The Joe Rogan Experience - #1099 - Christopher Ryan

Episode Date: April 3, 2018

Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. is a psychologist, speaker, and author of New York Times best seller “Sex At Dawn” and he also hosts a podcast called “Tangentially Speaking" available on Spotify. His latest book "Tangentially Reading" is available now.

three two one is that a is that a gun that was that was a weird point that was not i wasn't sure if that was the gun chris ryan hey i'm good dude the van vanthropology right out there man scarlett joe vanson i call her you just traveling in that thing I just got back from a month on the road, yeah. Wow. To New Orleans and back. I was just New Orleans too, but it only took three hours. Yeah.

I took a scenic route. How many days did it take to drive to New Orleans? You know, we stopped a lot along the way. Yeah. But I don't know, 10, 12 days, something like that. You want to stop. We actually, we went down along the border. We were in Bisbee.

Stanhope was in Asia. No, he was in Asia. He was on Southeast Asia. That's how, like, when you think of Bisbee, you think of Stanhope. They're inexorable at this point. There's not much of a reason to go to Bisbee. Like if you said Bisbee and you didn't visit Stanhope. Like if you went to Phoenix and didn't visit a guy that you knew there, it's like, I'm sorry, man.

I got really busy. That's normal. But if you went to Bisbee and didn't visit Stanhope, how many people are in Bisbee? I don't know. But it's a strange little place. Have you been there? No. I'm scared.

It's like this giant open pit mine and like the hills are all kind of purple and weird colors because it's all slag from the mine really yeah it's it's a toxic looking place i gotta say christ i don't know why anyone would choose to live there real estate crashes dr chris ryan trashes bisbee it's going down i'm not saying anything that isn't pretty obvious if you drive through town. I'm sure there are nice parts of town. I don't know. We just drove through. The coolest thing about this van is I've combined it with the podcast.

And so I'm traveling and I'm also meeting people along the way. Some of which are planned, like if Stan Hope had been around and was willing to hang, definitely would have hung with him. But others just come up, like right near Bisbee. See, people follow me on social media, and they're like, oh, I see you're in Texas. You should visit my buddy in Terlingua. And I did, and I'll tell you that story in a minute. But near Bisbee, this woman, Dorothy, I think her name was, wrote to me, and she's like, dude, Near Bisbee, this woman, Dorothy, I think her name was, wrote to me. And she's like, dude, you're in southern Arizona. You've got to drop in on my buddy, the rattlesnake guy, who's been studying rattlesnakes for 50 years by himself.

He's not looking for fame or anything, but I'll talk to him. I think he'd like you and you guys would enjoy each other's company. And so I'm like, sure, I'll talk to the rattlesnake guy. Perfect. So he came out to this campsite, and we hung out for the morning. This guy is amazing. John Porter is his name. He's been studying snakes for 50 years. He's just totally interested in them.

Lives on next to nothing in a trailer in the desert. That's his focus. He's been bit 15 times. Jesus. Yeah. What keeps you fucking with snakes after bite number 11 yeah i know fully bite me 10 times shame on me fucking this is bullshit this job sucks like how many years has he been doing it 50 years 50 he's almost 70 that's incredible and he's in really good shape he scrambles around in the hills and pulls snakes out of holes.

Wow. Yeah, he's a really interesting cat, and he's just like, that's his passion. That's what he does. Now, did he do the slow amount of venom in his system to try to make himself immune? You can't be immune to it, because what I learned from him, one of many things I learned from him, is that rattlesnake venom is essentially digestive enzymes wow and what what happens is they bite an animal the animal runs off 20 feet or something before it collapses the enzymes are digesting the animal from within because they don't have enough enzymes within their own

digestive tract to digest the whole thing from outside right so when they get the animal inside them they're digesting it simultaneously from outside in and then from inside out so that's why what a monster these are um the snakes that that strike uh warm-blooded animals right and then this the ones that eat cold-blooded animals they have the neurotoxins that's a different type of there's a terrifying video that i put on my instagram a couple years ago i think is that rattlesnake one you'll never find it it's like way back there jamie's smiling it's like oh it's a challenge uh i retweeted or reposted somebody else's some guys were hunting and a rattlesnake was pulling a rabbit and just the way this demon thing just

pulled this poor little fuzzy rabbit but I instantly made the differentiation I instantly differentiated which one I was on team like whose team i'm on i'm on team fluffy fluffy and furry always right anything that's furry well unless unless you've got a gun in or a bow in your hands well to eat it yes i think the furry ones are most delicious no no i'm not judging it at all but what i'm saying is it's but if something else was going after that snake if something had killed it's like a coyote had killed a snake. I really wouldn't be bothered by it. There's something that bothers me for whatever weird reason. I think of a rabbit as being not just a rodent,

a life form there. I mean, I think of it being like fucking Peter Cottontail or something stupid. Like that stuff's in your head. Herbivores are innocent. Yeah. Right. They're not out there fucking with other animals.

So it's kind of like very few herbivores. Sometimes they eat a lot of the birds yeah they eat birds when they can but they're more just opportunists like if a bird can't move they'll eat a baby bird right yeah what is this is it snake first rabbit no um it's actually dragging a rabbit in the desert it looks like we're in the mountains oh yeah this is the one where the mom saves the babies oh Oh, is that what it was? Yeah. Oh, God.

That happened to me once. Look at this. The mom rabbit comes over. Oh, she sees what's going on. Wow. That is crazy. That is fucking crazy. Now, that's not the one.

This one was a rattlesnake, a big-ass rattlesnake. And it was just the way it was dragging this rabbit around was so intense. When was a kid i i used to think i was an indian you know and i'd wander around the neighborhood in a loincloth are you allowed to do that today or would you get culturally appropriate probably i don't know someone would come after you i probably i mean a decent exposure too because i wasn't wearing underwear. Oh, you're a terrible person. What's your loincloth made out of? Bath towel. Purple bath towel.

So just folded in thirds, and I'd have a belt, and it would come up and hang down in the front and the back. Seriously, I was totally into it. But anyway, I was wandering around the neighborhood in my Indian thing, and I saw this rabbit rabbit and there was a bush with these hard little fruits on it and I grabbed one of these fruits and I threw it at the rabbit and I fucking hit it and the rabbit started flopping and boom just lay there I was like I just killed that fucking with a piece of fruit with a hard like little crab apple or something right so I walk over and I look at the rabbit and it's just laying there and then I I hear this squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak under this pine tree. And I go, and there's this nest of little baby rabbits with their eyes still closed. Little tiny ones.

I just fucking killed their mother, dude. I was like 10 maybe. Oh, what a bummer. So I took the babies home crying. She really did kill the mother with a crab apple. Dude, you should have went major league. You should have been playing for the fucking Dodgers. You got that kind of pitch?

So I took the babies home, and the next-door neighbor, my friend's mother, was a nurse. And I showed her, and she had like a syringe without the needle. And she showed me you have to mix can't give them straight milk because the rabbit milk is thinner so you have to mix water with it and all the stuff and i was feeding them and wow and then i went back actually a little while later maybe i don't know the next day or something and the big rabbit was gone which then later in life i thought maybe it wasn't dead maybe it was faking it to try to save the babies to distract me somehow more likely you KO'd it maybe

just a knockout yeah you knocked out the rabbit that makes sense because if you get hit in the head with something that you don't see coming it's very likely your brain could just shut off right yeah so anyway I raised these rabbits until I don't know a few weeks until their eyes opened. Wow. Yeah. And then what did you do with them? Boil them or fry them? Yeah. No, then we had to go visit my uncle in Ohio.

And I left the rabbits with this girl and told her how to take care of them and all that. And the girl apparently forgot about mixing the water and so by the time i got back after a three-day weekend a couple of them had died but she didn't want to tell me and you know we were 10 11 right and actually it was all through the biology teacher and then it turned out by the time that she told them they were all dead. Right. They all just died. They probably would have had a hard go of it anyway. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy.

Maybe you missed your calling. Baseball? Might have been you. I find baseball so boring, though. It's definitely boring. It's one of those things that you couldn't, and people right now are screaming, fuck you. Yeah. Well, your fans hate me anyway.

That's not true. That's definitely not true. I see it occasionally. You can't pay attention to those comments. Oh, I don't. First of all, they're amusing. They're only the people that would comment something shitty. They're the only ones that are going to get to you, right?

And then you've got to also think like- There's a lot of cuck beta stuff about me. Oh, that kind of stuff. Because they assume I am in an open relationship, and so therefore there's all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that cuck thing. That's interesting. Anyone who would call someone else a cuck or a beta male is. Most likely.

I don't think you could say anyone because sometimes people just are and some people say it and they're correct. But I think for the most part, the need to shut someone down. You're not in an argument. Okay. Like you aren't in an argument with them. You don't know them. You guys aren't.

So why are they insulting you? Why are they they going after you it's because of an insecurity but it's also because of this weird way of expressing each other uh ourselves on on instant you know on twitter and facebook and stuff it's just too instant that instantaneous ability to just go after something you don't meet them you don't establish a friendship with them you don't talk to them that's why i'm saying it's a reflection as a psychologist i find it really interesting because it's an it's it's you know you see these guys every fucking day there's another story about a an anti-gay you know minister who's been sucking little boys dicks every day or even big black guy dicks whatever you can get whatever dick is available whatever dicks's into. But if he's trying to like pray the gay away, for sure there's some gays going on somewhere.

I think we reveal our deepest secrets in our loudest accusations. I think you're right. And so this whole – the trolling and stuff going on online is interesting because people don't realize that they're exposing themselves. Yeah. People don't realize that they're exposing themselves. Yeah. Well, it's also a really shitty way of interacting with humans that some people participate in almost exclusively. There's some people right now in our culture that they're communicating with people. But the people that they're communicating with, they're only communicating with people online.

They're only doing it through Twitter or Facebook or however they do it. So like their days are spent interacting just randomly with people tweeting at them and reading tweets or reading, you know, reading message board posts or posting things or reading Instagram, you know, passages. All they're doing is interacting with people online. And I just think there's a lot of kids developing that way because they're not even, even when they're around each other, they're spending more time

communicating with people through a device than they are doing it face-to-face because they're always distracted. And I feel like this is a very, it's not indicative of how we evolved, like this method of communication. So like people say there's way more hate today than there's ever been before. I don't think so. I think it's the same amount of hate.

There's just this new weird form of expression that doesn't make you take into consideration the other people's feelings. It's like the only time we've ever had something like that. Like if you killed someone or you beat someone up and you looked at them and they looked at you and you knew that you hated them at least that's an honest attack yeah you know but if you're if you want something terrible to happen to someone and you don't even know them he just heard him on a podcast he was a guest and he annoyed you so you want terrible things to happen to him like you're not even you don't even know him it's like traffic anger you know fuck not even, you don't even know him. It's like traffic anger. You know,

fuck you. Like, yeah, you don't know that guy in that car. Like whatever. You know where that comes from though, right? Traffic anger comes from a heightened sense of awareness because you're going

so fast because you're in your car. You're scared. Yeah. Well, you're ramped up. You're looking constantly for anything to go wrong. You can't be at zero and just drive. When you're driving,

you're very aware that you're at the wheel of a big fucking thing. And then car accidents happen and people die in them. Everybody's aware of that. So you get ramped up. Although it's funny, I rode a motorcycle every day

for about seven years and I felt very calm on the motorcycle. I think because... Freedom. Freedom and vulnerability. Yeah, both. Did you have a Harley? No, I had a BMW. I knew it. I a bmw guy i'm not a harley guy some european thing fine drives too good fine

low center of gravity yeah i drove that like a grandpa too i was like i never got pulled over i was in spain i never had a spanish license really. That's amazing. Maybe you shouldn't say that online. Probably not. It's too late now. I'm out. Yeah. But the thing in Spain is funny because if you come from Mexico, Uganda, wherever, and you immigrate to Spain and you get residency, you have to turn in your driver's license and they'll give you a Spanish license, right? The only country where they won't honor your license is the United States. Wow. You got to go to driving school, that bullshit night school for six weeks, take the ridiculous test that's designed to trick you and the translation into English

is incomprehensible. And then you got to do it again. It's like 4,000 euros. It's a giant scam. And it's only for us only for america and the reason is that all these spanish kids were coming to the u.s doing like high school exchange thing and to get it you have to be 18 to get a driver's license in spain but in the u.s 16 obviously so they would come here and at 16 they'd get a driver's license and then they'd go back to spain and say hey give me the license you got to do it it's the law and so spain they talked to the american government like hey stop giving spanish kids licenses and the u.s is like fuck you we do it the way we do it we're number one and so spain was like all right then fuck americans and so now it's this giant pain in the ass if you're an american living in sp. Oh, man. So what happens if you get caught and you don't have a license?

If you're driving around, they pull you over. You get a fine. How much? A few hundred euros. That seems like a bargain. That's what I figured. You get paid over 10 times you get pulled over? That's what I figured.

I was like, what you do is you pretend you're a tourist. Right. Just in town. Have your passport. Right. Don't have a vehicle registered in your name. Not that I would ever do any of these things. Yeah, I was reading about expats and about people who just decide to just like go and move over to Europe for a while.

Yeah. That's like such an adventuresome thing to do if you really think about it as an American because Americans are for sure locked into our way of thinking. because Americans are for sure locked into our way of thinking. Like there's a, I don't want to speak for the whole group, but when you think of the typical American, you think of someone who just, they like things the way they have them here. This is the best.

We're number one. Well, those are the people expats are getting away from. Yeah. There's a lot, but the point is like, if you even have a niggling of that, and then you decide to move to Italy for a year, that will go away. You will realize like, oh, okay. Whatever form, I think that's one of the reasons why people cling so hard to those norms. I go, because they know, I think they know that Cambodia is different. And if they were living in Cambodia, they'd be living like Cambodians they know that laos is different they know that vietnam is different how could that be how could these

people in these other places be just like you just a person but they walk around in a rice patty all day and they push an ox and they don't have cell phones like how did that happen could that have happened to you like if you just got a weird roll the dice and instead of coming out with a seven you came out with a three could you have been in laos if you unless got a weird roll of the dice and instead of coming out with a seven, you came out with a three, could you have been in Laos? If you, unless, you know, I mean, I mean. And from a Laotian's perspective, he got the seven and you got the three. Oh, for sure. You have some, you make some guy take a cubicle job.

He's used to working outside and beautiful weather. Laos is great. I've been there. Have you? It's a beautiful, beautiful country. It's gorgeous on video. I've never seen it in real life. Yeah.

But that whole thing is just- Well, that's why I traveled all through my 20s and 30s was for that insight. Yeah, you gotta see it. You gotta see it and you gotta- In person, right? Yeah, and you gotta move slowly enough that you, Joseph Campbell called it detribalization, right? To understand

that you are from a tribe, right? Everybody thinks everyone else has an accent, but I don't. You know, there are all these biases that we're unaware of until you get out and look back at yourself and where you came from. And so I was, you know, I was based in Spain for 25 years. So I really got into Spanish. I've lived in Spain longer than I've lived in any other country. But you don't speak Spanish. Sure I do. Por supuesto, gilipollas.

¿Qué dices? I speak badly. But you speak it. I understand everything. And I sound like I gave a talk in Argentina once and they came up after and they said I sounded like, somebody said I sounded like a Catalan gringo because I learned Spanish in Catalonia. So I have this very specific accent in Spanish, which I'm totally unaware of, of course.

Intellectually, that makes sense to me. But my brain is like what different spanish accent how the fuck could you tell yeah well it's like obviously you can it's like a spanish person who learns english in scotland right yeah they sound scottish when they speak english yeah for sure or or i mean how many number of people that come from other countries that speak spanish or speak english rather but they speak it with the accent of their place. India. Even Canadians.

It's so subtle. About a boat. About. Yeah. Yeah. I went to university. Yeah. You know, and you see here a few,

two times and they're a little bit too polite. You're like, Hey, where are you from? Yeah. I love fucking with Canadians. So asking where they're from or what part of the States are you from? And they say,

I'm from Canada. I'm like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're James Brown has a song called living in the usa right and he goes through

and you know how he does like he calls out cities right you know it's new york you know pittsburgh b.a toronto well it's living in north america sort of. I guess that's his thing, right? Hey, Mexico's North America, too. Yeah, yeah. Isn't that crazy? Mexico's North America. My first apartment in Barcelona, I shared with this guy named Rogelio Gutierrez from Colombia. That's a fucking serious name. And I was just learning Spanish then, and he got really pissed off at me when I said I was American.

Because he's like, we're all Americans, dude. Colombia is South America. America is the whole Western Hemisphere. And you arrogant fucking estadounidenses. That's what I had to learn to say in Spanish. That means from the United States. Estadounidenses? Estados.

States. Estados. Unidenses. Unidenses. Are united. Yeah. I used to remember that. I. Unidenses. Unidenses. Are united. Yeah. I used to remember that. I used to remember Estado.

Estado. Do you speak any foreign language? No. No. I took Italian in college and Spanish in high school and remembered none of it. I took three years of German in middle school, high school, because I initially signed up for Spanish, which would have been the smart move. But then over the summer, I was like eighth grade, I think. And over the summer, this girl named Judy Gumpf, who I just lusted after Judy Gumpf.

