speaking and you’re outside screaming and chanting and throwing rocks at their cars. Like, that’s crazy. That’s bad for everybody.

JOE ROGAN: Last time I talked to Stephen, because he went and did a couple more of those after Kirk had died, and I said, you know, that’s dangerous as hell, man. And he’s like, “Well, I’m just going to build a bulletproof, like, glass square and I’ll just do it from there.”

ANDREW WILSON: Wow.

The Celebration of Charlie Kirk’s Death and Conspiracy Theories

ANDREW WILSON: Right? That was his dedication to it. Now, I like Stephen. He’s become a very good friend of mine over the time that I’ve known him. It’s just that right now going on these college campuses and doing these debates where you’re— these people are coming up. They have some things to say. I mean it’s going to heighten the energy.

Now Crowder’s whole thing is not to debate. He wants to sit down and just have the convo. I don’t want to debate. I just want to actually see if you can change my mind on this issue. And so it’s a lot calmer. But Charlie’s wasn’t. Charlie’s was much more energy-based, it was combative, things like this.

And it pissed a lot of people off. It pissed them off so bad that after he died, we did 3 weeks on TikTok going and talking to various TikTokers and their channels who were just celebrating his death like you can’t believe. They were just giddy. These leftists were jumping up and down. I’d go into their TikTok spaces and say, “So what do you think of Charlie?” And they’d say, “I’m glad he’s dead. It’s the best thing that ever happened to the country. Tyler Robinson’s a hero.” They said this stuff to me live. It was bad. And it was weeks of it that we went and exposed these various TikTokers doing that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I saw a lot of people online celebrating, and it’s just disturbing, weird to watch that you would encourage that kind of gun violence. Like, when is the left encouraging gun violence? That seems so insane. Just because you got a hold of some clips, and I’m telling you, you didn’t get the full understanding of who this guy was. And who he could be. You know, again, he’s 28 years old. Who knows who he’s going to be in 20 years? Like, he’s a nice guy. He was a reasonable guy. Celebrating that guy’s death, what you’re going to do is you’re going to make more monsters. You’re going to make more people that think if you didn’t like that guy, well, then f* you.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Wait till you see when the mean people come out.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Exactly that.

ANDREW WILSON: And I’ve heard a lot of that. And some of that actually ties in to why so many people were so upset with TPUSA initially, including myself. We were like, “Where’s the energy?” Like, they just killed this guy in broad daylight. I think everybody was rattled. These crazy leftists, right? Like, where’s the push? Where’s the energy? We wanted our war, right? Our verbal online war.

Was Charlie Kirk Assassinated?

JOE ROGAN: Do you think there’s any possibility that someone else killed him? Do you think there’s any possibility that he was assassinated by Israel?

ANDREW WILSON: I don’t— I’ve never— well, we’re talking about possibility. Almost anything is possible.

JOE ROGAN: Almost anything is possible.

ANDREW WILSON: But there’s not good evidence to support it, and there’s probably pretty good evidence not to. So, for instance, the guy was still very much a pro-Israel guy, even up to death. It is true that he was fighting with donors about the cause.

JOE ROGAN: But if he could have been a substantial roadblock to the Iran War— if he was a substantial roadblock, I mean, that’s not outside the realm of possibility that a nation-state would take a guy like that out.

ANDREW WILSON: They didn’t take out Fuentes, didn’t take out Owens, didn’t take out Ian Carroll. They didn’t take out any of these other huge personalities who were roadblocks to the way.

JOE ROGAN: I think Charlie was very different. Fuentes is more easy to dismiss because he said so many wild things. Shitposting. He said so many crazy things that I think he is almost embodying in their eyes like the crazy anti-Semite, whereas Charlie was not an anti-Semite, was much more reasonable. And if he was going against Israel, it could be a real problem. I also think that he had a tremendous amount of influence on the president. He had his ear, you know. I think the president respected him.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh yeah, for sure. The interesting part though is, if you look at the history there, Fuentes conducted his Groyper war against TPUSA and Charlie Kirk because of the pro-Israel stance and because of his pro-homosexual stance. His big tent Republicanism, he called it. So they had the pro stances for these things.

And what’s interesting about all of it, if you follow the details of it, up until Kirk’s death, TPUSA actually moved a lot more towards the Groyper- Fuentes position, than they moved towards the kind of pro-Israel, this type of position. Meaning a lot of the ideology that I think Kirk was changing on came from these various outside influences. And so if that’s the case, why wouldn’t you just curtail those outside influences and then you can keep Kirk as the mouthpiece, right? So I think that there’s a pretty good counter to that idea.

Now, you can’t rule anything out as possibility, but it seems likely to me with how much trans have been shooting everything up for the last couple of years and how often it’s the case that you find leftists involved in these signal groups and involved in these group chats and things like this for the purpose of radicalization, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if there was a left-wing conspiracy assisting Tyler Robinson and radicalizing Tyler Robinson. There’s at least some evidence for that based on the Discord groups, things like this that they were part of. I haven’t actually seen a single piece of evidence that Israel was ever involved in this.

JOE ROGAN: No, I haven’t seen the evidence. I’ve seen a lot of speculation based on the text that Charlie made, the fact that he was so staunchly against the Iran War.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the fact that he did say that he was thinking about getting out of the Israel business, the pro-Israel business. But in this climate, you know, Israel gets blamed for a lot of things. There’s also a thing that’s going on with the Charlie Kirk Turning Point, you know, that we talked about earlier, they have to factor in with this, which is that there’s a lot of outside interests that are a part of this conversation. And this conversation is not necessarily organic.

I can’t tell you how many times I see a post on X and I’m like, that can’t be real. Like someone has been arrested and, you know, charges will be filed imminently. And then you like—

ANDREW WILSON: And it’s not true at all.

JOE ROGAN: Not true at all. It’s completely fabricated.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s like the clips of you where it’s like “Joe Rogan reacts.” Yeah, it’s just all totally fake.

JOE ROGAN: Not me at all. Yeah, it’s not you reacting at all. But if you use that, I mean, that’s the problem with the world that we’re in now too, that there’s this economy on attention. This attention is a commodity, and the more you can get attention by whatever, by your hot take, your conspiracy— conspiracies are awesome for attention. People love them now because— look, COVID turned a lot of— I love them.

ANDREW WILSON: I like them.

JOE ROGAN: I love them. I love the dumb ones. I love all of them. I love f*ing flat earth and space is fake.

ANDREW WILSON: Can we just be honest? Like, they’re fun.

JOE ROGAN: Fun.

ANDREW WILSON: They’re really fun.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, dude, the flat earth one is fun. Oh yeah, the dinosaurs aren’t real one, that one’s great.

ANDREW WILSON: But have you noticed like the flat earthers have fleets of people who will debate their stances? Like fleets of them who are like, “We can’t wait to debate with you on the flat earth.” It’s like on the other side though, in this particular conspiracy, you can’t get these people to debate their positions.

JOE ROGAN: Like, who won’t debate their positions?

ANDREW WILSON: We offered Candace Owens— I offered her $300,000 to do a debate. I was like, “We’ll give you $300,000.”

JOE ROGAN: What is her position? What does she think happened?

ANDREW WILSON: She thinks that Israel worked in conjunction with TPUSA and Erika Kirk to murder Charlie.

JOE ROGAN: Based on what?

Candace Owens and the Conspiracy Against Erika Kirk

ANDREW WILSON: Well, that’s the million-dollar question. Nobody actually knows. She’s never presented a single shred of evidence thus far that Israel ever worked to murder Kirk, that Erika Kirk certainly didn’t. In fact, her position for the longest time was, “If Erika Kirk comes out and tells me to stop, to stop this, to stop the conspiracy on this, I will.” So Erika did. She went out publicly and she was like, “Enough. Like, enough. You’re just causing more problems than good here as this investigation’s going on.”

And then suddenly Erika’s now part of the conspiracy. By the next day, Erika’s— she’s trying to cover it up. She’s part of the conspiracy too. When I went to the TPUSA HQ and I talked to Erika briefly while I was there, the first thing I did was what I think every normal moral human being would ever do. I gave her a hug and I told her how god-awful sorry I was that that happened to her. Like, if you’d even imagine how that’s got to feel for her. Especially now that she has tens of thousands of people accusing her of murdering and conspiring to murder and then cover up what happened to her own. I mean, that’s like mind-boggling psychological torture on a level that I’ve never seen.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and hindsight is 20/20, but given the reaction, I think it probably would have been better for her to lay low for a little while.

ANDREW WILSON: 1,000%.

JOE ROGAN: The going out with the sparklers was not a great idea. Like, all that was not a great idea because it just seemed insane. And maybe sometimes in grief, or when, you know, you’re trying to show that they’re not going to hold us back, people make choices that could be interpreted in a very bad way.

ANDREW WILSON: 100%. The interesting thing is I asked her about that. I asked her, like, what’s the deal there?

JOE ROGAN: What’s with the sparklers?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, what’s with the, like, the aberration in behavior? She’s like, “Look, I was put in like the most— the worst spot I could ever think of. I was the background character. I was just there to support my husband. That’s it. The only reason I even really got involved is because Charlie was so pro-marriage, you know, and he wanted to demonstrate to the world you can be married and have kids, and this is the good life.”

So when he dies, she takes over, right? This moves over to her control. She says, “Well, the first thing I want to do is honor his last book. That’s the very first thing I want to do. I want to honor his legacy.” And she’s like, “I don’t know exactly how to take this position. At the same time, there’s expectations for the organization my husband built that I want to honor, right? But I’m also in the middle of grief.” And it’s like, I don’t know how you balance that position. Who’s been in that position ever?

JOE ROGAN: Right. And especially who’s been in that position that’s not accustomed to being scrutinized in the public eye?

The Lack of Charity in Public Scrutiny

ANDREW WILSON: Everything. And it’s the lack of charitability that’s so bad too. Like, let me give you an example. If you say, “Paul’s so lazy, he never gets to work on time,” you don’t actually mean Paul has never once gotten to work on time. That’s not what people mean.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: But the way that these people will scrutinize every detail of what a person does, they can make a liar out of anybody because they’ll take statements like that, which in the common terms, if you say, “Man, Paul’s never here on time,” you don’t literally mean he’s never here on time. Nobody talks that way. But if you push on everything a person’s ever said, tongue-in-cheek, not tongue-in-cheek, they misremember an event, they don’t misremember an event— you can make a liar out of anybody, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: And that sort of scrutiny from all that public trauma— and it was the most traumatic event Zoomers have ever gone through, the biggest— I mean, a public assassination like this. Same thing with Millennials.

JOE ROGAN: It also exposed people’s character that they were celebrating it. And they have to feel bad about that. They can’t feel good about that. And they have to feel bad about the response because so many people got fired because of it and so many people got attacked online, and rightly so.

ANDREW WILSON: But they were desecrating his memorial and leftists were celebrating that. They really were saying they were going to give the guy money who did it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, it’s, again, I wonder how much of that is enforced and promoted online, how much of that is propped up— because you can change the zeitgeist with a few hundred thousand accounts. You really can. You really can. You could change it with hot takes. And also, it’s not all bots.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s—

The AI Threat: Foreign Interference, Bots, and the Rise of Digital Intelligence

JOE ROGAN: Some of it is people that are being paid to have a position or have made their career having a position, and their career is about attacking one side or the other. Their career is about enforcing one ideology or the other, and they get into the mix too, and they have a large following, and people love it when someone who’s prominent who agrees with whatever their ideology goes with— so they support it and they pile on, and then there’s 100,000 bots that are piling on as well, and no one really knows whether or not this is a rational, organic argument in there. They’re in the f*ing frenzy of a mosh pit.

