Transcript of Mel Gibson on Joe Rogan Podcast #2254

Your brain, everything, everything goes to hell.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you’re in pain all the time. Yeah. People with back problems, like they can’t think straight, because you’re always like, you know, —

MEL GIBSON: There’s a gift to not thinking straight.

JOE ROGAN: Hmm. Tell me. Tell me more. I want to know.

MEL GIBSON: Well, it actually takes you down some pretty weird paths, you know. If you’re happy all the time, I don’t know, you don’t have, you don’t have to strive to find thoughts to make yourself happy. So it’s like, it’s a good, it’s a good, it’s a good predisposition, I think.

JOE ROGAN: I agree to that. Yeah. I think being happy all the time is, it’s kind of an unlikely scenario.

MEL GIBSON: No, nobody is.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. No.

MEL GIBSON: But we all want it. You notice we all yearn for it. That’s the only thing we all want, right?

JOE ROGAN: Right. Just happiness. Little peace.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also, we’re shown it, like, in, you know, television, movies, like, we’re shown happiness as the goal. Like, seek happiness. Should be happy, all the time, happy. Should never be upset. Well. It’s not realistic.

MEL GIBSON: It’s completely unrealistic. However, it’s nice to have those little journeys through art, where you can actually explore those things. You can explore your ids, you can explore happiness, and see, and experience the opposite. I look at situations around me, and I generally feel pretty grateful for what some people go through. I’m grateful.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

MEL GIBSON: And everybody’s got their crap, you know.

California Wildfires and Costa Rica

MEL GIBSON: But, like, this morning, for example, I would be surprised if my home is still there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we were just talking about that. The Palisades is on fire. My friend Tom, Tom Segura, his house is gone.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: This is where he used to live. He sold it, luckily.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, I have a son. He’s in a sort of volunteer fire brigade, Milo. I call him the mayor of Malibu. And he’s running around, and I asked him, how’s things looking there, Milo? He says, not good, Pops. He says, your neighborhood. And he sent me a video of my neighborhood, and it’s in flames. It looks like an inferno.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Do you think this will get you out of California, finally?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, maybe, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Where are you going to go?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, I don’t know. I got a place in Costa Rica. I love it there.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Costa Rica’s nice.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, I bought there many years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah?

MEL GIBSON: It’s in a real nice spot. It’s not too touristy or, you know, dirt roads.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, nice.

MEL GIBSON: It’s off the beaten.

JOE ROGAN: Does it feel safe out there?

MEL GIBSON: Pretty safe. I think, look, no place is safe. I mean, you’ve got the Dariang down there, you know.

MEL GIBSON: What’s that?

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of in the, what’s the next country down? Panama. And there’s this no man’s land where the Colombians come through, and it’s like, you know, all kinds of dirty dealings in the jungle with, you know, who knows, you know, drugs and mules and, you know. So, you know, it can be dangerous, and I’ve heard of danger happening there. You know, you hear about somebody getting chopped up by a machete.

And Costa Rica, it’s actually a cool place because it never had a culture of death like a lot of the Central American countries did. They have a culture of death, you know. Even Mexico, I mean, they used to, you know, tear people’s hearts out and tear them. All that sort of stuff. Aztecs were like the Romans. The Mayans were like the Greeks. But they all sort of dabbled in some stuff. Costa Rica always had a policy where they, like the Switzerland of Central America, they emphasized education and health. And everybody’s literate, and it’s kind of interesting in that way. But it deals with its own little troubles. Like every country, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Except anywhere down in that part of the world. It’s just like there’s so much sketchy shit going on all around you.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, there can be.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, one has to be forewarned, forearmed, all that, you know. So I have a nice place down there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I have some friends that have a place in Mexico. I’m always like, don’t you ever worry.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, I worked in Mexico a couple of times. I was down there, and it was in Veracruz. And apparently, you know, people were rolling heads into bars and stuff like that, you know, rival gangs and stuff. And they said, I’d go for a walk, you know. And they’d say, you’re crazy going for a walk. You’ll get kidnapped. I said, I’m not going to get kidnapped. I’m the guy that pays. You’re going to get kidnapped. And I’m not going to pay your ransom. It’s like I never felt insecure in that way. And, you know, if something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: You know, if your number’s up. I know, I used to watch guys who do what I do for a living, and they’d have a phalanx of bodyguards around them, you know, and, like, for security and stuff. But, and I used to have that stuff for a little while, but, meh, it doesn’t make any difference. You’re going to be okay.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

MEL GIBSON: Or not.

JOE ROGAN: Or not, right?

MEL GIBSON: Until you’re not.

JOE ROGAN: Until you’re not. And everybody’s going to be okay until they’re not.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I got in a dodgy situation one night, and I acted crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What happened?

MEL GIBSON: If you act crazy, everybody leaves you alone.

JOE ROGAN: Especially if you are a little crazy. You know? We know.

MEL GIBSON: You’re in a stress mode, so you actually get angry. If I feel like I’m threatened, I get angry, which is what happens. And then you get really in people’s faces, and they think, this guy’s crazy.

But all the old cultures thought that. Like, when there were people traveling across the Great Plains to go west, you know, if you acted nuts, they’d leave you alone because they didn’t want your evil spirits.

JOE ROGAN: Oh. So what happened with you?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, nothing. They left me alone.

JOE ROGAN: But where was this?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, man. I was in a bad neighborhood. I was, it was when I first got into L.A. And I was to go to dinner with Costa-Gavras. He was a Greek director. I went the wrong way. And it was before they had, you know, phones with like, you know, all that stuff.

JOE ROGAN: The Thomas guide.

MEL GIBSON: It was the Thomas guide. Anyway, I wasn’t guided well by Thomas. I ended up in the wrong place. And then my muffler fell off. And I was driving a Mercedes, you know, pretty nice sporty car, you know. And I thought, oh, and I had the wife in the car. I pulled into a side street. The sun was going down. And as I got out of the car, I thought, oh, I got to fix this muffler. I can’t just drag it. People started coming from houses. And they came up to me. And I saw them coming in the rearview mirror. And I jumped out of the car and got in their face. And I said, what the fuck do you want? Because I thought, I felt threatened.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: And the guy said, man, I’m just looking for some money. You got any money? He started being mugged. And it was like, I thought, I’ll think about it when I’m fucking finished. Like, you know. I opened the trunk. And this is the weird part, Joe. I will never quite understand this. I opened the trunk to see what I could find to help me put the muffler back on. And sitting there, the only two things in the back of the trunk was a pair of wire cutters and a coat hanger. It’s exactly what I needed. And I don’t know why it was there. That’s weird, isn’t it?

JOE ROGAN: That’s very weird. So you used the coat hanger to wire up your muffler?

MEL GIBSON: Yep. I cut a piece of wire, wired the muffler up. The whole time, more guys are coming. And they’re standing behind me. And I’m feeling like, oh. And anyway, I get up. I finish the muffler. And I’m acting mad and crazy the whole time. And I think, this guy’s nuts. And I get back to the car. And my wife gives me a handful of cash. And I thought, what’s this? She says, it’s just fives and ones. Give it to her. So I threw it and drove off. But it was like, it was looking hairy for a minute. And you never know.

JOE ROGAN: What year was this?

MEL GIBSON: Oh my God. Back in the 90s.

California’s Current Situation

JOE ROGAN: So things are more dangerous now.

MEL GIBSON: I think they are.

JOE ROGAN: I think so for sure. Yeah. We were just talking about the wildfire situation and how crazy it is that they spent $24 billion last year on the homeless. And what do they spend on preventing these wildfires?

MEL GIBSON: Zero. Zip. And in 2019, I think Newsom said, you know, I’m going to take care of the forest and maintain the forest and do all that kind of stuff. He didn’t do anything.

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t do anything. And then on top of that, they cut the water off.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. It’s all funny. And then I think all our tax dollars probably went for Gavin’s hair gel. I don’t know, but it’s like, you know, it’s sad. It’s like the place is just on fire.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the whole state is just so poorly managed. It’s so frustrating and confusing. And then he gets on TV and pretends like everything’s great. And California is the best. We have the best state. We have the most amazing economy. I’m like, you’re out of your fucking mind, dude. You’ve ruined this state. It personally ruined it.

MEL GIBSON: Well, it’s the same team that was up in San Francisco. They came down to L.A. and they’re doing what they did in San Francisco. San Francisco is kind of like apocalyptic now, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: I went there and it’s just like people, you know, homeless. You know, it’s just a mess.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just unbelievable that society can crumble that quickly. It really is unbelievable.

MEL GIBSON: It doesn’t take long.

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I read a book once by Jared Diamond called “Collapse”. You ever read that book?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Crazy, right? It says, all the things you need for a civilization to cave in and collapse. And a lot of the things are present. All those earmarks, the precursors of a collapse, they’re present in our time. So it’s an interesting observation.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And we’re no smarter than our grandparents, I don’t think.

Apocalypto and Ancient Civilizations

JOE ROGAN: Well, that brings me to one of my favorite movies of yours is “Apocalypto”. You know, when the Mayans were running things, like who could have ever thought when they had such an incredibly sophisticated society, unbelievable construction, like the stuff that they had built that one day you just walk through there and there’s nothing. Nothing and nobody.

MEL GIBSON: In fact, there’s something because it’s interesting. Somebody was flying by what they thought was a volcano in the 30s, some buzz boy. And he thought, hey, somebody built that. Wait a minute. There’s four by eight foot bricks. That’s not, that’s man-made. And it is literally the biggest pyramid in the world. It’s bigger than the ones in Egypt. And it’s in Guatemala.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. We talked about that the other day. Yeah. It’s a recent discovery, right?

MEL GIBSON: Well, not that recent. I was, maybe 20 years ago, I visited. I went down there with the, with the archaeologist, a guy named Richard Hanson, who’s from Idaho or someplace.

Ancient Civilizations and Archaeology

MEL GIBSON: And he’s down there with his family. He’s been working tirelessly for like 30 years, trying to extract this pre-classic city from the jungle. And there’s not a bunch of tourists. All the pyramids in Tikal would fit inside the one big pyramid in El Mirador.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It’s a monster. And so that tells you that the pre-classic civilization was bigger and grander and more sophisticated than the civilizations that came after it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Pretty interesting. Well, it is unbelievable how, like, when you, the accounts of, like, people that visited Mexico and visited the Aztecs, like, what the markets looked like and how insane it was and how gorgeous it was. And then just, yeah. Disease.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Disease. I don’t know if it was disease or what. I think the people were pretty dissatisfied. It would have been hard for Cortez, with his limited numbers, to actually take over a civilization like that, unless they kind of happened upon a civilization that was pretty dissatisfied with the way things were going.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: So I think they had people to help them sort of rebel.

JOE ROGAN: When you’re making a movie like “Apocalypto”, I mean, that’s a crazy undertaking. You’re making an entire movie where there’s no English in it at all, and it’s a blockbuster.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s cool.

MEL GIBSON: It was fun.

JOE ROGAN: That’s one of the best movies, man. It’s a fucking great movie.

MEL GIBSON: Well, because I think it’s scary because nobody’s speaking your language. And you’re looking at indigenous peoples who you, and because they’re not speaking the language, you totally kind of buy it. And you can buy the horror and the primal nature of the story you want to tell. And really, it’s just a series of fears, one after the other, you know, being chased by scary guys, or eaten by wild animals, or, you know, hit by blowguns. You know, blowguns. It’s all like a series of these things. But I think basically what I was doing was trying to talk about our time now and the civilization that we live in, and how close are we to collapse, and what are the things that lead to collapse? It’s, you know, it’s environmental stuff. It’s human sacrifice.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: I mean, we do that.

JOE ROGAN: Kinda.

MEL GIBSON: We do.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we do. We just dress it up. Yeah. When you find out medications are killing people, and they keep prescribing them, and they do it for money, that’s kind of sacrifice. When you find out that wars are irresponsible.

MEL GIBSON: They’re not just wars.

JOE ROGAN: Not just?

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: They’re for money?

MEL GIBSON: We send our young people over there to die. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not. I mean, I love the warrior. I do. I love the warrior, but I hate the war.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And, you know.

JOE ROGAN: We hate an unjust war.

MEL GIBSON: Yes. Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Anyway, it’s a mess. But the human sacrifice aspect is alive and well in our society, I think.

JOE ROGAN: It really is. It’s just dressed up in a different way.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Rhetoric around it. But they’ve always been able to justify it. Like in “Apocalypto”, it was like, yeah, so the crops will be better. Hey, we’ll just, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Kill a few people.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And then I had all these people come out of the woodwork. Hey, we’re archaeologists and scientists. And that never happened. So there’s this revisionism about it, too, that it didn’t happen. But there are accounts from the time where, yes, people did witness these things. And, of course, I had a bunch of battery of archaeologists and scientists and professors on my own that say, yeah, well, this stuff did happen. And here’s the, you know, the depictions of it in paintings and images. And, you know, it did happen. So, you know.

JOE ROGAN: When you set out to make a movie like that, like, what, first of all, what brings you to that? Did you get the script first? Like, was it an idea that you had in your head?

MEL GIBSON: It was, it just came from in here. And I was working on something and a buddy of mine said, so what do you want to do next? I said, ah, man, I want to direct something. I always want to direct a chase film. He said, what kind of chase? I said, a foot chase. He said, what? I said, yeah, people chasing you. I mean, there’s something kind of primal and scary about a foot chase. And I think in order to have a foot chase, you can’t have a society where there’s any kind of cars or anything like that. Otherwise, you have a car chase. But I want to film a foot chase like it’s a car chase. And he said, oh. I said, what are you thinking? I said, well, I’m thinking if you go back before Columbus discovered America, you know. And it’s like people assume that Columbus discovered America and then life began. And I said, I want to know what was happening right before he got there.

Before he got there. And I said, so I had this idea that you see all this stuff going on and there’s no time period on it. And then all of a sudden you date it by the arrival of Europeans. And I said, it’s kind of like the Rod Serling, you know, “Planet of the Apes”.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Like it’s kind of a cool, cool ending. And he said, oh, wow. And he said, where do you think Columbus landed? I said, well, let’s look. So I looked up and the first peoples he encountered were Mayan trading canoes off the coast of Honduras. And I thought, cool, what was happening in Honduras, you know. And you look at these towns and pyramids and temples and stuff at that time. And then the story was born from there. And, of course, then we read the book by Jared Diamond, “Collapse”. I read the Mayan Bible, the Popol Vuh. And, you know, tried to delve into what they believed and what their civilization was like. And they had concepts, as we do, of heaven and hell, of punishment or reward, you know. It was a little different, quite a bit different, actually.