Tell me about Judy. Judy Gumpf was like the 15-year-old who was totally built and gorgeous and smart and going out with a 23-year-old dude with a Camaro. And here I am with my zits and braces and I'm thinking

I got a shot at Judy Gumpf. So she was taking German and she said, oh, but there are only eight people in the class. I don't know if they're going to do it because you should have nine. And I was like, Judy, I'm going to call the school and switch over to German. I did. I sat in that class for three years with Hare Flint and Judy. Never had a shot at Judy, of course. And then Hare Flint, I could not, I have no talent for language.

I'm like, I'm all right in English. But like when you start talking grammar in the accusative case and, you know, in German, there are three genders. And, you know, there's D, D, D, masculine, feminine and neutral. And every noun has a gender. And it's like a fucking nightmare. So it's neutral for objects like that's boot. Yeah. Right. Objects. Like a fucking nightmare. So it's neutral for objects, like das Boot? Yeah, right, objects.

But also it's weird because, like, Mädchen, girl, is neutral. And you would think girl would have a fucking feminine gender. Girl is neutral. Yeah, das Mädchen. But anyway, Herr Flint was also the soccer coach. So we sort of had this unspoken agreement that if I was on the soccer team, he would pass me in German, even though I was lost constantly. I mean, I would have failed out for sure, but he would give me a C as long as I was on the soccer team. Not that I was any soccer star.

It's just that he needed enough people on the team that they'd keep paying him or they'd shut it down. So my memory of german is basically humiliation from judy gump because i never got anywhere humiliation in the class because i couldn't understand a fucking thing and humiliation on the soccer field because not only did i suck at soccer but he would scream at me in german because i was in the German class. So it was like, it was my tutoring or something. So like, yeah, yeah. Okay. In my Italian class in high school, there was this really friendly, beautiful Puerto Rican girl. She was beautiful. Like she was the type of girl that I would have been way too nervous to ask out or way too nervous to approach. I just would have

need, I would have needed a bunch of green lights to talk to her. I'd be super nervous. But she would approach me and she was always inviting me to go places with her, her and her friends. And I'm like, well, what are you guys doing? Well, we're going, you know, like a camp out. We're going to do this thing. And there was this getaway for the weekend.

Like one of them I couldn't do. So I was fighting back then. One of them I couldn't do because I had a fight and one of them I couldn't do. So I was fighting back then. One of them I couldn't do because I had a fight. And one of them I couldn't do because I think, I don't remember what the fucking reason was. But it was enough of a reason that I would say no to this hot Puerto Rican girl asking me to go somewhere with her on the weekend. That's beta cuck behavior, Joe. She was so hot. She was so hot.

She was built like a woman. I mean, we're both, I think I was probably 19. And so she was so hot she was so hot she was built like a woman i mean we're both i think i was probably 19 and so she was probably 19 too she was a she was a phenom i mean her body was just holy shit super duper pretty and super duper friendly so i'm thinking one day this is gonna happen right yeah so i go to the lunchroom one day and it was the day that it was a Trump airplane. I know I've talked about this before. The Trump airline, the runway gear didn't come down, and it skid. Remember when Trump had an airline?

Do you remember that? Vaguely. Yeah, he had a fucking airline. Big Trump on the side of it. Of course. And I'm pretty sure it was him, or maybe it was JetBlue. Now that I think about it, it might not have been trump or might have happened either way this airplane skid in you know they had to foam up the runway the

whole deal and things skid in without the gear and um i showed up and it was her and her friends landing gear fails on trump jet no injuries okay 1989 that is it that's exactly when it was happening you're in high school in 1989 no so that was 89, that must have been I was 21. No, that doesn't make sense. There must have been another one. See if there was one from earlier. Because when I was 21, I had already given up on the idea of college. I thought you were going to say giving up on the idea of her.

No, I was like, what am I doing? When I was 21, I was like, this is just too ridiculous. And then I started doing stand-up. In 87, there was a Mexico City air disaster, Belize Air International, Mexico City crash? No, it wasn't a crash. It was the same thing. The landing gear wouldn't drop down. I typed in airline runway gear.

Man, my memory sucks. Was it in Boston? It was in Boston, yeah. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I just can't imagine that I was 89, I was 21. around my memory sucks was it in in boston it was in boston yeah there you go yeah i just i just can't imagine that i was 89 i was 21 anyway so what happened with the woman and yeah no it's definitely not 89 because i was uh i was already doing stand-up by 89 um so i i'm sorry i sit down hundreds of thousands of people are going joe sit and I say, did you guys hear what happened today at the airport?

Yeah. And they're like, no, what happened? I go, this jet came in and the landing gear didn't drop, so it had a skid across the runway. I go, but everybody's okay. And they all go, praise God. Oh, praise God. And I went, oh. That's the weekend getaway.

This is the weekend getaway. It's an indoctrination to a Christian cult. They were bananas. They were, and they were super proselytizing. They would go everywhere and sit down with people that were by themselves. And if you saw, if they thought you were lonely or an outcast, they would send in the hot one. She would come and sit next to you and invite you places.

And then they'd pull you into the fold. And they were just recruiting people left and right to join. And then I noticed as the class would go on later in the semester, I noticed some of the people from the class were now in that little tight group. And they'd all hang together. It was very strange. I was watching people get – they got culted up. I was watching it happen.

They got culted up. I mean, I was watching it happen. But it was all like standard Christian stuff, but extremely involved in your life. Very rabid and recruiting, proselytizing everywhere. And the fact that this happened, it was very strange because I was like, you dummy. Of course she doesn't like you. She wants to bring you to Jesus. Well, you know, maybe she was going to fuck you to jesus i didn't think so yeah i didn't have much confidence back then believe it or not i didn't think it was

gonna happen i you know does anyone have confidence at 1920 really dumb kids yeah that's it when i was 19 i was like i just couldn't nothing made sense. I might have been 20 when it happened. Yeah. If you think you got it figured out at 19 or 20, you're destined for a life, you know, stacking shelves somewhere. I can't imagine it was in an 89. It doesn't make any sense unless my whole timeline for when I quit college is off. I just finished watching, binge watching this new Netflix documentary about the Rajneeshi,

you know, the Sannyasins in oregon wild west wild wild country wild wild country yeah that's amazing it's really good it's how many six episodes i think yeah we just binge watched it um i have a buddy who was a sannyasin for 15 years maybe something like that uh he wasn't in oregon though he was always in in india but yeah that's very interesting and the the whole sort of appeal of the cult and and the the hunger to be part of this community and wow it's a very interesting documentary yeah well i don't think it's too hard i don't think it'd be very hard at all to start a cult i just don't think it's very difficult. Well, some people would say you already have. Well, maybe.

But you could do whatever you want. I mean, there's no one's asking you for a membership fee. How many Rolls Royces do you have? I don't have any. Well, see, you need to step up your game there. Those aren't the way to go. You're like, instead of the Rolls Royces, you got the Porsches. I like old cars. You're the Porsche guru.

This is what I'm realizing. I like old cars. Old cars. They don't even have to drive as good. Yeah. They're a different thing. You ever heard of Mickey Avalon? Yes. I had him on my podcast recently. Really interesting and smart guy. Yeah. And he, in addition to

being a rapper and whatever he does, he, Simon Rex is a good friend of mine. Dirt Nasty. Yeah, I know Simon. And the two of them are on tour together. Anyway, so I was talking with Mickey, and it turns out Mickey restores antique cars. Wow. And he's got like 20 of them.

Like Model Ts and shit. Oh, that's awesome. Like really interesting cars. They're art, man. Yeah. This is what an old car they're just a it's a different thing you know what's cool to see the process of them figuring out how to design cars at faster and faster speed his car oh my god look at that thing

god that's beautiful what is that 61 impala a rockford fosgate equipped 61 Impala. A Rockford Fosgate-equipped 61 Impala. Wow. I love that sort of art deco lines. Yeah. So what he's doing is, I mean, I think that is what they would call a resto mod. You know, they take an old, that's the best of both worlds. They take an old car and they put modern brakes and modern suspension. Right.

And they're just safer and they ride better you can even swap out the engine right oh yeah they all do a lot of them do i should say um they use modern fuel injected engines you can buy them from almost all the companies ford sells crate engines and people put them in old mustangs it's amazing i love those old mustangs some of those cars are just, you look at them and you're like, God damn, how did they do it so good then? And why, you look at those old Mustangs or old Corvettes, there are a few years where Corvettes just couldn't have been more beautiful. Have you ever seen my 1965?

I don't think so. Dude, it's the greatest car I've ever seen in my life. I have a 1965, silver 1965 Corvette convertible. Wow. And I just sit in front of it. I think I may have seen it. Did you and Jay Leno drive around in that? Yeah. Were you in Topanga? No.

I remember watching that clip and thinking, oh, yeah, look at that. No, we went to Angel's Crest Highway. That car is two years older than me. Sort of. See, but sort of is the real thing. Like the outside is. But everything in the inside, as far as like dashboard and stuff. Well, you've had the hip replacements and stuff.

Those are new. I've got all my joints. Yeah. This car has got. Everything in that car is modern in terms of like the brakes and the engine, the engines from a 2007 Corvette. Yeah. They just do that. And that way, like you're driving around in an old car, but it brakes good.

It handles good. It's not a death trap. Right. And I think some of the mechanisms, the psychological mechanisms that make that possible apply to what's happening in podcasting these days. Yes. And the beautiful thing about podcasting is so far no one has taken advantage of it and started some compound somewhere and banged everybody's wife. Are we on? Is this thing on?

And required you to give up all of your financial money and all of your worldly goods. Yeah. No. I got a Patreon account, though. It's getting there. The Australian guy that said he was Jesus? Uh-uh. Pretty fucking interesting. Because there's this whole documentary on it, and he has this woman, and the woman said

that he said that she was Mary. Then, like, halfway to the documentary, it was said that she was Mary then like halfway to the documentary it was revealed that there was another girl in the past and he said she was Mary too that girl thinks she's Mary and he thinks he's Jesus it's it's fucking hilarious well Mary was Jesus's mother right uh yes so but they're partying together and banging because they're reincarnated it's not really Mary so Jesus is a motherfucker in this guy's view? Jesus is his own motherfucker. Oh, jeez.

Imagine? I don't know. I'd love my... I don't know. Sorry, she's not Mary the mother. She's Mary Magdalene, the prostitute. Oh, the prostitute. There you go.

Now it's fitting into place. Maybe the other Mary was the mom. This is the lost gospel. That's the lost gospel. Is the other Mary was the mom. It's just a lost gospel. It's a lost gospel. Is that what he said? Yeah. Dan Brown, right? Yeah.

Oh, Dan Brown. That Jesus was hanging with the hookers and very accepting of sex workers. Yeah. Why not? I mean, God made people horny. God knew what he was doing. But God made us monogamous, Joe. Oh, yes. Don't get me started. It's one of the reasons why i wanted to have you on i have an intervention on behalf

of that weinstein yeah you're gonna get me married you know um i told you in the email that i felt bad when your book came up on the show and i didn't know how to defend it i didn't know what to do because i didn't i was in that weird moment where I was recommending it cause I like it. Cause I think it's a great book. And he was saying that it just debunked. Well, I think he said you cherry picked data, right?

Which is always weird. Well, the thing is any sort of popular non-science or nonfiction book is you have to choose what data you're going to include right i mean there's an infinite amount of data and so of course you form uh an argument and then you present data that supports your argument did you ever consider um arguing against yourself sure yeah yeah and in fact the book is you know the book is written as an argument against the standard narrative so you know we had book is written as an argument against the standard narrative. So, you know, we had to present this. What is the standard narrative? Who believes this?

You know, who thinks that people evolved as monogamous? And so we quote quite heavily from those people. But, you know, the thing is, and I really appreciate your email and, you know, we don't need to talk about this at any length. and we don't need to talk about this at any length. But it's not your job to defend the book, and it's not even my job, really, to defend the book. I think once a book is out, it's out. The book is there. But isn't it, it's not just the book.

It's that when someone goes hard on a book, they're doing it about you as well. It's the expression of your work. But see, that's the thing. I don't accept that association. And so if somebody wants to critique the book, that's totally cool. And like, look, are there things that we may have misunderstood?

Of course. Are there things we left out? Of course there are. You know, mistakes? Of course. You know, that's... You're a human. You. You made it right. There are hundreds of citations in that book. Now, if somebody says, as people have, like, you know, Chris Ryan, you know, deliberately misrepresented the science or doesn't understand the first thing about evolution or, you know, whatever it is. first thing about evolution or, you know, whatever it is. I just don't engage because that's emotional. It's like what we were saying earlier about comments online. I think people react to sex at dawn very emotionally.

And so if they're reacting emotionally, there's no point in me engaging with them because they're expressing something that's going on in their lives that I don't know anything about. And I don't, they're suffering in some way. I'm not talking about Brett Weinstein or anybody specifically. But there's an emotional reason to have that kind of reaction. Whereas if somebody says, look, on page 72, you said that bonobos are the only ape that does this and actually gibbons do it as well

okay we can talk about that you know that's that's factual right so when people say oh it's cherry-picked well which cherries what are you talking about right you know what specific thing and what's wrong with it right right instead of saying it's cherry-picking this vast general critic critique of the book like what right and if it gets about me, like, oh, that's because he wants to get laid or he was... Well, that was one of the arguments, right? It was that it would be

a good book to write, I think. I don't remember if he said or if his wife said it, that it would be a good book. And I really love those two. They're great. They're cool. I just think

when it comes to monogamy and sexuality, people have a notion in their head and that notion almost always aligns with how they're living their life or how they wish they were living their lives yeah maybe and again we're not talking about specific people here i've never met them no they're listen they're a great couple they're wonderful people but i mean there's there's something about the subject of your book i think i told you this before without naming any names my friend brought your book home and his wife threw it away yeah you and I talked

about that on the very first podcast actually yeah yeah yeah I mean I mean I've run into this a lot right you can imagine cocktail parties with me can get awkward very quickly oh for sure you know because people ask oh wait you're the guy yeah you know and then often you'll see some people are very eager to hear about it and talk about it and other people are just the esteems coming out of their ears right i i think you know a lot of people are in relationships that they're trying to make fit into what they believe is the right way to have a relationship and And often it just doesn't work. And so there's a lot of shame and regret and resentment

and all kinds of negative energy around that. And so any discussion where you're saying, well, maybe that's not actually the way it's meant to work, for some people that's an incredibly liberating message. For other people, it's extremely threatening. Right. And I understand that. And so I've become very emotionally sort of separate from the book.

It's out there. It stands or not based on its merits. When people get all riled up, I've learned to just be like, yeah, you know what? That's fine. That's between you and the book. That's a very healthy approach. Good for you. It's just, to me,

it seems like people that get most upset about it don't get most upset about it for a rational reason. They get upset about it because it challenges the way they live their life. Well, that's what I was saying

about the gay preachers and stuff. It's like, if you're getting that upset, it's about you, man. It's not, I mean, if you disagree with it, then disagree with it. What they need is out gay preachers, like people who love Jesus and are also gay. You can't do that? You can't figure that out? How come this guy can start a whole fucking cult in Australia and tell people he's Jesus and his girlfriend's Mary, and you guys can't get together

and form yourself a nice gay church. I mean, do they have them that I don't know about? It's called the Vatican, dude. I mean, have you heard all this stuff going on in Italy? They've got all their sex parties. They're their own country. Do you know that? When I was there,

when you just walk around the Vatican and just see the fucking vast amount of pilfered riches that are all just sucked out by an ideology yeah i mean that's really what it is like that that church that whatever the fuck you want to call it that religion they just acquired an ungodly amount of wealth literally ungodly ungodly yeah it's fucking stunning yeah jesus is all about living in poverty and hanging out with sex workers and these guys are like just lavish wealth and it's crazy because if jesus came back the first thing he'd say is like what the fuck have you

guys done yeah like what have you done look at these gigantic places that you built and i told you guys you don't even have to be anywhere for this yeah you don't you don't need to have some ornate temple with stained glass windows and it took craftsmen like like st. Peter's Basilica like is it a shock that that is probably one of the most stunning things that I've ever seen in my life like one of the most beautiful works of art yet was created for this religion that most likely the people that were living in that day were probably like worshiping these people that were running this thing, like as if they were deities themselves and they needed them to have the biggest, craziest building.

They impress the rubes, right? When they come in from the countryside and they walk into a cathedral like holy fuck the impact that it has on you is you can't understate it still yeah yeah and there there are churches in barcelona i would go into and i'm i'm a pagan but just go in there and just feel the space yeah just feel it that does the you just you your body knows how big it is why can you it's like when you walk into an airplane hangar. Yeah. You know? It's not something you really can't overemphasize how crazy it is.

Like these people built this without power tools. I mean, I don't know what kind of fucking ladders they used, but whatever they did. Look at that. Fuck, man. Yeah. I mean, it's just crazy. You walk around that place. You can't believe how ornate it is.