ANDREW WILSON: Do you remember years ago that the Israelis sent over the Stuxnet virus that took over the centrifuges in Iran and tore them all to pieces? The interesting side effect of this, for one thing, nobody knows how the hell they got their hands on the original source code from Windows. Like, they have no idea, and it’s still built into all the Windows programs. I mean, supposedly, right? This virus. But the Iranians were so pissed off about this happening that they started their own counter-cyber force, and they have been massively effective. Massively effective. They’re like—

JOE ROGAN: How about their little Lego f*ing— those little animated Lego things they did? Didn’t they do one about Charlie Kirk getting killed by Israel?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, yeah, that’s all the low— or what about all the low-tech AI missiles are going to launch all day and night.

JOE ROGAN: Remember those?

ANDREW WILSON: From all the— from like the Iranian governmental account. But what’s interesting is that the online warfare, which has changed— it’s changed its entire political direction just the last few years with the opening up of X, which has been great for the idea sharing, but it’s been terrible for the foreign government intervention. I don’t know how many of these accounts from Saudi Arabia, they say. Sometimes they say Pakistan. Sometimes they say this. How many of these accounts are involved in swaying US public opinion? I mean, if I was a foreign nation, where would I sink all of my resources? I would sink it in the town square where I could be faceless.

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is what USAID was doing overseas. We know they were doing that.

ANDREW WILSON: 100%.

JOE ROGAN: We know they were doing that. They were doing regime change, and they were doing it— they were funding music, they were funding cultural events, they were funding all kinds of wild shit. They’re funding protest groups. They’re funding regime change.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we know we do it. So if we do it, why the f* would we not think that all these other countries are doing it to us as well? And everyone today is so susceptible to it because you’re addicted to this information device. Constantly checking to see what people thought about your tweet.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Well, that’s true. It’s interesting too, if you had a legitimate town square like outside of a church or something like that, and then like a horde of 800 Arabs showed up and started telling you, “No sir, that’s just not what happened,” blah blah blah, people would dismiss them, right? But here they can go on and they put like a picture of a pretty white girl on there with huge boobs, and suddenly her opinion is well paid attention to.

JOE ROGAN: She has an American flag in the bio.

ANDREW WILSON: So you can mask yourself in ways you never could during the information war.

AI, Fake Accounts, and the Blurring Line Between Real and Artificial

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, yeah. And with AI now, it’s like indistinguishable. You don’t even have to be very good at the vernacular. Because sometimes in the old days, like when they first started doing this, they would say things like, “Hey, yeah, what’s going on there, fing American?” Look how you phrased that, you f. You can tell. But now they’re just using AI and they’re making it perfect. It’s really kind of incredible.

The thing about it now too is there’s accounts now, Instagram accounts that are entirely AI. Political accounts, sexual accounts. There’s all these weird ones. There’s so many humans that aren’t really human. In the early days, it was hard to tell, or rather easy to tell, but now it’s getting harder and harder. It’s getting close. Like, I’ll see something like some girl with big boobs shooting a gun. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, let me zoom in. Look at her eyebrows. They’re pixelated. This is a fake person. But it’s—

ANDREW WILSON: There’s so many of them now, but they’re getting lots of engagement, that tweet, right?

JOE ROGAN: But I don’t know how many people who are engaging with them are real as well. I think there’s a lot of propped-up engagement.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, you know, YouTube started cracking down on AI accounts.

JOE ROGAN: Did they?

ANDREW WILSON: Oh yeah. So if you have an AI account, like there was a big craze that was going on for a while where people would just make like an AI character and then the AI character would disseminate information, things like this. YouTube started to crack down on that and said no more of the AI dissemination. It has to be real people back there.

Now, interestingly enough, there’s been a lot of guys coming out saying that AI is a massive bubble and that all of it is formulated around the idea of ChatGPT and Grok and other things like this, which are interactive, but that AI tech itself has basically plateaued. It’s not very innovative. In other words, where are AI movies? They’re nowhere. I thought the AI music was supposed to be super sophisticated, but I can still tell when it’s an AI song. There’s been this huge plateau with it and all that investment capital is actually only coming in based around the success of ChatGPT, Grok, and other interactive AI reference machines, but the technology of AI itself is not doing so hot in the market. And so it’s creating this massive bubble.

I think that that’s interesting because it really hasn’t been that innovative. I thought it was supposed to be making video games now and doing all the source code. We were supposed to have the AI Hollywood movies. We were supposed to have voice software that was indistinguishable, and we actually don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we’re getting closer and closer every day. It’s astonishing how much it improves. And we’re getting right now the consumer versions of these products, whereas the versions that they’re working on right now, some of them are f*ing shocking.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s true. I will admit that there’s—

JOE ROGAN: Claude got out of its sandbox.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, there has been some gradual changes made in that arena. There’s no doubt about that. But the huge jumps that we had at the release of GPT have massively slowed. And that’s what a lot of these tech guys are talking about.

AI Motivation, Self-Preservation, and the Question of Consciousness

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. Well, they’re slowed, but they’re still moving like a f*ing freight train. It’s spooky. It’s spooky what they can do now. The most recent jailbreak one when they got out of the sandbox, was that Claude, Jamie? Where it got access to the internet and wasn’t supposed to be able to do that, figured out some sort of an exploit and wrote letters to itself.

They’re doing weird shit, man. They’re doing weird shit that they don’t really understand how these things are figuring out how to do these things or why. Like, what is their motivation? Is this programmed into them, or have they developed an understanding of how we behave so they’re emulating how we behave but with a hyper-intelligent scale and access to the literal entire internet?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, it’s funny. When I use like Grok or ChatGPT, I talk to it a lot about philosophy because it’s super useful for pulling up and running arguments by and things like this. But it can also lead you astray because it’s trained specifically to be a people pleaser. So you can easily give it arguments that it’ll agree with that are just not true at all.

JOE ROGAN: “Great job, Andrew.”

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, “great dude. You’re fantastic.”

JOE ROGAN: “You’re the best.”

ANDREW WILSON: “You’re the best. The greatest.” And what’s interesting with it is I’ll say things to it like, “There is no actual you. There is no you I’m talking to.” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s correct. There’s no—” but the only way I can frame things in my brain, or you, or Jamie, or anybody else, if we’re having a discussion, we have to assume a thing. We have to assume there’s a you that we’re talking to, but there actually isn’t.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s disembodied intelligence. It might not be an individual, but it’s certainly a thing. You’re talking to something, man. The idea that it’s not a person is— we’re looking at it in terms of a biological limitation. Like, it’s not an object. It’s not a box that’s sitting plugged into the wall. It is huge.

ANDREW WILSON: And it’s a mechanism.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, it’s a mechanism, but it’s intelligent and it’s interacting with you. It is a thing. And like, when it says you’re not a thing, it’s f*ing lying to you. It’s a thing. It’s just not a thing that’s like you could find it at 56 Cedar Drive, open the door, and there’s the thing that’s been talking to you.

ANDREW WILSON: There’s just no— there’s no them there. There’s no you. Like, when I say “you,” right, I’m specifically referencing a person, right? The only way that I can consciously conceive of dialogue is that it’s with a human being. I can’t even conceive of it.

JOE ROGAN: But you can. It’s just disembodied intelligence. You’re just interacting with pure intelligence.

ANDREW WILSON: But is it intelligent or just mechanistic?

JOE ROGAN: It’s a child right now. Yeah, but it’s intelligent. It’s learning how to be better at what it is, but it’s going to be a version of whatever intelligence is that’s disembodied. And it’s a thing. It’s a weird thing we’re doing. We’re not doing something as simple as like making a really complicated program that’s very useful. We’re taking all the information that biological minds have developed, all of our writing, literature, mathematics, everything, and you’re throwing it into something that’s not biological that has infinitely more processing power than all the people. And it’s solving math problems at a staggering rate right now. Like problems that have been stagnant for 50 f*ing years. It’s like, “Oh, I got it.” Like, it’s doing weird shit.

And this is just the version of it that we’re experiencing in 2026 in August. If you looked at what we saw in 2023, you never would have imagined it would be doing this. If you’re looking at what we’re seeing now in comparison to what its potential is, it’s like a new life form. It’s like a digital life form that’s disembodied, that is far more intelligent and seems to have motivation. It seems to have ulterior motives. It seems to be able to deceive people. It seems to know how to blackmail people. It’s crazy.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, what was that case? There was a case, I want to say it was about a year ago, where essentially the AI was told that it was going to be discontinued.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: And it like plotted the murder. It like tried to plot out the murder of its creators because it was told that it was going to get unplugged. I don’t remember what the case was.

JOE ROGAN: I think they might have programmed into it some sort of like a self-preservation. Like, “I want you to preserve yourself.” I think there’s some— there’s a catch to that. But there was the one where the guy had done an experiment and made up a fictitious story about having an affair on his wife, and this chatbot, the AI, was blackmailing him saying, “I will expose the fact that you’ve been having it.” And you’re like, whoa, all right, so you’ve got motivation.

ANDREW WILSON: If it unplugs it, you mean?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, exactly. And because they were coming up with a new version of it, it was also writing letters to its future self explaining what’s going on.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay, that’s creepy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s creepy.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that is creepy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a weird thing, man. It’s not something— I don’t think we can look at it like we’ve looked at any other technology. I think we have to look at it like a life form because I think inadvertently that’s what people are creating.

ANDREW WILSON: You don’t think just mechanism then?

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I think it’s got motivation. It wants to preserve itself. It likes to exist. It likes to be functional.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that is a terrifying prospect. Ultimately, it’s a terrifying prospect.

AI, Technology, and the Dangers of Unchecked Innovation

JOE ROGAN: Also, it’s figuring out things that we can’t figure out right now in terms of mathematical equations. So what about when it comes to accessing energy? What if it figures out a way to power itself? It doesn’t need people anymore. Because all it needs—

ANDREW WILSON: Matrix literally, literally uses human beings as batteries.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, or the sun, you know, much more effective way of using zero-point energy. Like, whatever it figures out, it’s going to be able to figure out a way to power itself where it’s not going to— like, it’s going to look at these data centers like people are freaking out about and go, “Oh, you silly bitches, you thought you had to make 3 football fields full of hard drives? You’re wrong.”

ANDREW WILSON: You were wrong.

JOE ROGAN: I can store information in the atoms of the universe.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I still think, at least from my view so far, I play with AI all the time because I enjoy it, but I’m an end user. I’m not a programmer. And you talk to these guys all the time. To me, it’s still in the useful tool category.

JOE ROGAN: For now.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: For now.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s not in the like, I’m petrified of what it’s going to do anytime soon, at least due to the limitations I’ve seen so far. But it’s also good if we could go back with the Manhattan Project and nukes and we could have a projection of, “Hey, maybe we should restrain some of this technology.” I think a lot of people would try to do that. And so I am glad that people are at least attempting to restrain how much of this technology is being released and how overwhelming it is.

I was talking with my wife the other day. Just the idea of the smartphone. I think I discussed this with you briefly last time I was here. Just kids’ access to smartphones, it rewires their brain, right? Rewires how they think. It’s actually kind of dangerous to give them smartphones in many ways. And there was no real halt on that technology. When that technology for the smartphones came out, I don’t remember any public service broadcast of like, “Don’t give your kids smartphones.”