In fact, when I went down to the archaeological sites at El Mirador, they dug something up. And it was like, well, what is it? And they said, we don’t know. Well, there was this carved image in the stone of this Mayan warrior drinking. And he had an ear spool. And it was like, hmm. So they dug further and further. And it went like 26 meters down. And it was the entire story of the Popol Vuh, of the twins going into hell and getting their father’s head and swimming back. And it’s this crazy story. And it kind of dated that book because I think it was almost 3,000 years old, this mural, this carving. So it tells you the story is pretty old. And they thought initially it was probably back in the 1300s. But this confirmed that it was at least 2,600 years old, something like that.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. So it’s pretty cool. To be there when they’re digging that stuff up is mind-blowing.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re missing so much of the Mayan history. It’s very interesting. You want some coffee?

MEL GIBSON: I want some water.

JOE ROGAN: That’s water.

JOE ROGAN: Water. They’re missing so much of the Mayan history because everybody’s gone. But one of the – you ever see the very bizarre carving where it looks like there’s a guy who’s sitting in a cockpit of a spaceship looking through some sort of an eye thing?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. They’ve got some weird stuff. It’s like weird.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Where there’s fire underneath the chair. Like what is that?

MEL GIBSON: They’ve got dudes that look like Europeans. They have these guys with red beards and helmets and stuff like these Phoenician guys who probably traveled over there early on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Probably maybe in the 6th century or something like that. So they – it wasn’t that long a boat ride. So they probably went over there and made contact and they thought they were gods or something and then they went away again and they said, well, wait for them to come back. And, of course, they did come back. But it didn’t work out the same.

JOE ROGAN: No. No. No. Well, there’s so many accounts of people visiting, especially when you get into the Amazon.

MEL GIBSON: Sure. Oh, I don’t know about the Amazon.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God.

MEL GIBSON: Tell me about that.

JOE ROGAN: Well, first of all, the Amazon used to be filled with people and most of the Amazon is man-made. The jungle in the Amazon is agriculture.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. The jungle in the Amazon, they didn’t even know this until fairly recently. And they now know from flying over. They use LIDAR, which is this lightning radar. So when they use this laser radar shit, when they fly over it, they’re finding all these grids and pathways and cities in the jungle. So the jungle had consumed all these cities. I think there was millions and millions of people living in the Amazon.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that Europeans came over, diseases.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody dies. The jungle consumes the city. People come back 200 years later looking for it, like the lost city of Z, like that story.

MEL GIBSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They go back to look, and there’s nothing left.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Guns, germs, and steel.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Wow. That’s fascinating. I’ll have to look into that.

JOE ROGAN: And we’re going through all those things right now. Guns, germs, and steel.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Germs. I’m just on the tail end of some hideous flu that was going. I don’t know if you’ve got it.

JOE ROGAN: Did you get the H5N1 or whatever the fuck it is?

MEL GIBSON: I don’t know what the hell it is. Yeah. I’ve had that. That was the swine thing. I had swine flu one time.

JOE ROGAN: Did you have that in 2009?

MEL GIBSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: It was around then.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. It was an epidemic, a pandemic, whatever you want to call it. But it didn’t have the same sort of press releases that COVID did.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. I got the swine flu. I acted more like a pig. Terrible. Terrible. Wallowing in my own mud.

Filmmaking and Language

JOE ROGAN: So I like “Flight Risk”. It’s a fun movie.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, it’s a hoot. You know, it’s a hoot. I mean, I think the first thing you’ve got to do with any film, and I think it’s incumbent upon all directors, artists, to entertain first. In some fashion. Even if it’s a heavy story, you have to find some aspect of it that entertains. And I think this, for entertainment’s sake, is just fun. And it’s quick. I’m not subjecting you to four hours of, like, watching autism dry. You know, it’s like, you know, it’s 85, 90 minutes, and you’re out. It’s a good time. Yeah. And Mark is insane.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He’s great in it. He plays a good psycho.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, he’s a psychopath. Mark’s got a good dark side. There’s some dark stuff there that he was able to draw from. And every now and then, he’d let it out. I can’t even repeat some of the stuff he’d say. In fact, we had to cut most of it out. It was, like, really sick. But we hint at it.

JOE ROGAN: Hmm. Anyway. When you make a movie now, I mean, you’ve had such a career.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When you make a movie now, like, what motivates you at this point in your life? Like, how do you decide, let’s hit the green light on this one?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. There are things that speak to me. And they speak for a long time. And it’s, I remember when I was a kid in high school, I was studying English. And they were, well, where did the English language come from? And they talked about, wow, it came from this old guttural German, old Norse that the Vikings brought across. And I was thinking, wow, that’s cool, the Vikings, you know. And then immediately I start thinking, man, somebody should make, I want to make a film about Vikings. And they only speak in Old Norse because if they say, you know, if they speak English all of a sudden, you’re not buying it. But if they’re speaking some guttural language, you’re sort of scared by them. And it’s, like, that’s scary to me. And then I said to myself, I’m 17 years old. Why am I thinking about making films about Vikings? I don’t know anything about making films and not much about Vikings. So why the hell am I even thinking about that? But that was something that was early on was like a drive, I guess, to sort of depict things like that. So I did films in other languages, in Mayan and in Aramaic and in Latin, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And there’s a power to that. I noticed when I was young, I used to go and watch a lot of foreign films. I watched French movies, right, or German or whatever they were, Spanish. I’d watch them and I’d think, wow, the acting’s great in those. And it seemed better because of the subtitles.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Yeah, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: More believable somehow. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Right, because you’re not hearing insincerity in their voice because you don’t even understand what they’re saying.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You just feel the emotions in the words.

MEL GIBSON: And also, it has to take your attention because you have to do another function. You have to read.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Which is another thing that sort of maybe blinds you to the flaws in the filmmaking, perhaps. So, you know, hey, it’s a great trick.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s obfuscation. There’s a thing about reading it while you’re watching it. It’s like an added element of concentration. You know, like subtitled movies, you feel like you’re a smarter person watching a movie where you’re reading it as well.

The Power of Subtitles in Film

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And there’s, yeah, there’s something about the written word that’s like, it’s a pretty interesting thing to throw into the mix. I know when I first started, it was kind of confusing, but then I got really good at it. And I think, especially with something like, well, “The Passion” that I did, the written word was very important. Because it was, you know, you got all those books, the Bible, you know, you’ve got the different gospels and stuff that people are quite familiar with. Half the time, they didn’t even need to read the subtitles. They could look at it and know what was going on.

“The Passion of the Christ” and Hollywood Resistance

JOE ROGAN: That was a crazy movie because it was a great movie, but it seemed like there was resistance to that movie.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Which I thought was very strange. There was like Hollywood resistance to that movie. Like people didn’t like that you were making it, it seemed like.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, there was a lot of opposition to it, and I don’t know. I think if you ever hit on that subject matter, you’re going to get people going because… It’s big subject matter, and it’s like, you know… And my contention is, you know, when I was making it, it was like, you’re making this film, and the idea was that we’re all responsible for this. That his sacrifice was for all mankind and that for all our ills and all the things in our fallen nature. It was a redemption. So, you know, and I believe that, you know, I actually am, you know, I was born into a Catholic family. I’m very Christian in my beliefs, you know, so I do actually believe this stuff to the full. So depicting that was an honor, but it was also, yeah, you got the daylight beat out of you for it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, because there’s resistance, first of all, from secular Hollywood, where, for whatever reason, Christianity is the one religion that you’re allowed to disparage.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Christianity is the one religion where people, all these progressive, open-minded, leftist people, they’ll embrace all these different religions until it comes to Christianity. And for whatever reason, that represents, like, white, male, you know, whatever it represents, colonialism, you know, whatever it represents that’s negative.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, sure, it’s gotten a bad rap, and they, people do feel free to beat up on it.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: Even I do when I see it’s like, you know, when it’s not fair.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: When I think it’s off.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: You know, like, you know, when they appoint some cardinal in some diocese, and he’s been covering up for, like, people who are child molesters.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MEL GIBSON: You know, like Theodore McCarrick or Cardinal Wuerl or those kind of guys. I mean.

JOE ROGAN: For the Pope.

MEL GIBSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Absolutely. I’m not.

MEL GIBSON: Benedict.

JOE ROGAN: Not Benny.

MEL GIBSON: Well, he was covering up, but, like, so is the guy now.

JOE ROGAN: Is he really?

MEL GIBSON: Well, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s not great. I thought he was, like, the more progressive Pope.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, he’s very progressive, yes.

JOE ROGAN: But he’s covering up for some as well. Well, they all are. I mean, it’s a dark institution in a lot of ways because it’s history, you know.

The Catholic Church and Its Controversies

MEL GIBSON: Well, you know, the institution, it was instituted by Christ, you know, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be flawed. And there’s a school of thought that says it isn’t what it purports to be anymore. It’s moved away from what it was intended to be and what it is. It’s almost like there’s a guy called Bishop Vigano who says it’s a counterfeit parallel church, and it’s running an entirely different religion. I actually don’t adhere to a post-conciliar church. I adhere.

JOE ROGAN: Can you define what that means?

MEL GIBSON: Okay. There was an event that happened in the 60s. First, there was an event in the Vatican where they elected John the 23rd Pope, right, in 1958. I was two years old, right? And he was elected, and it was a very funny thing that happened in the conclave. You know, usually there’s white and black smoke that goes out of the chimneys to tell you, we have a pope, you know, have him us, pop him, you know. And the white smoke came out, and everybody cheered, and they went crazy. And then about a half an hour later, black smoke came out. Never in history has that happened, that the white smoke came out, and then the black smoke came out.

JOE ROGAN: So white smoke means we found a new pope. Black smoke means no pope.

MEL GIBSON: That’s right. They’d have votes, or there’d be one reason or another they’d have a round in the conclave, and black smoke would come out many times, many times maybe. Maybe it would take two weeks. But never was it known that white smoke came out, then black smoke came out.

JOE ROGAN: So what was the scenario?

MEL GIBSON: That somebody was elected, and that maybe something else happened, and he was pushed aside that someone else was put in.

JOE ROGAN: So it was power struggle.

MEL GIBSON: Some kind of power struggle. And, of course, the man who came out was a man called Angelo Roncalli, and he was John XXIII. Now, it’s interesting to note that never had a pope taken the name of another pope ever before in history. But this man took the name of a known anti-pope from the 15th century that Cosimo de’ Medici put in there as his own man. I’ll get you in the chair, and then everything will be rosy. You know, everything will go good for business, you know, whatever he was putting him in there for, some corrupt reason. And there have been corrupt men in that place before. I mean, there’s Alexander VI and Julius II and Sixtus IV. I mean, some of these guys are, you know, they’re not saints.

So he took the name of a known anti-pope from the 15th century who actually said, yes, I’m an anti-pope. Sorry, I’m not the right guy because there was more than one, and he confessed to being, and he wanted to, you know, square things with the Almighty, I guess. So he confessed to being an anti-pope. And so he took the same name as that guy, John XXIII. So it’s interesting, don’t you think? I mean, why would he do that?

JOE ROGAN: Well, whenever you have that kind of power, like I’m sure you’ve been to the Vatican, right?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s stunning.

MEL GIBSON: Yes, it’s huge.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy. When you’re walking around, you see just a massive, just a dollar value in the art that they possess.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s fucking insane.

MEL GIBSON: It’s crazy. Yeah. And, you know, it’s a very small country. It’s a country.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a country inside of a small city. Yeah. Because Rome’s not the biggest city.

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: And then it’s got a country inside the city?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: With walls around it?

MEL GIBSON: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: And you can’t extradite people?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, pretty weird.

JOE ROGAN: How convenient.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Even Ratzinger, he didn’t drive from the Vatican to the other place. He flew.

JOE ROGAN: Ooh.

MEL GIBSON: And it was only a little while, because who knows why? I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he was wanted.

MEL GIBSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, he had done, one of the things that he had done was he had moved a priest that had molested a hundred kids, and he moved them to some new place where he molested deaf kids.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. Boy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. I know. That’s the dirtiest, most evil practice that the Catholic Church has been accused of.

MEL GIBSON: I think so. And many institutions as well. Yeah. But that is a very bad one. And I think it’s all part and parcel of the same corruption they crept in. And when you asked, what’s the difference between pre-Vatican II? So Vatican II happened, and of course, they took the church, and they reformed it, and they changed things in it. And it didn’t necessarily agree with everything that went before it. And up to that point, yeah, you could find it agreed with itself. But all of a sudden, you got something else, to the point where now, I mean, we got a pope that brought a South American idol into the church to worship.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: He did. The Pachamama. He brought the South American, and he got it.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know what that is.

MEL GIBSON: It’s kind of like a South American god Pachamama.

JOE ROGAN: Why would he do that?

MEL GIBSON: Good question. But he did.

JOE ROGAN: Did he have an explanation for why he did it?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, it’s kind of a weasel-worded thing of like, oh, all religions are just as good as one another. But, you know, if that’s his contention.

JOE ROGAN: He shouldn’t be the pope.

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: How can you be the pope if you say all religions are just as good?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, we all worship. So, yeah. That is Pachamama. There you go.

JOE ROGAN: So he brought that in.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, into the Vatican. Then the hierarchy even worshipped. They had a ceremony around it outside.

JOE ROGAN: What?

MEL GIBSON: Well, that constitutes apostasy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: That’s an apostasy move.

JOE ROGAN: Worshipping false gods.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. That’s number one on the Mosaic hit list. Moses goes up on the mountain. He comes back down. People are worshiping a golden calf.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: You know, it’s that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: So you can’t do that. And for me, that’s a departure from what you, you know, that’s called apostasy.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: That’s a falling away from it. And the very nature of apostasy means that you have to be part of it to fall away from it.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: So it’s an inside job.

JOE ROGAN: Ah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So do you think there’s a motive behind these things?

MEL GIBSON: I don’t think you, you know. Probably.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think it is?

MEL GIBSON: I don’t know. But it isn’t good.