But at the same time this was happening, people were starving. You know? Guaranteed. Like, how old is that? 1500? 1506. 1506. How well do you think everybody was doing financially in 1506?

I bet pretty fucking shitty. I bet everybody that lived around that place suffered and these motherfuckers were building these crazy places they have an obelisk in this whole place where you're uh these images right here we're showing from egypt this massive stone obelisk from egypt and i was like okay how the fuck did they get that there? Yeah, it shows you how cheap labor was. Oh, dude. Yeah, you could hire people for a lifetime for a pittance, you know? Yeah. Like really skilled artisans.

Yeah, and they couldn't go anywhere, man. Yeah. What they did in that place. I mean, the Vatican is just a, it's a stunning place. Like way more so than I thought it was going to be. Have you been to Spain? No, I have not. Look at that.

Oh, my God. Look at that. Oh my God. Look at that. Yeah. What is that, Jamie? What are we looking at? Is that the roof? I don't know. It's just St. Peter's Basilica.

Look at the fucking carving and everything. And I'm telling you, it's one of those things like you were talking about, how you have to see another culture in person in order to really appreciate it. I think that's the same with this thing. St. Peter's Basilica is one of those ones when you're there. Like, look how little those people are walking around down there. See the top of their heads? That's it.

That fucking place is giant. Yeah. Beautiful light coming through there. Unbelievable. It's one of those game changers. Yeah. Where you leave there. To me, it was way more impressive than the Coliseum.

Huh. Coliseum was very impressive, but it wasn't as impressive. Well, it's not intact, right? Right. But it's not even that. It's just like what it is. What it is is just craziness. It's fucking...

One impressive thing was the elevator complex that they had set up to lift animals up from the floor. Like, that is fucking nuts, man. Do you ever think about the Coliseum when you're doing UFC commentary? It's kind of like this modern. A little bit, right? Yeah. It's definitely a big, violent distraction from everyday life that people really look forward to and enjoy.

Yeah. You know? For, like, entertainment value. I mean, it's as primal as you can get without anybody really dying. Yeah. I mean, that's. Most of the time. Most of the time. Yeah. I mean, that's- Most of the time. Most of the time.

Yeah. I mean, no one has in the UFC. Oh. Ever. But it's because they have the most stringent rules and because they have the best medical staff and the best referees and all that stuff. But it's also just luck. Because people can die sparring.

It happens. What- If you're in a chokehold and you don't tap out. You just go unconscious. And then you'll be all right. Yeah, you'll be fine. And you can feel when someone goes unconscious. The muscles relax.

Yeah, they just slump. And the referee, sometimes the referee will pick up an arm. Even like the old pro wrestling move. They would check to see if the guy was still awake. They would pick the arm and the guy would be like. And the crowd would go nuts. Yeah, he was about to make his comeback. But they do do that sometimes.

I've seen referees pick a guy's arm up to see if the guy responds or girl. I've seen girls get choked out a bunch. But, you know, people are tough. They don't want to tap and then they wind up going to sleep. Holly Holm, when she fought Misha Tate, Misha Tate choked her unconscious and before Holly went out, she was throwing punches in the air, and she went unconscious. Wow. It was crazy.

It was crazy. That's deep. It was primal. It was like drowning. It was like watching someone drown. Yeah. You know? So it's just, you know.

You have a preference for how you die? Ooh. Drowning. Drowning's one of my least favorite. Seems like it would suck. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Yeah. I have a buddying's one of my least favorite. Seems like it would suck. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Yeah.

I have a buddy who's a big wave surfer and like 40-foot waves. Shout out to Kyle. And he did a breath-holding course. He can hold his breath for five minutes. Jesus. Because he goes, you know, if you get caught in one of those waves, you're like down in the deep for a long time. Yeah. Yeah.

Some really interesting. He was telling me some really interesting things. Like when a human being puts its face in the water, all sorts of physiological changes start happening. Your metabolism immediately slows way down. Your oxygen consumption cuts way back. Just automatically. slows way down your oxygen consumption cuts way back just automatically we've got a lot of seemingly evolutionary adaptations to living in the water yeah have you ever heard that um aquatic ape theory sure does that make any sense does it feel like someone should have already

known that already it it makes here's what it does in my opinion. We should explain it. Yeah. So the idea is – I first read about it in a book by Buckminster Fuller, actually. Great. You know about him? Yes. Genius. The idea is that there – according to the people who support this theory, there was a period in human evolution where our ancestors lived in tidal areas. So they spent most of their time in the water that was about body temperature. So it was comfortable and it was shallow enough that they weren't worried about sharks coming

in and deep enough that leopards and other predators from the land couldn't get at them. So it was safe in that respect. Also, you have great sight lines so you can see if something's coming from a long way off, and there's lots of food there, lots of mollusks and fish, and you can net. And so it sort of made sense that they would be there. And so we have these physiological adaptations for aquatic living. Like, for example, human infants are the only apes certainly i don't know primate probably the only primates that know to hold their water or hold their breath underwater

so like that great uh nirvana album cover of the baby so you take a baby and drop them in water and it holds its breath right uh chimps just chimps just breathe and die yeah whoops yeah chimps don't can't even swim. So there's that. There's the fact that babies are really fat, so they float. You can't teach chimps to swim? No. And also chimps don't have enough body fat to be buoyant.

Right. They're super. They're like corded steel, their bodies. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know they could never teach them to swim. That makes sense, but they're so smart. I guess they just can't do it, huh. I didn't know they could never teach them to swim. That makes sense, but they're so smart. I guess they just can't do it, huh?

I don't know. But yes, if you see lots of contemporary zoos, they have the chimps surrounded by a moat. Right. Because they won't cross the moat. Wow. What a bummer. They'll wade in water. I've seen chimps wading, but not swimming.

You know, maybe then there's also the connection between eating fish and fish oil and brain health. Right. And there's a very strong correlation between fish oil and brain health. Yeah. So it could be related to cortical development. Yeah. And also you would have to be clever to try to dive into the water to go after those things. The smarter ones would probably survive.

Right. Even the nostrils, like, you know, nostrils come straight out of the face. And the idea of our nostrils facing down is related to this aquatic explanation. The oil glands that we have on our heads and faces and shoulders that, you know, cause acne and stuff in teenagers. You know, that's for protection from the sun, apparently. and shoulders that cause acne and stuff in teenagers. That's for protection from the sun, apparently. So there are lots of adaptations that seem to fit into this interpretation. But lots of mainstream evolutionary theorists would say, well, wait a minute.

There are other adaptations we don't have and that we would have if that had been the case. So it's controversial at best part of it was also the theory that the human brain in order for us to be born vaginally the brain could only be so big before the kid was born right well that's so much right yeah i mean that's the explanation for why humans are born helpless right no but what i'm saying is that we really can't the brain can't get any bigger right for the vaginal canal unless our dicks get bigger and the vaginas get bigger as well i just do a whole bit about that about dick pills but if there really were dick pills no one's

stopping at one you know like what's the dosage okay how much gives me a stroke i'm gonna take one less than that and roll the fucking dice. Yeah, or risk it. And the idea would that be every dude's dick would just become a super dick and every woman would be, you know, it was a joke about flying squirrel pussy people. They would just jump dudes with big dicks and shopping carts. We chase these girls to the edge of cliffs. The women would leap off with their giant GMO vagina. The body would have to morph. It'd have to change for the big dick pills.

But it does seem like if humans are going to get smarter, the head is going to have to get larger. Does that make any sense? Or is that just a crude way of looking at the brain? Is it possible that people can get smarter? If we evolved from lower hominids, it's generally assumed that those lower hominids had little brains or littler brains than us.

Right. Up until like Australia Pythagoras or something. Yeah. What really seems to matter, though, is the ratio of brain size to body size. Right. There are plenty of animals that have bigger brains than us that aren't obviously aren't smarter than us. Like an elephant. Elephants, blue whales. I mean, a blue whale brain's probably the size of this room do we know if elephants are fucking super smart because isn't the thing about intelligence is not just like there's communication between elephants for sure and we know that they um recognize each other after long periods of time yeah like 20 years apart they get together and they see each other and recognize each other instantly sure so there's a there's an intelligence there but what we judge intelligence oftentimes depends on

whether or not it can communicate with you, whether or not it changes its environment, builds a structure. I mean, to me, this is one of the deepest questions in life. Do you ever see the elephant that painted a picture of itself? Sure, yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, in Thailand, I think.

Yeah, pull that up. That is one of those things where you go, okay a minute a dog can't do that i thought you said this thing was as smart as a dog because that's yeah that's a hundred times and they're like gray parrots that have you know 300 word vocabularies or something yeah i mean i don't don't quote me on the number but jamie can look that up there's They can speak a whole sentence? Yeah. And there's a guy, I remember seeing this recently, there's a guy who has a border collie who obviously can't talk but understands well over 100 words. And so what he'll do is he'll put all these different toys behind a wall and he'll say, go get me the yellow bunny. And there's like a yellow bunny, a red bunny, and a green bunny in addition to hundreds of other shit.

And the dog will go find the yellow bunny and bring it back. Go get me the green turtle. He'll go get it. So the dog knows those words, right? And also the dog sees in color. I guess it's a predator. Predators see in color. So here's the elephant painting itself it is

fucking crazy because it really looks like itself and this guy helps it and gets the brush and puts it in its hand but the elephant is essentially doing all of this with its trunk and just replicating itself and it's proportional, too. It's really good. Dude, that's better than a four-year-old. The dude was holding his tusk. Yeah. You have to training him to do that, I think. Well, I'm sure they're training him.

Or is he just pulling so that the brush goes where he wants it to go? Let's see. Look at the trunk. He's definitely holding. But look at the trunk and look at how much motion is in that thing. How could he possibly be controlling that? He's definitely lifting it up and down and helping them, though. But what it is is they're working together.

Like, the elephant knows to stay in these lines. It's doing it with him. You're not buying it. I'm not buying it a little, too. That hand on the tusk. It's not going to mirror anything. That hand on the tusk is a little rough. See if there's another one.

There are other ones. Let me see the other one. There's just articles that say that they're being trained to do it and it's cruel or something. Okay, this one right here, this thing doesn't have anybody's hands on it. I think this is the one that I had seen before. Let's see if this guy puts his hands on it. In any case, the question of intelligence is so much more complicated than we generally credit it with. Right.

Not only among animals, but also among humans. There's this big controversy that's, you know, perennial controversy that's being raised again. Okay, see, this is a problem. Right now, we're looking at another video, and this is the one that I had seen. And nobody's... Nobody's touching his tusks. Nobody's controlling him here, yeah. Well, he doesn't have any

tusks it looks like does he i don't see any no so that looked like the guy was just giving him the brush and he was doing it why don't they pull back though so you could see if that's true so this is the one that i had seen before i hadn't seen the other one but i would imagine yeah this is unassisted i would imagine that if you did get a guy like this that teaches his elephant how to paint a fucking picture, that it's going to become a tourist attraction. Right. People are going to say, come watch the elephant that paints the picture as seen on YouTube. And the next thing you know, you've got a tourist business. Well, and if he always does the same picture, too.

Right, draws himself over and over again. But right here, it looks to me at least like the elephant's doing that yeah you couldn't even talk a four-year-old into doing that so you know i'm saying like four-year you ever see a four-year-old do an elephant you have to ask him what the fuck it is like what is that like that's an elephant like whoa that elephant's crazy what is it doing do you think it knows it's drawing an elephant or it's that's a good question elephant's crazy. What is it doing? Do you think it knows it's drawing an elephant? That's a good question. Like does it draw on a tree? It probably doesn't know it's drawing an elephant, if I had to guess.

I would have guessed that it probably doesn't understand 2D space like that, because if it did, it would start creating art. They would start expressing themselves to each other. They would start drawing directions, like go this way. If you start seeing animals do that that that is so far beyond using tools that's what bees do yeah right these do it smells right well they do it with a dance yeah so they can they give instructions on where the flowers are yeah so this question of intelligence is really interesting and i think very important because you know we talk about intelligence as if we know what it is right but we don't it expresses itself in so many itself in so many different ways

there's so many manifestations so this big controversy that's happening now among in between I don't know if you're aware this was Sam Harris and Ezra Klein and Andrew Sullivan and people are trying to marry Charles Murray right exactly that whole thing about racial – Darrell Bock Why don't I explain it to people that don't know what the hell it is? Darrell Bock So Charles Murray wrote this book called The Bell Curve, I don't know, 20 years ago or something. Darrell Bock I think it was 25 even.

Darrell Bock Yeah, where he argued that there are racial differences in intelligence, IQ specifically with Asians being the highest and then whites and then blacks and that that's just the way it is and social adjustments aren't going to change that because it's um largely genetic right and you know that's as i understand that was the argument i haven't read this book saying largely genetic but i think they're saying that genetics play a factor and environment plays a factor i think some people are not willing to look at genetics if it shows an unfavorable trait in minorities. They don't want to look at it.

They deny it. That's true. But I think it's also true that part of the argument is that social programs are a waste of money because they're not going to affect it because it's genetic. That's crazy. If that is part of the argument, that's just straight racist to me. Well, I think that's what people are grabbing onto. The idea like save your money, save your money. No, do a better job. Like you don't even know if it works because what have

you done? Like what, go to an inner city school and pretend you're a 10-year-old kid trying to get by in this life. And you're literally seeing gang members and craziness and people flashing cash and people dropping out because they're pregnant when they're 13th. And you're trying to tell me there's not some sort of a massive environmental factor. If you were a white kid going to a school like that, I only went to a bad school for one year of my life. I'm no OG, but I really did go to one bad school, Mary Curley Middle School in Jamaica Plain. And in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, now it's become gentrified, sort of. It's kind of like East LA or um a silver a silver lake area you know like a lot of hipsters have moved in and nice places but when i lived there it was not good

it was very poor people and the the fucking middle school was scary it was 17 year old kids in my seventh grade class no one it was just a weird play maybe i guess it was eighth grade but the point was these kids were they were never going to graduate they knew it and they were trying to go back to seventh grade again or eighth grade whatever the fuck it was and the teacher would have them in the class for a couple days and then they would leave and everywhere you walked you were scared everywhere you walked like some weird shit was happening with people people were yelling at people there was always like tension and there was always like bigger kids around that were robbing other kids.

Like, fuck. I got through that year going, holy shit. And when I got out of there, my parents moved. We moved to a really nice part of town, Newton. But if you're a kid growing up in that environment, good fucking luck learning anything. Good fucking luck having – And probably it's pretty bad at home too. Yeah.

And what I experienced in Jamaica Plain was nothing compared to Dorchester and Roxbury. Those are the bad areas. Yeah. They were way worse at the time. That anxiety, stress stops brain development. Yes. It retards it. It also makes people much more inclined to violence.

Yeah. Sure. When you grow up, even in the womb, if your mother's around horrible situations and people screaming and fighting and that cortisol and all those adrenaline and all those all those hormones are flowing through that baby preparing that baby for a violent world well and you i'm sure you know about the epigenetics that show that that can pass several generations your grandfather was in a famine you're more likely to be obese isn't that crazy it's nuts yeah you also live longer. Isn't that crazy? It's nuts. Yeah. You also live longer though. Isn't that weird?

Like the people that were, um, that were in famine people, their kids lived longer for some strange reason. Interesting. Yeah. Like your body's preparing you to be extra durable. Like we were talking about before the podcast started. Right. And fasting is the only intervention that's ever been shown to extend lifespan. Not nuts.

Yeah. I do it because it makes me just function better. I do it every 16 hours I eat. So I'll eat and then I don't eat for 16 hours. So I eat for eight hours of the day. That's it. When that's over, that's over. So what is it? Like 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or something?

Whatever it is. I just figure out what the time is and then add 16 to it. If I'm cheating, I add 14. But I never add less than 14. Oh, I see. Yeah. I was talking to a guy recently about this, Brian Freisinger in Austin. Really, really smart guy.

And we were talking about this and he's like, I only eat when the sun's up. It's easy to keep track of. That's good. But what if you want to go to a nice dinner? Don't eat. Pow! Or go earlier. I know.

You've got to have cheat days. When he said it, I was like, dude, I spend most of my life in Spain where dinner time is 10 p.m. Like, that's not going to work for me. If I go to a restaurant, I allow myself to have a little bit of bread. I allow myself to have dessert occasionally. I allow myself to eat some shitty things. maybe a little pasta if I feel like it. Fuck it. I think you have to both be disciplined and also I enjoy the art form of cooking.

I enjoy that people make these delicious dishes. I follow your elk and jalapeno Instagram feed there, Joe. Looks great. Do you cook at all? I love cooking, yeah. I have meat Do you cook at all? I love cooking, yeah. I have meat for you then. Oh. I have sausages.