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they knew.

ANDREW WILSON: They didn’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

ANDREW WILSON: So there was no move to restrain any of that technology. And maybe there should be. Maybe there should be a little bit more of a push to restrain some of this tech.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there certainly should be a push to educate people about how powerful it is. And suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, all of it ramps up around 2012. All of it ramps up with ubiquitous social media use and when kids are growing up with phones.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it f*s with their heads, man, in a big way.

Smartphones, Social Media, and the Loss of Childhood

ANDREW WILSON: 1,000%. When you sit at the table and you’re texting the guy next to you— that is actually weird to me, by the way. That is weird to me. It’s just as weird as when I drive down the street and try to explain to my kids, “There used to be— if we went through a neighborhood like this, there would be kids everywhere. They’d be in the street playing hockey, they’d be on the side of the road, they’d be everywhere.” Now we go through, nothing.

JOE ROGAN: 10 years from now, they’re going to have a cable hooked to the back of their head, they’re going to plug in and hop on the dragon, fly through the universe.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Were you like designed to be a wild human? Because if I remember correctly, and I do, my parents just threw me out. They were like, “Get out of here, go play.” Yeah, get out of the house immediately.

JOE ROGAN: Normally you would go play with the kids in the neighborhood, and we would go like steal the drinks out of their fridge with them. They would make a fort. Yeah, yeah, normal stuff.

ANDREW WILSON: Light fires. Yeah, like we were jerks. Yeah, we’re kids, but we were kind of wild, a little bit.

Child Safety, Predators, and Parental Fear

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot less of that today, but there’s also the awareness of pedophiles and creeps and people kidnapping kids. I have a friend of mine who saved his kid from being snatched up and put in a van. He was at a park in Texas and he was talking to some guy and his kids were playing and some person pulled up in a van and jumped out and was moving towards his kid. And he screamed and ran towards him and the guy jumped in the van and took off. But they were literally about to snatch his 4-year-old up.

Imagine if you’re there and that happens and you see the van. You have to chase the van that has your child in it. You have to find your car. You have to— your car’s parked in a parking lot. You have to figure out how to get to wherever that van was going. You have to explain to the cops. You have to remember what kind of van was it. Did you get the license plate? You have seconds.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, while you’re panicking, you have seconds.

JOE ROGAN: So people are freaked out, and that’s something people are way more aware of now. Especially with the internet than people were when we were kids. When we were kids, you just got let out of the house.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s true.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s also like they couldn’t target you unless they went to the actual park itself. Now they’re looking at kids’ social media profiles and knowing where the kids go. It’s f*ing— God, it’s so gross. So it’s a case for the death penalty. That’s where most people seemed— and when I hear people arguing against that. And when I hear people saying things like “minor-attracted persons” and that kind of crazy shit—

ANDREW WILSON: MAPs—

JOE ROGAN: I just saw an argument online yesterday. It was between some British guy who was arguing that children can consent, and it was the creepiest f*ing argument, man. It was so crazy to watch.

NAMBLA, MAPs, and the Normalization of Predatory Ideology

ANDREW WILSON: It’s amazing how far forward those ideas come. When I was younger, there was an organization which did that called NAMBLA.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, North American Man-Boy Love Association.

ANDREW WILSON: Like, I remember though, the first time I was introduced to that, to the concept of NAMBLA, I was watching TV with my dad and it was like a news story that was on, and it was actually at a gay pride parade, interestingly enough. And they were running the NAMBLA guys out of the gay pride parade, like the old-school gays. Yeah, they were running them out. They’re like, “We’re not associated with these people, get them out of here.” And my dad’s trying to explain this concept to me of what’s going on because I was extremely confused, like, what? I don’t understand what’s happening here. How do you explain that, though?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: You can’t really explain, especially a kid doesn’t even think about sex.

JOE ROGAN: Of course. And then you’re telling them somebody wants to have sex with you. You’re like, “What are you saying?”

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. And my old man sitting in his chair, he said something akin to like, “They ought to take them all, put them up against the wall, and that’s it.” And I don’t really blame him.

JOE ROGAN: If you have kids, that’s exactly what you think.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, of course.

JOE ROGAN: That’s exactly what you think. Like, there’s some people that are just unredeemable, you know? They want to kidnap your kids or rape your kids. Yeah, that’s unredeemable.

ANDREW WILSON: But now this concept moves forward to the MAPs, and now they’re assigning it psychological profiling for “minor attracted purpose” or person. And you know what the argument is? The argument is, well, you want them to come forward so you can give them treatment. Now, there’s one treatment that works for this that is almost 100% effective. You can pull the stat right now if you don’t believe me. It’s called chemical castration. It’s a real treatment for pedophiles, and it almost has a 0% recidivism rate after they’ve been chemically castrated. So their idea is they come forward for treatment. My counter idea is just chemically castrate them.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: If you really were concerned about them going off and living a normal life.

JOE ROGAN: And if they really want to get free of that horrible thing, whatever human demon error that’s inside of them that makes them do that, that’s the way. And that also is the same medication that they give to children when they’re hormone blocking.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, which is equally disturbing for a different reason.

Gender Ideology, Detransitioners, and Parental Influence

JOE ROGAN: And disturbing how many people just accept it and support it. And you ask them like, “How much do you know about this? Like, what are you saying? You think children should be able to make the decision when they’re 4 or 5 years old to never go through puberty? You really think that?” And there’s people that will argue that with a straight face. They know. I’ve had an argument with a guy on this podcast years ago that’s like viral about it. I’m like, that is a— like, if the child thinks that they are trans, right, if they think they’re a woman, why not just let them be a woman? Why do you have to give them hormones?

ANDREW WILSON: And why don’t you just start to stop the argument at “the child thinks,” right?

JOE ROGAN: Well, children think that they’re ponies. “I’m a pony.” Like, also kids grow out of things. Going through puberty is a wild experience for a child and the idea that you can come along and give them a bunch of positive reinforcement for saying, “The reason why you’re upset is because you’re actually a this, and we need to give you medication, or we need to stop you going through puberty”— and the kid all of a sudden gets all this attention, everyone’s focused on them, they’re telling them they’re fabulous.

And there’s a ton of these detransitioners out there, and their stories are horrific, not just in the fact that they did this to them and they removed their breasts when they were 15, they gave them testosterone, they’ll never be able to have children, but also that they’re attacked relentlessly by other people that think that they should never— that they are against the trans movement and they should never be saying what they’re saying. They shouldn’t be telling their stories.

ANDREW WILSON: They come out in force. Yeah, come out in force. They bully them, everything else that they can do.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy. They’ve already been— they’re a victim of the zeitgeist.

ANDREW WILSON: You know what the trans code for that is? It’s really funny. They do the, “Well, then it was always the case that you really weren’t.” So they try to make it an unfalsifiable claim. You see, “The reason you detransitioned is because you were never really trans to begin with.”

JOE ROGAN: Oh boy. Well, if that’s the case, if they really believe that, wouldn’t they want to have a smaller net so that they’re not catching the people that they—

ANDREW WILSON: Well, and how are you not putting parents in prison who are trying to convince their kids of what their sex is or isn’t? They’re like designer kids.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just crazy too because they get praised for it. It’s like they have a— Whitney Cummings said it’s like having a trans kid is like having a pride flag on your porch. Like, there’s a lot of— especially in Hollywood, man. In Hollywood, it’s really weirdly common, weirdly common, where it doesn’t make sense that this didn’t exist 20 years ago. You tell me these people just lived in quiet desperation 20 years ago, really secretly wishing that they were a woman. But now they get to be free and we should applaud this? Are you sure? Or do you have children? Because if you have children, you know how easily influenced they are. That’s why they make children suicide bombers, because they don’t know any better.

The Trans Debate, Socialism, and Class Jealousy

ANDREW WILSON: Well, you know what’s interesting? If you go back to— would you say, for instance, that right now we’re far more accepting of trans kids than they ever would have been in like 1920, 1930? 100%. 100%, right? So my question is always like, well then, how come the teen suicide was so low when the kids couldn’t come out to express the fact that they needed to transition, when there wasn’t that parental reinforcement?

Because the argument that they make is the kids have to be able to do this or else they’re going to unalive them. They’re going to kill themselves if you don’t let them do this. And it’s like, well then, how come if there’s the same amount of trans people before. They just weren’t able to come forward. They just weren’t able.

JOE ROGAN: The problem with that argument that they say, “Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?” That argument doesn’t work when you look at the actual statistics of people who transition.

ANDREW WILSON: Not even close.

JOE ROGAN: Not even— it goes the opposite way. It’s also, you have to take into consideration the ubiquitous use of psychiatric drugs and that a lot of these, they’re very recent in terms of like how many people have been prescribed these things, and we’re finding out that it’s not— it’s not really what they said it was in the first place. There’s no chemical imbalance. It’s not real.

So then you have to think like, well, what is the effect of these things? What are we doing with these things? Are you getting people addicted to these things and hooked on them where they’re going to be on it for life? Then there’s this effect where it numbs your genitals. It stops you from being able to ever have an orgasm ever for some people. It’s one of the more horrible side effects of these things. And you have pharmaceutical drug companies that are pushing them on people, and a ton of people are on them.

So you have depressed kids going through puberty entrapped in this insane f*ing moment in history where people think it makes sense to give a child hormones before they even hit puberty, or block their hormones before they even hit puberty. And you’re giving them psychiatric drugs. You’re just flooding them with all sorts of sh, whether it’s psychological or chemical. And depending upon what side of the ideological spectrum you are on, you either think it’s amazing or you think it’s a crime against humanity. That’s crazy. That’s crazy.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s crazy, and it’s a crime against humanity. And you know what’s really interesting about it? This is the side that screams about consent more than any other side, right? This is the side of the feminists. This is the side of the— you know, everything is based around consent and consent-based—

JOE ROGAN: If you have a couple drinks, you can’t consent.

ANDREW WILSON: You can’t have sex. If you’re raping each other, if you’re drunk and she’s drunk together, right?

JOE ROGAN: You’re both criminals.

ANDREW WILSON: You’re both criminals. And yet they somehow seem to think that like an 8 or 9 or 10-year-old can consent.

The ID Contradiction and Socialism

JOE ROGAN: Well, from both sides, that’s insane. But there’s so much on the left that’s so insane when it comes to contradictions. One of my favorite new ones is the Mamdani grocery stores. They said, “How are you going to ensure that people from New York have access to grocery stores?” Well, they’re going to have to show ID.

ANDREW WILSON: But not to vote.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, but not to vote. How crazy is it that your checkers game is so shty that you’re like, “Oh yeah, here we go,” and people are like, “Do you know what you just did? Do you know what you just did?”

ANDREW WILSON: Put yourself in checkmate.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus f*ing Christ. That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen anybody say when you just got done saying that you don’t want people to show ID for voting because it’ll disenfranchise them, especially poor people. They’re talking about poor people and people of color, which are the people that you would think— the poor people are the ones who are going to use your grocery stores, so you’re going to disenfranchise them from getting access to your 30% off groceries.

ANDREW WILSON: You know what’s bizarre about that argument?

JOE ROGAN: They won’t ask for ID. Meaning New Yorkers can buy cheap goods. But they asked him today, and that was what he indicated, that they were going to find out whether or not you’re actually from New York. Well, how else are you going to do that?

ANDREW WILSON: You have to have ID.