Spiritual Realms and Human Importance

MEL GIBSON: I think, look, I think we’re looking at a world where, and this is the, in the next film I’m going to do, I’m going to try and tackle this question, that there are big realms, spiritual realms. There’s good, there’s evil, and they are slugging it out for the souls of mankind. And my question is, why are we even important? Little old flawed humanity, why are we important in that process where the big realms are slugging it out over us? And I think there’s bigger things at play here. And institutions that purport to touch on the divine are necessarily going to be affected by that slugfest that’s going on between good and evil.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And sometimes good gives up ground.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And maybe not on purpose. You know, maybe there’s some deception involved or self-deception. Like, every morning when I wake up, I actually pray that I don’t deceive myself. You know, because it’s like, you know, your mind is a very funny place. I mean, there’s, I’ve always said, you know, it’s your second thought and your first action that you’re responsible for. Your first thought, throw it away, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But upon consideration. The second thought is what you’re responsible for. That’s the difference between first degree and second degree murder.

MEL GIBSON: There you go.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

MEL GIBSON: Right?

JOE ROGAN: There you go. First degree, like, I’m plotting this out. And we take that into consideration when we sentence people.

MEL GIBSON: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: Like, if you’re a person who just, you’re all of a sudden you’re in a fight with a guy, you didn’t expect it, and you stab him and kill him, second degree murder.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But if you’re like, I’m going to kill this motherfucker. I’m going to find out where he is, and I’m going to go get him, first degree.

MEL GIBSON: Sure. I’ve planned a lot of murders in my life, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. We all have.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. In your head, you plan the murder, and you think, well, that’s not a very good idea. But I think I could get away with it.

JOE ROGAN: Right. There’s the second thought. Yeah. That is interesting that we take that into consideration. That we do. Like, if you’ve had time to think about it, you’re a different kind of person than a person that acts in the act.

MEL GIBSON: Sure. You’re in your animal brain. The act of passion.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

Personal Struggles and Brain Health

MEL GIBSON: And I found this out. But I actually spent a long time in my animal brain, which is a very horrible place to be.

JOE ROGAN: And when you say that, what do you mean by you spent a long time in your animal brain?

MEL GIBSON: You’re in flight or fight.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: All the time. You don’t even sleep. It’s like really not a good place to be. And if anybody looks at you the wrong way, you want to bite them.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And sometimes you say and do things that are socially unacceptable. And, you know, I went and got a brain scan by this guy called Daniel Amen, who’s this brain guy. He’s against all psych meds and stuff, but he thinks, like, let me have a look at your brain. And you put a radioactive tracer in me.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MEL GIBSON: And to photograph my brain.

JOE ROGAN: Right. MRI, right?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. He works with a lot of football players and guys who have a brain injury.

Man, it’s thirsty in here. But so he looked at my brain and he was like, and he opens the file and I’m in there with the guy and he looks up and he goes, are you okay? And he goes, first, no, first he went like this.

Brain Health and PTSD

MEL GIBSON: And I said, what? And he goes, are you okay? Like that. And I said, yeah, I think so. And he, he came over and he sat next to me, but very slowly and cautiously. And he says, no, you’re not. And I said, what do you mean? He says, you’ve got the worst case of PTSD I’ve ever seen. And I said, you mean like even worse than guys in war and shit like that? And he goes, yeah. And he says, you’re not okay.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

MEL GIBSON: And I was like, and I, and I started, I started to well up, you know, like, no, no, I’m not.

JOE ROGAN: Oh boy.

MEL GIBSON: And it was, uh, he had a very miraculous and, uh, great remedy for it, which was to eat a bunch of fish oil, vitamin B complex and get into a hyperbaric chamber for 40 sessions. But make sure you do at least two or three a week.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

MEL GIBSON: It fixed my head.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It got me out of that wacky place, you know?

JOE ROGAN: So it was something to do with nutrition and oxygen.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And your brain is neuroplastic. He explained neuroplasticity to me and how, okay, you can get brain damage and like holes in your head and all, you know, concussion. I used to play rugby.

JOE ROGAN: Ah.

MEL GIBSON: I’ve been knocked out on the field a couple of times, you know?

JOE ROGAN: That explains a lot, you know?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And, um, so it actually, you can actually heal the holes in your head. It looked like Swiss cheese in there. It’s like horrible. There’s a lot, a lot of these football players get like that too. The poor guys, I mean, they get depressed and they get, you know, oh yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Hormonal imbalance, pituitary glands fucked up.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: Not producing testosterone or human growth hormone correctly.

MEL GIBSON: That’s correct.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Depression, low energy.

MEL GIBSON: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Irritability.

MEL GIBSON: Irritability, you want to kill somebody.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: Like terrible. You know? And, uh, and it’s just not socially acceptable. Plus, I don’t want to go to prison.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, the rugby, I bet, that’s a giant factor.

MEL GIBSON: Uh, yeah. I, I played from like 13 to probably in my late teens and, and you get knocked around a little bit.

JOE ROGAN: A hundred percent. Yeah. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about that. No helmet, no, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, people don’t realize like even shots to the chest cause brain damage.

MEL GIBSON: Oh yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s what people are realizing now.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Sure. I mean, you know, and like I’m addicted to the UFC, right? I love it. But, but I know that these guys are, I, I feel kind of sorry for them.

JOE ROGAN: I do as well.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And one of the guys, I, I knew one of the guys fairly well. And usually I’m pretty immune to like, but like he was in there and he was fighting against Volkanovski. It was Brian Ortega and he was getting his ass handed to him in one fight. He almost got him a couple of times, but like.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I almost submitted him twice.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I know. But because I knew Brian, it was like my child, it was like my son was in there. I almost started crying. I was like, and it got to me. I was like, I should probably feel like this about all these guys, but I don’t know them as well.

JOE ROGAN: It becomes a problem for me when I’m friends with a guy.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then also I see when they’re on the tail end of their career and they can’t take shots anymore. And then when you talk to them, you recognize the speech patterns are slurring.

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I met Muhammad Ali when he was in the chair, you know, and, um, and I don’t know if I could even tell this story. What he said was so funny, but he was still in there and he was still a little devil and he was like, uh, and he was still, he was still fucking with people.

JOE ROGAN: Of course.

MEL GIBSON: But it was like, uh, I can’t, I can’t tell the story.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t?

MEL GIBSON: No, man.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. Footnote it. Tell me later.

MEL GIBSON: I’ll tell you later. It is funny, but it was my assistant, you know, and what he said to my assistant was like so funny. And, um, and, and then he said it and we all were like, whoa. And then I looked at him and he was just laughing. He was laughing his ass off. So he was still all in there, but it was hard. I guess he had the damage of being punched.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Trauma related Parkinson’s disease.

MEL GIBSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Very common for fighters.

MEL GIBSON: Oh my God. Oh no.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not good.

MEL GIBSON: No. I got knocked out when I was in a fight when I was like 20 and it was like knocked out. Like out. And it was, uh, you know, I woke up in the hospital.

MEL GIBSON: Hmm. Not good.

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: Well, a few of those will explain a lot.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, it does. Yeah. And we didn’t know that, you know, back then. That’s why it always drives me crazy in a movie when someone gets hit over the head with a gun and knocked out. And then five minutes later they’re fighting and they’re fine.

MEL GIBSON: Or shot in the arm. You know? Like, kill you. You know? That always makes me laugh too. But we used to do it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you kind of have to, right?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It’s like part of the whole thing of telling a movie. You gotta.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

MEL GIBSON: I mean, Michelle. Michelle Dockery even brains Mark Wahlberg with a fire extinguisher at one point.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: He’s back. You know? Brains him, shoots him.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah.

MEL GIBSON: He’s a cockroach. You can’t kill him. It takes a lot more.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you’ll find out.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But we’re, you know, people used to think that concussions are just something you recover from. Like, no big deal. You get a concussion, take a break for a little while, you’ll be fine.

MEL GIBSON: You might not be fine. No, you’re not.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I got a concussion at my daughter’s wedding. This is really weird, okay? So, she’s getting married. Married a great guy. They got a great family. And a buddy of mine from Australia comes to the wedding. And he goes, hey, he comes up and I go to hug him. And he ducks down and he comes up and he puts his shoulder into the point of my chin. The guy weighs 240. And he puts his shoulder into the point of my chin and knocks me the fuck out.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

MEL GIBSON: I’m like, ah. And like, for the next four months, I’m messed up. I have to get like a guy to work cranial sacral, you know, fix me up and stuff like that. It really messed me up.

JOE ROGAN: Fucking Australians.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah, there you go.

JOE ROGAN: Wild folk.

MEL GIBSON: We’re the Germans.

JOE ROGAN: Wild ex-prisoners.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah. Wild prisoner of Mother England.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Anyway.

The Resurrection Story Project

JOE ROGAN: So, this story that you want to tell about good and evil, like, do you have a script?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Or is it just a thing in your head? What is it?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It’s the resurrection story. But it’s not linear because you can’t really – it’s hard to understand. You’ve got to put in a framework where you answer a few other questions as well and you have to juxtapose the event itself against everything else so that it makes some kind of sense in a bigger picture, which is a hard thing to do. And it took my brother and I about – and a guy called Randall Wallace plus my brother and I took us six, seven years to write it.

JOE ROGAN: So, are you doing this with historians as well? Are you trying to make it –

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, historical stuff. Well, I regard the Gospels as history. It’s a verifiable history. Some people say, oh, it’s a fairy tale. He never existed, but he did. And there are other accounts, verifiable, historical accounts outside the biblical ones that also bear this up that, yes, he did exist. And the other aspect of that is that the – all the evangelists, the apostles who went out there, every single one of those guys died rather than deny their belief. And nobody dies for a lie. Nobody.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: So, that’s part of what I’m doing. It’s like showing nobody dies for a lie.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, the resurrection is the one that is the most difficult for people to swallow.

MEL GIBSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: That is the one that requires the most faith.

MEL GIBSON: The most faith and the most belief, yeah, resurrection.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Who gets back up three days later after he gets murdered in public? Who gets back up under his own power? Buddha didn’t do that shit.

JOE ROGAN: Right. You know, so.

JOE ROGAN: You believe that was a real event?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, I do.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. What brought you to that belief? Is this something that you’ve always had or is it something you studied it and you’ve come to this conclusion because of the historical accounts?

MEL GIBSON: Yes. I think as a child, you know, I think as a child, you know, one accepts things on faith because, you know, you’re raised by people who are nice to you and they believe it. And my dad was a pretty smart guy. He was like Mensa smart, you know, like real smart. Like back in 1968, like back in 1968, he won Jeopardy, right? And then.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: And then they brought all the Jeopardy winners back and he played all the winners and he beat all of them too. So he had a mind like a steel trap and his memory was practically photographic. My memory is pornographic, but his was like, I don’t have that kind of mind.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: But I’m more like he did math and, you know, I can’t add. But so as a child, you learn these things and you accept them on faith. And I still have that faith. But as I got older, I came to it through intellect and through reading and putting things together and accounts and then occurrences like in my own life.

The Shroud of Turin

MEL GIBSON: I mean, just recently, they verified the Shroud of Turin. Have you seen that?

JOE ROGAN: I’ve been reading about it and I know that there’s some contention. There’s some discussion and debate about it. But they used to think that it was only a couple hundred years old.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And now they’ve changed that.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. They said, no, it’s back then.

JOE ROGAN: They also don’t understand how it was made, which to me is very fascinating because it’s not paint. It’s not.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t know what caused the image itself and how that technology would have even been available.

MEL GIBSON: It wasn’t.

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: A couple thousand years ago.

An intense light. I mean, atomic. To leave almost like a photographic imprint on a piece of cloth.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And.

JOE ROGAN: It’s wild.

MEL GIBSON: Pull that up. Pull the Shroud of Turin up.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. It’s wild to look at.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, yeah. Because it’s so interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And you can see it, that it depicts a first century Hebrew male because the hairstyle was from the first century. And a Hebrew hairstyle that he was about six feet tall, that he was completely scourged all over his body. He was crucified.

JOE ROGAN: The one on the right is just like an artistic rendition. That’s the face. Yeah. Click on that one, the face. The face. Yeah. That’s good enough. Get that large. That’s fucking crazy.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah. Scourged, beaten, the wounds on the thorns, the hands, the feet, and the scourging. And the hairstyle was from the first century. And the pollens that they found in the cloth were from that region.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Also, the weave was a first century weave that was typical. And another guy, an archaeologist who I knew who actually translated the passion into Aramaic, told me that if you look close, you can see the image of a Tiberius coin mark on the eyes. Now, I don’t know if that’s real or not. I’ve never actually checked that. But that there’s images of Tiberius on the coin.

JOE ROGAN: So they would put the coins over the eyes?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. So that would date it.

MEL GIBSON: But they have now verified that it does actually go back to that time period. For a while, they were testing pieces that had been repaired in the 13th century or, you know.

JOE ROGAN: What is the latest on that, Jamie? Can you see, like, I was trying to get that.

JAMIE: I have two different articles from within the last six months saying opposite things. Yeah, opposite. Of course. You didn’t know which one sounded the most accurate.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s such a crazy thing to even try to verify. Yeah. What are you saying? You’re saying that this is really the shroud that Jesus was covered in? So you’re saying Jesus historically absolutely did exist, and we think that this is the shroud that covered him. Just that alone. Incredulity. People immediately, their hackles raised, like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. And they just, instead of, like, looking at it objectively, they almost always want to look at it from a point of view of disproving it immediately.

JOE ROGAN: Dismissing it immediately.

Scientific Skepticism and Historical Artifacts

MEL GIBSON: But that’s science, isn’t it? You have to sort of, you know, you play the devil’s advocate.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And that’s okay. Go for it, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Are you aware of Graham Hancock?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, no.

JOE ROGAN: Graham Hancock is sort of a historian that has a very, he’s got a series on Netflix. He’s a fascinating guy, and his career started because he was investigating this, these accounts in Ethiopia of the Ark of the Covenant.

MEL GIBSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And that they believe the Ark of the Covenant is in this one church that’s protected by all these monks that wind up getting cataracts and radiation disease and sickness, and they think that it’s because they’re protecting this Ark of the Covenant, this actual thing, that it’s an actual physical thing that’s there.

MEL GIBSON: And if you touch it, you get zapped, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And that even being in its presence fucks these people up.

MEL GIBSON: Maybe. Maybe. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, there’s got to be someplace, right? They buried it. They lost track of it. But, man, it used to be. And all the stories are, if you even touch it, you fall over.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: You know, because it was instructed electrically somehow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, like, what is that? What’s in there?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Why is it giving people cancer if they’re really protecting it?