Joe Rogan has meat for me, ladies and gentlemen. That's not what I meant. He's one of the few people you can't really say that to. Here comes that cuck beta thing again. So I'll tell you a great, we were talking about the van. My favorite thing in life is travel and the reason i love travel is that you can wake up and have no idea what your life's going to be like by the time you go to bed right right so we're driving the van through uh along the rio grande and we want to go

to uh big ben national park which is beautiful beautiful. You know where that is? No. It's like that part of Texas that sort of dips down. Okay. And there's like a Big Bend, literally a Big Bend. That's the river. So it's way down South Texas. That's a weird spot.

It's cool. It's interesting down there. South Texas is strange. Yeah. Yeah. You should have a passport to go there. And the river is like as wide as this room i mean it's nothing you know you could just walk across over to mexico wow um but anyway so

so we get into uh the western entrance of big bend and it's like 4 p.m and the guy says yeah all the campgrounds are full and i was like yeah shit okay can i get a back country permit like no you can't you you gotta. Okay. So he says, just go back to that little town right there, spend the night there and then come in the morning and I'll hook you up. Okay, great. So we go back to this town, it's called Terlingua, little town. We just drove through it on the way in, nothing there, you know, some houses, whatever. And, um, and we find this restaurant and it's like, okay, we're just going to crash behind a dumpster in the van and, you know, whatever, and spend the night there.

So we're sitting there, and I remembered somebody had sent me an Instagram direct message about Terlingua. So I go back and I find it, and the guy's like, hey, if you get to Terlingua, Texas, you should look up my buddy Tony. He's really cool. So here's his handle. You can't tell people that you're willing to do this because now they're going to be sending you direct messages. Oh, they do it all the time, man.

Bringing you to traps. I love it. You're paranoid. There's going to be a dude with a ball gag in his hand. And you're going to go, what? And then you're going to feel that cloth filled with chloroform cover your nose. You're in a different world, Joe. And then you're going to feel that cloth filled with chloroform cover your nose. You're in a different world, Joe.

I'm in the world of micro-podcasting where everybody who reaches out to me likes me. Oh, everybody reaches out to you, I'm sure. And they're not crazy. They just want to tie you up a little. Well, hey, what's wrong with that? I remember showing you one time a long time ago. I was here doing a podcast and my phone, a message came in and I looked and it was this really hot woman in Australia who liked to send me naked pictures of herself. And I showed it to you and you're like, that's a trap.

That's a trap. That's a trap. That's what a trap looks like right there. It is what a trap looks like. She's in Australia. They are different over there. And they're far away. Yeah. They are different over there. And they're far away. Yeah.

They are interesting people. Anyway, that's a place I would live. I like Australia. I would live there. I like Australian people. They're funny as fuck. Funny as fuck. Yeah.

But they get American comedy straight away. There's no problem doing shows over there. Yeah. Humor is an interesting thing, cultural humor. Anyway, let me finish this story. So I text this dude. like hey i'm interlingual you don't know me but some friend of yours whatever he texts us back hey we're in this restaurant come have a beer so we go to this restaurant there's this table maybe a dozen people sitting at the table hey come on yeah have a beer really nice people uh after about 15 minutes i say to somebody are you guys tripping he's like yeah we

ate some mushrooms okay some of them did some of them didn't anyway but super relaxed and uh somebody makes some joke about like their their beer glass was dirty or something and someone else is like yeah just lick it it's good for your microbiome and i'm like oh you guys know about microbiome? They're like, yeah, yeah. I said, I read this article a couple years ago. This dude, you probably read this article yourself. This dude was in Africa with the Hadza people,

the hunter-gatherers, and he took some Hadza shit and he mixed it up and blasted it up his ass to see if he could get a hunter-gatherer's microbiome because it's a much more complex microbiome, right? I say this to this dude thinking he's going to have a reaction like you just had. And he says, oh, yeah, that's him. He points to the end of the table. I said, what?

And the guy's like half alive. Wires coming out of him. And the guy's looking at me smiling. And I said, that's you? He's like, yeah, that's me. You blasted fucking hunter you that's you he's like yeah that's me you blasted fucking hunter gatherer yeah yeah i do this thing in africa this guy's a world famous scientist microbiome expert wow spends half his life in in africa with this hunter gatherer group and the other half in this tiny little town in texas and there. And so I, we stay there four days, became great friends with this

guy, did a podcast with him. Fantastic guy, Jeff Leach. I'm going to, and as in tangentially speaking, the podcast available on iTunes, Stitcher and everywhere else. Available or find podcasts I found. Wow. I'm going to listen to that one. That sounds amazing. What a coincidence. This was the trip, you know, and that was totally fell out of the sky. We went to visit Peter Gorman, you know him? He was editor of High Times Magazine in the 70s. First person to write about ayahuasca in the Western press. Really?

Not scientifically, but popular press. Oh, wow. Explored the Amazon for years, was all over down there. First person to write about sapo, you know, the burn. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting dude. He's in Texas too.

Wow. So he drove up to see him. So it's kind of like just cruising around in the van, like hanging out with cool people. I heard that frog poison stuff is horrible. The trip. I mean, I guess it was Aubrey. Wasn't it Aubrey that was on the podcast talking about doing that tree frog poison? Pretty sure it was him. He's done everything. Yeah. I mean, I guess it was Aubrey. Wasn't it Aubrey that was on the podcast talking about doing that tree frog poison? Pretty sure it was him.

He's done everything. Yeah. He's like Mikey from that commercial about Mikey likes it for life. He won't eat it. He hates everything. He's in there. That's Aubrey. He loves everything.

Takes everything. But he was saying it was just a terrible ordeal. But there was also an article that I read about certain countries where they didn't have an endogenous psychedelic or didn't have a local psychedelic. So these people would take ordeal poisons. So they would take poisons that would get them like literally to the brink of death. And then they would come out of it like a near-death experience. and then they would come out of it like a near-death experience and that this near-death experience provided some sort of a shamanistic, some sort of a breakthrough experience where you could move on to the next level. Like you'd experience something that was like we were talking about before the podcast,

like when you lived in Portland and then coming here in L.A. when it's sunny out, you're like, ah, sun. You just feel it. Yeah. That it's similar well there's a similar theory about uh africa that there aren't a lot of uh endogenous psychedelic plants there iboga is one of the only ones and that's incredibly strong and not available all over the continent and so they develop complex rhythms to provoke uh altered states that makes sense and that's

why african rhythms are so complex and native american makes sense. And that's why African rhythms are so complex and Native American rhythms are very simple. That's interesting because they were high as fuck. High as fuck already and just boom, boom, boom is enough. Have you ever heard any of the Icaros that Aubrey plays when he has his little illegal drug ceremonies? He's got these Icaros that he got from these South American shamans

And I listen to them sometimes when I write Because I like listening to things that I don't know The language when I write Like I like Some music from Armenia I like some Lebanese music It's cool listening to things Where I have no idea what they're saying

So like I don't get wrapped up in But I feel their emotions But I don't get wrapped up in, but I feel their emotions, but I don't get wrapped up in whatever they're talking about. So I can write about whatever, fucking tabletops. There's a lot of good music out there. Oh, yeah. You want Brazilian, African. Most of the music I listen to, I don't understand the words

because I really fixate on the words if I do. The Icaros are crazy because they they make the psychedelic trip dance to them like dmt like when you take dmt with the icaros you realize like the icaros it's like a technology that was invented to work with dmt right like this is give me some volume on this shit. This is what they sound like. Now, by itself, you listen to this right now and you go, oh, this is just like some weird slow music. But when you're in the dimension of dimethyltryptamine and the world has become infinite fractals that are moving and changing and morphing. When you hear this song,

the hallucinations or whatever they are that you're experiencing, the visualizations, they dance to the song 100% in sync. So all this... It's comforting. Yeah, but that's another thing. It keeps people from having bad trips sometimes because they can cling to the music and the structure in the music. Whereas their own paranoia and fear and inability to let go gets hit with that psychedelic juice.

Boom. And you just experience that new. And some people freak out. But this music might be able to bring them down. It sounds like what a fetus might hear in the womb. Got that heartbeat, too. Yeah, right? Imagine what a fetus hears.

See, I like to listen to this kind of shit when I write, because I have no idea what they're saying. And so I can just keep it on the background. It also makes me feel like just knowing, just knowing that that's out there, knowing that the DMT world is out there, it makes me just a little bit nervous. It makes me write better. You're writing jokes or other stuff? Everything, whatever.

You ever written a book or essay or stuff? I've written essays. I used to write a lot for my website. Oh, yeah, no, I've read some of your essays. What am I talking about? You wrote a beautiful one a couple years ago about that I really, I don't know if I've ever told you how much I appreciated that, actually. It was about how the quest for optimal fitness shouldn't be taken as immortality, that we're all going to die, and you've got to sort of deal with that.

Do you remember what I'm talking about? Yeah, I think I wrote, your body's a sandcastle. That's what it is. Yeah, sandcastles are beautiful, but one of the beautiful things about them is we know how temporary they are. When you see a sandcastle, it's not just like, oh, this guy made an amazing sculpture. It's like, oh, no, this person made something that they know is not going to last,

and they put a massive amount of work into it, but part of the person made something that they know is not going to last and they put a massive amount of work into it but part of the beauty of it is that it's not going to last. Yeah, I really, I enjoyed that a lot. I think that was for a magazine. Yeah.

I forget what magazine. So you have a book in mind? I started writing a book and then I had to deal with the publishing company like wanting, they wanted very specific kind of writing. Oh, that's, yeah, yeah it's for Maxim that's what it was um they wanted very

specific like they wanted jokey jokes they even offered to just pay me to transcribe my act and I was like I don't want to do that and they go but these people did it you know some famous comedians did it I said that's fine I just not what I want to do I like writing but i like writing shit that i feel like writing like i don't i don't want to have some so when we went into it they were like we love your blogs we think you're really funny uh this would be good was this before you had the podcast yes yeah so i gave them all their money back yeah i just i don't want to do this yeah because at this point you'd have have free range to do whatever you wanted. Yeah.

I just think that any time you willingly take on some new project managers and other – they might – like their opinion might very well be valid, but I'm not looking for it. I want whatever I write to be out of my head. And whether it's good or bad, dependent upon how much focus and attention I put into it. You know, I'm pretty self-critical. So if I think it's clunky, I'll try to redo it. But I'm not interested in like artistically or creatively going down a direction where somebody else is picking the subject matter or somebody else is suggesting. Like I'm not. It's fine.

There's no reason for you to do that. I mean, you've got the massive's no reason for you to do that. I mean, you've got the massive platform and a well-established voice. You don't, I think, honestly, I think publishing is, is at the Napster stage right now. I think it's, it's sort of collapsing. I'm at, I'm finishing this book I've been working on for a few years now. And, uh, I don't know that I'll ever publish another book with major publishers well you've had great success with your podcast as well but the beautiful thing about your podcast is it allows you to put out an idea almost instantaneously i mean you get together with this rattlesnake guy

you guys have a couple hour conversation you upload that shit and that's it it's wonderful and it brings these really interesting people into my life and like my circle of friends now is largely composed of either guests or listeners of the podcast you know it's yeah it's wonderful i've just put out a book recently that's um uh sort of compilations of podcasts so it's not the whole conversation obviously but it's excerpts and the whole thing was crowdsourced so people who listened to the podcast picked the episodes they picked what part of the episodes that they thought was most interesting they transcribed it this guy adam mcdade did all the art um the publisher

misfit press are people that i know through the podcast they reached out to me and we had some beers and it not intending to do anything together just like hey dude we're in town and we like your show can we get a beer and really like these guys and ended up having the ceo uh on the podcast aj and um yeah so we just put out the book and it's it sort of fulfills my fantasy of being a writer without having to write you know know, if I could like do what you're in it. You remember you signed a release for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember.

Hope you remember that, Joe. You and Duncan. You and Duncan and my mother blurbed it. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. You don't even know you blurbed it. We just lifted something you said on a.

On a podcast about you. Yeah. You said. Oh, perfect. Was it? You said. Whatever it Oh, perfect. What is it you said? Whatever it is, I sign off on it now. You said, Chris is the best beta cuck I've ever met. And yeah.

So yeah, that's my dream is to put out one of these a year. That's a great idea. I mean, really, there's a lot of amazing conversations that I've had with people on this podcast that I would love to see written down where I could read it, go over it, and not hear my own fucking voice. And also, people have it in the bathroom. It's like a little thing. You just pick it up, whatever it is. You don't need to follow the flow. And you're encouraging reading, which is a dying thing.

And there are a lot of people out there who don't listen to podcasts right me included i rarely listen to podcasts do you listen to books on tape no no but see i don't have spaces in my life where i'm doing something that would allow me to listen to voices talking that wouldn't interfere with what i'm doing so like yeah i'm not a carpenter i'm not driving driving long distances. You know, it's like, I'm either writing or, um, doing the, doing my podcast or something else, but there's not, I don't commute. You know what I mean? So, so there's a specific sort of, you know, activities that lend, lend themselves to listening to podcasts. And a lot of people just don't have those spaces in their lives. Right.

So I envision the book is like something where people can be like, hey, dude, I know you don't listen to podcasts, but this is why I do. These are the sorts of crazy-ass conversations that Chris and Duncan and Joe get into, and that's why I like listening to those guys, you know, or Wim Hof or Graham Hancock. All these guys are in the book. Oh, awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, man. If I stopped and thought about it, because before I started doing the podcast, I would listen to recordings of like lectures that Terrence McKenna would give or Timothy Leary or, you know, there wasn't a lot, you know, you or listen to Art Bell having some, you know, weird UFO expert on or something like that. I mean, that's really what you had to listen to. You didn't have very many choices. Right. And then I think about all the conversations that I've been able to have with guys like John Anthony West, with Graham Hancock, and Randall Carlson, and Michael Shermer, and you, and Duncan, and Ari.

I mean, so many people have had these crazy conversations with them that, to me, they've been – I mean, it's shaped the way I look at everything. It's changed everything. So I feel like I'm constantly getting educated. Yeah, you set up your life as like – I'm not talking about myself, but you've had guests who are some of the smartest people in the world who come to you to sit here and chat with you. You have set up an amazing little educational institution here. Sometimes. Sometimes it's educational. Sometimes it's chaos.

Well, that's education. Yeah. Well, it certainly is. You learn about what we're like when we're drunk. But what it is is, you know, I mean, it's a thing, you know. I mean, it's a thing. And it's a thing that's enjoyable to me. It's like I like having all these conversations.

So if I can record them and then just put them out there and other people like them, this is a very rare, balanced sort of relationship. So to me, there's no other way i'd get like if i said to you hey chris let's sit down and talk for three hours you'd be like um okay all right i'll block off three hours for you yeah can i look at my phone at all during this time can i get up to go to the bathroom we would never have this like as connected a conversation i i just got another set of headphones um to give to my guests because the ostensibly the main reason is i'm using handheld now because my whole thing's mobile

right right right people will occasionally come to my place in topanga but normally i go to them and uh they can't hear when they're they don't hear so i have to keep like going hey hey the mic you know they're a lot of them they're not used to talking on mics and all that yeah but the other reason i got it is uh my buddy kyle actually pointed out to me that when you both have headphones you're both in a shared space and you're much less likely to be thinking about your phone or whatever because you're both like i don't know what it does but it seals it off in a way yeah we talked about that yesterday actually me and eddie bravo talked about it because he doesn't like to wear them because he doesn't like the sound of his own voice. And I said, he and I are so comfortable. We've been friends for so long.

We didn't need to wear them. But I feel like when you're having a conversation with someone, it cuts out everything else. It's just you two there. There's no distractions in the room, but if there were, they would be less distracting because of the headphones. Well, that's the thing. I'm out sitting in a campsite somewhere or by a river or whatever. There's a lot going on. Yeah, and the handheld microphone, too, is a big thing.

And if you get a mic that picks up everything, then they pick up everything, everything. They pick up some shit over by the outhouse. You'd hear in the background. Yeah. I was using lapel mics for a while, but they were omnidirectional. It was too much. And people were complaining, like i can't in the car i can't hear it right you know so i got the handheld it is an interesting thing right because this is not something that a

production company would ever uh get together and fund because they would say if they did they'd have a sound guy and they'd have a like half fun is watching you well this one sucked these mics are bullshit alright we're not doing that anymore we've done a few from an iPhone we used to do podcasts on a plane like we'd be me and Duncan or me and Ari or whoever it was we'd be on a plane next to each other I just stick the iPhone

between us press record and start talking voice notes and turn it into a podcast and it's not that bad yeah I did that recently in the van. I was driving. I had some ideas. I just grabbed my phone and started talking into it and I threw it up. And people like it because one thing they know, this is one of the things that's appealing

about podcasts in general, is that it's not produced. It's just this is what it is. It's like you got an idea and I'm getting it right from Chris Ryan's head. It's going right from his head, right into that phone, and then it's going right into my ears. There's no filters there. It's getting right into your head. It's one of the weirdest things about podcasts in general is that the intimacy of your voice in someone else's head. Like I'm sure when you meet them, they get weirded out, right?