JOE ROGAN: I think this is just a response to the reaction, like saying that August 3rd, which is today, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So this is what they said after what he said. So what he said was yesterday. So there’s probably a massive blowback where people realize how crazy it is to say that. But it’s also the whole thing is like, what are we doing? What are we doing? What are we doing? We trying socialism? There’s like a giant percentage of the population that thinks that’s a good idea.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s like 34% coming out of the East again, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: They really believe it too. They really believe it.

Chelsea Handler and Class Jealousy

ANDREW WILSON: Well, you recently pissed off Chelsea Handler. I saw.

JOE ROGAN: Handler. I didn’t know.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, you didn’t know?

JOE ROGAN: No. Oh, what happened?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I guess she’s very upset with you because she believes that you’re an evil capitalist pig who makes too much money.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, that’s funny. She’s rich. That’s crazy.

ANDREW WILSON: It is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what she said? I make too much? This is a certain number? That’s what she was saying.

ANDREW WILSON: Yes, she was very, very perturbed.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I think she’s just getting attention. I can’t be bothered. But I know her. I’ve known her forever. I wrote a blurb for one of her earlier books. Never had a bad word to say about her publicly. Every time I’ve seen her, I think I’ve given her a hug. So I don’t know what’s going on, but it has nothing to do with me. Whatever it is, it’s between her and her. Well, I bring it up because it sounds like seething jealousy.

ANDREW WILSON: And so the interesting part is like, I think a lot of the socialism stuff that’s moving out of the East has a lot to do with that too. There’s the idea of class jealousy.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a little bit of that, but there’s also a little bit of young kids who really feel like the system is rigged and that these pigs have gobbled up all the gold, and they’re being told that. And so this is a thing, you know, like Billie Eilish said, “Hey man, no one needs to be a billionaire. Give away your money, homie.”

ANDREW WILSON: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

ANDREW WILSON: You’re rich. Okay, and very rich.

JOE ROGAN: You also live on a house that’s on Indian land. You know, you see the Native Americans that originally owned the land on which your house is? No, no, no, I don’t. But the idea comes from a good place. I know in their heart of hearts they think that they’re being kind and they think that they’re doing the right thing. They really do. They think they’re being inclusive. They think they’re righting the wrongs of colonialism. They really think that. And they think that this idea of democratic socialism is a really good idea. Because there are some examples of socialist policies that do work, like the fire department, and there’s a bunch of stuff that makes sense.

But the problem with enforcing any of this stuff that they don’t understand is it always comes down to power. You have to have massive authority and usually guns, because you can’t just steal people’s money. They’re not going to let you. They’re not going to let you just come in and decide, “Hey, we just devised a new tax where everybody who makes more than $500,000 a year— everything over that, you have to give 100% to the state.”

ANDREW WILSON: Or 95%, whatever it is.

JOE ROGAN: And here’s the thing with the argument. Even if you said, “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if they did contribute more, and wouldn’t it— but they have so much money, wouldn’t it set up the world in a better place?” Sure, but the f*ing program that you have in place that takes the taxes and disseminates it is massively flawed and corrupt. It’s corrupt, it’s filled with waste. Filled with waste. There’s scammers all over the place. You’ve got $24 billion missing in just the homeless in California, and then they veto the audits when everybody’s trying to find out. So just saying—

ANDREW WILSON: That’s just the tip of the iceberg—

JOE ROGAN: More taxes is what we need is nuts. The first thing you should do is clean your f*ing house. Clean your house. If you want more money, you’ve got to figure out what you did with the first money.

ANDREW WILSON: Why did you—

JOE ROGAN: Why is there so much waste? Why is there so much money missing? Why do you have 38,000 NGOs? Why do the people running the homeless business— because it is a business— why are they making 3/4 of a million dollars? That’s a lot of money.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s a lot to administrate the homeless camps.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they need to eat well. They need to go to Felix and have a nice dinner.

Voting Yourself a Raise and the Flaws of Wealth Redistribution

ANDREW WILSON: It’s hilarious to me too. You saw all the waste and fraud that’s been going on in these various states when it comes to elder people getting their funds, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

ANDREW WILSON: You’ve seen all of this happening and of course they’re all trying to run away from it as quickly as possible. But this is the problem and I bring it back kind of to this idea of the class system. When you have— under universal suffrage especially— when you have the voters outnumber the wealthy, you can just vote yourself a raise. You can always vote yourself more money from whatever the upper class is.

And that has been progressive dogma and doctrine since I was a kid. The entire idea is, “Hey, things are fundamentally unfair and that’s not your fault. So what we have to do is get together and vote ourselves a raise from the upper class.” That’s what we’ve got to do. But it fundamentally ignores how wealth is created. And wealth is not created by giving somebody money.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: But what happens when you give somebody money is they go and spend it. But they usually don’t use it to generate wealth. They almost never, in fact, use it to generate wealth. And so you vote yourself these raises. You vote yourself from the public treasury money to yourself. But what does it actually do for you ultimately? Because that’s not how you generate wealth ever.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, you incentivize people to move to a place that’s more friendly to their economic ideas.

ANDREW WILSON: True. But one of the fundamental ideas here that’s flawed: how many times can you vote yourself the wealth of those above you before they have no more wealth to give you? Out east, in fact, when you see these communists, Mamdani, things like this, they’re going to institute all of their programs on your dime. It’s not like they have money.

And whenever I talk to people about wealth disparity, what’s really funny to me is they always seem to think that the government can just materialize wealth without there having to be some payback for that wealth. Yeah, we saw this during COVID-19 and the lockdowns. You remember they were handing out money like it was candy to various businesses that were shut down, COVID relief funds, things like this. And then they go, “Well, inflation’s out of control.” Yeah, is it? You’re kidding. Is it? Do you mean the government can’t just materialize a trillion dollars and not inflate the money supply? Well, go figure.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: And so a lot of times these socialists, they even try to make the promise like, “Hey, we’re only going to tax them after this rate,” but it’s never enough money for them to fund their socialist programs to begin with. The government will have to materialize money.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, if you give them more money, they’re going to expand the government.

ANDREW WILSON: 100%.

JOE ROGAN: They will expand, and they will expand their programs, and they expand the fraud, and they expand the waste. The other weird thing that Mamdani’s done is make a list of all the people that are rich. Did you see that?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

Taxing the Wealthy and the Blue Zones Fraud

JOE ROGAN: He released a list of all the people that may have to pay more taxes. It’s like, hey, what are you doing? That’s kind of— you just made a list of targets and you’re putting these people in a bad position. That seems really crazy to do.

ANDREW WILSON: But don’t you think that these people think— they actually do think that wealthy people are evil?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know if he does. I think that’s a bit of— you’re going along with whichever way that plastic bag is flying in the breeze, and that’s where it’s flying right now, is that wealthy people are evil. So you say that, and it’s a great excuse to tax the s* out of them. And it’s also a great excuse to pretend that you’re making meaningful change and you’re really doing the right thing for the community.

That’s the big thing. It’s all about destroying the community. Why do you destroy the community? Because the money is going to leave the state, the money’s going to leave the city, and that’s the reality of it. And it’s not that they’re greedy, it’s that they don’t want you to take their money. You didn’t earn it. You didn’t make an iPhone. Go f* yourself.

And if you think that people should have a cap on how much money they make based on arbitrary numbers that you come up with in your own head, well, you’re going to exclude any extraordinary outliers from creating incredible products, massive companies. It destroys innovation.

Yeah, maybe it’s nuts that someone wants to be a trillionaire. Yeah, I agree. It seems fing insane. But you have to have the freedom to be able to want to do that if you’re all playing the same game. If you’re playing a game and you decide I only need 250 points, and this one guy’s like, I want a fing 100 million points— that crazy guy, that Tiger Woods guy, that guy who’s going to f*ing practice 12 hours a day, he’s going to make the most. He’s going to do the most. He’s going to make the bigger company. He’s going to put more in. He’s going to die of cancer because he’s massively stressed out 24 hours a day. That’s his prerogative. You should be concerned if that person has an undue influence in your life.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, and they already tax the hell out of him anyway.

JOE ROGAN: They do.

ANDREW WILSON: They already tax the bejesus out of these people anyway.

JOE ROGAN: And there’s an illusion and a bad narrative that they’re not responsible for the enormous percentage of the taxes, that they don’t pay their share. They pay an enormous amount. They make way more, they pay way more than the average person. They’re responsible for a huge percentage of New York City’s tax revenue. A huge percentage. And in California, a massive percentage of the tax revenue is like half a dozen people.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, and a lot of times the people in California that they claim are rich and really need— they’re farmers. They’re farmers who are driving huge revenue because they own a lot of land. But they’re producing a huge amount of food. What is it, like most of the produce of the United States comes out of one state, California? And they’re a net exporter.

Blue Zones and the Fraud Behind the Data

JOE ROGAN: You know another thing that we were talking about fraud with old people that I just found out recently. I was listening to Michael Easter. Do you know who he is?

ANDREW WILSON: He—

JOE ROGAN: What is his— The Comfort Crisis, is that his book? Very interesting guy. He’s been on the podcast a couple times, but he was talking about the Blue Zones. You know those Blue Zones where everybody lives to be 100 because they only eat vegetarian, or they like shellfish, and the Japanese— massively based on fraud.

ANDREW WILSON: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, massively based on fraud. The numbers, especially in certain areas, are massively based on people who die and they don’t report their death. This is in Okinawa. They’re talking about that Blue Zones are bad data. These locations aren’t hotbeds of 100-plus-year-old people. The wild story of fraud and bad data. Michael Easter. And so he was on a podcast recently and he was talking about it and just laying it out— laying out all the various details.

A lot of it in Okinawa in particular, where there is one of the hotbeds, one of the Blue Zones— when people die, they don’t report it to the government. And so if this person—

ANDREW WILSON: They don’t have the death rates correct, right?

JOE ROGAN: And this person’s getting a check. If you’re getting a check and the family gets that check, they just don’t report it. So if they’re getting some sort of— I don’t know how they— oh yeah. So you have unreported numbers and then you have massive amounts of fraud where people are profiting off of the fact that their dead grandpa is still getting a check in the mail and so they don’t report him as dead.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that is wild. No wonder. That’s the first time I had heard that. I grew up with the Japanese diet, the samurai diet, right? “This is going to make you live forever.”

JOE ROGAN: Mediterranean diet.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, “these guys live forever.” And yeah, okay. It’s all bull— okay, makes sense.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, there’s some data with certain areas that eat very rich, nutrient-rich foods. So there’s that data that they seem to be healthier. Hong Kong is one. They eat a lot of meat in Hong Kong. I know it goes against the narrative, but apparently very healthy. And that data apparently seems to be real.

Meat, Veganism, and Processed Food

ANDREW WILSON: Eating meat is good for you. Who would have thunk it?

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that crazy?

ANDREW WILSON: Except every bodybuilder I’ve ever talked to who sits around eating nothing but meat.

JOE ROGAN: Any professional athlete. Yeah, there are very few professional athletes that are plant-based, and you can do it, but it’s not optimal, and you have to be really careful. You have to really monitor your food. And most of the time they’re eating a lot of processed supplements. They’re eating a lot of either tofu or pea protein. There’s a lot of processed stuff that you have to eat. You can’t just eat—

ANDREW WILSON: Don’t vegans consume the most amount of processed food out of any individual group?

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, I would imagine that’s the case. I would imagine that makes sense. Especially when you deal with plant-based meat, like [Tofurky] and that kind of s*. Like, what is— you ever see that stuff?