MEL GIBSON: I think it’s the actual structure of the container it’s in that is the problem. That’s my thought.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: I could be wrong. But I think inside it they have things from, like, when Moses was, like, manna and, you know, stuff like that that they managed to keep from, like, for example, they say that Golgotha, the place where the crucifixion happened, it’s called Golgotha, the place of the skull, because that’s where Adam’s head is buried.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yes. And that it’s also, perhaps, the same place. And it tells you it’s kind of in the same area where Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

MEL GIBSON: So it’s interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And the cross, when in any artistic depiction, at the foot of the cross, underneath it is the skull, representing the skull of Adam.

JOE ROGAN: Huh. So it’s interesting.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there it is. Yeah. That’s the skull of Adam, huh? Wow. The place of the skull, memory, myth, and the chapel of Adam. What did you find on the Shroud of Turin, Jamie?

JAMIE: Both those articles that just asked, like, one person, like, one researcher thought it was. Another researcher, based off of their research, said it wasn’t.

JOE ROGAN: Can you put it to the one that thought it was?

JAMIE: Um, so the one who thought it was, is, uh, like, a nuclear researcher.

JOE ROGAN: A nuclear researcher. Jesus Christ.

JAMIE: Yeah, that one was, like, an AI artist from Brazil.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So I don’t know who has the most.

JOE ROGAN: So it says, study published in the Journal of Heritage. The authors conducted dating work on a sample from the Shroud, coming to the conclusion that it may be a 2,000-year-old relic. The Shroud has long been a subject of intense scrutiny, features a faint image of a man, some believe, is the body of Jesus, miraculously imprinted onto the cloth. While the latest study does not discuss the question of whether or not the artifact was indeed Jesus’ burial shroud, specifically, the authors did find its age is roughly consistent with his time.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. I think, isn’t the Smithsonian guy all for it? I don’t know. Maybe that’s him. I don’t know. But, yeah. There’s for and against. There’s always been. Yeah, always. But just, but the image is like, come on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s pretty crazy. Yeah. Whatever it is, it’s pretty crazy. And the fact that they don’t know how they made it is also pretty crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s not a painting.

MEL GIBSON: Nope.

JOE ROGAN: Not exactly sure how it even came about.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It had to have been some kind of intense light.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the thought was that even trying to replicate something like that today would be incredibly difficult to do. It’s like an x-ray vision.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It’s like an x-ray. That’s what it is. You only see, you really see it in the negative only.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Right. It’s like a negative.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Hey. I’d buy it. But that’s not the only reason I’d buy it. I mean, I think, you know, there’s other logical reasons why I, why I believe. So.

Personal Beliefs and Experiences

JOE ROGAN: Like, what are those?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, okay. Stuff that happens in your own life. The results you get from actually appealing to a power greater than yourself, you know. And, I mean, I don’t think it’s any secret. But I am flawed in the fact that I am, by nature, born an alcoholic.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: I did drugs. I did alcohol. So. And there was nothing that could stop me from doing that. Nothing. So, I was really kind of on, you’re on a downhill run. So, I regard the fact that I was able to appeal to something greater than myself to help me and actually stop me doing that. I think that’s a miracle.

JOE ROGAN: Hmm.

MEL GIBSON: It is. For me, it is. And for many. You know, so.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that is the thing about AA, right? It’s a part of the whole process is appealing to a higher power.

MEL GIBSON: Sure. It’s a spiritual program.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Because you’re suffering a spiritual malady.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: So, it’s a spiritual cure. And that’s the essence, I think, of why it works. Because you can’t explain it otherwise. I mean, well, you kind of can, but I think what you’re being asked to do is to think about other people and other things more than yourself because it’s kind of an ego disease.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That is the problem with addiction, right? It’s very narcissistic.

MEL GIBSON: Very narcissistic.

JOE ROGAN: Because you’re constantly thinking about yourself and what you need. Mm-hmm. I need a drink. I need a bump. I need, you know, I need something.

MEL GIBSON: Sure, I need a, or.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And no matter what you need, it’s never going to be enough. So, you actually have to appeal to something outside that you consider bigger and better than yourself, which instantly kind of pushes you more in the direction of humility.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Because you’re not the center of the universe anymore.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: And that you can’t do it. And the first step in any of that sort of stuff is accepting that you are powerless over it. That’s the first, that’s the first, that’s the most powerful step you can do is that you’re powerless. When you realize that, you’re like, okay.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: There’s fuck all I can do about this. I have to appeal to something better than me. And that to me is a miracle.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s a very uniquely human thing, the ability to course correct and also just the concept of addiction in the first place.

MEL GIBSON: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it’s a very uniquely human thing that we all know there’s dark roads our mind can go down. And then we wonder, like, what is the purpose of these dark thoughts? What is the purpose of this destructive behavior that we’re all prone to in some way, shape, or form?

MEL GIBSON: What is the purpose of everything?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: I mean, like, right. I mean, why am I here? What’s the meaning of this? I’m looking for a purpose and what is it we’re here for? I think, you know, we have to leave some stuff, but you have to leave some good stuff. You can leave plenty of bad stuff, you know? And it’s, and we’re all prone that way. I often think about, you know, the human race as a whole. You know, you think about guys like, you know, Stalin or Hitler or Chairman Mao or the, and I’m, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be sharing a cell in the afterlife with those guys.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: I don’t know where I’ll be on the ladder, but.

JOE ROGAN: Depends on how you end up, right?

MEL GIBSON: Well, that’s it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It really is.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It’s like, you know, and we’re allowed to make mistakes and we do. We are so flawed and I am, I, I’m more flawed than anyone, you know, but it’s something that you, I think, and it’s pretty safe to say I’m in the third act now. You’re in act two, right?

JOE ROGAN: Gesundheit.

MEL GIBSON: But I’m, I’m like, I’m in the third act, man. So you got, you have to think about the other side.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: You have to think about what comes next. Is there a next? Yes, there is. I believe there is. And I think it’s, uh, uh, depends on how you live now. And, uh, and the beauty of believing is that even for your transgressions, you can be forgiven and you can be redeemed, but it’s all up here.

JOE ROGAN: Right. You know, it’s the true acceptance and understanding of what you’ve done and what you should do.

MEL GIBSON: Sure. You have to look at yourself honestly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Absolutely.

MEL GIBSON: Honestly, you have to be able to accuse yourself and, uh, and understand that there is, there’s, it’s a great deal of mercy involved in the fact that I believe that God sent his son down to tell us, okay, I’m going to ransom you people from your fallen nature and, um, and I’ll give you a roadmap on how to do it. And, um, and people do it. There’s even people that do it that I’ve never even heard of it. You know, some guy in the jungle someplace, I’m sure.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: You know, because the creator is above the law. I mean, it’s an interesting fact to note that the first canonized saint, you know who it was?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: The first ever confirmed canonization as a saint was Dismas. You know who Dismas was?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: He was hanging, he was the thief on the cross next to Jesus.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

MEL GIBSON: And he says to him, you’re going to be okay this day. You’ll be with me. Unbaptized, criminal, all that stuff. So.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MEL GIBSON: The lawmaker is above the law. So there’s a lot of mercy.

JOE ROGAN: What about people that never experienced Christianity? What about the uncontacted people?

MEL GIBSON: That’s right. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m saying.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: In the jungle.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: It’s been known. That it’s called invincible ignorance because they don’t know what the truth is.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: You know? It’s possible that they can be saved as well. I don’t, you know.

Evolution and Creation

JOE ROGAN: So what are your thoughts on evolution?

MEL GIBSON: Hmm. Wow. The Darwin thing?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: I don’t really go for it.

JOE ROGAN: No?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Ice Age, dinosaurs, you know, what did they turn into? I mean, things became extinct at some point. I don’t think I was some kind of like, you know, legless thing that crawled out of the ocean. I don’t think I came from that. I think I was created.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think other things were legless things that came out of the ocean? Do you think like multi-celled organisms came out of single-celled organisms and there was some sort of a natural selection and random mutation and it led to everything else but us?

MEL GIBSON: Sure, look, a gain of function, you can like, you can make stuff happen. I’m sure stuff did happen. But I think it’s all part of creation. I think it’s all ordered. I think anyone left, anything left to itself without some kind of intelligence behind it will devolve into chaos. And so that there has to be some big intelligence that orchestrates everything. Not that we don’t have chaos in the world, but I think that’s our own making.

JOE ROGAN: But what do you think separates us from all the other creatures?

MEL GIBSON: Well, I think we have a soul. We’re created with a soul. And, you know, I went to a restaurant last night. It was a steakhouse in Austin. And it was interesting because all the pictures on the wall are pictures of animals that look resentful, like cows and steers staring at you looking angry as you rip into a steak. But I just believe we are higher than those creatures because we have a soul. We have an intellect above theirs. And we aspire to higher things. We have aspirations.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: And, you know, this is part of why people drink and smoke and do dope and all this kind of stuff is because they’re looking for a spiritual experience. They’re looking for, like they actually call alcohol spirits. I mean, they’re looking for something higher.

Spirituality and Human Nature

MEL GIBSON: And I think we all have that yearning in that we want to be happy and we want to be at peace and we want everything to be hunky-dory. So there’s this yearning in building all of us for that to aspire to something greater. And that’s why we’re inspired by stories, I think, because it’s like, you know, hero stories. You know, Joseph Campbell’s stuff, the hero of a thousand faces and stuff. It’s like these stories inspire us.

I met, I was at a party the other day in Tennessee. And you think, Tennessee, what’s going to happen there? It’s going to be squeal like a pig. No. Man, there’s some people living in Tennessee.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

MEL GIBSON: But, like, amazing people. And I found myself in a conversation with four tier one dudes, all of who did something extraordinary. And it was that Tom Slattersley guy. It was the Blackhawk Down guy. There was Sean Ryan, who’s, he’s got, you’ve probably heard of this guy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, a friend of this.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Right? Yeah. There was a guy called Christian Craighead. You know who that guy is?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: Whoa. And then there was Eddie, they wrote a book about him.

JOE ROGAN: Eddie Gallagher?

MEL GIBSON: Gallagher. Yeah. Eddie Gallagher. I was talking to four of these guys at the same time. And I didn’t know who to, who do you even talk to? But their stories are amazing. Especially, and the one guy I ended up talking to was an SAS guy. British SAS. And he just looks like a bank teller. But he did something extraordinary and incredibly brave. And with no regard for himself, only regard for other people. And it was like, whoa. You hear these stories and it’s sort of just like, it pumps you up. You think, would I, could I do that? Could I be that person? I don’t know if I could. But I don’t, in a way, I don’t even want to ever find out because you have to be in an extreme situation.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: But hearing about other people and how they behave in situations that are difficult is very inspiring. So, you know, it’s, yeah. There’s so many of those stories around, and through history.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s another unique thing about human beings is that we learn from others in a very extraordinary way. And that’s one of the reasons why we like stories.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Why we like myths and fables because there’s lessons you can apply to your own life without having to actually go through those things.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Well, that’s right. I made a film about that guy, Desmond Doss. You know, I don’t know if you saw it. It was like Hacksaw Ridge. It was this film, and it was about a medic who figured so much killing going on, he’s going to go into the battlefield and save lives. And he didn’t have a weapon. And he was in the worst place on earth. And he got a Congressional Medal of Honor because he kept going in to the worst place possible and dragging wounded guys out with no regard for himself. I mean, who does that kind of stuff?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: And over and over again, he didn’t just do it once. He did it hundreds of times. He finally got, you know, hit with shrapnel and a bunch of other stuff. But he lived to be an old man. But, wow. And it was just pure faith, you know. So, you know, those guys, those kind of stories inspire the hell out of me. Anyway.

Evolution and Intelligent Design

JOE ROGAN: So, back to this idea of evolution. So, do you believe that evolution exists in animals? Or do you think there’s some sort of a natural selection process? Or do you think that it is all intelligent design?

MEL GIBSON: Well, I think everything was created. Right? And maybe things do move on and adapt and change through time, but I think that that’s a function of an intelligence also. And, I mean, look at the fires in L.A., you know. I mean, what’s that going to do? It’s going to give me a new house, you know, maybe.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe. Or a new place to live.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, something.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, I’m just not totally convinced. I feel it. And I can’t really, I’m sorry, I can’t intellectually tell you why I don’t believe in evolution, but I don’t. It’s just a feeling. I don’t think I was some ape, or I don’t think my ancestors were. I think they had to be pretty smart to survive.

JOE ROGAN: So what do you think all these pre-human hominids are that they keep discovering?

MEL GIBSON: Like, tell me what a pre-human hominid is.

JOE ROGAN: Like Australopithecus. Oh, right. Or some of the other human-like creatures that never made it, like Denisovans, Neanderthals.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah. Stuff like that. Okay, well, they’ve got something called Zinjantropus. You remember him?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: Zinjantropus, man. And he was like, hmm. He looked kind of like this. But it was like, they looked at it, and they did some core samples on it, and it was put out there by people advocating evolution. And they discovered that it was a human skull attached to the jaw of an ape.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I do remember this. So it was a hoax.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, there’s been some hoaxes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But there’s also been real stuff.

MEL GIBSON: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You don’t think so?

MEL GIBSON: Well, maybe. Well, you know. Like, I don’t know. Tell me.

JOE ROGAN: Well, what was that one that we looked at the other day that was one of the first pre-humans that buried their young, or buried their dead, rather? It was Homo Naledi. What was it? Remember that? Yeah, I can’t remember how to say it, but…

JOE ROGAN: Naledi.

MEL GIBSON: Naledi, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Pre-human hominid, very small creature that buried their young, or buried their dead, rather. I keep saying buried their young. They buried their dead. You know, Australopithecus. There’s a bunch of different, you know, the Lucy skeleton. There’s a bunch of different pre-human hominids.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, maybe they were monkeys. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, they’re similar to us, just not where we are.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They’re on the road to becoming what it means to be a human being.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think those are?

MEL GIBSON: I don’t know. They could be animals, or they could be like, look at today. I mean, you can get, some mosquito can bite you, and your kid can be born with a malformed skull or something. It’s like, you know, they have those, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but this is like a genetic thing. Like, they’ve done, they’ve mapped the genome of these creatures.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, they haven’t?

MEL GIBSON: They’re different.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Well, I don’t know how to explain those, Joe. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: But you do think that human beings were created by God.

MEL GIBSON: I do, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When do you think that happened?

MEL GIBSON: When?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, probably, and not that long ago.