A lot of people get weird. Because you get in their head. And all of a sudden, you're right in front of them. Yeah. Hey. Yeah, and it's it's strange like they know you yes you know and they really do know you it's not like fame where you're an actor right and people like oh i know your face like yeah but yeah i mean people really do know

joe rogan yeah strangely yeah so there are parts i know both of us have parts of our lives we don't talk about on the podcast specifically your marriage our lives we don't talk about on the podcast, specifically your marriage, I guess. Family, I don't like to talk too much about. Yeah, I'm that way too. My impulse is to talk about everything. My impulse is like I got nothing, I got no secrets because I feel like there's a revolutionary shamelessness. I feel so privileged and largely thanks to you and Duncan, honestly. When I started the podcast and you guys did that shrimp parade thing and that really built up my audience.

And to the point now where it pays, it's self-sustaining and it's my main gig. That's awesome. It is awesome. It's incredible. But it's like I feel like there's a responsibility i have in a way to express yourself shamelessly because everybody else has a job they can get fired from right or a marriage that they can get you know right screwed their wife can leave them or they can right i'm invulnerable and so i kind of feel like all all right, so the cost of that, you know, every opportunity or every, you know, privilege comes with a responsibility.

The responsibility is like I got to talk about shit that other people don't talk about so that it's out there. And so my impulse is to just say everything, you know, and my sex life is really has been very interesting and I'd like to talk about it more. But I don't want to, you know, other people never sort of said they were down for that, you know? So that's, that's magnified when you have children because they,

they have no say. Well, that's the other invulnerability. I have, they put their kids out there and I'm like, well, okay, I don't know.

I'm not saying it's the worst thing to do, but it's not the child's choice, and they're very young, and you're making a, look, whoever did what they did to Michael Jackson, right? Yeah. One of the things that they did

is they made him famous way before he had any idea what the fuck that meant, and they profited off of it. Yeah. They kind of pimped him out, right? Yeah. And that's kind of what's happening.

And they destroyed him. Yeah, ultimately the whole thing destroyed him, right? And, I just, I don't want to be a part of that. I just there's no benefit in it. I don't think it's intelligent. And I also don't. This is my real honest feelings.

I do not think that fame is I don't think that people should aspire to it. I think it should be something that happens if people like your work and then it's cool it's fine but i think there's way too much emphasis put on just trying to get attention and it's being rewarded and supported in this weird way there's nothing wrong with getting attention but it should make sense it should make sense there should be some reason and if it's out of balance yeah you know you should you should probably look at like why why is it out of balance like yeah and lots of things that attract attention are not things that we need we want more of you know like conflict yes conflict that's a big one but it's also the i like just

fame itself one of the weirdest parts about it is that you have to constantly be checking yourself like all these people are nice to you all these people uh are saying nice things to you or being mean to you you know one of the like all people that you don't even know so you can't rely on them for your self-esteem and you certainly can't rely on them for criticism you can't rely on them and people you don't even know that don't care about you you know so you you you're in this weird position you have to be very careful with who you communicate with because one of the weirdest things you'll see from famous people is all of a sudden they get this very strange thing where they feel like people are supposed to do things for them.

And they're not supposed to pay for things and everything's supposed to be easy and they're supposed to get that. That's a weird one. They don't respond to criticism well. They don't understand that they're still a human being in the middle of growth. No, they're a fucking star. I'm a fucking star and I want this and I want it now. And they're just like, what kind of fucking bullshit is this?

Do you know who I am? Yeah, exactly. We've all seen like a version of that, right? And we know about it. The problem though is that they know that their shit stinks. Yes. They know that they're human. Right. it stinks yes they know that they're human they know so they're so then they develop this sort of

um fraud uh phobia right that people are going to find out what they really are i mean i've seen this with fashion models you know i used to hang out with a lot of fashion models in barcelona you know that whole story where i lived in the mansion with the fashion models did you talk about that could be i don't know i'm not sure but who can keep track of what the fuck we've talked about it's impossible yeah it's impossible um yeah anyway so uh yeah fashion models become famous wealth people who are extremely wealthy and that gets back to the 70 grand a year thing and the whole sort of question of you know saturation you know what else it is it becomes a real problem with things being too easy and life being like way too uh patterned like you you everything is

very predictable in terms of like your success you have plenty of money you have adulation from fans without any stress or duress you're gonna have a little bit of stress in terms of like trying to manage your career, but it's nothing like trying to make it. I don't know if I'm ever going to make it stress. That's a totally different kind of stress. I don't know if I'm ever going to be a success stress. That's real shit.

That goes away once you definitely become Kanye West or whoever the fuck you are. And then you're subject to your own demons because then you're alone. You're really alone. You can't even go to the grocery store. Do you spend any time with Jim Carrey? No, I don't know him. I'd love to meet that guy. Yeah, he seems like he's in a weird stage of his life.

He seems to me like someone who you talked about, you know, you get to that pinnacle and you have to deal with your demons. Yeah. It seems like he's dealt with them. I agree. Now he's come out the other side. Yeah. It seems like he's dealt with them and now he's come out the other side and he's in this very sort of this place of wisdom. And yeah, I just think he's something.

Russell Brand is another guy who I think I really admire where they are in their lives and how they got there. They sort of went through the fire and they've come out the other side somehow. Russell certainly has. I know Russell. He's a sweetie. He really is a super sweet guy, like genuine too, and really trying to be a better person and a better human. And I don't agree with him on everything. He gets a little social justice warrior-y on some things, but I think it's just because

he wants to do good, and he's leaning towards good, and he's leaning towards love. It's all for the right reasons. Even if I don't agree with him, I see how he's thinking. And even if I don't agree with him, it's a soft do not agree.

It's not a hard do not agree. He's a fascinating guy. I think if Jesus came back, he'd be Russell Brand, actually. He'd probably fuck a few less chicks. I don't know. Maybe Jesus would go just slinging dick all over the place just to remove everybody of their ego. Show everybody you don't possess these women.

Years ago, I came back from Asia. I was in Asia for a couple of years and I visited my best buddy in Paris. And we're throwing a football around, I remember, in some back street in Paris, which freaked out the Parisians, of course. And my buddy's like the opposite of me. He's religious. He's disciplined. He speaks seven languages. He's a musical prodigy. I'm a lazy fuck.

But growing up, it was like I was Kirk. He was Spock. It was that kind of dynamic. Half your audience won't even know who we're talking about. Isn't that sad? Yeah. But he, which explains why I've always wanted to fuck a green woman that got this thing. But he said to me, he's like, Chris, I figured you out, man.

I said, yeah, what's the deal? He said, you're the anti-monk. I said, what do you mean? He said, monks cut themselves off from the temptations of life in order to pursue a spiritual path you're you're pursuing a spiritual path but it's by way of the temptations of life you immerse yourself in them because in those days i was doing a lot of drugs and you know whatever right and uh i think he's right and in bud in Buddhism, there is a path of the drunken guru, right? There is a path of sex and altered states of consciousness and sort of, you know, William Blake said the palace of wisdom lies at the end of the road of excess. You know, and so someone like Russellsell brand i think that's his path he's gone

through the the addictions and the orgies and all that stuff that a lot of people think would make them happy he's like check those boxes like no that didn't do it and check them in a way that very few humans ever get to check them right because he's a beautiful man and a superstar yeah and he came on the other side and became this you know really conscious very spiritual person yeah and very humble and a sweetie which is a really nice guy i think humility is what you find if you get through to the other side yeah i think so i think if you but even when you get through the other side it's like there's no there's no destination it's not like a spot you get to like right i made it finally i can relax i'm here yeah

well you used that phrase a minute ago like you know trying to make it yeah make it it's like it's as if you'll make it and then you'll have it made yeah you know like what what did we make what's made the make it thing is really for a comic it's just this uh the high unlikelihood of success is always looming over you and what is success being a netflix special no i'm not even just being able to work just being a working working comedian just paying your rent yeah with your stand-up that was always the dream like every comic that starts out if they're being honest like fitzsimmons and i've talked about this 100 times because it was we'd never thought of a career i mean fitzsimmons is I have talked about this a hundred times because it was, we'd never thought of a career. I mean, Fitzsimmons is one, I think he's won at least two Emmys for writing.

Brilliant guy. And, you know, we were just two dorks, two 21 year old dorks hanging out together in Boston. You weren't a dork, dude. You were a fucking martial arts expert. Even though I was a martial arts expert, I was a dork, dude. I would get nervous talking. I've talked about this.

I never could figure out why I'd freak out when I would be about to talk to a bank teller. Like walking up to, I'd get like social anxiety. I wouldn't know, like I would get nervous about it. It's not a good place to look nervous. Yeah, exactly, right? I mean, but back then it didn't even make sense because I was fighting. And I would still get nervous talking to like any person who was in like an official person yeah any person like a you know a teacher or a principal or anybody that authority any authority figure I was super nervous talking to them

my wife gets that way around anyone wearing a uniform freaks her out because she was in a war when she was a kid oh wow so she's so like immigration guys she just she starts shaking tsa workers yeah yeah no i hear you man well uniform means uniform behavior right uniform means she could go sideways when's the last time you wore a tie speaking of uniforms probably when i was taking the photos for my 1999 cd because on the cover of the c, I decided to dress like old school Frank Sinatra. I just decided when I made the CD, I was thinking, I never wear a tie, a suit and a tie. That'd be fun if I just decided to wear a suit and a tie for the cover of this. So that's it right there.

That's probably the last time I wore a tie. I'm going to be dead someday. Yeah. Yeah, that's the theme song to my podcast is you're going to die one day. Yeah, I don't want to give the end away, but you're going to die one day. It's a good song. Carpe fucking diem, baby. Yeah.

Enjoy that. I mean, don't dwell on it too much. Don't freak out. Well, it's like i think every young man should shave his head like at 21 or something shave your head see yourself bald for a month or however long it takes to grow back and it's like okay that's it yeah and then you're not gonna worry about it heads though well say this but you have a normal head i don't know i've never shaved my head i don't know i have a friend it looks like his kid his parents never picked him up for the first year of his life

to just let him lay down on a flat marble pillow his head is flat like a fucking pizza this poor bastard on the top or the back the back of his head's flat i think his parents just ignored the shit out of him and uh he's got a flat head you know about the flathead indians which ones are those there was uh up in idaho that area northern yeah they they would put oh yeah um yeah they put a board on the baby's head because the heads are so malleable and then tighten it and they look like cone heads yeah like scare the fuck out of anybody i'm sure you saw those dudes riding up i'm sure shit war paint flat heads yeah that was a thing about um some of the i think was it was it peru where they would do they would find a lot of these skulls from a certain period of

time that had been elongated and you know the alien people went nutty like this is it this is evidence this is evidence of contact the aliens they've been here but it's just boards they just put boards on the side of their heads and stretched their heads up yeah they think they might have even been trying to emulate one of like originally the idea was bounced about that someone in the royal family in egypt had deformities and uh that was one of the things that said about King Tut like King Tut was not a healthy person like that he may very well

have been the product of incest and that there was some did you remember reading about this? Yeah I know about the incest in the Egyptians Yeah and that some of the like heads when you see people

like with like elongated heads and hieroglyphs and images they might have actually done that to try to replicate when you see people with elongated heads and hieroglyphs and images, they might have actually done that to try to replicate someone who had something fucked up with them. To normalize it. Which might have been like a royal who had been, like look, that's his head. That's his actual head.

So on the left, that's Tutankhamen. Is that his real head? Peru. It's Peru. Oh, Is that his real head? Peru. It's Peru. Oh, these are giant skulls in Peru. But they have King Tut's head too, though. You see if you can Google King Tut's head. The ones in Peru, they know, they're pretty sure,

like a high degree of certainty. I don't want to give you a number, but that they use boards and flatware. One example of that is in Spanish. Yeah, look at his head. Look at what Tut's head must have looked like. It was all fucking weird. Yeah. It was is in Spanish. Yeah, look at his head. Look at what Tut's head must have looked like. It was all fucking weird.

Yeah. It was all stretched out. Like, look at that. Like, if you saw that on the ship of a spaceship, on the deck, like, walking around, you'd be like,

oh, my God, that's the alien. Oh, he must be from another planet. Right? Like, if you were on a spaceship, say if you're watching Star Trek and that dude walks by, like, well, for sure, that dude must be playing someone from another with a martini

On his head like look the top of his head is flat. There's all this extra brain It looks like there's like 10% extra brain maybe more What the fuck is going on back there? Here's the flathead Indians. This is a painting of there you go. Yeah, Caitlin did to the babies That would make you very non-aerodynamic. You'd be like a Land Rover Defender, like a big flat square thing. Similar skulls, though. Oh, wow.

That normalizing. It's crazy looking, isn't it? A royal weirdness. You ever hear Spanish people speak? They have the lisp. The lisp, yeah. Well, they say that's because one of the Kings had a lisp and then all the, you know, courtiers started replicating it to seem cool. You had told me about that. And I'd forgotten when it came up the other day, when someone was bringing up a be the, and then I, and then I

remembered it after the podcast was over. Yeah. I don't know that that's true. I mean, I haven't looked it up if it's historically accurate or even if there's a way to know because there are no recordings, right? Do you know the powdered wig one? Do you know where that came from? No, no. That's the best one. That is a weird one. That came from syphilis. Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How? Because men started getting syphilis. Find out what year it was. I forget what year. We just brought it up recently. But there was a royal family, I think two brothers. They both had syphilis.

And they started losing their hair. And a lot of men were losing their hair to syphilis back then. They just had it. Nobody knew what the fuck it was, right? So they would make wigs. And the more expensive the wig was, the bigger it would be. So the really rich people would be big wigs. Big wigs.

That's where big wigs come from. They literally put this style on to mask the effects of syphilis. Jesus. It's a great story. I didn't know syphilis made your hair fall out. Yeah, your teeth rot out. You're falling apart, man. You're rotting from the inside.

Your nervous system gets really screwed. You're shooting your rotten jizz into somebody and giving it to them, too. And you don't even know what the hell's going on. Louis XIV was only 17 when his mop started thinning. Yeah. So 1655, when the King of France started losing his hair. And so if you scroll down, it goes into the whole syphilis thing. Wig out.

So where's the syphilis part? They mentioned up above that he probably had the brother's head syphilis. Apparently everybody had it back then. You just imagine. These people, I mean, they only lived to be 30. The syphilis outbreak sparked a surge in wig making. Victims hid their baldness as well as bloody sores that scoured their faces with wigs made out of horse, goat, or human hair. Perukes were also coated with powder,

scented with lavender or orange to hide any funky aromas. Although common, wigs were not exactly stylish. They were just a shameful necessity. So the King of France started losing his hair in 1655, and that's when everybody hopped on. And his cousin, Charles II, did the same thing. Both men likely had syphilis. Syphilis created a whole, like, a thing where, like, judges would wear those wigs, those

powdered wigs. They would look like they were important people. Look at my wig. You know what we're doing right now? Detribalizing. Right now? Yeah. See, we're looking at our own culture.

I mean, it's British culture in this case. And seeing how it's all this arbitrary silliness. And that's travel. That's what travel does for you. Sure. Because you see it in other cultures. And then you look back at your own and you're like, oh, shit, we do weird shit, too. We're all weird.

There is no – it's like the – what is it? Einstein, right? That there's no fixed point from which to observe anything. You're always on a moving – your perspective is always mobile. So there is no objective truth culturally. It's all looking at one thing from another thing and both of them are moving yeah i love that shit yeah because and and again i think it leads to humility i think so too you know i think all roads lead to humility ultimately it just leads to a greater perspective

i mean if you live in a small town and i'm not knocking ohio jamie but if you live in a small town in ohio that's what you're used to. Yeah. And you kind of like develop your pattern of what you expect to see in the world based on what's around you in a very close immediate area. But if you're in the fucking rainforest of Bolivia and you're hanging out with these tribal folks

who are going to go hunt a monkey and you're with them on a monkey hunt and they're all excited, they shoot this monkey out of a tree with a bow and arrow they made themselves. And then they're cooking this monkey over a fire and throwing wet leaves on it and smoking it. And you're like, what the fuck? And these people do this every day and they're going to die in this forest.

I mean, this is what they do. This is how they live. And for you, it's like, I got to get out of here. For them, this is like, this is the small town in Ohio. This is just the small town in Ohio in the jungle. Like this is to them. This is just the small town in Ohio in the jungle. Like this is to them. This is their world. And maybe, interestingly for you, it isn't, I got to get out of here.

Maybe it's like, this is where I should have been my whole life. There are thousands of cases of people from civilization running away to go native. There are no historical cases that I know of where native people have chosen to come and live in civilization. Yeah, I hate to beat a dead horse because I always do, but Sebastian Younger's Tribe is amazing.

It's a great book. I really enjoy that book. I talk about it too much. It's one of those things. It's a good book. People try to get annoyed at me. It is really good. I've read it three times.

It's a short book. It covers a lot of the same ground that I cover in Civilized to Death, actually. I quote him in Civilized to Death and some of the, we have some of the same sources. But yeah, he looked at some of the, that, those accounts of people running away to go live with the natives. And it makes sense. Totally makes sense.

I mean, it makes sense like a dog. You ever read Call of the Wild? Jack London? Jack London, yeah. It's about a husky. I think I read it in high school. It's a good book. It's about a husky who goes and lives with the wolves.