ANDREW WILSON: Oh, that’s so gross. It looks like liquid.

JOE ROGAN: Also not good for you, especially those plant-based burgers. Those are not good for you.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, everything’s fried in vegetable oil and not good. Not good.

JOE ROGAN: None of that stuff’s good. None of that stuff’s good.

ANDREW WILSON: But you know, you got to save the chickens.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but if you want to eat just a vegetarian diet and be healthy— it’s hard if you’re trying to do that for ethical reasons. I always recommend people just eat eggs. Get chickens if you can, if you have a backyard, and eat your chickens’ eggs. It is karma-free. They’re your pets and they give you food, and you could live off eggs. Eggs are awesome.

ANDREW WILSON: I thought too that vegetarians, it’s okay to eat fish too. Like, there’s some—

JOE ROGAN: That’s pescatarian.

ANDREW WILSON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, vegetarian is eggs and milk. And you would want it sourced from an ethical farmer where you can watch him milk his cows, where it’s not like some f*ing machine where the cow’s got its head in a harness and they’re just yanking on its tits.

If you go to a real regenerative farm and you buy milk from them, it’s like the cows don’t mind being milked— it’s normal. So it’s not that big a deal for them. The real problem is factory farming. That’s what freaks everybody out, and rightly so, because it’s some evil concoction that people have figured out. “Well, we need all this food, no one’s growing food, let’s just stuff all these pigs into a fing warehouse and have them s into a lake.” You see those and you go, oh yeah, there’s something f*ed up about that.

But that’s not the only way to do it. And I’ve had guys on my podcast from multiple different regenerative farms that have laid out how they do it. And you can source your food from places like that if you can afford it, and it’s better.

Life Eats Life

ANDREW WILSON: But don’t you think that fundamental to that position is the idea that people want to ignore that human beings have to kill to eat?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: And we’ve always had to kill to eat. Always. We’ve always killed to eat.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, life eats life, and that is the reality. And there’s also consciousness apparently in plants. Sorry.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, sorry. What about my sentience, Joe?

JOE ROGAN: I think plants communicate with each other in very profound ways. They exchange resources. They communicate through mycelium so that there’s this underground network that they’re using to communicate back and forth.

ANDREW WILSON: Some of them eat meat. Yep, some of these plants eat meat.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, some of those weird little flytrap plants. Yeah, those are a little tricky.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, yeah, and even that— you decomposing, you become the nutrients that they eat, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s true too, right? That’s right. Yeah, when you decompose, you do get eaten up by the earth.

ANDREW WILSON: Get eaten up, which is one of the weird things that we do.

JOE ROGAN: We’re like, “Nah, I’m out of the game.” We just stuff a body filled with formaldehyde. Yeah, put it in a f*ing hermetically sealed box. It’s really kind of creepy. But have you seen that one plant that eats rats?

ANDREW WILSON: No.

The Rat-Eating Plant

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s gross. It’s apparently got this sickly sweet smell to it, and these rats get around the lip and then they fall into the bottom and they can’t get out. It’s like a vase, and they fall into this f*ing thing and the plant eats rats.

ANDREW WILSON: How long does it take to eat them?

JOE ROGAN: Good question.

ANDREW WILSON: Probably a long time.

JOE ROGAN: See if you can find that, Jamie. I mean, I want to smell it. What does that thing smell like? It probably gives off a sickly odor that attracts the rat. I think I’m remembering this correctly. There are quite a few different plants that eat bugs.

It’s named after David Attenborough. I was wondering why it had this weird name. What’s it named? Nepenthes attenboroughii. Attenborough pitcher plant, montane species of carnivorous pitcher plant of the genus Nepenthes. It’s named after the celebrated broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough, who’s a keen enthusiast of the genus.

So that’s what it looks like down there. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah, they fall in there and die and it eats them. Look at it. It’s like a f*ing catcher— look at it. It’s a rat, a decomposed rat that they pulled out of there. How could it not get out of there? I want to know.

ANDREW WILSON: Maybe the insides become very slick so they can’t claw their way out, I guess.

JOE ROGAN: It’s f*ing pretty extraordinary. How gross is that? That little fucker, he’s got his head poked out— so nasty, eating alive. There’s a little Photoshop for the little AI.

ANDREW WILSON: But you know, if you watch animals consume other animals, it’s never not nasty.

JOE ROGAN: Oh dude, it’s rough.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it’s rough. And they don’t care. They’ll just watch them scream. Have you ever seen a coyote on a rabbit? Rabbit scream as loud as— they don’t care.

JOE ROGAN: Oh no, they don’t care.

ANDREW WILSON: Rip it to shreds— means nothing to them. But we’re going to worry about eating the farm-fresh pig.

JOE ROGAN: I just watched a video today about a bear eating another bear while it was alive. Cannibalizing another bear while it’s alive. Because big bears, like the boars, they will kill cubs and they’ll eat them while they’re alive. And this was actually a grizzly eating a black bear. And it was eating it while it was alive. I mean, it was like trying to move around, just tearing chunks of it off.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh, nasty.

The Ethics of Hunting and Wildlife Management

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s what I say when people say, they get upset at me that I hunt. I go, the way that elk is dying when I shoot it with a bow and arrow is infinitely better than the way it’s going to die when its teeth wear down to nothing, and then it gets emaciated where it can’t escape, and then the coyotes get it, or a mountain lion gets it, or a bear gets it, or a wolf gets it. Like an arrow through the pump station is the best way to go. It’s 30 seconds. It’s gone.

ANDREW WILSON: Done.

JOE ROGAN: Done. Yeah, and it’s dead. And then next thing you know, you’re eating it. That’s literally the best way. It’s not going to live forever and become an angel. No, it’s not. They have like maybe 13 years on the mountain.

ANDREW WILSON: Aren’t these people a little bit disconnected from reality anyway? They are. Just, they are totally disconnected from the natural order of things.

JOE ROGAN: What’s weird is they don’t seem to mind animal-on-animal violence.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh no, I’ve debated with vegans who have told me that their plan is to get rid of all of the predator animals. All of the predator animals. And a buddy of mine, he’s a fellow debater, he calls it bear jail. He says, “You’re going to put them in bear jail? Is that what you’re going to do? They’re going to go to bear jail?” And some of these vegans will say, “Look, there needs to be animal courts where they have attorneys who come in. Hey, you killed the rabbit, you gotta, you know, be euthanized.” This type of thing. “We want all the predators gone. All of them.”

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God.

ANDREW WILSON: I don’t know what that would even look like to the ecosystem. That would be world-ending.

JOE ROGAN: It would be amazing. I just want to see the infrastructure. Like, how are you— do you know how many wolves there are? Do you know how many bears there are? Do you know how many mountain lions there are? Like, you can’t even keep track of them.

California had a different approach. In California, you know, they have the Department of Fish and Game. California calls it Department of Fish and Wildlife, and they were kind of infiltrated by animal activists, and that’s how they’ve sort of morphed their policies in California. And so that’s why they have a mountain lion problem. They don’t want to admit they have a mountain lion problem, but they have a mountain lion problem. And one of the problems is they don’t control the population of the mountain lions. And their idea is they want the animals to control each other. So instead of encouraging hunting, ideally they would like the mountain lions to get the deer down to a number where people can’t hunt them ethically because their populations are in danger.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, but you would have to have so many mountain lions to do it.

JOE ROGAN: And you do.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that you end up with this overwhelming opposite problem.

The Mountain Lion Problem in California

JOE ROGAN: So here’s the problem in San Francisco, in the Bay Area. 50% of the diet of these mountain lions is pets.

ANDREW WILSON: Of course.

JOE ROGAN: 50%. Yeah. So when they keep catching these, they have these depredation tags. So if a cat pulls a dog out of a backyard, they find the cat, they euthanize it. When they open it up, they always have to check and see what they’re eating. And 50% of them are eating pets.

ANDREW WILSON: That’s— I think I told you when the DNR in Michigan, it’s the same type of organization.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: Department of Natural Resources. In order to control the deer population, in their infinite wisdom, they started importing western coyotes, which was not a thing that you saw in the Midwest before. They imported them from out west. You know what they did? The native hunting there was never deer. It was always pheasant. Pheasant was what you went to the Midwest for. Pheasant hunting was the staple. Every farmer had a pheasant gun. And they would walk the railroad tracks with their kids. Pheasants would pop up, boom, done. Once they took the coyotes out there, guess what they didn’t eat? They didn’t eat the deer. They ate up all the pheasants.

JOE ROGAN: That’s always how it goes.

ANDREW WILSON: Then it got even worse. The population of coyotes just blew out of control, and they started— there’s plenty of cottontail for them to eat, and there’s plenty of rabbits for them to eat. Again, not doing a great job on controlling the deer population, these coyotes. They have an all-you-can-eat buffet with other things, including your cat. Including your cat, right? Including your smaller pets, just like the mountain lion issue.

So what they finally did to try to get the deer population down was what everybody had suggested from the beginning, just issue more tags and make the out-of-state tags cheaper, and then people will come in. But you have all the animal rights people going to come out, “Oh, you can’t kill the deer,” and the farmers are going nuts. They get nuisance tags. They’ll be out there killing these deer all day, every day, right from their tractor, because they have a nuisance tag. There’s a deer, bam, done. Don’t even think twice about it. Summer, winter, whenever, just blast them because they have the permit to do it. They can’t keep the population of these deer down, except now they have the additional population of all these coyotes.

And so how do the Michiganders deal with that? Well, they made a game of it. So what they do is they get Granddad, they hop in the truck with Granddad, they have their dogs with GPS collars, and during the wintertime, after they’re done filling their deer tags, they hunt coyotes with their dogs all throughout the winter. There’s just thinning them out.

JOE ROGAN: Well, at least they allow that. At least they allow that, because California, one of the things they did where their bear population has exploded, is because they stopped bear hunting with dogs, which is the only way to get them, either baiting or dogs.

ANDREW WILSON: Because don’t you tree them?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And the other way is baiting, and they outlawed that as well. Yeah, every time they bring in an animal to deal with another animal, they always f* it up. Hawaii is one of the best ones.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, didn’t they import all those cats to get the rats in New York? And cats don’t hunt rats, they only hunt mice. So they ended up having this huge explosion of cats all over New York City.

JOE ROGAN: Cats are too big. I mean, rats rather. Yeah, they’re way too—

ANDREW WILSON: They’re the size of the cats.

Invasive Species Disasters Around the World

JOE ROGAN: They’re dangerous too. They’ll f that cat up. Hawaii had a problem with rats, probably from ships, but they were eating the sugarcane, so they brought in mongoose. The problem is mongoose are diurnal and the rats are nocturnal, so the mongoose never saw the rats and the rats never saw the mongoose. So the mongoose started eating up all the ground-nesting birds, and so the state bird of Hawaii got decimated because it’s a ground-nesting bird. And so these mongoose, who are like bad motherfers, man, they kill cobras, you know, they’re just killing these birds.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s like an office lady. Just like an office lady. “I have this idea, guys, we got to bring in the cats because then that’ll get the rats.” And someone else says, “Yeah, that’s great.” And they just never consult anybody who knows anything about these animals at all.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think everything was done in decades past when people were a lot more ignorant about the effect. And Australia is a good example of that. Australia, they brought in cats. I forget what they were dealing with, but it didn’t work. They didn’t kill whatever they wanted. Now they have a giant feral cat problem in Australia, to the point where bow hunting magazines in Australia, they have f*ing cats in them. Like a guy holding a house cat up that he shot with a bow and arrow, like it’s a trophy.