MEL GIBSON: Really?

JOE ROGAN: No, not really. Like, what do you mean by not that long ago?

MEL GIBSON: Probably only about 8,000 years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So, what do you think things like Gobekli Tepe are when they find these constructions that are dated, carbon dated to 11,000 plus years old?

MEL GIBSON: I question carbon dating.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that makes things a lot simpler.

MEL GIBSON: Well, yeah. Yeah, well, there’s a lot of money. And, you know, claims. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Water’s there.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, carbon dating seems to be pretty rock-solid studies.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, the science behind radiocarbon dating and detecting carbon isotopes. It’s like, that’s pretty legit.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I don’t know. I can’t square it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, you don’t have to.

MEL GIBSON: And I don’t have to. And what difference is it going to make to me?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s the thing. It doesn’t make a difference in terms of your experience in this life on Earth.

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: Like, you can have your faith and your ideas and live a great life from beginning to end, and it might not suit you to really ponder evolution and all the puzzles and problems. No. It doesn’t.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. And I just, like, you know, I look at all sorts of stuff like that, like, you know, the icebergs melting and the water overflowing. It’s not. Ever have a glass full of ice and watch it melt? Did you ever see the glass flow over?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: It takes up less room, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: You know, the hot greenhouse, whatever.

Climate Change and Scientific Narratives

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a lot of horseshit that’s involved in climate change for sure. I’ve studied that, and I’ve had many discussions over the last four years. The problem with anything is that once a narrative gets established and then there’s a profit attached to the solution to that narrative.

MEL GIBSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s green energy and green energy bills, and there’s businesses that are wrapped around there. And then there’s also this fear that they love to pump into people about climate change, that, you know, they terrify the shit out of young people that we’re going to destroy the world. And climate change, you must act now. And then you become beholden to the political party that is espousing these ideas, and then your enemy is the deniers of this science, even though you don’t even understand the science.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. And did you see the Washington Post article that they published recently about temperature change on Earth?

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a down – like, what they’ve realized is over the last, you know, X amount of thousands of years that the temperature on Earth is plummeting.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s dropping. And then when they look at the dips, this is the most important thing for anybody that’s really freaked out about climate change. There’s no static temperature of Earth ever. There’s never been a time where it maintains a temperature until human beings came along and fucked it all up. That is just not real. Before human beings ever existed, if you trust these core samples, there’s been a giant rise and fall and this constant dip. There it is. Scientists have captured Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years. Here’s the surprising place we stand now. Look at the dip at the end.

MEL GIBSON: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: That’s where we are. That’s reality.

MEL GIBSON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: And then if you look at the course of history, you look at the rise and fall, like, it’s never a straight line. Way before human beings ever existed, if you believe these silly people, way before human beings had ever existed, there’s always this rise and fall. And this idea that the whole thing is based on carbon emissions from human beings is total bullshit. It’s not true. We might be having an effect, but we’re having a small effect, a very small effect. And the other things are completely outside of our control, including solar activity, the distance between the Earth and the sun. You know, there’s a lot of factors. There’s all sorts of factors involving natural activities like volcanic emissions, you know, which devastate. You know, the entire human race was knocked down to a few thousand people at one point in time because of the Toba volcano.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, my God, yes. Yeah, no light.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, no light for years. Good luck.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. Good luck. And the people that survive are fucking barbarians.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The most savage. And then it takes a long time before they can figure out civilization again after that.

MEL GIBSON: It’s like dinosaurs. They just stop.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: So what are they evolving to?

JOE ROGAN: Chickens. I guess. Birds, raptors. Well, they think a lot of dinosaurs had feathers now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s the newest thing.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Maybe.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t think so?

MEL GIBSON: I don’t know. I need to take a pee. I’m talking.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. Let’s take a pee. Let’s take a pee. We’ll take a break. We’ll bring it back.

MEL GIBSON: I need to take a piddle.

[After the break]

JOE ROGAN: It’s a nice picture. That’s got to be a moment in your head where you’re just like every now and then just go, fuck.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: It is funny. Yeah. But it was a good picture. The only thing that was going through my head was.

MEL GIBSON: I just can’t look bad. And I didn’t have any, no grooming implements, so I just tried my best to not look too bad.

JOE ROGAN: There you go.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You talk about humility.

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what gives you more humility than being publicly humiliated?

MEL GIBSON: Sure. Yeah. Public humiliation. And it’s, you know what? Most, for most people, it is their number one fear.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

MEL GIBSON: Is public humiliation.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Public speaking, and because of that, public humiliation.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Happens all the time.

JOE ROGAN: Because we’re so concerned about other people’s opinions of us.

MEL GIBSON: I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because we’re not sure of our own opinions of us.

MEL GIBSON: Well, you’ve been through a lot.

Media Criticism and Controversy

MEL GIBSON: Well, so have you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I mean, I remember, you know, I think they were giving you a grilling once for taking horseworm medicine.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Funny.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Funny how that works.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Funny how that works. Funny how that does work. Yeah. What’s really funny is how that was a part of the demise of mainstream media. Mm-hmm. Because people were like, well, this is crazy. This doesn’t make, are you guys really the news? Like, what is this?

MEL GIBSON: Yes. I know. You know. It seemed to be, they seemed to be complicit with a.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, 100%.

MEL GIBSON: Hmm. And, you know, you think, well, why? Well, why?

JOE ROGAN: Because of money. I think this is what we were talking about before, that there is good and evil.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And sometimes it manifests itself in a very clear and obvious way.

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: And I think that’s what that was. That was evil. That was putting people’s lives second and putting money first.

MEL GIBSON: Well, I don’t know why Fauci’s still walking around. How is that guy still walking around? I don’t get it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just people understand the history of the AIDS crisis and what that guy did back then.

MEL GIBSON: Did you read that book?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I read the book. I listened to it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I did too.

MEL GIBSON: I drove up to San Francisco and I listened to it and I had road rage.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And it was like, whoa. How is he still there?

JOE ROGAN: How is, first of all, people that don’t believe it, how come RFK Jr. didn’t get sued? How come there’s no lawsuits? If there was lies, there would be lawsuits.

MEL GIBSON: No, but that’s true.

JOE ROGAN: He’d be publicly humiliated. Instead, they kept that book off bestseller lists. That book sold millions of copies.

MEL GIBSON: I know.

JOE ROGAN: They hid it. That’s when you find out the bestseller lists are actually curated. It’s not really bestseller.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s censored.

MEL GIBSON: It’s all censored.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Everything’s censored. You know. But that book is an accurate depiction of what Anthony Fauci did during the AIDS crisis, which probably was an AZT crisis.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: More than it was an AIDS crisis.

MEL GIBSON: I mean, it’s fairly incontrovertible now that he was fooling with gain of function.

JOE ROGAN: 100%.

MEL GIBSON: And, you know, why is he still around?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: Or at least free.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Right. And no repercussions.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Whatever happened to that story where, you know, the wombat and the weasel got together and they were forcing around and a bat pissed on him with a golden shower.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: You know. And all of a sudden it was in a wet market.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Very wet market. You got, you know, complete total horseshit.

MEL GIBSON: Totally.

JOE ROGAN: And the scientists that we’re supposed to trust were pitching that horseshit.

MEL GIBSON: It was like the AIDS thing. Some green monkey bit of Quanta Stewart on the ass. Then he went around the world and got everybody sick. And it was like, you know, ridiculous.

JOE ROGAN: If you want to go through the AIDS rabbit hole, look up a guy named Duesberg.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, yes. I know. I read that book.

JOE ROGAN: That is crazy. He’s telling the truth. This is the fucking COVID crisis times a thousand. I had him on the podcast way back in the day. It was one of the earlier guests that I had. It was like way back in like 2010. It was one of the first times I got openly attacked for someone being on the podcast. They were like, blood is on your hands. I’m like, first of all, no, it’s not. It’s 2010. Who’s dying of AIDS? Zero people. So stop. It’s not blood’s on your hand. Like if this guy’s correct, he’s a tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is like his work on cancer is, you know, everybody thinks it’s groundbreaking work. Brilliant doctor. But he was a heretic. He was a guy who stood outside of Fauci’s.

MEL GIBSON: The narrative.

JOE ROGAN: Doctrine and the narrative. And he said, I don’t believe that HIV is what’s causing this when all these people that are having these immune systems are all heavy drug users. He’s like, I think this is a disease of a decimation of the immune system due to heavy drug use. And then on top of that, you’re prescribing this chemical, this AZT that kills people.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They stopped using it for chemotherapy because it was killing them quicker than cancer was.

MEL GIBSON: I was in the Sydney Theater Company in the 90s. And I was going to a funeral once a month of friends. They were all dying.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy.

MEL GIBSON: In the 80s and 90s.

JOE ROGAN: And they were all getting AZT.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Maybe.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, the ones that were getting AZT, even the ones that were asymptomatic, like Magic Johnson, they were giving Magic Johnson AZT. He had to stop taking it.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because he was making him sick. It was killing him.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. I read it. And like, it’s even with RFK’s book. And he’s an amazing guy. People say, oh, he’s kooky. He’s crazy. He’s not crazy. He’s not. He’s one of the most erudite, you know, they say he’s an anti-vaxxer. He’s not. He’s not. He’s like, he’s a very shrewd. He’s never lost a case, I don’t think, when he brings something to suit. I don’t think he’s ever been defeated. But that book is not just him. It’s him and about a thousand highly qualified scientists and physicians commenting on the whole situation. So when you read it, it’s a pretty convincing document. And you’re right. Nobody sued him for it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: You know, it’s pretty scary.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only do they not sue him, their response is to try to ignore it. They don’t want to debate him on it. They don’t want to do anything.

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: They want to just ignore it and hope it goes away. But it doesn’t go away. And the more people talk about it, the more people read it. And when you do read it, you go, if this is true, what the fuck is going on? And how is that monster still loose?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: And he seems like a monster. The way he talks about things. He just seems. But first of all, there’s so many instances of him lying. There’s so many, like, where he said one thing, two years later, it turns out to be a lie. He said one, like, whether it is the natural. Yeah, the mask thing, whether it’s the natural spillover, you know, the lies about gain-of-function to Congress, you know, when he was lying to Rand Paul about whether or not they did gain-of-function research. Like, how is that not perjury? How is he not in trouble?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Well, hey, other mysteries, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, then the Biden administration is now talking about taking that guy and giving him a full pardon. It’s like fucking crazy.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, they might. He gave Hunter a pardon.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But Hunter’s.

MEL GIBSON: Hunter didn’t need a pardon. Was he indicted?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I mean, he was in trouble for tax evasion.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, I see.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of tax problems. He definitely did some uncool things. And then there’s the Burisma thing. But the crazy thing about his pardon is it starts at the time of him being involved in Burisma. So it’s from 2011 all the way to today.

MEL GIBSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what he pardoned him is the biggest sweeping pardon that anyone’s ever received ever. And Biden’s pardoned more people than anybody ever, too.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He was already over 8,000 people pardoned.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. A lot of criminals on death row and stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s that. But then there’s also people that like the Kids for Cash judges, where they were locking up kids and putting them in child detention centers because they wanted money. And they were doing it for kickbacks.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I saw that.

JOE ROGAN: Evil.

MEL GIBSON: It was a documentary.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Evil. Again, what we’re talking about, good and evil.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, these are real things. And rational people that profess themselves to be intelligent and secular, they don’t want to believe in good and evil. They don’t think that they’re – they just think people do bad things, people have motivations, they do bad things. But they don’t want to believe in the concept of good and evil because these are biblical concepts.

MEL GIBSON: They are.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And I – they’ve been around since the beginning.

JOE ROGAN: And people want to pretend they’re smarter than the people that sort of embrace these biblical concepts.

MEL GIBSON: Right. Or, yeah, I think that goes into evolution. Are we smarter than our grandparents, you know? I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we are about some things, but we can’t survive the way they did.

MEL GIBSON: Nope.

JOE ROGAN: They’re obviously intelligent.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just they didn’t have access to information the way we do. But there’s a difference between information and intelligence.

MEL GIBSON: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

History and Book Recommendations

MEL GIBSON: I don’t have many devices for information. I read books. I read mostly history books.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Oh, I got to recommend the book to you. It’s fascinating. And it’s – it’s called The Frontiersman. And it’s about a guy called Simon Kenton. You ever hear of this guy?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MEL GIBSON: Whoa. And it was written by a guy who’s now deceased. His name is Allan Eckert. And it is really about opening up Ohio and Kentucky and places like that with this guy Simon Kenton who was just an Irish immigrant. He wasn’t much for farming and stuff, but he thought he killed a guy. And so he ran away because he thought he’d be indicted for some crime or something, and he ended up being this frontiersman. And it is – it’s a very interesting document because you get the history of what was going on at the time when the country was opening up between the settlers and the Indians, you know, the Shawnee. One of the most brutal books I’ve ever read.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, it’s very well – and it has a narrative, but it’s reconstructed from his, you know, all kinds of historical documents and letters and diaries and all this kind of stuff. So I think the guy took about 15 years to sort of compile all this stuff and write it. And the first half of the book is about this guy Simon Kenton, and the second half is about Tecumseh, you know, the chief. Really great book. One of the most fascinating books I’ve read. You can’t put it down.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, because it’s just like – it’s like little chapters.

JOE ROGAN: I’m going to get that right now. Have you ever read The Empire of the Summer Moon?

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: The Empire of the Summer Moon is about the Comanche.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s all about the settling of this area.

MEL GIBSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s fucking incredible.

MEL GIBSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And again, one of the most brutal books ever. So this is The Frontiersman?

MEL GIBSON: The Frontiersman by Allan Eckert.

JOE ROGAN: I’m going to check that right now, just so that I make sure that I have it.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And it’s all in little bite-sized chunks. And it actually, for a history book, it has this incredible narrative with heroes and villains and all the players. Very interesting document.

JOE ROGAN: I’m getting it right now.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, yeah. Don’t read it before bed.

JOE ROGAN: No?

MEL GIBSON: No, it gets pretty dark.

JOE ROGAN: Why are you so drawn to history?

MEL GIBSON: I don’t know. I think because maybe I’m trying to learn something. It’s been about 80 years since the last big war.

JOE ROGAN: Allan Eckert, got it.