It's essentially the story of the domesticated being going and living with the wild iterations of that same being, right? So it's like one of us and going to live in the Amazon or whatever. Oh, a fantastic book, if you like that kind of thing, is At Play in the Fields of the Lord. I've heard of that book as well, but I never read that one. That's a great book, man. Peter Matheson. That's an old book, right?

Isn't it? It's probably 30 years old, maybe more. And it was made into a film starring Daryl Hannah and Tom Waits. Oh, yeah. And who else? John Lithgow, Kathy Bates. Incredible, incredible cast. There's something that you get from escaping civilization that you don't know you're missing it until you're out there. When you're out there, and I'm sure you experience this in your travels,

there's a certain detachment from the masses, just to be out of the hive and the influence of all the people around you. As weird as it seems, there's energy that we're all exchanging in these giant hives together, and some people live off of it. Like those New York City people, like my friend Jeff lives in New York City, he's always going to live in New York City. This is what I like. He likes it.

I love it. He's walking through the streets, honk, honk, bam, bam. Yes. That's his thing. To me, I'm like, wow. I'm always, my thought is always, how do you guys do this?

How do you guys do this? That's all I ever think. How the fuck do you guys do this? For him, it's how could you live any other way? But the people that, but he has got a good life so he's got a he enjoys what he does he's a fulfilled life he's happy but if you didn't i think we're talking about the same thing i'm talking about jardia have you ever had jardia yeah got it in nepal i heard it's rough yeah your farts smell really interesting well you might not have got it too bad because

i have a friend who got it really bad where he's sick in hospital for like two days yeah i didn't go to the hospital i by that point i'd been traveling for a few years i've had giardia i've had hepatitis i mean i've had some i've had you know yeah i spent three days in a room in Palenque shitting and puking into the same plastic bag. Oh, boy. Three days in the same bag? Yeah. What is it like after day three? If you had your worst enemy and they were below you.

It was the same as day one, man. If you were on the third floor and the worst enemy was below you just standing there smoking a cigarette, would you drop that bag on them or would you have mercy? I'd have mercy. I don't have any enemies that bad yeah you'd have to really hate somebody for that one yeah and the funniest thing about that was i came out of that room after it might have been two days out of it i came out of that room you know pale emaciated just totally drained and i went out on the terrace of this, do you know Palenque? You ever been there? No, never.

Oh, amazing Mayan ruins and lots of magic mushrooms. I've only been to one, to Chichen Itza. Chichen Itza's cool. Chichen Itza's much more sort of commercialized. Palenque is pretty wild still. And Tulum is another one. Tulum, that's out on the Yucatan. Or is that? It's Mayan.

It's Mayan still. Those are both Mayan. Anyway, I come out and there's this woman there this german woman and we start chatting a little bit and she and this was at a time in my life where i was really nervous around women and you know whatever and this woman was like super into me and i was like so i was like i could not fuck you like i just there's no i didn't too much i just i was felt so sick and horrible and it turned out later i got to know her a little bit she was really into punk music and she thought i looked like johnny rotten oh so she thought you were cute because you looked like

like i was about to die she was into that look yeah just for people out there that you might go camping please just get a gravity filter don't't get jarred yet. It's real easy. And there's also a thing called a SteriPen. SteriPen's wonderful. You take this SteriPen, you run it around in the water for a certain amount of time, and it kills everything bad in the water. And it doesn't taste any different. It's literally ultraviolet light.

Right, it's like UV light. Yeah. There's a bunch. Like SteriPen's a good one. But these gravity filters are amazing. They have pumps. They have another one. You can take some water and you pump it, and it goes through the filter into your water

bottle and you can drink it. You can clean up like 99.99% of all the bullshit with just a good filter. Yeah. And you don't have to drop chemicals in there. Some people bring little iodine tablets and stuff like like that but you don't need to but please don't drink out of creeks folks i don't but shit could be dead just 100 yards up i don't know if you if you pull this up i just recently i read a thing online saying that like it's almost never necessary to filter your water when you're in the when you're camping and i've always filtered my

water uh camping but it was this thing where they did all these, they took all these samples. From creeks? From creeks, and apparently they're like self-correcting mechanisms in nature. But if something's dead, 100 yards up, you're screwed. You're fucked. You don't want that. It's not worth it. The gravity filter's so fucking easy.

It's like if you, you could take the risk and shit your brains out for three days, or you can just enjoy yourself with water from the same place. I think shitting your brains out for three days is a good experience. Yeah. It's like an ordeal poison, right? Yeah, exactly. Do you ever get high from vomiting? No.

Have you? Yeah. Whoa. Yeah, because when you vomit, you get all these endorphins. You don't feel like great after you vomit? I feel better. Yeah. I wouldn't go with great.

It's true. Relatively great. The last time I did some serious vomiting is I had food poisoning. I guess that was about 10 years ago. I had some pretty serious food poisoning. It was just hurling at me. That was the last real, real like unstoppable. Yeah. was just hurling out of me yeah that was the last real real like unstoppable yeah where it's just coming out and just a fat tube of it you ever have a colonic irrigation no i'm not into things

going in my butt even in i don't believe i don't believe that that is necessarily a healthy thing either um i don't believe it's not that it's but this all the stuff that people saying that it's healthy for you i'm like i don't necessarily think it is i was just talking to andrew while about that you know him i sent you an email about him actually he's he's like you know him the big beard he's a fan of yours oh okay yeah i was i was with him in tucson and he he saw he's an old friend of paul stamets. He was at Harvard when Leary was there. Yeah. I can, I'll hook you up. He's a suit.

Do you know who he is? Yeah, sure. Yeah. He comes to LA. He's, he was the most famous doctor in America for years. He, he, um, but he's really interesting because he was at Harvard with Leary. He studied under Richard Evans Schultes, his undergrad degrees in botany. Richard Evans Schultes is the guy who basically discovered in commas, hundreds of psychoactive plants in the Amazon. Amazing dude. Anyway, so Andrew was right in the

mix and he sort of was central in Leary getting in trouble because Andrew wrote an article in the Harvard Crimson criticizing Leary for indiscriminately giving psilocybin to students. And that's what triggered a lot of the tumult after that. Anyway, Andrew went on to Harvard Med School, residency at Mass General in Boston, like top, top flight, you know, academic stuff. Mass General in Boston, like top, top flight, you know, academic stuff. But instead, he got his MD, but then he went and worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the main government research center. It's like early 70s, I think. And he has never wavered in his understanding that drugs are not necessarily bad. And so he did these double blind studies about marijuana, the first, I believe, double blind studies of marijuana, where he said, like, okay, you know, people have tested marijuana, and they say, oh, it's bad for your

brain. Because what they do is they get people high who've never been high, and then they give them a bunch of math questions and they have trouble. I can't answer them, whatever. He's like, I've been high. I don't want to do math when I'm high. So let's test people on things they like doing when they're high, like color perception or pattern recognition or ability to recognize tonal changes in music, things like that.

And he found that their perceptions were actually heightened. So it's like, ah, see, marijuana is not bad. It's just bad for certain things and not others. So then he did, I think it was about driving, where he said, okay, they find that marijuana impacts, impairs driving ability, but that's, again, because they're using naive people who've never been high before. And they don't have a chance to practice driving while high. So he got people, let them practice, let them get used to being high.

Then he tested their driving ability versus what it had been before or when they're not stoned and average scores and all that. And, again, he found that when people had a chance to practice, they drove fine. There's no problem. And he found that when people had a chance to practice, they drove fine. There's no problem. He got basically pushed out because he was finding, you know, he was demonstrating that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Yeah. It's one of those things that we talked about before.

Sometimes people don't want to know the actual results. They just want to know the results that jive with their understanding of the world. This is really dangerous in science because people are purporting to be objective in science. Yes, it is dangerous. And so often they're not. And it's not fair. It's also not fair to all the people that were unjustly arrested and prosecuted and then imprisoned for something that's very beneficial.

And they were saying, a lot of them, saying that they like it, saying that it does good things for them. You know, it's not the end-all, cure cure all, but there's not a goddamn thing that is. Right. But it's certainly a tool. Right. And look at it objectively.

What's the ratio of benefit to danger? Right. You know, how many people have died from marijuana overdose? Zero. Ever. Right. And so Andy Weil's been saying this since the 70s. That's amazing.

And his first book's called The Natural Mind. Then he wrote the marriage of the sun and the moon then a book called from chocolate to morphine these are all that's a big stretch yeah but chocolate is a drug right yeah right yeah yeah and the marriage of the sun and the moon each chapter is about a mind altering substance or experience so vomiting is one chapter in there cocaine mushrooms so he and paul stamets have been buddies for 35 years or does that have anything to do with bulimia is bulimia also like something where people are getting addicted to actual throwing yeah yeah and there are religions where people vomit every morning

in india i think gandhi vomited every morning jesus gandhi and he drank his own piss by the way way to go yeah so anyway andy weill is this kind of hippie doctor dude with all the drugs and all that and the big white beard and then he um he became very famous in the 80s with books about alternative medicine what he calls complementary medicine because he's not saying western medicine's bad he's saying it's good for some things and not the best approach to other things so he brings in ayurvedic and chinese and all these different traditions depending on what the issue is he became very mainstream huge mega bestsellers on oprah cover time magazine you know he started a school at the university of arizona for doctors to get a

certification in complementary medicine so he's super mainstream successful but he has never wavered on his stance on drugs and so yeah imagine the pressures that were coming on that unbelievable and he's like no fuck it the truth is the truth. Especially in the 70s and the 80s. Right. All that say no to drugs era. Here's a question that you'd probably know the answer to. They're obviously killing untold numbers of rhinos for their horns because men want to grind them up and it's supposed to get your dick hard. Does that work?

Not for me. Did you try it? No. I've been out there killing rhinos on a sneak pit forever. You know, I think. Is there any science to that? No. Not that I'm aware of.

That is the craziest genocide ever. And who's doing it? It's not Africans who think it's going to make their dicks hard. It's Chinese. It's Asian people that apparently have uh there what i was told is that it's not even necessarily just about the idea that it gets your dick hard but there is value in the fact that it's a forbidden thing that's very difficult to acquire i think that's i think it's a signaling it's like a rolex watch or a lamborghini or whatever it's look what my friend told me is

that it's not just a signaling, but it's a signaling that you don't give a fuck. Like you're here to make money and get the best and have the best things. And look, let's drink Rhino tea. And then we're going to eat Shark's Fin soup. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And live monkey brain. Yeah.

Have you seen that? I've seen that. That's real, huh? That's pretty intense. That's real. I saw it in Faces of Death. A bunch of people sitting around there whacking a monkey in the head with a hammer and his head stuck in this little thing. But I was like...

In the table. Yeah, I wasn't really sure if that was real. And they scoop it out and eat it. Yeah, rattlesnake. The monkey brains, though, isn't that like prions? Can't you get prions from primate brains? Yeah. Like, you could be deathly ill from that, right?

Yeah. Like, that's essentially what mad cow disease is. Yeah. Yeah. From brains. Yeah, from cow. Forcing cows to eat cows. That's where mad cow disease comes from.

Yeah. Which is a body of mine that couldn't give blood because he was in England. He lived in England during the time that the mad cow. Yeah. I was in Spain then. Yeah. I can't give blood because of the hepatitis. Which one do you get?

B or C? A. Is that a good one? Yeah. That's the one. There's an easy one. Oh, nice. Yeah.

It was like a month down. Yellow eyes. Yeah. Yeah. Like no energy. A month. That was, yeah, that's a long story but that that i actually got it from a guy who was sort of saving me from something else that i i never told you the whole scorpion in guatemala

story i think you did but tell me again well it's a long story yeah i mean if you don't now though people will be well i feel like they get now people can hear it i i've told her on my podcast and i've also i told it on a podcast called Risk. And they, that's actually. Can you give us the cliff notes? Yeah, but listen to the Risk thing if anyone wants to hear the whole thing. Because they added sound effects and it's really good. What is Risk?

It's a podcast. Just called Risk? It's a storytelling thing. You know, it's like the moth. It's that kind of thing. Oh, nice. Yeah. And they added sound effects.

Yeah. They produced it really well yeah it was well done um yeah what happened was i was i was with my girlfriend at the time puerto rican super beautiful puerto rican girl did she try to get you to go to a camp away and talk about jesus or no she never tried to talk to me about jesus but i would have listened because she's too interested in el diablo she was great um I would have listened. Because she was too interested in El Diablo. She was great. So I was with her in Guatemala, and we had met this other couple, Solange and Fabrizio. Whoa.

And, yeah, we were at this place called Tikal in northeast Guatemala, way, way back in the jungle. And it's the Mayan ruins. Beautiful. Crazy. You know, it was like a big city. And now they're, you know, when I was there, this was 1989, there were maybe 10 big ruins, big temples that they'd uncovered. And we're staying in this campsite with hammocks. It was very primitive at the time.

We were staying in this campsite with hammocks. It was very primitive at the time. Anyway, it was a full moon, and Ana and I decided we were going to take some acid and watch the moon rise and the sunset up from the top of Temple 4. It's called the Jaguar Temple. And so we went up with this other couple, and there's this this ledge up there and it's up above tree line. You know, you're way above the tree line. You can see the monkey, hear the monkeys and and like see out over this flat jungle. I think it's called. And so we're up there and the sun's sinking and the moon is rising and the moon comes up.

It's beautiful. And there's this big bank of storm clouds and the full moon is like between the horizon and the storm clouds but then it starts to go up behind these clouds and you can see it's going to get dark as fuck right so this other couple are like yeah we're going to go back to the campsite they didn't know we were tripping right and we timed it so we were peaking like now you know and so they're going to go back to the campsite so we but we were like yeah we're going to just hang here right so i went over to hold the flashlight for them as they went down this ladder it was like maybe a 30 foot ladder pipe ladder

drilled into this the temple's made out of limestone blocks and so to get up there yeah there you go temple four so that's steep yeah is that temple climbed up is that temple four though the jaguar temple yeah that's right i typed in temple for jaguar okay cool yeah yeah when i was there it was much more overgrown yeah wow anyway so we we went up to the top of that looks like it there on the right yeah that looks like it from like when we were there anyway so we're up on that ledge there and uh and see how flat the the jungle is it just goes forever amazing it's so crazy how it's almost like uniform in height yeah i mean it just varies a little bit but oh look at that picture yeah yeah oh man it looks like a picture i took actually up there um anyway so it's insane looking it's so beautiful

so we're up there and uh and i'm holding the ladder for these guys going down and they're like okay we're good like okay i turn off the ladder and i take a step and oh fuck ow what the fuck was that i turn the flashlight back on i see the scorpion going up the wall scurrying up the wall like four inches green and then they're like three other ones on the wall it's like fuck this thing's crawling with fucking scorpions and i just got stung on the toe while you're on acid while i'm tripping and thank god i didn't jump because i would have dropped 30 feet to fucking rocks oh my god so i go back to anna and i was like shit she said what happened here i said i just fucking scorpion like watch out and like oh jesus right oh my god so we're kind of like oh are they dangerous i don't know i i don't know are they i

don't know so um now it's getting dark right because the moon's going behind these clouds and there's this other these two dudes like way over on the other side of the ledge and we go over to them and they're italian and they don't speak english but honest spoke spanish so she was talking to them in spanish and and you sort of understand, you know, they're both Latin, similar languages. And those guys are like, I don't know. And we were like, watch out because they're all around. Like, oh, shit. Yeah.

So while we're talking to them, now it's totally dark. This Guatemalan dude comes up the ladder with an old bolt action rifle. And he's like the night guard or something. So we go over to him and Ana says to him in Spanish, son peligrosos los escorpiones. And are they dangerous, the scorpions? And the guy says, si son letales, hay muertos. They're lethal. There are deaths. I'm like, oh, fuck, man.

I understood enough Spanish to get that. You're thinking you're dying. So I'm like, yeah, this is it. April, full moon of April 1989. Yeah, I was 27. That was right around the time of Trump's plane crashed. What if it was exactly the same? I think I think I talk about being Mercury was in retrograde.

Yeah. Yeah. I was at a about being. Mercury was in retrograde. Yeah. Yeah. I was at a table with that Puerto Rican girl while you were with that other Puerto Rican girl up there. Puerto Rican girls crossed our paths. Yeah. We both survived. Just barely. So what happened to you?

So I'm thinking like, fuck, I got to get down from here. Right. Because there's no way anyone else could carry me down. Right. All these ladders and you couldn't get a down from here. Right. Because there's no way anyone else could carry me down all these ladders, and you couldn't get a stretcher down, right? So if I'm going to survive, I got to get down on my own quickly. So then if I collapse, they can get an ambulance. Although we're like, you know,

two days from Guatemala City and whatever the town was. I don't even know if they had a clinic or I don't know, but we were pretty remote. And like, they're not going to send out a clinic or I don't know, but we were pretty remote. And like, they're not gonna send out a helicopter or some shit like that. Right. So I get down. I Oh, so what happens is my girlfriend's freaking out. No, no criticism of her. I think it's much harder to watch someone you love die than to die yourself in this case. And so she's like, oh, fuck, you're dying.