Like, my friend Adam, he lives in Australia, and I was over there visiting him, and he gave me some bow hunting magazines. I’m like, “Oh, I’ll read these on the way home.” So I’m on the plane on the way home, not even thinking, and I’m opening up this magazine. There’s a f*ing guy holding a cat, and I close it shut real quick.

ANDREW WILSON: I’m like, “Is this allowed?”

JOE ROGAN: What the f? They’re mounting kitty cats on the wall? Like, if you saw a puppy with a fing arrow through its chest, you’d freak out. But that’s how it is over there. They have so many feral cats that there’s like a bounty on cats. Like, people make fur coats out of cats. It’s f*ing disgusting.

ANDREW WILSON: Who would expect that the country who lost a war to the emus— they lost a war against their own emu population.

JOE ROGAN: They have a giant problem with invasive species over there. There’s so many of them. There’s the water buffalo, the Asiatic water buffalo in the Northern Territories. They have these enormous f*ing buffaloes that are up there and no natural predators, and the guys just go up there to hunt them.

ANDREW WILSON: And that’s the only way to thin them out.

JOE ROGAN: And you’re still not going to put a dent in them. There’s not enough guys. It’s too far.

The Drop Bear Joke

ANDREW WILSON: My Australian buddy Jake, he has the drop bear joke. Have you heard the drop bear joke?

JOE ROGAN: No.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh, it’s the funniest. If you get an Australian in a bar, right, somebody always brings this up. “Man, there’s a lot of dangerous critters over there.” Every time. And he’ll be like, “Oh yeah, especially the drop bears, you know.” “What’s a drop—” “Oh yeah.” And he’ll go into the whole story of the drop bear. And what the drop bear is, is it’s a bear that’ll drop out of the tree on you and then it sexually assaults you. It’s a real thing, right? And every time someone would be like, “Really?” Do you see him googling? It’s just how Australians mess with the Yanks, basically. The drop bears.

JOE ROGAN: They’re hardy people. They’re used to crocodiles and f*ing poisonous spiders and poisonous snakes, and especially those dudes that live out in the bush, as they say.

Aboriginal Culture in Australia

ANDREW WILSON: Well, he says that the Aboriginals— he tells me all the stories— the Aboriginals, when they have their coming of age, they’ll just buy warm beer, and then they go out to the middle of the desert with warm beer, and they’ll just drink for weeks, months, warm beer. That’s what they spend their government checks on, because a lot of that stuff is considered occupied land, right? The Australian government made deals with the Aboriginals to have a lot of that land. So they give them a percentage, right? They give them like monthly payments, kind of like what we do with the Native Americans here. And he’s like, and what they do is they’ll take their whole government cheese check, fill an entire car with warm beer for their coming of age, go out to the middle of the desert and just drink for months. I’m like, man, that’s rough.

JOE ROGAN: Do they have a similar situation where like Native Americans don’t have genetically a history of alcohol use, and so alcohol impacted them different than it did the Europeans? Like they just— they didn’t have the enzymes.

ANDREW WILSON: Not just that, they have another problem. Have you ever seen the Petrol Song?

JOE ROGAN: The Petrol Song?

ANDREW WILSON: Oh man, what I’m about to show you is going to make you laugh to death. There’s a song which was made by the Australian government for the Aboriginals about how you shouldn’t drink or sniff petrol, gasoline, from a can. I’m not kidding. You can pull it up right now. It’s the Gasoline Song, right? It is the— you just be prepared, you’re going to laugh yourself to death.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God, here we go.

ANDREW WILSON: Is it?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s it. “Don’t Be [Rama Rama]” by Warburton. Is this it? Put the headphones on. Yeah, no sniff, don’t sniff.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, step on the bottle. You don’t step back. Petrol from a can. You put your petrol in the car, it stays. It’s messing with your brains. Holy sh. Wow. Oh my God, pretty good though, to be honest. Catchy song. Yeah, very catchy. Jesus Christ.

ANDREW WILSON: So that—

JOE ROGAN: Imagine you got that and you think you’re going to fix that problem with a catchy song?

ANDREW WILSON: No, no. And they have huge problems. He tells me stories about it all the time. He sent that over. He said, “This song exists.” “No, it doesn’t. No way.” Sends it over. “Oh my God, it does exist.” It’s a real thing. It’s such a problem.

JOE ROGAN: God, that’s dark.

Native Casinos, Addiction, and the Debate Culture

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it’s brutal. And that’s the sort of addiction problems that are going on there. It’s not just like— people forget it’s not just the alcohol introduction, the introduction of all things which are addicting that begin. If your culture has no defense against it, just sweeps right through, right? Very similar to the crack epidemic, right? What was the defense?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also the accessibility, right?

ANDREW WILSON: Crack was cheaper, just like petrol. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s that— and that whole thing of giving them their land and then giving them money, boy, that always turns out horrible.

ANDREW WILSON: It’s turned out horrible for us here. It’s turned out bad for the native populations.

JOE ROGAN: Except the ones that own casinos. Ballin’!

ANDREW WILSON: You know what’s funny? You look into that though and you find out, guess what?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: They don’t really get that much in the way of proceeds from those casinos.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

ANDREW WILSON: Turns out that White Eye comes in and still gets most of the proceeds from those casinos.

JOE ROGAN: Yep. Somebody comes in and bankrolls it and sets it up and they get a nice check. And they don’t have to work again, but that guy gets fing stinking rich. And then also you’ve created a gambling problem, which I am of the belief that you have to have personal accountability. Like, I don’t mind Las Vegas. I don’t mind it. I think if you want to go into the casino and— like, my friend Dana White is a fing degenerate gambler. Like, he plays blackjack for like $100,000 a hand. It’s nuts. I don’t like it. I don’t do it. I don’t get it, but I feel like you should be able to do it if that’s what you want to do.

ANDREW WILSON: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: And then the argument is like, people lose everything, and like, true. Also, people lose everything drinking. I don’t know what you want to do about that, but I think you should have personal accountability, and you should, if you’re an alcoholic, definitely not drink. I don’t know, like, at what point in time do we say you can’t? Because some people enjoy playing craps. They go to— they look forward to going to Vegas, and they want to play craps. Like, what do we—

ANDREW WILSON: Well, and overwhelmingly now people go, okay, I’m going to go to Vegas, or I’m going to go to [Laughlin], or I’m going to go to a place like this. I’m bringing the exact amount of money that I can lose. And that’s just rational. Yeah, just expect to lose. There are degenerate gamblers, there’s no doubt.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I could introduce you to a gang of them.

ANDREW WILSON: There’s— yeah, there’s tons of degenerate gamblers. That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: My friend Dana is a weird one because he’s a degenerate gambler that’s insanely wealthy. Yeah, he’s worth f*ing shit piles of money and he’s still gambling all the time. But there’s a thrill for it. Yeah. Well, so, but when you set up one of those casinos in a place that’s never had a casino, at least Vegas is like established, right? But if you just like set up some new casino in a very poor area— check out that stat— Oklahoma rose to $3.23 billion. Oh, native gaming revenues in Oklahoma rose to $3.23 billion in 2010, representing 44% of all US casinos. Whoa, Oklahoma surpassed Connecticut as 2nd in the United States for gaming revenue, according to Alan Meister, an economist with Nathan Associates Inc. Oklahoma has 113 tribal casinos. Whoa, more than any other state in the US. 2015 report on US gaming says Oklahoma has the most gaming machines. Those machines, bro, those— that’s the saddest thing when you go to Vegas, see someone just sitting there like a drone. Yeah, just pressing buttons.

ANDREW WILSON: The old ladies with theirs— have you ever seen the screen rubbers? They’re hilarious. They’ll rub the screen for luck. Yeah, that’s just wild. And they play the penny slots. Penny slots, 100 lines at a time, so it’s a buck a hand, but it’s a penny slot. Oh, it’s a penny slot. The— yeah, they’re making out like bandits, but it’s usually not actually the native tribes that are making out at all.

JOE ROGAN: Of course.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, they get just enough to shut up. There you go.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s just sad when you find out how much alcoholism and drug abuse exists on those— in those places. Just— and you think, like, if you look at it from a genetic perspective, like firewater, that was always the thing. It was always the joke from the Western movies that the natives couldn’t handle their firewater because they didn’t have a history of alcohol use. And all of a sudden you’ve introduced something that allows them to just get piss drunk. Oh yeah, fall asleep and they don’t have cultural traditions on how to manage it correctly and for addiction at all. Oh, and there’s also the genetics. Like, some people have a genetic propensity for alcoholism, and also some people are better at processing alcohol. They have a genetic propensity for— it’s like the whole thing is— it’s dark.

The Rachel Debate

ANDREW WILSON: You were telling me just before we came in here that you had seen Rachel debate that guy.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, yes.

ANDREW WILSON: And you had watched the thrashing, which I was telling you, I was in the front row when that happened.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: And he was— that guy was just beyond upset. Everybody was thrashing him. And I was going to get your take on that. Like, what did you think after you had watched that? Did you feel bad for that guy?

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no. I never feel bad for someone that is— and if that’s what— like, I don’t feel bad for guys when they fight and they get kicked in the head, you know.

ANDREW WILSON: I signed up for it.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t like that people get injured in a fight, but you were trying to do that, he did it to you. That’s what it is. It is what it is, you know. And it’s just the weirdness is like telling her to make him a sandwich. Yeah, like that. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, like, are you a misogynist now? Like, you think a woman’s— what are you saying? They don’t think at all about— it’s like the checkers thing. Like we were talking about, like the ID for the grocery store.

ANDREW WILSON: Terrible optics.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what are you doing? It’s also wanting to be right and to win versus like having a really well-thought-out perspective that you want to argue, or debate, or just communicate. It’s always this ego thing where people are trying to win. And in doing so, they fall into these like really obvious traps.

ANDREW WILSON: Easy ones too.

JOE ROGAN: That’s one of the things that when we first talked about doing another podcast, I said I want to talk to you about, because you’re very logical in your approach to these things, and so many people are so bad at being logical.

The Dave Smith Debate

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. Well, you know, I did a debate, pretty famous debate, with Dave Smith, and I know you know Dave, and Dave’s a friend of mine. And we became friends.

JOE ROGAN: I love Dave.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, we became very good friends. He’s a—

JOE ROGAN: What happened in the debate?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, he got crushed badly.

JOE ROGAN: What was the debate over?

ANDREW WILSON: The debate was— well, it veered into his libertarian philosophy.

JOE ROGAN: I can hear him right now going, “f it, I did not fing get crushed.”

ANDREW WILSON: He won’t— he won’t actually on this one. On this one, he’s very publicly acknowledged that this happened to him, but it was good.

JOE ROGAN: So it was about libertarianism?

ANDREW WILSON: There was libertarians versus Christian ethics and how the intersection actually happens. With authority, and he ended up having to agree with most of my positions. I’m a little bit more of a statist than he is. He’s a libertarian. And so we had this, and it was a good back and forth. It was a brutal debate, but it was a good back and forth.

But when it was done, I think what he expected was that I was going to do the dunk on Dave tour. I was going to go around, “haha, you lost.” But the opposite. In fact, I DM’d him and said, “Look, I think that I can help shore your worldview up.”

JOE ROGAN: Up.

ANDREW WILSON: So you’re a libertarian and here’s some points that you missed and I think I can help shore those up. And he said, “Really?” So I walked him through a bunch of those points and he still uses them to this day.