MEL GIBSON: I think I just want to learn, you know. I mean, my dad went to World War II. He went to Guadalcanal, right? He got bit by mosquitoes. He had, you know, malaria. Which is interesting to note that he used to take hydroxychloroquine when he got a malaria attack. Isn’t that crazy? And then when I tried, when my doctor recommended I get it when I had COVID, they gouged me. 800. It used to cost him 30 bucks. They wanted 800 bucks for that. They were gouging.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that. When Trump talked about it, then all of a sudden they demonized it.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah. They laughed.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Which is crazy because it’s an antiviral. It works.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It works on malaria.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And people have been taking it forever. Sure. Pregnant women can take it if they have the flu. And it doesn’t hurt the baby, you know. Yeah. It’s pretty safe. It’s like ivermectin.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s what’s so bizarre about the time that we just went through because there’s more information now available to people instantaneously than ever before. You look it up on your phone and instantly know, oh, ivermectin, the guy who created it, won the Nobel Prize.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. 2014.

JOE ROGAN: 2015, for use in human beings.

Medical Treatments and Controversies

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. So what the fuck is going on? Like, who’s running this thing?

MEL GIBSON: And it’s harmless. And it wasn’t made for horses. It was made for people. And then they used it for horses.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s like saying penicillin is for horses because they use that on horses too. Like, that’s stupid.

MEL GIBSON: They told me it was for moldy bread. That’s what it was from.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, there’s a lot of medications used on animals too. You can’t say it’s a veterinary medication just because it’s also used on animals.

MEL GIBSON: No, that’s true.

JOE ROGAN: It’s been used on literally prescribed billions of times on human beings.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It’s like the stem cell stuff. They started using it on horses with emphysematic lung conditions, racehorses, because they would bleed. And they got the stem cells from the umbilical cords of their offspring, injected it into them, and it healed their lungs, which is part of my story because I smoked for 45 years and I couldn’t stop. And I read this silly book by Alan Carr, not the little guy who, you know, managed the village people in the caftan, the little fat guy, but no, this other guy, Alan Carr, and he wrote this book. And it’s the only thing that made me stop. It worked like crazy.

JOE ROGAN: But the book made you stop?

MEL GIBSON: The book made me stop. I read this book. It was the book called “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking”. And it’s a silly title, right? And it was sad, and my son gave it to me. He said, stop smoking, Dad. Here’s this book. I left it out. I used to walk past the bookshelf and go, dumb book, dumb title, you know. And then I finally, my doctor said, you have first stage emphysema. And I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. He said, yeah, you’ve got to get the smarts. I said, yeah, I better read this book. So I read the book and I stopped. Right? So it was, I think it was like neurolinguistic programming or something like that. You read it and you kind of filth hypnotize yourself. But it worked.

JOE ROGAN: What did the book tell you?

MEL GIBSON: It said, it didn’t tell you you’re bad, you’re going to die. It didn’t tell you all that sort of stuff. It was like, I mean, they had things like, maybe I’m blowing it, but they had a chapter where it says, okay, we focused on the negative aspects of smoking. Now we’re going to talk about the good aspects of smoking in the next chapter. And then you turn the page and the page is empty, you know. And it’s just a trick. It’s a mind trick. The whole thing was a mind trick, but it worked. And I don’t know why it worked. But it was sort of like self-hypnosis while you’re reading the book. And it wasn’t a negative thing like, I’ve got to stop this. It’s bad. It’s bad. I’m scared. It wasn’t even that. In fact, if I hadn’t had the stem cells afterwards, my lungs completely healed from that, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: Did they do it intravenously?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Intravenous. And it gets stuck in your lungs.

JOE ROGAN: Was this Dr. Reardon?

MEL GIBSON: It was Reardon.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And we talked.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. It worked.

JOE ROGAN: Stem cells are incredible. And the fact that you can’t get them the way they can get them in overseas, the way we can get it in Panama, where Reardon has his clinic, and Tijuana.

MEL GIBSON: They’re getting better here.

JOE ROGAN: They’re getting better, but there’s so much resistance because of the FDA.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, sure.

JOE ROGAN: And the resistance is purely because of money. Again, it’s an evil thing. It’s not because they’re not effective. It’s not because they’re dangerous. It’s just because of money.

MEL GIBSON: I think so. Yeah. And, you know, there’s an agenda. I think, you know, pharma wants to keep you on stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: They want to sell you something. And so if there’s a surefire cure for something, it’s not necessarily hailed.

JOE ROGAN: No. Well, and then there’s also the problem of the media. The media is lockstep in with these businesses that are promoting these things.

MEL GIBSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re not giving you information. They’re giving you propaganda before they’re giving you information. Propaganda is more important to them than information.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s what’s crazy. We’re counting on you guys, and you fucked us. You fucked us for four years with this COVID thing, and now you expect us to listen to you about the fucking swine flu or the bird flu or whatever other thing you’re trying to freak us out about, which always coincides with some sort of a political event. Like, here it is, the inauguration of the new president, and, oh, look at this. There’s a new disease. What do we got now? What is it?

MEL GIBSON: Do you think there will be?

JOE ROGAN: Well, there is. There’s this fucking swine flu. H5N1, whatever it is.

MEL GIBSON: I thought it was bird flu.

JOE ROGAN: Bird flu. One person died. One person in America, first person died, 65 years old with a bunch of comorbidities.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, okay.

JOE ROGAN: Which is usually what it is. But, by the way, 65 people with a bunch of comorbidities die all the time of nothing. They die of anything. I mean, this is like a car that’s falling apart, and you run over a nail, and, oh, the nail killed the car. Now, that car was falling the fuck apart.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, the nail you ran over was the last nail in the coffin, but the thing was falling apart.

MEL GIBSON: I got COVID from my gardener, and he had it first, and then I got it. And I was like, ah, did I grab the hose, or what, you know, what was, I don’t know. But, uh, it was, um, it was, I knew the guy for 20 years, and we both went to the same hospital. And he died, and I didn’t.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus.

MEL GIBSON: I think we both got remdesivir, which is not good.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, not good.

MEL GIBSON: Not good.

JOE ROGAN: Causes kidney failure.

MEL GIBSON: I know. I couldn’t walk for three months after I had that stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Because it kills you. I found that afterwards, it kills you, and that’s why I wonder about Fauci, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you should wonder about that guy. Well, meanwhile, they were trying to stop people from getting monoclonal antibodies. Well, they’ve restricted monoclonal antibodies, which is fucking insane, because they wanted to promote that vaccine, because they wanted to profit off of it. Which brings us back again to evil. Evil’s real.

MEL GIBSON: It’s real.

JOE ROGAN: Putting money over human lives is evil.

MEL GIBSON: I agree.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a real thing, and there’s a temptation to do it, too, which is even more crazy.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I don’t believe that there is anything that can afflict mankind that hasn’t got a natural cure for it. I think that that has to be. It just makes sense to me. Now, I couldn’t prove that, but I just believe that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: That there’s got to be something that cures things. And I’ll tell you a good story. I have three friends. All three of them had stage four cancer. All three of them don’t have cancer right now at all. And they had some serious stuff going on.

JOE ROGAN: And what did they take?

MEL GIBSON: They took some, what you’ve heard they’ve taken.

JOE ROGAN: Ivermectin. Fembendazole.

MEL GIBSON: Fembendazole. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’m hearing that a lot.

MEL GIBSON: They drank hydrochloride something or other.

JOE ROGAN: There’s studies on that now where people have proven that they’ve.

MEL GIBSON: People are drinking methylene blue and stuff like that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, methylene blue, which was a fabric dye.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it was a textile dye. And now they find it has profound effects on your mitochondria.

MEL GIBSON: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: This stuff works, man.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of stuff that does work, which is very strange.

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: Because, again, it’s profit. When you hear about things that are demonized and that turn out to be effective, you always wonder, well, what is going on here?

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: How has our medical institutions, how have they failed us so that things that do cure you are not promoted because they’re not profitable? That they can’t control it. They don’t have a patent on it, whether it’s vitamin D, K2, and magnesium.

JOE ROGAN: Yep.

MEL GIBSON: You know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, yeah. Zinc and quercetin.

MEL GIBSON: I do all that stuff. I do all that stuff. Did you do the Bricka thing?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Me, too.

MEL GIBSON: I lost 30 pounds, right? It’s fantastic. I was talking to Dana, and he said, oh, you know, I was a, you know. And I said, yeah, I’ve got to do something about this. I’m like, I’m 5’10”, 235, you know. That’s too fat. So I had to sort of roll it back some. Now I’m under 200, which is about where it should be.

MEL GIBSON: And it was that Bricka stuff.

JOE ROGAN: No, Gary’s a national treasure. Yeah. And he gets shit on all over the place, too.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, sure. Yeah. Going to sauna. But I feel better.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Oh, I do all that stuff. Yeah, yeah. Cold plunge, sauna. I’m ritualistic with it.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, that’s good.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s part of my everyday life.

MEL GIBSON: I hear your cold plunge is like 34 degrees. I don’t understand that, though. I mean, dude, 34 degrees.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s cold.

MEL GIBSON: That’s hardcore.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you get accustomed to it. It, to me, is not. I mean, it sucks. Every time I do it, I’m like, don’t do it. There’s like the part of me that’s like my inner bitch. I’m like, oh, we don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do this. But luckily, the general is stronger than the inner bitch. The general is always telling, shut the fuck up and get in there. And I just get in there every day.

MEL GIBSON: But I do like 48, man.

JOE ROGAN: That inner bitch is always talking, though. He never shuts up. No. Never shuts up. Don’t ever think that it, like, even though I do it every day, anybody who’s like, I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how I do it either. But I fucking do it. I make sure I do it. I just, I’m the boss.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Do you do the saunas, too?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Do you do the red light bed?

JOE ROGAN: I have a red light bed, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I have a sauna, red light bed. I have a hyperbaric chamber.

MEL GIBSON: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: I have everything.

MEL GIBSON: Hyperbaric chambers is the best, man. It’s incredible.

JOE ROGAN: Incredible work.

MEL GIBSON: I’ve got to get back in there. Oh. I feel like I’ve got more holes in my head.

JOE ROGAN: It’s phenomenal for just overall recovery, for everything.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also been shown to lengthen telomeres. They did a study out of Israel. Yeah, they gave people a protocol over 90 days. You do 60 sessions of 90 minutes over 90 days.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s shown to lengthen telomeres and decrease your biological age.

MEL GIBSON: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: And you just feel fucking great.

MEL GIBSON: That makes sense to me.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah, you’re flooding your body with oxygen. Most diseases, a lot of them, come from a lack of oxygen. You know, your body not having enough oxygen is very bad for you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Alternative Medicine and Energy Work

MEL GIBSON: I used to have a Qigong master. This is what kind of blows my mind about medicine and about ancient stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: This guy is from Shanghai. He didn’t speak much English, right? A little bit. His wife would translate for him. And he’d come in, and he could, like, point at you, right, from this far away, and you’d feel it. But, like, feel it, like, as palpable as someone pushing you around. It’s like, ugh.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not kidding. You’re like, ugh.

JOE ROGAN: What year was this when this was happening?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, shit. I met him when I was, like, 40.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah?

MEL GIBSON: He only just passed away.

JOE ROGAN: Damn, too bad. I’d like to meet that guy.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, no, just people like him. There are others like him.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: He’s not the only one. He learned it from somebody. And I think he imparted some knowledge. But, you know, he would get you, and he could, like, point at you and stuff like that. And it makes you wonder, like, how did they build the pyramids, you know? I mean, if he can use his mind and kind of get into quantum physics and move shit around with thought and with energy, there’s actual energy coming out of his fingers, they could have built the pyramids like that. I don’t know.

Alternative Medicine and Energy Work (Continued)

Maybe somebody had that down somewhere.

JOE ROGAN: But, well, I’d like to hear a better explanation.

MEL GIBSON: Me, too. Well, it was really weird. He, one time, he was working on me, and he was working on my liver. He said, your liver’s blocked, because he looks at you. And if you look at him, he looks away. And his wife engages you while he checks you out. And then he gives you a little body map, and he puts X’s all over it. And you go, yeah, that’s right. I’ve got a pain here and a thing there. You know, he knows where everything is. He knows exactly what’s going on.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ask him, is he seeing your aura? Like, what is he seeing?

MEL GIBSON: Everything. He sees everything. He was an allopathic doctor first. He went to medical school. He could write you a prescription. He could do all that stuff. He was a doctor. And then he saw a Qigong master, this old guy, and people were lining up getting cured. And he thought, that’s really interesting. And he learned that on top of being an allopathic doctor.

So one day, he’s at me on my back, and he’s pushing. And I can feel my back, and I’m at the wall. And there’s a poster of a film on the wall, you know, in my office. And I’m looking, and I can see him in the background. And he’s, like, down like this, like, ah, like kung fu pointing rays of energy at me. And he hit me. He started yelling at my organ, at my liver, like, ugh, get out, you know, whatever. And I went up the wall, and there was, like, eight inches of air under my heels. And I was up the wall. And I was like, whoa. And I came back down. And it freaked me out. And I looked at him, and he just went, ah, you said, don’t die. He said, it’s just science, like that.

JOE ROGAN: Just science, okay.

MEL GIBSON: Just science?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, just science.

MEL GIBSON: And I was so freaked out. I went to a priest. I said, is this guy demonic or something? Because he’s lifting me off the wall. And the priest was, like, he was an old Jesuit, right, a traditional old guy. And he was a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Elmer Fudd, you know. That’s the way he sounded. And I said, is this anything, like, demonic about this guy? And he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, did he heal you? Like that. And I said, why, yes, he did. And he says, that’s all right, then. And he says, I have no trouble with something like that. Because it was within the realm of possibility that somebody had power like that. And that it’s inexplicable. But that it works. And it did work. Yeah, he just passed away. He was pretty old.

JOE ROGAN: There was a place that, you know, I bought a comedy club out here. And before, the building that we bought was the Ritz Theater on 6th Street. But before that, I was under contract to another building. And this other building was owned by a cult. And this is a crazy story. The cult was awful, horrible. There’s a documentary on it. It’s called “Holy Hell”. And this guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist. He was a yoga instructor. Got a bunch of people in West Hollywood. And then eventually moved them all out here to Austin. But what this guy was doing, one of the things that he would do to his disciples is he would do a thing called the knowing. And they had to be chosen for it. They had to earn it. And when he would get them and bestow the knowing upon them, he would touch their head. And they would have this incredible experience where they said they contacted God.