And I'm thinking, yeah, maybe. And so one of the Italian dudes is like, look, you guys go. I'll stay with her and make sure she's all right. And so I go down with this other Italian dude. We go down the ladder and we get down to the floor and we start walking around the jungle and it's fucking totally dark now because the moon's totally obscured. And the jungle, you know how when you're tripping, your pupils are super dilated so you can see light and stuff that normally you might miss. They're like the jungle in Guatemala is full of glowing worms and shit flying by that's all like green and blue.

And yeah, yeah. And they're like these caterpillars and like, holy shit, this place is wild. So we're walking around lost, totally dark. Tripping. I'm tripping. He doesn't know I'm tripping. How tripping are you?

Tripping. That was three head nods, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, you know, I'm peaking from the acid plus all the adrenaline. Right. And so this pain is running up my leg. And it's like running up the bone in the center of the leg. This kind of fire. And when it gets to the top of muscles, they seize up.

Oh, wow. So like, you know, from the knee down, it's just like rigid. And then my tongue starts swelling and my throat starts swelling. And I got this like Novocaine feeling in my lips and I'm sort of drooling. And, and I'm thinking when this gets to my heart, that's, that's when I die. And so I'm with this guy and we're lost. And at first, like I'm freaked, I'm scared. And then it occurs to me that I'm saying my last words to a guy whose face I've never seen because we didn't shine the light in his face when we were talking to him.

And he doesn't understand english and that cracks me up that i just i start laughing like a fucking maniac and he's like got his arm around me he thinks i'm like losing it and i'm just like this is hilarious and i think about my friends and how they're going to be like, yeah, you know, good on Chris. You know, he didn't die in some dumbass way like we all thought he would. He died in this. It's still a dumbass way, but at least it's interesting. And then I start thinking, you know, all right, I'm 27, but I've been around the world. I literally around the planet. I've been in love.

I've had sex with gorgeous women who loved me. I made a shit ton of money. I walked away from it. I've done everything I wanted to do. I'm 27, but I've done everything. And I've had a fucking amazing life. Wow. And this is cool.

I would have been crying like a bitch. I would have been like, not yet, I'm not done. You know, I felt really bad for my parents and Ana. But for myself, I was like, I've had a good fucking run. It's not as long as I would have liked, but I've had a good fucking run. It's not as long as I would have liked, but I've had a good fucking run. So I really came to this peace and like the world doesn't owe me shit, man. I've had, I mean, I'd been in Alaska two summers at that point. I worked in New York in Manhattan for two years at that point with a guy who offered me a million dollars if I would stay

and I said no and I left I flew to India I'd been in Asia for two years you said no to a million bucks when I was 26 why did you say no to a million bucks what was the the catch was what did he need to do to you no he was a really good guy actually he I liked him a lot um the million bucks was he said when you're 30 you'll have a net worth of a million dollars and if you don't i'll write you a check for the whatever you're missing and we'll notarize it and this guy's worth 30 million dollars or something so he just wanted you to work for him he wanted me to stay and i wanted to go i wanted to see the world and this guy hired me to help him manage his family's property in Midtown Manhattan. And the main reason he hired me is because I didn't give a shit about money.

So he knew I wouldn't steal from him. Oh, that's interesting. And then when it stopped being fun and new, I was like, I got to go. And he's like, no, no, stick around. I'll make it worth your while and so there was this weird dynamic but anyway i'd had all these experiences and so i was you were at peace i'm like hey i've had a good run so anyway we finally we come out into this little parking lot and there's this guatemalan kid there maybe 10 or something and the italian guy talks

to him and says scorpion scorpion and the kid looks at me like, oh, my God, come, come. And he takes us to this trailer and we bang on the door and this horrible fluorescent light comes on. And this like Guatemalan dude who obviously had been drunk and asleep, you know, is like, what? And the kid says he's the doctor. He's not a doctor. He's some jungle dude, whatever. And the kid says he's the doctor. He's not a doctor.

He's some jungle dude, whatever. And so the guy takes us in and he's talking, you know, it's sort of talking broken English. And I explained to him, he says, how big is the scorpion? He looks at my foot. He says, how big was the scorpion? I said, yeah, like, you know, this big, like a finger. And what color? Gray, green, sort of.

And he says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not a scorpion. That's alacrán. So in Spanish, in that part of Guatemala anyway, there are two different words. A scorpion is a little red thing. Alacrán is a big green thing. But they're both with the tail and the, you know. And so we had been using the word scorpion

because in English that's all there is. But scorpion, escorpion in that part of Guatemala is lethal. And that's a little tiny thing. That's a little red thing. And that'll fucking take you out. But the guy's like, look, this was two hours ago and you're still alive. You'll be fine. Apparently it's like if you have a bad heart or you're a kid maybe this will kill

you but if you're if you survive a couple hours you're going to be all right speaking to something i read today something about the atkins guy this is an interesting story you know the atkins diet it's it's very controversial because the atkins diet is a lot of protein stuff. I'd heard that the guy died of a heart attack and that they weren't being completely honest. Apparently even Snopes says it's not clear. The guy, I feel like he was the head of, it's so weird when this happens. The Atkins diet guy, when he died,

he weighed 258 pounds. So he was overweight and he was 72 years old and the story was that he slipped on ice in front of his house and hit his head but he also had a history of heart disease I did not know that and he had had heart attacks is that why he got into the research that led to the diet I I don't know. I don't know. I just read that today. I'm like, that there's some conspiracy. And it was a vegan guy who was talking about it.

That there's a conspiracy about Atkins. And that Atkins really died from a heart attack. Which would ruin the brand. Yeah. Well, when that found out he was 258 pounds, I was like, wait, how? Wait, that's heavy. How tall was he? The report concludes that Dr. Atkins, 72, had a history of heart attack and congestive heart failure.

And notes that he weighed 258 pounds at death. Yeah. So he was really unhealthy. Which is really interesting. Because that whole diet, the Atkins diet, like a lot of people were really criticizing that diet. Yeah. And saying that it's really terrible and that all the fat and all the stuff, all the protein you eat, you really shouldn't eat that much. But it's very similar to what a lot of people are eating now.

When they're eating paleo and they're eating low carb. Apparently, the real problem, and I read this today, about high-fat diets is if you're going to eat a high-fat diet, it must be a low-carb diet as well. You cannot have high fat and carbs. That is really bad for you because your body is going to use all the carbohydrates for fuel and all the fat that you eat is just going to be stored. And apparently, that combination, especially with saturated fats, is very bad. So you want to be ketogenic or close to it. Yeah, or you want to be close to it. You know, you essentially want to eliminate most of the stuff that people love,

like pizza and bread and pasta. Eliminate almost all that stuff. That's just all those unnatural foods. But the point being that I'd never heard that. I'd always heard that he had fallen. And I'd assumed that anything other than that would be a conspiracy theory. But then I read that and I was like, whoa. You know who wrote it? Now I remember John Joseph from the Cro-Mags. You know that guy? He's a vegan, super healthy, ultra marathon, triathlon dude now. He used to be, or he still is, lead singer of the Cro-Mags.

I think they're still around. I know he tours still. Might be touring on his own now. But he wrote that about Atkins today. Yeah. Well, just to tie this together, the guy, after he explains this to me, he gives me a couple pills probably aspirin or something and he dips some water out of a bucket and says take these pills you'll be fine

i've been traveling a long time i knew you don't drink water out of a bucket in the tropics but this guy just told me i wasn't going to die so i'll do whatever the fuck he says i drank the water and a week later i had hepatitis wow that's how i got the hepatitis you got hepatitis from a bucket that this dude had laying around his dirty shed exactly that's crazy exactly that's you narrowed it down to that particular moment you got hepatitis well i assume i mean that's a pretty high risk pretty high risk Yeah. Fucking crazy people with their gut biome down there. It's like if you see other animals drink out of a puddle, do you freak out? No.

Like a dog drinks out of a puddle, you don't freak out because the dog's body is going to handle that. Well, that's what Jeff Leach was telling me about the Hadza. They drink right out of mud puddles all the time. It's like that's why he wanted their microbiome. That's so crazy. Yeah. Yeah, we have a weak-ass, bitch-, that's why he wanted their microbiome. That's so crazy. Yeah. Yeah, we have a weak-ass, bitch-ass,

preservative-laden microbiome. Yeah, antibiotics. Yep. You can't avoid them in America. It's hard to stay alive, you know, if you get really, really, really sick.

Oh, no, I'm not talking about medical. I'm talking about in the food supply, in the water supply. They're everywhere in America. I don't know if that really affects us that much. One of the things that I was, I don't think there's levels of antibiotics in the

water supply that's really affecting us. It's possible that some of it is getting to us in the food supply, but more so than not, I think the issue is poor dietary choices because poor dietary choices are the number one factor in what affects your microbiome. Super low fiber. Yeah, low fiber. Just not eating healthy. If you're eating a lot of sugar in particular, you've got candida running around your gut. The unhealthy bacteria reacts better to that.

And your body starts craving it. That's one of the weirder things about when you do eat a low-carb diet is your body really doesn't crave carbohydrates anymore. It's like it's a trick. But when you're on carbohydrates, if you eat them a lot, man, your body's craving them all the time. It's like you are being influenced by those organisms that are in your digestive tract, which is really freaky. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole sort of superorganism. I think you and I have talked about that in the past, the idea that toxoplasmosis. You know about that?

Sure. Jesus, these things that get into the brain and determine behavior and from the gut as well can determine. Even something as simple, this is a simple example of wanting the organism to crave the thing that works for them but not for the organism. But, man, the weird, like really complex behaviors that are created by some parasites in the brain, you know, like cats that – or mice that aren't afraid of cats and are actually attracted to the smell of cat piss. Sexually attracted. Yeah, they get turned on by it. It's crazy.

And that bacteria or this toxoplasmosis can only grow and it can only reproduce inside a cat's gut. Right. Which is fucking bananas. Right. Like Sapolsky. We had Sapolsky, Robert Sapolsky. Oh, he's great.

He's amazing. And he went into depth about that. And it's one of those things where you just stop and go, what? He's a cool guy. I remember mentioning him to you once on this podcast. And Jamie brought up his photo. And you looked at his photo and you said, there's a guy who does not give a fuck. If you look at him, his crazy fucking hair, his ponytail and shit.

He looks like he's homeless or something. He's interested in the work, period. Yeah, the work. Yeah. But he was gracious enough to give us an hour. There he is right there. Great. Super nice guy, too.

But just, I mean, his work with baboons as well was covered in a Radiolab podcast. It's a fascinating podcast where they observed like this baboon, this temporary baboon utopia. Yeah, you and i talked about that where the the upper ranking males ate the contaminated meat and died out yeah i love that story that's one of the only hopeful fucking stories out there well i feel like there's certain pockets of humanity like i mean i've never been to burning man but i assume that that's sort of a representation of that as well certain pockets of humanity where like-minded people get together and they say, well, it doesn't have to be like this.

Like, just because we're all caught up in this crazy trap, and I think more of those little pockets of humanity are popping up day in, day out. I think you're right. This podcast represents that in a lot of ways, too. You know, we're talking about the podcast being a cult of its own creation. A community, I think. It's more of a community. Well, no one's asking you to do anything.

There's no rules, but it's an opportunity for like-minded discussion that's rarely present in cubicle life. What do you think about, I mean, podcasting, in the intro to this podcast book we were talking about earlier, I said that I think that podcasting is on a par with the invention

of the printing press in terms of the potential for radical social change. Because there's no, like you said before, there's no filter. There's nothing between you and your audience. And that's a radical thing. I mean, the printing press said, when the printing press came about, what that meant was you didn't need to have a team of scribes to copy out this thing that you've written, right? So you can be just a regular guy and pay a thousand bucks or whatever the equivalent of that was in medieval Europe and have all these pamphlets printed. So you could be Martin Luther and change the world if you have a good idea and it takes hold.

Podcasting seems similar to that in the sense that anybody who can afford a few mics and a laptop can get their message out yeah and if it catches fire it catches fire it and it goes around the world you could do it on a phone too like we're saying you don't really need a whole lot of equipment yeah a lot of people use one of those small mp3 mics a zoom we use that early on i still use a zoom those are great great. I think maybe. I think you're probably on to something. I think the Internet in general and the ability for people to just create their own content, that's the real – the gatekeepers to the masses have always been these production companies, content providers, networks, all these people, the hallowed halls, and those people all got fat on it in a weird way because the gatekeepers are the ones that hoarded all the money.

And they gave some of the money to the actors and some of the money to the writers and everybody got wealthy. Don't get me wrong. But the gate, the Harvey Weinstein's of the world is the one that really got rich. If you look at that guy, like that guy's the guy that really got rich. And you're really happy, too. Oh, he's doing really well. Yeah. Yeah.

He's doing super well. That's great. I mean, obviously that guy's the guy that really got rich. And of course- You're really happy too. Oh, he's doing really well right now. Yeah, yeah. He's doing super well. That's great. He, I mean, obviously that guy's the worst example, right? But he obviously also, on a positive note, financed a lot of amazing movies. And if it wasn't for him, they wouldn't have gotten done. But clearly those people who do that, they're a different thing.

They're business people. Yeah. Now is the first time ever that there's a direct connection between a guy like you and a guy like whoever's listening to this right now. That's never happened before. I mean, the only one in the room, you know, we have Jamie helping out and then it goes to the server and then it's uploaded to the RSS feed. And then it goes tounes and it goes to wherever the fuck you're getting your podcast from and that's it yeah there's no steps there's no network there's no notes there's no production meaning if you did your podcast and your podcast was on

some radio network somewhere you'd have to go to meetings weekly meetings with the studio you'd have some fucking program director some dick fuck asshole wants to tell you what not to talk about anymore. Yeah. Look, you're losing sponsors. I don't even have advertisers. Good for you. Yeah, I do it. I had them for a while and I just got tired of listening to myself talking about underwear and shit.

So just do it for fun now. No, it's supported through Patreon. That's great too. People send me money. This is what I think, ultimately. I think, ultimately, people will, someone's going to develop some sort of an app thing where you can have basically everything you put out. Your podcast, blogs, all that. It would all be like a channel.

You could even call it channel. And that would be like a new social media platform that you could do everything from. And people could either sign up for it and pay for it or not. That's how Sam Harris has it. You can either pay for his podcast or not. That's how you have it too, right?

Yeah, although you get it for free. Yeah, you get it for free. So if you want to support it, you pay. And I do some bonus stuff for Patreon for patreon only yeah sam does it could be a buck a month you know yeah why not and i think there's the the future is probably going to be something like that that's the present as you said i mean sam's doing it duncan's got a patreon thing i do you got to get a patreon joe no i some money. I make plenty of money with ads. I'm trying to think of what-

It's almost like give the option, if you pay, you get no ads or free. A lot of people do that. That's a good move. Like Dan Savage does that. He has the- I forget what it's called, but yeah, there's the ad-free version and the- That's probably a good move. Sponsored version.

That makes sense. Because that way, if you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to. But the point being that you can reach a whole lot of people. Forget about paying. You can reach a whole lot of people and get ideas to a whole lot of people that you could just never reach before. No one would let you. Why would anybody invest in you? Why would anyone put that time in?

And then you're going to keep all of it? What? Yeah. No way. Well, think about publishing now, right? I write a book. That book comes out. Somebody buys a copy of Sex at Dawn right now in paperback. I get 8.25% of the price. That's hilarious. Minus 15% of that that goes to my agent and then taxes.

That's hilarious. Right? I mean, a pimp lets a hooker keep 50% of the money. Wow. A stingy pimp. What is a lady like J.K. Rowling's when she's balling on top of the world? What kind of deal does she get? Well, it depends what she signed, you know? But, I mean, she's already like Stephen King.

People like her, they can cut a totally different deal. Right. like Stephen King, people like her, they can cut a totally different deal. But the standard contract is what I had, which is 8% on hard copy. It's 8% for 5,000 copies, then 10%, 5,000, then 12% after that in hard copy. And then paperback is 8.25% forever. How many books have you sold? In America, maybe 400,000, 450,000 450 000 something like that it's a lot of books not really not really i mean it's in like 20 languages that's what's cool it's worldwide

filled with 400 000 people it's a lot of books if you look at it that way that's how you have to look at it because that's what it really is but i mean in terms of money it's not that much money right especially if you, you know, stretch it out over the years it took to write it and all the promotion and all that. It's not a way to make a lot of money writing books. Even it used to be, if you had a New York Times bestseller back in the day, you made a lot of money. But the reading audience is much smaller now than it was 20, 30 years ago. What about books on cassette or audio? That's a different deal.

You sign a deal generally with Audible. They sort of own that market, which is an Amazon company, right? And yeah, you get, I forget what the percentage is, but it's probably 18 to 20, something like that. And also e-books, you get a slightly better deal. I think you get 17.5% of the price of an e-book, which is funny, though, because it's not costing the publisher anything additional to have an e-book, right? It's already edited. It's already the cover and all that.