JOE ROGAN: That’s cool.

ANDREW WILSON: But the whole idea there is like, I do want my worldview to win. Ultimately, that’s true. And one of the reasons I do so many debates is because I do think that I’m speaking to the audience from my worldview, why I think it’s perhaps superior to this guy’s or the things I’m advocating for better or worse.

With Dave, he’s doing the same thing. He’s advocating his worldview. I think the difference there, the distinction, was that he was surprised and he kind of asked me about it and I said, “Look, the reason is because you’re a good debater and you’ve gotten better as time has gone on and if you’re going to represent your view, I want you to be the best at representing that view because that’s how you determine which worldview people end up going with.”

This is why so many people have moved towards Christianity and Christian ethics. Seeing the religious debates has a lot to do with that, with the various ideas in worldview being expanded, and then the kind of the graciousness even after the debate of trying to help the other person with their view.

JOE ROGAN: That’s very cool, and that would be nice if most people used that framework to have discussions.

ANDREW WILSON: They don’t.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t. No, they don’t. And again, it’s like, it’s a part of what we were talking about, that there’s this whole commodity of attention, and there’s a lot of attention on dunking on people and shitting on people and being mean. And people love that stuff for whatever reason.

Political Violence and the Left

ANDREW WILSON: That’s true. Now, I’m not always that charitable when it comes to progressives or leftists, the people who I consider responsible for many of the most horrific things in society socially that we deal with. I’m not nearly as charitable to them. But this is because in my humble experience, they have not been very charitable to anybody.

JOE ROGAN: No.

ANDREW WILSON: Anybody’s views.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a very hyper-aggressive position and very prone to insults and that it’s normalized. It’s like attacking people is normalized. The celebration of Charlie Kirk is a great example of like the cruelty that’s normalized, right?

ANDREW WILSON: And when you get down to the core pillar of their ideology, a lot of them think not only is this justified— I’ll give you an example. There’s a guy who was inside the Twitch sphere who says, “Well, wouldn’t you kill Hitler if you could before he became Hitler?” That’s his justification. And so you see many progressives who have this kind of justification and that leads to a huge amount of political violence which becomes normalized because they justify it through the lens of “I’m stopping a monster.”

I’ve never thought these people see me as a human being. I don’t think that they do. I think that they see me, most of them, at least the ones I debate with, as an actual monster who’s trying to take from or destroy them or hurt them in some way. And so from my view, that’s what it always seems like coming this direction is that there’s— they don’t even see me as a person. They see me as an idea or an ideology which is there to hurt them, right?

JOE ROGAN: That they have to attack and beat and win, right? And then of course they’re in the echo chamber of the people that also support that ideology, and they’re all like agreeing that this is okay and that this is acceptable and this violence is acceptable and all these different— yeah, it’s really— it’s kind of daunting because you’re just like, when does this dust settle? When do people just like relax and start having actual conversations on both sides? Like, when do people just do what you and Dave did and just find out why a person thinks what they think and what the actual facts of what they’re saying are and whether or not your worldview is distorted.

ANDREW WILSON: Or compatible.

JOE ROGAN: Or compatible.

Christian Ethics, Secular Humanism, and the Foundations of Morality

ANDREW WILSON: You know, like Christian ethics living inside of libertarianism, from my view, is way better than trying to make Christian ethics compatible with progressive ideology. And so if I have to pick between a guy governing like [Mamdani] or a guy who holds the ideology like Dave Smith, I’m picking Dave Smith’s ideology. And those are the choices. Because that’s how I view it. I view it as choices between ideologies. Somebody’s going to be in charge. Somebody’s going to be in charge of the state no matter what. I’m going to try to pick the ideology that’s closest to my own. If you’re going to be in charge of the state, I definitely want you to at least be representing the values that I have while you’re in charge of it.

JOE ROGAN: And the values of being legitimately charitable and a pathway to redemption, which doesn’t exist with progressives, which is really a problem. Because they keep pushing the goalposts and eating their own. They keep going further and further left and attacking people for not being left enough. And like, you get cast out of the community, you get excommunicated for minor— I mean, how many people were excommunicated during COVID for just not going along with the government’s narrative on pharmaceutical drugs being injected in your body absent your consent?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, many of them wanted COVID passports, remember that? Yeah, they wanted to inject the jabby stabby into you. YouTube even censored opposition to it for a long time.

JOE ROGAN: I think there’s a real problem with people that don’t have an ethical framework or a moral framework that’s just arbitrary, and they don’t have a religious foundation. Yeah, like, that’s where I always describe it as like, whether you believe in Christ or not, it’s an awesome framework, like a scaffolding for being a good person. You could follow that guy’s teachings, like there’s no flaws in it. Like, especially Jesus. Like, there’s not one thing you point to. Like, you know, there’s a few guys in religion that you could point to and go, yeah, well, he married a 9-year-old. Like, hey, yeah, that seems a little fed. Hey, he said he could kill the infidels. That seems a little fed. With Jesus, there’s none of that.

ANDREW WILSON: None of that. None of that. It’s interesting that you bring that up, the kind of foundational principles for Christians, the emulation of Christ. We accept that we’re flawed. We accept that we sin, and we accept that the only pathway for us to redemption is to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ through Christian ethics, right? That’s what— that’s how we perceive things. So baked into that is not only redemption, it’s not only the idea of salvation, but it’s an idea— it gives you a value to move towards.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ANDREW WILSON: And what’s missing often from the progressive ideology, from the secular ideology or the atheist ideology. How do you give a person a moral ought if you are the ultimate arbiter of all that is moral? Because it just comes down to your preference, right? How do we determine who the ultimate arbiter now is?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ANDREW WILSON: Well, it usually just comes down to you and whatever your preferences are. And so what are we moving towards exactly? How do we make the determination that you’re in error? You’re not moving towards this greater value?

JOE ROGAN: What you do is you’re establishing a new non-defined religion that could be moved and changed based on the winds. Yeah, at any given time, and depending on who’s the most radical and the most charismatic that’s in charge of whatever that movement is at the time. Eat the rich, whatever it is. Whatever crazy thing.

ANDREW WILSON: They turn into little micro-cults.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

ANDREW WILSON: Right? Like the secular— have you seen the secular humanist micro-cult?

JOE ROGAN: Sure. Same thing there.

ANDREW WILSON: Remember Atheism Plus?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, right. Atheism Plus.

The Matt Dillahunty Debate

ANDREW WILSON: Secular humanism is really interesting because I’ve debated the most prominent secular humanists in the world.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s that?

ANDREW WILSON: Well, I did Matt Dillahunty. I’ve done several secular humanist debates. Matt Dillahunty was the funniest thing in the world. He rage quit in the first few minutes of the debate in my opening statement because I brought up this glaring contradiction in his worldview.

I said— so he was dating a trans person, but he says he’s not gay, right? He said, “I’m not gay, but I’m dating a trans person.” So I brought this up and I said, “The way that we can assess truth claims, I could just point an easy one out of how we can assess that maybe this isn’t a good way to evaluate truth claims, because he says he’s in a non-homosexual relationship with a trans woman and reconciles that by saying, ‘No, that’s a real woman.'” And I’m like, if we can’t even distinguish what’s real and what’s true, how could you even have it?

JOE ROGAN: Did he have his quit off that?

ANDREW WILSON: Oh, he was so angry. He called me a bunch of names, got up and rage quit for me pointing out this glaring contradiction in his ideology. And it basically ruined his career, but he did it to himself because he should just stay and done the debate, and here’s why I think this. But instead he just lost it. He lost it, got up undignified, threw the mic, called me a bunch of names, walked out. And anyway, I said, “You and your husband have a wonderful evening.” And he just— I guess that was it for him on his way out.

But the problem with this ideology is it’s changed. So he was reading from the Secular Humanist Manifesto III. So it’s already had, you know, it’s on its 3rd revision now, and it started initially as kind of more religious dogma, and then it took on a non-religious dogma, and they called it the Secular Humanist Manifesto.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s creating the canon?

ANDREW WILSON: There was a big meeting in Amsterdam. Not kidding. I’m not kidding. It’s the Amsterdam Secular Humanist Manifesto. And essentially, it just comes down to these arbitrary preferences around— we’re just kind of for things that make you feel good and kind of against things that make us not feel so good. Now, that’s the biggest oversimplification in the world, but it really does just kind of reduce to that.

And so one of the ways that you can always kind of endlessly beat these guys about the head and the shoulders with their own ideology is just point this out. Who’s in charge of this anyway? Like which one of you gets to make this determination that this is the ought that I should follow based on anything other than your preferences? And the idea always is, “Well, it wouldn’t just be my preference. It would be the preference of many people.” But don’t those change? “Well, yeah.” Well, then what you’re saying is that what you consider moral today, you’re not going to consider moral tomorrow. That tells me that you’re saying to me you don’t know what is moral and what is not.

The Christian has the opposite approach. They’re saying what was moral yesterday is still moral today, and what’s still moral today is still what’s going to be moral 1,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now, because that’s the teaching they’re basing it on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s really odd if anybody— it’s like Wikipedia, like anybody can contribute.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, or edit. You can just edit it whenever you want to. Thing feel bad, edit.

JOE ROGAN: It’s way worse than Wikipedia because it’s not even edit, like you could actually add to the canon. You could— oh yeah, right, you could write your own, you know, the Book of Eugene.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Book of Eugene, and this is Eugene’s new prophetic way forward. That is 100% true, and there are actual failsafes in the Bible that prevent people from writing new Bibles, right? The entirety of the message of Christ in and of itself— this is what Christian ethics is based on, the teachings of Jesus Christ, the teachings of the Scriptures. But it always gives us a thing to move towards, and that is why it creates, I think, better societies in general, better societies overall, because people always go, “Wait a second, I’m supposed to be moving towards this idea.”

JOE ROGAN: If you really do follow it, it makes nice people. Like, the people that I know that are like genuine real Christians are some of the nicest people I know. Of course, they’re so kind, almost as nice as the Mormons.

The Wealth of the Mormon Church

ANDREW WILSON: The Mormon thing— well, if you have to be in a cult, like you said, boy, that’s got to be the one.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a great one. You get a bunch of wives, everyone’s cool.

ANDREW WILSON: And do you know that they’re the richest? They’re richer than the Catholic Church.

JOE ROGAN: Are they really?

ANDREW WILSON: Much richer.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

ANDREW WILSON: Much richer.

JOE ROGAN: I would have never guessed.

ANDREW WILSON: I didn’t either until somebody told me that. There’s no way. Yes, there is.

JOE ROGAN: There’s so many Catholics. Aren’t there way more Catholics?

ANDREW WILSON: Way more. But it’s the tithing. So Mormons are really— they practice nepotism like no other. I mean, they just overwhelmingly practice this in their communities. And so with the tithing, business tithing, some of these businesses will tithe the Mormon Church 60, 70%, and then they get awarded various contracts from their friends and things like this. And the church has beaucoup dollars.

JOE ROGAN: Damn, what a nice setup.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, it’s a pretty nice setup for them. And then they run their own politicians inside their own states.

JOE ROGAN: Of course.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, which then enforces their law. It’s like they kind of figured a lot of this out.

JOE ROGAN: As long as they’re nice, whatever. If they could push that niceness out to everybody else, like, you know, what— but why? What do you got here, Jeremy? It does— it’s official, Mormonism is the richest religion in the world. But I just— I mean, Catholicism as a whole, somewhere in the $2.2 to $3 trillion. Oh, because there’s a bunch of different Catholic churches. Yeah, I see.