Now, all these people denounced him eventually. They left the cult. They all said he was a con man and this and that. But they all talked about that experience and they said it was the most profound experience of their life. That they really do feel like they came in contact with God. And it’s like, what can a person, if a person truly believes and this other person truly believes that they can do this to them and they have this moment and something does happen. Like, what is – is that all inside of us? Do people have ways of pulling that out of you that we’ve lost track of that we don’t know? And even an evil person who’s running a cult and manipulating people and exploiting people still has this thing that he was able to do to them that even after they’ve admitted that this guy exploited them, they say that was the most profound moment of their life.

MEL GIBSON: That’s interesting, isn’t it?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Because I think, yeah, there are party tricks that you can get.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But is that party trick, if it really is a pathway to connect you, at least temporarily with God, that there is a thing inside of us?

MEL GIBSON: Well, that’s why I went to the priest because I thought – Because I’m off the floor. So I thought, I’ve got to check this out because this is too weird. And he said, did he heal you? And I said, he did. And he said, that’s all right then. Because the guy wasn’t trying to get anything out of me.

MEL GIBSON: In fact, he never charged me.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: The first time I went to see him, he charged me. And it was like, okay. And then he never charged me again. And he used to call me when I was sick.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: I wouldn’t call him. He knew when I was sick. He’d call me. He’d say, I need to come see you. I’m like, okay.

JOE ROGAN: So he had like some sort of a direct line with your energy.

MEL GIBSON: Something. Pretty amazing. And he could, oh, this is the other thing. He could teach you martial arts, like quickly, without you having to know what to do. It was a weird thing. He did it, firstly, with my son, who he got him for a couple of weeks. And like, he said, I’m going to show you something. And I went out there and he blindfolded him. He had these two swords. And he was doing all this, you know, this crazy stuff. I’m like, what the? I said, how did he learn that so fast? He said, it was in him. And I’m like, whoa. And then he started to do a thing that he taught me how to harness this energy. And to actually begin what seemed to be almost like involuntary movement. And depending on the hand mode you took, it would create a style of kata or self-defense.

I mean, I used to do like some, I used to do a crude martial art. Not crude, but like a hard martial art.

JOE ROGAN: What was it?

MEL GIBSON: Kyokushin.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, yeah. Kyokushin Karate.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s Korean.

JOE ROGAN: It’s Japanese.

MEL GIBSON: It is?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: I can’t remember. But it’s like, you know, I didn’t stick with it. But it was, but he got this whole other approach of breathing and visualizations that would actually draw energy into your lower chakras. And then you’d, you know, you’d release the energy and it would create this kind of movement. And I showed it to a friend of mine who was a martial artist. And I said, tell me about the footwork I’m doing here and what I’m doing. And he looked at me and he says, that looks really good to me. I said, it was kind of like, what’s that really soft kind of martial art?

JOE ROGAN: Tai Chi.

MEL GIBSON: It was like that. I was doing stuff like that. It was crazy. And it was really a great release. But it was about visualization and breath.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And the release of those, that energy that you pent up from all around that you visualized coming, manifesting itself in you.

JOE ROGAN: There’s got to be something to all that stuff. People have been practicing Tai Chi for a long time.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They wouldn’t be practicing the safe movements for all these years if it didn’t do something.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Pretty interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: It keeps people young and healthy. They do it in China. You see groups of people out in Asia sort of out there in groups doing it all in unison. And it’s like, it’s a good thing. Exercise.

Physical Health and Aging

JOE ROGAN: What do you do now for exercise?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, gosh. I’m terrible. I’ve been, I’ve come off, I’m falling apart. I got this, I got dead, dead guy’s parts in my shoulder. I’ve got, you know, cadaver parts. This shoulder fell apart. This shoulder fell apart. A hip, a foot. It was terrible. I couldn’t walk for about a year almost.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: And so, you know, you fall down. That’s partially why I had to go and see Brecca to sort of get the couch potato stuff off. But, you know, I lift weights and I do some, you know, walking and stuff like that. Like, really get your heart rate up and stuff like that. And so, you know, I’m trying. Hey, I’m, you know, I’m 69 years old. So it’s like, it’s getting to be like seven decades or, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: But I want to stay fit if I can. And I banged myself up a little too much in my early life, so I’m paying for it now. And like in your 60s, man, you’re not there yet. But stuff starts like giving up on you.

JOE ROGAN: Yep.

MEL GIBSON: It’s like.

JOE ROGAN: No, I feel it in my 50s.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. How old are you?

JOE ROGAN: 57?

MEL GIBSON: 58 is when it starts, man.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: That’s when I first noticed it. It was like, oh, what’s going on with this here? And I went down to Reardon, of course, who shot it up with stem cells. And it was good for like two years, you know.

JOE ROGAN: You just got to keep going back.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t go back often enough.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the thing. I think it’s just your body’s just not going to heal the way it did when you were younger unless you consistently get therapy for that. You’re in good shape, though.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I mean, yeah. So I was in reasonable shape at 58. And I think I’m in reasonable shape now. But I’m just, you know, it’s just trying to push the old man off.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: And various methods to do it, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s what it is. Keep the body as young as you possibly can. Yeah. Yeah. And demand a lot from it.

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what I do.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I just demand a lot and make sure I recover.

MEL GIBSON: I think a lot of it’s about meditation, too. You know. You can actually get into a good head space that kind of cools you out and stops the stress, even no matter what’s going on. I’m going to have to do it tonight when I find out whether I still have a home or not.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, if anything looks demonic, it’s the fires in Los Angeles.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I remember one time we were filming Fear Factor and we had to drive home. We had to cancel the shoot or end it early and drive home because the fires had hit. And this is like we were off the 5 and driving home for 50 minutes on the highway, the right side of the highway was in flames. Yeah. Like Lord of the Rings, like Sauron is coming over the top. It looked fucking insane. It’s biblical. It looks insane.

MEL GIBSON: And you’ve got to be careful, too, because you could die.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, 100%.

MEL GIBSON: If you can’t breathe. I mean, come on.

JOE ROGAN: If you can’t breathe or if the cars in front of you catch fire and the wind blows this way and all the cars catch fire and you can’t get off the road because to the right of you is on fire, to the left of you is on fire, and the fire is coming up the highway. Yeah, people have died that way. And it can happen in an instant.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I got hung once by mistake. And I was on a film set and I had my neck in a noose and I was directing the film. So I’m on a ladder and I’m like, so I’ll just be hanging here like this. And then the next thing I knew I was waking up. I was on the floor. And there were all these people standing over looking at me and I’m saying, what are you people doing? Get to work. You know, it was like, and they said, well, you hung yourself. I said, whoa, are you kidding me? It happens in an instant and you don’t know it. It wasn’t painful. Nothing. I was just gone.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you probably got choked out.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, choked out by the noose. And then they grabbed me by the legs and got the rope off. During Braveheart, it was.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, really? Oh, wow.

MEL GIBSON: It was funny. So I found out what it was like to sort of go into the next realm. But of course, we did. I was fortunate enough to work with Horian Gracie 39 years ago. You know, he’d just come from Brazil.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I remember when you were doing Lethal Weapon. It was the first time I’d ever seen jujitsu in a movie.

MEL GIBSON: A leg choke on film. He taught, yeah. Horian taught me the leg choke. He said, now you grab your foot. And it was cool. But it was, now my girlfriend does it. And she’s like a purple belt. So I’ve learned.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, I’ve learned not to talk back.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, she’s legit.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, she’s legit.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Relationships

JOE ROGAN: Purple belt is basically a black belt. You just need a little bit more time.

MEL GIBSON: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: I always tell all jiu-jitsu students, if you can get to purple belt, you are a black belt. You’re going to be a black belt.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, she will be.

JOE ROGAN: You just got to stay on that path.

MEL GIBSON: No, she is. She’s obsessed with it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And she’s, you know, as I say, I don’t talk back to her.

JOE ROGAN: I think the purple belt is the hardest belt to get to.

MEL GIBSON: It is.

JOE ROGAN: Because it’s just like, in the beginning, you’re just getting crushed. That’s jiu-jitsu. Especially for women. It’s so difficult for women. Because they don’t have the physical strength that the men have.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because you can kind of get away with a lot. If you’re a big, strong guy, you can get away with a lot of shit. But then by the time you get to purple belt, like, man, you have to have real technique. And you have to have a real understanding of what’s going on.

MEL GIBSON: Well, she’s got a good mind. And I think she’s like a chess player.

JOE ROGAN: Mm, it is like that.

MEL GIBSON: Because I know from fighting with her. She wins arguments when she’s wrong.

JOE ROGAN: Sometimes you let them win, though, right?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just like you’ve got to walk away.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Sometimes it’s like, oh.

MEL GIBSON: You’ve got to go, okay. It’s my second thought of my first act.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: But she got the purple belt. That’s amazing.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Good for her.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, it’s good for her.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah, a woman black belt. That’s an unbelievably exceptional woman.

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: They can get to that. Because they have to roll with men. And it’s just this.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, she does. She never gets disadvantaged. Big dudes and stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: And she’s like, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: She’s done some exceptional things I’ve heard. So it’s like, yeah, it’s pretty good.

JOE ROGAN: That’s awesome.

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t follow it up. You can still do it.

MEL GIBSON: No, I’m a more baseball bat gun kind of guy. I’m in trouble. I just think, you know. That kind of stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Well, be careful with that in California.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, right.

JOE ROGAN: You could wind up being in jail.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, that’s true.

JOE ROGAN: You wind up using it to protect yourself and to lock you up.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, it’s…

MEL GIBSON: Which is also evil.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. That happens a bit.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Mm-hmm. Oh, well. Yeah, there’s a perverse nature in our society right now with the law.

Career and Creativity

JOE ROGAN: You know, when you look at your life now and you’re on your third act, as you were saying, like, what do you look forward to these days? Is it creating things?

MEL GIBSON: It’s creation.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, I think it is. It’s about creation. And I figure, ah, I’m pretty average at most things. But I’m good at a couple of things, you know. I know how to tell a story on film. I know how to do that. I don’t know. That’s a weird place to be. But I think a lot can be achieved by art and image. And you can convey a lot without actually having to say it. You can do things to affect people emotionally or spiritually, even without being overt.

I always like to reference just a shot that, and it’s in a Ridley Scott movie, right? And you don’t know why it works or why it’s effective on some level, but it’s kind of a profound, effective shot. And it’s that first shot in the Gladiator movie where he’s running his hand over the wheat. Right? With that music and stuff. Why does that work? I don’t know. You can’t explain it, but it works.

JOE ROGAN: Well, Ridley Scott is a master.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a visionary human being. He sees things. He knows how to shoot.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s really good. It’s a valid pursuit, I think, in storytelling, if you can do that. Everything, every time he goes out there, it’s eye candy. It’s a feast for the eyes, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Do you have different goals with, like, different projects? Like, obviously, Flight Risk is entertainment.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s fun. It’s entertaining.

JOE ROGAN: It’s entertainment, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And, yes, different goals. And it was, the other thing, too, is it’s like we’re living in a different time now in the film world. I mean, everything’s upside down, and you have to compete in a medium where you have less time, less money, do it fast, do it now. And it’s like, wow, can I do that? I always had the luxury of, like, you know, a big budget and 3,000 people on horses and all this kind of stuff or, you know, and was able to take my time with stuff. But I had 22 days. And here you got to tell this story in 22 days.

So I felt the challenge of being able to do that and being able to make something that really got people, like, they could watch it and enjoy it, you know. And I’m glad you saw it. I’m glad you liked it. And that’s all I wanted. I just want people to have a nice little ride, a fun ride, entertainment. But, yes, you have different goals with things. I mean, the next thing I’m going to tackle is more profound for me. And it’s going to take more out of me.

JOE ROGAN: This is the resurrection story.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And I even have to change my entire life to do it.

JOE ROGAN: How so?

MEL GIBSON: You can’t go into a project as profound in nature as that without somehow preparing yourself for it. It’s like preparing for a fight.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: It’s like you have to be fit for the fight. And, yes, so you have to spiritually prepare yourself for that. And that’s going to take some sacrifice because, you know, I profess this and I profess that. I’m not a great example of Christianity. You know, I’m just, you know, I’m flawed and I make a lot of mistakes. But I have to try and be better somehow in order to go in and make that film.

So what does that mean? I think I know what it means, you know.

The Passion of the Christ and Jim Caviezel

JOE ROGAN: Well, one of the things I thought was fascinating was reading and listening to Jim Caviezel talk about his experience playing Christ in your film.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That just truly changed that guy’s, the course of his whole life.

MEL GIBSON: Well, it was fascinating to watch him work, actually. And most of the time I just, like, backed away because he was doing something that, and I’ve seen a lot of people portray Jesus in films, right? And I never buy it. You can’t quite buy it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: Something creeps in the colors that’s not, something’s not right or discordant. And some of them are pretty good, but you never quite believe it all the way.

JOE ROGAN: What was the Willem Dafoe movie?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, that was a Scorsese film.

JOE ROGAN: Right. What was that called?

MEL GIBSON: The Last Temptation.

JOE ROGAN: That’s right. That’s right.

MEL GIBSON: Which, interestingly enough, I was in a hotel in the Savoy, and I had food poisoning. I was near dead from, I ate a bad oyster in London, and I was dying in a hotel room, and I couldn’t even leave. It was the worst. I think it was like salmonella or something. And I saw this cord on the side of the bed, and I pulled it, and all of a sudden, a door opened up, and a butler like Jeeves came in. He says, yes, sir. And I’m like, whoa. And I said, I’m really sick. I said, what do you think I should eat? Might I suggest some warm consomme and a cup of tea? I said, okay. So this butler took care of me in this hotel.

But while I was there, Scorsese calls the room, and she says, come here, I want to talk to you. So I go in and talk to Martin, and he’s in his room, and all the windows, the screens are drawn. He’s got 18 different TVs going on at the same time in this dark room. And he’s talking to me about the last temptation of Christ, and he wants me to play Jesus. And I said, whoa. I’m not doing it. And I sort of got out of there.

And then I went back to my room, and they changed my room. Now, this is really weird. They had changed my room and moved my stuff. And they told me they were going to do it, but I forgot. So I’m using a key to get into my room, and it won’t work. And the door opens up all of a sudden, and it’s Keith Richards in his underpants standing there staring through me. And there’s a girl in a mink coat walking around it, mink coat and nothing else, walking in the background. And Keith Richards is standing there in his underpants with a spliff. And I’m like, I tried to explain that I thought it was my room, but it wasn’t. And, you know, it was ridiculous. I’m 26 years old. And he just looks at me like, shuts the door in my face. I thought, well, that was my meeting with Keith Richards. He slammed the door in my face. I was like, it’s fantastic. Anyway.

JOE ROGAN: But what were we talking about?

MEL GIBSON: He did something, I think, that nobody else did. And I think he pulled it off, because I totally, like, believed it.

JOE ROGAN: I believed it, too.

MEL GIBSON: And it was like, what did he do? He emptied himself out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And he invited something else in. And he left it. He just, he didn’t try anything. He just, he emptied himself out, and he meditated. And he let Christ in.

JOE ROGAN: And that role seemed to have had a profound effect on him.

MEL GIBSON: It did.

JOE ROGAN: As a human being.

MEL GIBSON: Oh, absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: And kind of fucked him up in his career.

MEL GIBSON: A little bit.

JOE ROGAN: Because people associated him entirely with that film. And then they associated him with Christianity. And then they associated him with right-wing politics.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, he got sidetracked by a few guys. I mean, there’s some people out there. They get in your ear. And it’s like Cassius, you know, talking about it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: And they get you up to make a speech somewhere.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: And, you know, it’s like, you know, people throwing eggs at you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And you wonder, you know, should I even be saying this? And so he stepped on a bunch of landmines. But, yeah, it did have a profound effect on him. But I think he was already mostly there anyway. And I noticed that. Because when I was trying to cast it, I thought, who could play this? And I saw the opening shot from Terry Malick’s film, which is The Thin Red Line.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

MEL GIBSON: And it was just a big close-up of Caviezel. And there was something otherworldly and childlike going on there in the close-up. And I thought, who’s that guy? He’s amazing. Of course, he couldn’t keep the blue eyes. He had to trade them out. So I changed the color of his eyes to brown and all that stuff. So it looked like he came from the region.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: But amazing, what he already had a quality, an ethereal kind of otherworldliness, space cadet quality.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And he’s still kind of like that. He’s still like, wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I wish I had met him, or I haven’t met him still. But I wish I had seen him before and then after.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And to see, like, did that role change him? Because it seemed to have strengthened his faith.

MEL GIBSON: Sure. It did. Yeah, yeah. He got in real tight with it. And I think he had some experiences while he was doing it. He suffered a little, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t he get struck by lightning?

MEL GIBSON: Well, there’s two times there was these lightning strikes happening on the set, you know. And there was this guy with him. He was a young fella, one of the assistants on the film. His name was Jan. Jan, and old Jan was like, he’s like six foot two Italian, northern Italian guy, you know.

Making “The Passion of the Christ”

MEL GIBSON: If he tripped in the street, women would slide under him, you know. It was that kind of stuff. The guy was like a babe magnet, right? And I think he was taking full advantage of the gifts he had. But he got hit by lightning the first time, getting people. We were out on the hill and there was a lightning storm, like with the crosses and stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Jesus.

MEL GIBSON: And this guy called Chieppo, he was a grip. And he never spoke a word to me the whole time. He’s just a quiet kind of guy. And I figured, oh, he doesn’t know English, so, you know. But he came up to me and in perfect English, he said, you know, I think you should get all the people off the hill. We could be struck by lightning. And I thought, oh, that’s a good idea. Let’s get off the hill. So we’re moving off the hill. Everybody’s getting off. And this kid gets hit through the umbrella, this Jan guy. He gets zapped by lightning, right? But he’s 22. And he goes to the disco all night and dances. You know, he’s doing a whole, you know, 22 experience. And he comes back the next day. He’s like, yeah, it was great.

And then he was with Jim the second time it happened. But this time, I found him in a Fiat Bambino with his knees up around his ears, like waiting for the third strike. He was like, this just doesn’t happen twice in the third strike. And he says, I have to change my life. So it was pretty funny.

JOE ROGAN: Filming that movie must have had a profound effect on a lot of people, right?

MEL GIBSON: It did, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because you were doing something that wasn’t just a film. It was…

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, verite kind of.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and it was strengthening people’s faith. That film was a, I mean, profound success. And a lot of people dismissed the idea of it even.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, especially in Hollywood. I mean, you had to self-fund all that, right?

MEL GIBSON: Yes, it was self-funded. And it was a very strange experience, that one. Because I put the money in. I thought, well, maybe I’ll break even. And it was… Then I got these messages back. All the majors wouldn’t distribute it. So I was like, nobody will distribute it. Okay, I guess I’ve lost, you know, the money. But it was worth the experience. And so one guy was left in the room at the end when the dust settled. And there was some guy. He said, I’ll distribute it. And he had a little company called New Market. And they distributed like one or two films before. And I think it was a Charlize Theron movie called “Monster” about that horrible serial killer.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And he said, I’ll do it. And, you know, it was just really basic. So I went and I met the exhibitors. And, you know, and this guy was like the distributor. This little company was just him and a toothless dog and a fax and an assistant. And it was like, okay, what’s all the smoke and mirrors about this between the distribution and the exhibition? I made handshake deals with all the exhibitors. Yeah, we’ll show this. I said, okay. And then we put it out there. And it went out. Nobody expected it to do much. But it did phenomenally well. And there was this kind of thing in the town that said, did anyone just see that? Did anyone just see what that guy did? Can’t let that guy do that again. And we don’t want anyone doing that. You know, because it sort of walked around the entire system.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MEL GIBSON: And scored.

JOE ROGAN: Right. So there was two things. There was resistance to the Christianity aspect of it and promotion of Christianity. And then there was resistance to the fact that you went outside the system.

MEL GIBSON: Well, I had no alternative.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Because no major would back it.

MEL GIBSON: Because of the Christianity aspect of it.

JOE ROGAN: I guess, yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Well, Rupert Murdoch said, you know, he wanted to. And then he said, nah. And then somebody advised him and said he’d be out of business in five years.

JOE ROGAN: Rupert Murdoch.

MEL GIBSON: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: In five years if he distributed that.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And I was like, wow, if he’s scared, I’m like, I’m going to crash and burn here. But it actually did all right.

JOE ROGAN: It did phenomenal.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And then, again, I tried to. Then I went with the studio on Apocalypto, but that didn’t work out so well.

JOE ROGAN: It didn’t?

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: In what way?

MEL GIBSON: Well, it was interesting. The film was a film with, it had no stars. It was in another language. And it came out on a weekend with another film that had Leo in it. And another film that had Cameron Diaz in it. And so those three films came out on the same weekend. And the one with no stars and without the language won the weekend monetarily. It won the box office by a narrow margin on the other two. And the second week out, Disney pulled the screens.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. So I thought, oh, that’s funny. Well, screens are gone. I guess there’s another agenda. Because that was another self-funded one.

JOE ROGAN: Did they pull the screens because they had movies that they had already made deals with?

MEL GIBSON: I think so. But, you know, it’s just politics and, you know. And I think perhaps the distribution deal on that wasn’t as good as something else. So it’s all business.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a phenomenal movie, though.

MEL GIBSON: It’s a great film, yeah. And it did better afterwards.

JOE ROGAN: In DVD and streaming and all that?

MEL GIBSON: Sure. Yeah, it did well.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I watched it again like two years ago. I hadn’t seen it in a while and I watched it again and I forgot a bunch of aspects of it. I was like, God damn, it’s a good movie.

MEL GIBSON: It’s just primal.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MEL GIBSON: And I think I love primitive stuff, you know. And primal emotions. I mean, basically it’s a guy just trying to get back home to save his wife and kid. And he’s got a lot of obstacles in the way, like jaguars and bad guys chasing him and trying to skin him and trying to rip his heart out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s pretty cool.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. And I sat in a room with my assistant. He said, what do you want to do next? Chase movie? He said, well, so we found out where the Mayan canoes and Columbus and all that. And then we just started making the story up in the room and we wrote it.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Some assistant, man. He actually wrote. He actually tapped it out.

JOE ROGAN: Hmm. Crazy.

The Resurrection Movie

JOE ROGAN: So when you’re making this resurrection movie now, you also have this obligation. You’re doing a very similar thing that you were doing with the Passion of the Christ, where this is a profound story.

MEL GIBSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: When you put something like that together, how do you choose who’s going to be the next Jesus?

MEL GIBSON: You use him again.

JOE ROGAN: Caviezel.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I know it’s 20 years later.

MEL GIBSON: It’s 20 years later, but it’s.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but it’s the right guy.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah, but it’s supposed to be three days later, but he got 20 years older. And I think I have to use a few techniques that they’ve started to get really good with the CGI.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, they can do amazing things now.

MEL GIBSON: You can actually get some of the same people.

JOE ROGAN: By the time you film it, it’ll be even better.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When are you going to start filming?

MEL GIBSON: I’m hoping next year sometime. There’s a lot required because it is, I’ll just tell you this, it’s an acid trip when we wrote it. It is like, I’ve never read anything like it. And my brother and I and Randall all sort of congregated on this. So there’s some good heads put together, but there’s some crazy stuff. And I think in order to really tell the story properly, you have to start with the fall of the angels, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Which is you’re in another place. You’re in another realm. You know, you need to go to hell. You need to go to Sheol.

JOE ROGAN: So you’re going to have hell? You’re going to have Satan? All that?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MEL GIBSON: Sure, you’ve got to have his origin.

JOE ROGAN: How do you depict that?

MEL GIBSON: This is a good question.

The Resurrection Movie (Continued)

MEL GIBSON: And I think I have ideas about how to do that and ideas about how to evoke things and emotions in people from the way you depict it and the way you shoot it. So I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. So it’s not going to be easy and it’s going to require a lot of planning. And I’m not wholly sure I can pull it off, to tell you the truth. It’s really super ambitious. But I’ll take a crack at it because that’s what you’ve got to do, right? Walk up to the plate, right? So I think I can get it. But it’s not about me, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MEL GIBSON: It’s about something else.

JOE ROGAN: Well, if anybody can do it, you can do it.

MEL GIBSON: Well, I hope so.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: It’s trying to find the way in that’s not, like, cheesy or obvious, but that actually, it’s almost like a magic trick in a sense. It’s diversion. It’s obfuscate this, show that. Look over here.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Do you have a title?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It’s just like “The Resurrection of the Christ”.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: It’s like, so that’s a title. And, yeah, it’s very ambitious. That’s all I’ll say. It took a long time to write. It’s really ambitious. And it goes from, like, the fall of the angels to the death of the last apostle.

JOE ROGAN: Do you have a start date?

MEL GIBSON: I don’t have a start date. I just have to begin pre-production and see what happens. And it’s just going to roll in its own time. It’s taking its own time. I thought it was late. I thought, oh, it’s taking too long. It’s taking too long. But it’s probably just right. Yeah. It’s when it’s supposed to be.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, if you believe that, that’s true.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. I hope you’re right.

JOE ROGAN: I think I’m right. My instincts are that I’m right. And if I was going to trust anybody with that story, it would be you.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s a massive thing. And theologically, it’s something that you have to really look at and make correlations that ring true because it’s not all written.

JOE ROGAN: Do you consult with someone, like a biblical scholar?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, of course, there’s your own thing that comes into it from having read the book a few times. You read the book a few times, and it’s amazing how your memory, how there’s these recessive files somewhere in the background, how you can correlate this piece to that piece over there. And that’s important because juxtaposition is everything with this story and what it means in a bigger picture.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: So it’s hard to explain, but it’s quite involved.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, I can only imagine.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. And I don’t know that you can do it in a foreign language because the concepts are too difficult now so that you may have to resort to the vernacular so that that at least is clear.

JOE ROGAN: Is that up for debate right now with you?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, it is. I’m thinking like, eh. But, look, have you seen these apps now where they have this AI stuff where the guy’s talking German and then he switches to French and then he’s Spanish and then Chinese?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Have you seen that?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: And his mouth moves? It’s the same voice. Right. I mean, it’s crazy what they do.

JOE ROGAN: So are you going to use that kind of a tool, do you think? You could. Will you begin it in Aramaic or in Hebrew?

MEL GIBSON: Maybe. Yeah. Aramaic is really the kick, isn’t it? But, you know, I think I’ve written it in English, but I wrote the last one in English, too, and translated it. And then the people had to learn to speak it because I think there’s only about 400 people that actually speak Aramaic still.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MEL GIBSON: And apparently they understood it, so I was happy about that.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MEL GIBSON: So that was good.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: 400,000 people, sorry.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

MEL GIBSON: In the world.

JOE ROGAN: That makes more sense.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah. Sorry. 400 people. I’ve, like, preserved those 400 people.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Not many people speak in Latin still, but that’s quite well known.

Closing Remarks

JOE ROGAN: Well, I can’t wait to see it, man. And I just want to say I appreciate you very much. All the stuff that you’ve done, you’ve made some really awesome pieces in your life. You really have.

MEL GIBSON: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. You’ve done some great stuff.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, yeah. I’m blown away by where you got to with this, which is like, didn’t you start off just smoking a spliff on a couch with a guy?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: It’s amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s pretty bizarre. Yeah. I’m not exactly sure how it happened. I just kind of kept doing it.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I’m a fan.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you.

MEL GIBSON: I watch it all the time.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you. There was no plan to do it. I’ll tell you that.

MEL GIBSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: There still kind of isn’t. I still kind of do it the same way.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, okay. Every day you wake up?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I just look at my phone. I go online. I say, who do I want to talk to? This guy might be interesting. That’s really it.

MEL GIBSON: Who’s next? You get some pretty interesting people.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, I was amazed at that. I can’t remember his name now. Terrence, what? He’s all into.

JOE ROGAN: Terrence Howard, the actor?

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant guy. He had a bunch of stuff going on. I was like, whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, he’s out there. Yeah. He’s out there. But, I mean, you have to be to be one of those guys.

MEL GIBSON: You do.

JOE ROGAN: Well, listen, brother, thank you very much for everything.

MEL GIBSON: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Appreciate you coming in here.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, thanks.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Your new movie’s great. And all your stuff’s great. I’m a big fan.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. Tickets on sale, don’t they?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. When does it come out?

MEL GIBSON: Oh, God, on the… 25th?

JOE ROGAN: 24th, 25th.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah, 24th.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. So soon.

MEL GIBSON: Yeah. It’s fun.

JOE ROGAN: It is fun. I enjoyed it.

JOE ROGAN: Yep. All right. Thank you very much.

MEL GIBSON: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Bye, everybody.

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