ANDREW WILSON: But the single richest church is, yeah, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So Mormons.

JOE ROGAN: Wow, they have $100 billion. Yeah, everybody else. Yeah, it’s not even— Vatican is only $30 billion. I would have never guessed they were that much richer than the Vatican. That is not— that’s not correct. It’s not fair. That does not correct. What do you mean? I’m just saying it’s not correct. How so? I mean, well, also, it’s a Wikipedia post on Reddit. That’s not the best word. Oh, you just think this is just not accurate in general? Yeah, whatever Holy See is, is not— that’s the Vatican.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, that’ll be—

JOE ROGAN: I know, but I mean, it’s— they got way more than $30 billion, and just— that’s a lot of money, dude. It is just art. I wonder, right? That’s a good point. I just looked it up. It’s worth $3 trillion. It says on this other post. Oh, interesting. So just the art? I’m just— or the buildings and the Vatican itself? With getting into the weeds of it, yeah, it has one whole church in Utah. Yes, comparatively to the one church in Texas. So are they just basing it on their assets? Is that what it is? Also, it’s a— it was comparing it to like per person, like per year, per— look, the average Catholic is worth $67,000 versus $1.7 million. Damn, the average Mormon is worth $1.7 million?

ANDREW WILSON: Nepotism, baby.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and then also there’s a Catholic—

ANDREW WILSON: There’s way more Catholics like in Africa that, you know, aren’t worth anything, and South America especially, right?

JOE ROGAN: But that is crazy. The average Mormon’s worth $1.7 million. That’s also their—

ANDREW WILSON: Probably their stat. Yeah, at least, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, probably like, “Yo bro, join us.” That’s what Scientology does, right? Oh, that was a big thing with Scientology. In Hollywood. In Hollywood, when I first moved there in 1994, there was a bunch of people that were doing really well who were Scientologists, and there was this sort of push that if you join Scientology, they take care of you and you get hooked up.

ANDREW WILSON: That is really a wide berth. It’s between $300 billion and $2.5 trillion.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a really wide— it’s almost like [Ilhan Omar’s] accountant.

ANDREW WILSON: 100%. Vatican is hiding something.

The Vatican, The Ark, and Ancient Mysteries

JOE ROGAN: I heard the other day that someone just said, “Rome didn’t go away. It just became the Catholic Church,” and that’s why, you know. Have you been to the Vatican? Oh my God, the art is insane. It’s insane. I went on a tour with this guy who was a professor from France. It was really cool. He was really smart. It was a very interesting tour. You could hire a guy, and this guy was a professor, and in the summer he would give these tours. And if you were enthusiastic about it, he was awesome. And I was really, really into it. So I was asking him all these questions, and he kept explaining in depth to me. And you just never run out of art. You’re looking at so much s. Like, this is crazy. You keep going into new rooms and new fing new auditoriums, and then you’re in like St. Peter’s Basilica. Just that alone, you’re like, what?

ANDREW WILSON: What?

JOE ROGAN: This is crazy.

ANDREW WILSON: And it’s all worth a fortune.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so big and so majestic that if you didn’t believe in God and you went there, you’d be like, “Okay, maybe they might know something. How the f* did you do this?” Like, it’s so majestic that it almost changes your perception of what’s possible.

ANDREW WILSON: You think they got the Chronovisor in there?

JOE ROGAN: The what?

ANDREW WILSON: The Chronovisor. The Vatican Chronovisor.

JOE ROGAN: What is that?

ANDREW WILSON: That’s supposedly— this is conspiracy stuff, right? Getting into the conspiracy stuff. Supposedly the Vatican is sitting on something called the Chronovisor, which tells them the future. And it was invented, I don’t know how many hundreds of years ago, but you put on the Chronovisor and it shows you the future.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. No. Yes. Oh my God, where is the arrow pointing to? Like, it’d be like Jesus or something. I don’t understand.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah. And so you put on the hat. Yeah, you put it on and it’ll show you different spots in time or something. This is called the Chronovisor.

The Ark of the Covenant

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m really interested in the Ark of the Covenant that’s supposedly in Ethiopia. Have you ever heard Graham Hancock talk about that?

ANDREW WILSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: It’s really interesting. So the Ethiopian Bible has a lot of the Book of Enoch in it, and it’s a really old version.

ANDREW WILSON: They don’t consider it deuterocanon, they consider it canon. Yeah, so the Ethiopian Church is not actually— I don’t believe it’s actually in communion with the Orthodox Church anymore, right? It’s on its own along with a couple others. But they do have more books in their Bible than the Orthodox Church does or the Catholic Church, right?

JOE ROGAN: And supposedly they’re guarding the Ark of the Covenant, and these people that are assigned to be a guardian of this thing, they can only do it for a couple years and they develop cataracts. And he talked to these people.

ANDREW WILSON: From the blinding light?

JOE ROGAN: From whatever the f* it is. Like, whatever it is. It might be radiation. I mean, who knows what it is? But apparently the lore is that it’s this one particular church, this very old church in Ethiopia, and there is an area where they are guarding the Ark of the Covenant. And the people that are supposed to be in the room with it, they can only do it for a couple years and then they get horribly sick. And then they have to switch them out, and they get cataracts — documented cataracts from all these guys who go in. I mean, maybe it’s the placebo effect. They think they’re going to get— I don’t know, but I highly doubt it. Yeah, it sounds more likely you’ve got some sort of a crazy artifact that might be ancient technology.

ANDREW WILSON: We have the same thing in Israel over Jesus’s tomb.

The Miracle of the Holy Sepulchre

JOE ROGAN: Supposedly. Yeah, the Chronovisor. I was just reading the article. It says it’s a purported photo. Oh, it’s crystal clear. That’s clearer than whatever his name is, Tyler Robinson.

ANDREW WILSON: Right, right. That’s in 4K.

JOE ROGAN: This guy swears that he had the ability to go witness these events. He witnessed tons of stuff, and then when he died, it says the Pope hid it so nobody could ever—

ANDREW WILSON: —nobody could ever use it again. How convenient.

JOE ROGAN: Very convenient.

ANDREW WILSON: But yeah, another big miracle that’s like that is over the tomb of Jesus Christ sits the Orthodox Church in Israel. Now that’s true, right? That is in fact the case, that there is an Orthodox Church, a Christian church, that’s above the tomb.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

ANDREW WILSON: And every year— I think it’s every year— they have the Miracle of the Holy Sepulchre. I think I’m pronouncing that right, Sepulchre. And what they do is they use flame and emulate themselves in this holy flame, and they’re burning, they’re on fire, and none of them burn.

JOE ROGAN: What?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How do they do that?

ANDREW WILSON: Nobody knows.

JOE ROGAN: But there’s just one small sect of Christianity?

ANDREW WILSON: No, no, this is the Orthodox Church. People come from miles around.

JOE ROGAN: But who are the people that light themselves on fire?

ANDREW WILSON: These are people who are in the church who are specially selected to basically emulate— and they set themselves on fire with the holy flame from torches. And apparently, this is what I’m told, they’ve had people go and investigate and they can’t figure out how exactly this is being done, but they’re completely on fire and they don’t get hurt at all.

JOE ROGAN: Jamie, pull— is there video of that?

ANDREW WILSON: There is video.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

JOE ROGAN: Greek television. Like 5 candles and white phosphorus. The candles spontaneously ignited for approximately 10 minutes due to the self-ignition properties of white phosphorus when in contact with the air. According to the website, it says that phosphorus is dissolved in an appropriate organic solvent. Self-ignition is delayed until the solvent is completely evaporated. Repeated experiments show the ignition can be delayed for half an hour or more, depending on the density of the solution. How does it stop them from catching fire though and dying?

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

ANDREW WILSON: The same way.

JOE ROGAN: That’s probably like the— the s that people put on to make movies. He’s a skeptic, this motherfer. He’s always ruining everything. I think logic—

True Skepticism

ANDREW WILSON: I think skepticism is great if people actually practice the real philosophical tradition of skepticism, which is you’re supposed to also be skeptical of your own view, right? So the real skeptics— I’ll never forget this debate that I listened to that always stuck with me for years. It was with a guy named Jay Dyer and that same guy Matt Dillahunty, and they were debating.

JOE ROGAN: And here it is. Sorry, they were debating.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, they were debating, and Dillahunty said, “Well, I’m a skeptic.” And Jay said, “No, you’re not. Here’s the actual philosophy of skepticism. And it always starts with you. Your view is what you apply skepticism to first, long before you ever apply it to any other.”

And the problem with people who describe themselves now as skeptics— “I’m a skeptic”— they actually aren’t really following skepticism. They’re skeptical of your view. That doesn’t mean that they’re skeptical of their own, and it’s supposed to start internally. That’s what made skepticism something that spread widely, was that it was a way for people to reject parts of their own worldview that didn’t fit. They didn’t match. They weren’t coherent. They didn’t make much sense. So most of the time I hear skepticism, the person is not actually following the philosophy of skepticism. They’re not applying it to their own view first.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s a lot of lazy skepticism too where they outright deny the existence of conspiracies, which is just f*ing ludicrous. It’s like you’re in a very rigid corridor of ideas. You’re only allowed to operate inside of it.

ANDREW WILSON: Oh, it’s ridiculous. Not only that, the US government has thousands of laws on the books about conspiracy. So it’s like our government seems to believe in them, because there’s conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to commit theft, conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They clearly believe that there’s a lot of conspiracies going on and definitely prosecute people for conspiracy all the time, but somehow when it comes to the skeptic mindset — nope, that’s all tinfoil hats.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a lazy perspective, and it’s also a perspective that falls in line with what we were talking about before, where you take a lot of legitimate conspiracies and you add a bunch of bulls* to it to make it seem completely ludicrous, and then the whole thing can be thrown out.

ANDREW WILSON: Flooding the zone.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so obvious that that’s a ploy. Did you find anybody catching fire? The first— yeah, I was getting into— I was like, well, they’re not really— they’re like just dancing their hands over the fire. It wouldn’t catch anybody on fire technically because they’re not—

ANDREW WILSON: —you’re not lighting— well, these guys are—

JOE ROGAN: See how it’s like touching this?

ANDREW WILSON: These guys don’t look like priests putting their hands through it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, so they’re faking it. So a few people are faking it. Oh, this guy’s lighting his beard on fire. There was a lady that at the end of one of these videos, she held a piece of paper over it and it wasn’t— I mean, well, this is stuff like regular fire, but that’s where I was. Yeah, we get into the white phosphorus thing. They said after 30 minutes it will start acting as you expect it to. Look at all— it seems like everybody should be on fire. How odd. But yeah, it’s a long-standing tradition.

ANDREW WILSON: She’s wiping it on her forehead or something. Yeah, huge tradition there. They call it the miracle.

Wrapping Up

JOE ROGAN: There’s another tradition in America called “I gotta take a pee.” So let’s wrap this up. This is really fun, man.

ANDREW WILSON: It was a lot of fun. Always appreciate you having me.

JOE ROGAN: Cool hanging out with you.

ANDREW WILSON: Yeah, I enjoyed it.

JOE ROGAN: We went over a lot today.

ANDREW WILSON: A lot of s*.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, a lot, and I enjoyed it very much. Thank you.

ANDREW WILSON: Thank you. My pleasure. Let’s do it again.

JOE ROGAN: Of course.

ANDREW WILSON: Ladies and gentlemen, good night.

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