It's already done. And there's no distribution cost. So you get 17.5% as a writer. They get the rest. That's so crazy. There's no trucks. There's no shelf. There's no store.

There's no reason for them to be getting all that money. No. That's so crazy. It's all gravy for them. Yeah, and it's not like they're recouping costs. And it used to be, like back in Hemingway or whatever, back in the day, a publisher would support an author through three, four, five books thinking eventually something's going to hit. This guy's got talent eventually.

And so it was an investment. Now they expect you to have your own platform, your own access to media. Sometimes they're asking authors to hire their own editors, their own publicists. Really? Yeah. But- They still get all the money. They still get the same contract.

The ratios are the same. So it's like, yeah, that's why I say it's like a Napster kind of thing. Yeah. It's at the point now where it's like, wait a minute, if I got a platform, I got access to media, I'm hiring my own editor, why am I giving you creative control and 92% of the fucking revenue? It's a strange business. It's a strange business. That is a strange business.

Essentially what they have is credibility. So if you self-publish or publish with some independent publisher, like New York Times isn't going to review it. They won't? No. Wow. Because it's a very insular world. That's crazy. If it's a very insular world. That's crazy.

If it's a book that takes off, then a publisher will come in and buy it. So like Fifty Shades of Grey, that was self-published. I wonder why. Yeah. But look what happened. Yeah, they tapped into a market, a chick that likes to get spit on. Right? There are a lot of them.

There's a lot of them. I don't know about spit on. Oh, yeah. But certainly. Choked. Yeah. Smacked around. By a billionaire. Yeah. Good looking. Good looking guy with a lot of them there's a lot of them i don't know about spit on oh yeah but certainly choked yeah smacked around by a billionaire yeah good looking good looking guy with a heart of gold heart of gold but he likes to spit in your mouth yeah and then she and then ultimately he'll see the light and and of course he'll be tamed of course that's the fantasy yeah that's the fairy tale that's what everybody wants see that's why i was saying earlier i've

got this idea i was talking to duncan about this the other night i've got this idea to write an erotic memoir but that'll sort of be like my last book because at that point i'll have burned all the bridges you'll be the only person who would ever interview me after that. I was planning for it to come out around my 60th birthday, and it'll be called an old manifesto. It's just, if you change the names of people. Oh, no, I'm not worried about the people. I'm not going to hurt anyone in the book. I'm sure. It's more just about, you know.

How many people you fucked and people find out the truth. Yeah. Dun, dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun. Dude, you're going to become legendary. But it's not a book about how much I got laid. It's not a book about how cool I am. It's a book about the amazing things I've learned in sexual situations.

Right. And that the world is so different from what people think. How so? There's just so many things going on that mainstream people can't imagine. Like, I mean, I was in college the first time a man told me he would be happy for me to have sex with his wife.

And it wasn't a kinky weird thing. It was like, I'm not doing it. She's wonderful. I noticed that you guys like each other. I just want you to know it's cool with me. Wow. That's the first time. Since then, there have probably been, I don't know, half a dozen or something.

Mothers are like, would you please have sex with my daughter? Because she really, you know. She's a good one. Generally, it's because she didn't like the boyfriend. Always. Yeah. So it's like, will you show my daughter, like, there's a world out there that she doesn't know about? Yeah, there's always that.

But then they recruit you, and you've got to take on the project. Well, you know, should you choose to accept it should you choose to accept it they expect you to stick around as well not necessarily necessarily yeah yeah yeah the world's weird stuff that people think like you know oh my god if you know you have sex with someone's wife and he knows he's gonna kill you well maybe not maybe he'll take you out for a beer afterwards and you'll be friends. This is the subject of Ari Shaffir's podcast this week with Aubrey Marcus, and they're talking about open relationships and they get super honest. It's very intense. I think that we live in cultural patterns and that what we see around us, we replicate. I think there's a lot of evidence for that. If you just pay attention, forget about studies, just look at how different people are in other parts of the world. People that are putting plates in their lips and rings through their noses.

The way people tattoo themselves, the way people express themselves and dance. Like human beings vary so wildly in what we accept and what we don't accept. I was going to bring up Japan earlier. It's one of the more fascinating travel experiences I've had was going to Japan because when you go to Tokyo, you realize this is a completely different way of living. They have a completely different way of interacting on the streets. They have a completely different way that they have decorated their buildings.

I have tattoos. They told me I had to wear long sleeves at the gym. I had to go back and change my shirt. They don't accept exposed tattoos. Because it's associated with organized crime. Yes. So I had to go back. And there's a lot of that where you realize this is a totally different way of living.

But if I lived there, I wouldn't live like these people. So the momentum of these patterns and these cultures gets established, and then it takes something radical to lift them and to free people from these patterns. And once they're free from these patterns, then they have a real opportunity to objectively assess the way they behave and whether or not this is the way they want to behave or the way they want to live or whether or not to just expect it to because of this unthinking culture, this momentum. I think that's what podcast is doing. The big thing with podcast is that it's creating more narratives and it's creating more discussions about interesting subjects and more questions and discussions about like why we live our life a certain way. And if you live a regular life with regular people, what are the odds that you get a chance to sit down with a guy like you for three hours or a guy like Graham Hancock or a guy like, you know, fill in the blank, all the fascinating people that you or I have talked to

in our podcasts. And then these conversations get right into someone's head, whether they're earbuds on, whether at work, typing some nonsense bullshit into some fucking form that they have to fill out. Cause that's what they do for a living. Yeah. That's what's different.

And that's never happened before. These, I like no generation before the podcast generation had that option. You had Howard Stern, you had, and it was always funny. You had Art Bell, it was always weird. And then you had all the right-wing wacko dudes

on AM talk radio, the Michael Savages, and the fucking Rush Limbaugh's. And you had all those people. But you didn't have a guy who just talks about whatever he wants to talk about. You had to be like, well, Chris, before we give you this radio broadcast show, what kind of a show are you going to do? Are you going to do a left-wing show? Are you going to do a show on cooking?

What are you going to do? Like, no, I'm going to talk about sex and tribes and about how I think monogamy is just a cultural construct. And really the way we evolved, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you fucking hippie. Get out of my office. There's no money in that. Like before, if you came to someone and said, hey, I'm going to write this book, and it's going to sell about 400,000 copies, and it's basically saying monogamy is bullshit. What do you think? They'd be like, what?

The fuck out of here. No one's going to buy that. Everybody wants to be monogamous and have a picket fence and live in the same row of houses where everybody looks the same. Everybody's got this, oh, you have an in-ground pool, you lucky bastard. But what podcasts have done is expose why we accept things as fact and why we just choose. It's because everybody around us does it we are such a massive product of our environment you know and i think when we were talking earlier about race and about race being a determining factor for iq like you don't really ever know you might know from studies but you don't know until those people who have the high IQ have to live the lives of the people that have the low IQ.

And they have to have the same environment that they grow up in, the same fears and the same influences, negative and positive. Then you'll know. And even then you won't know. Because there's so many determining factors. Like, you know, I know people that are just way fucking smarter than me. They're just smarter. I just know they are. They're just smarter. I just know they are. They're just smarter.

What is that? I don't know. Is it the amount of studying they've done? Is it the amount of knowledge? Is it the path that they're on is different than my path? Or is it just their fucking brain works better? But also, what do we mean by smarter? Right.

You know, I mean, I look at someone like you. Your discipline is a major factor in your success. So is that part of being smart? It's smart enough to understand that discipline is a worthwhile pursuit. That's what it is. So what about someone who has a really high IQ that's sitting in a basement eating lots of ice cream and not doing what they want to do? That's not smart decision making for sure. Yeah.

But it's very high IQ. Right. So what do we mean? Or a hunter-gatherer, these people in the Amazon we're talking about who can identify 500 different kinds of plants at a glance and know the behavior of animals and all this stuff. But you give them an IQ test and they're like under 100 for sure. Well, I've had conversations with people that are brilliant, super brilliant people in science

and they'll try to explain to me mixed martial arts in some fucked up cockamamie way and I have to stop them. I'm going to stop. Okay, right now, you sound like a fucking moron. And I know you're not. Professor. But you're talking about something that I have a PhD in. I have a PhD in people fucking people up.

I understand it as good as anybody that's ever lived. So if you start talking nonsense about how to fuck people up, oh, your Kung Fu instructor said that. Oh, great. Well, you know Aikido. I love your Aikido. You silly fuck. I like Aikido, but I recognize that there's a lot of bullshit there. It's a fun thing to practice.

It's fun to be able to flip people around like that, and it would be a great thing to know if you lived in feudal Japan and you lost your sword and someone was coming at you and you had one chance at glory. What I love about Aikido is how it translates into psychological and emotional stuff. So what we were saying earlier about how I don't engage with people who are emotionally triggered by sex at dawn, to me, that's Aikido. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, I learned that kind of thing from my keto. Like,

first of all, you don't need to engage. Secondly, if you do engage, what's important is that you stay calm and centered. And most of the time people burn themselves out. You don't even really need to like, as long as you step out of the way,

let people have what they need to have. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But yeah, as far as a fighting technique, it's not what you're going to pull up in the street. No, it's not. But it's just my point is that people who are brilliant and are geniuses in one aspect of life simply don't have enough time to accumulate the same amount of data about everything.

They just don't. Sure. Whether it's about, you know, fill in the blank, clock making, or whatever the fuck it is. There's just like, there's things that people know that you don't know. And it doesn't make you stupid. It's just information. The difference is between how you apply that information. Like, if you're a really smart person, you don't do shit with it, you're a moron.

You might be a really genius person, but if your life has fallen apart, and it's all because of your shitty decisions, and you've never tried to improve upon your thought process and you just blame the whole world instead of yourself. You're a moron. Even if you're really good at taking IQ tests, you're still a moron. That's it. I mean I don't – personally, I don't think that I'm particularly intelligent. do that a lot of people don't do is think outside the box and connect dots that other people aren't connecting, which is precisely because I didn't go to the right schools and I didn't, you know, in my twenties I went and fucked around the world for 20 years.

Also, you don't have like tenure that you're working for or anything weird that's going to keep you in line. I can just fuck around and figure it out. And I mean that's- There's a lot of going to keep you in line. I can just fuck around and figure it out. There's a lot of people that get stuck in that. Even intellectuals, they get stuck in that trap of having to toe the line in terms of like, I mean, good luck trying to find a conservative professor, right? I mean, what is like 4% identify as conservatives in mainstream universities and colleges? Some really ridiculously low

number, might be 10%, whatever it is, but it's like the vast minority. If you get one out of 10, you're super lucky. I think that's probably not really what it is. Although, again, what do we mean by conservative? Right. It's so confusing because the older I get, the more I realize that the language, it's like one of those Venn diagrams where there's language and there's reality and there's some overlap, but there's a lot that doesn't correspond.

You know, I get into this a lot when people are talking about homosexuality and whether it's, you know, human nature or its culture or whatever. And it's like, first of all, what do we mean by homosexuality? You and I have talked about this before, this tribe in Papua New Guinea where the boys suck as much dick as they can because they think that semen contains the essence of masculinity.

And so it's like, to them, that's not homosexual behavior. That's normal male developmental behavior. And yet we look at that and say, oh, well, that's gay, but they don't see it as gay. So again, it's, as you were saying, we replicate the behavior we see around us. Do they have adult homosexuality or do they only have sex with kids? I think it's only, at least the only kind that's been reported by anthropologists,

because again, there's a filtering there, is younger boys with older boys. So it's the younger boys are given blowjobs to the older boys because that's the way to get stronger and more masculine. Well, what a scam somebody pulled off on that place. One dude probably a long time ago was like, listen to me. We've got a new way of do things around here

starting with my dick he pulls the grass skirt aside oh shit here we go do you want to get strong or not yeah beating drums sucking dicks there you go it's pretty crazy though again like what we're

saying earlier that you can have these pockets of culture that they're radically different than other places but the people just adapt and conform to what's around them and i think that's the case with human beings everywhere i don't think it's just the people that live in new guinea and it's not just the people that live in the Congo or live in Woodland Hills. It's people that live everywhere. It's just how human beings behave. And it's also interesting to look at how the culture reflects the environment. Yes. Right?

And Marvin Harris wrote about this cultural materialism, how a culture responds to an environment sort of like how c you know, cacti live in the desert. There's a reason for that. You put a cactus in the jungle, it dies immediately, right? It's adapted to an environment. So you've got desert cultures, right? You've got jungle cultures. So the culture actually grows in a way that fits that ecological environment. He was the first, I think he's the first person to figure this out, certainly the first time

I read it. Like some islands, some cultures are cannibalistic and others aren't, right? Why is that? Like I'd never thought about it. Like why would the Aztecs eat their victims but the Christians didn't, but the Christians killed a lot more. They just left them to rot on the field. Why is that?

Is it the Aztecs are particularly evil or something? I don't know. He applied this prism to it and showed that also in the South Pacific, there are some islands that were – the people are cannibalistic, there are no domesticated animals that eat different food than humans. So, for example, you can't raise dogs for meat because dogs eat what we eat. So it doesn't make sense. But you can raise goats for meat because goats eat shit humans don't eat. Right. So in the places that are cannibalistic, there was nothing they could domesticate for protein.

So when you killed a human, you ate him because your protein starved. Wow. Isn't that crazy? So it's an ecological thing. The Aztecs had no pigs, right? There was nothing they could domesticate, no cattle. They had turkeys, I think, was the only domesticated animal. So when they had meat from a person they killed, they were so psyched just to have meat.

They're not just going to let it go. Wow. Yeah. Did I ever tell you that's the case with bears? That bears are all cannibals? Huh. Yeah, all cannibals. It's really dark.

My friend Jonathan saw a boar, a male bear, kill a cub, and then saw the female eat it. Oh, the female ate it? Yeah, the female chased the male away. And after he'd killed it, he was trying to eat it, and she chased him away, and then she ate it. She ate her own cub. And he said he had heard that they did that before, but watching that in person.

But they're all cannibals. Well, lots of mammal mothers will eat. They're young. But these guys come out of the den looking for cubs. The crazy thing about spring bears. Yeah, they do it for two reasons. They do it, one, they know now that it's not just to try to force the female into estrus again. They used to think it was just that.

But now they, like, if you shoot shoot a bear other bears will claim it as theirs and start eating it and you have to chase them off like they're it's the world of a bear is so fucking hard scrabble and so fraught with peril and they have to you know you're talking about a 500 pound bear how much do you have to eat every day yeah what do you have to eat like 30 pounds of meat or something crazy like m they're eating like moths and shit. Everything. Yeah. They're machines.

What they are is they clean the forest up of babies that can't get away. And there's no overpopulating when there's bears around. Dumbass hikers. Yeah. Well, that's so rare. It's so rare. And it's more black bears than it is brown bears. When brown bears kill people it's usually

because someone fucked up and came across a female with her babies and the female doesn't want to take any chances she fucks you up but when a black bear eats you it's more likely for predation also a black bear will chase you up a tree yeah and a grizzly won't climb a tree right that's true and a lot of times when the black bears are near people the reason is because people have encroached on their their areas and then they started getting into eating garbage right and they start getting into eating garbage they become a real problem because they're smart and they realize like why don't fucking chase after some deer when i could eat this dude's trash and then how about just eat this dude like they don't they don't think about the problems with that like this

is going to bring heat on the clan no they just fucked that person up i spent a lot of time thinking about bears in alaska you should yeah i was working the first year it's so stupid i worked in this cannery in kenai for like six weeks salmon cannery yeah and i was 16 hours a day seven days a week just like full-on fucking busting it out. Cause the fish are coming in and they got the lines running, you know? And at night I would go back and sleep in my tent on this bluff where we were all camped out. And so like, you know, after six weeks, everything smelled like salmon, everything, my skin, my teeth, my hair, my butt, everything. And so after we left, I was with these two other dudes,

and we were like, let's go to McKinley and hike for a while. And we hitchhiked up. Oh, no. Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, I see this coming. This is terrible. We hitchhiked up to Denali, and we were walking back this dirt road, and this ranger came along in his truck, and he stopped,

and he was this cool guy. He's like, hey, you guys been working? I'm like, yeah, man. He's like, yeah, where? You've been working at Canterbury? Yeah. Hmm. And you're going to go hiking now?

Like, yeah, yeah. He said, do you realize that every bear within 20 miles of here can smell you guys and you smell like food? I'm like, oh, yeah, hadn't thought about that. Like, get in the truck thank god that guy probably saved your life more than the guy who saved you from the scorpion he gave you hepatitis that was the real savior fucked me up man he did but the other guy really saved you yeah

dude bears and fish man that's a crazy combination and so the the big bears of um kodiak kodiak i was out there that's the whole deal is that they're just eating fish and even beach whales. They eat whales. They eat everything. That's a bananas place to be, man, when you look at 12-foot bears. I worked on a boat. The second year, I worked on a boat that was based out of Kodiak. Really?

Yeah. Did you get to see a lot of them wandering around? Oh, man. I saw the bears. I saw orcas. I saw all sorts of shit. Yeah. We were out in Prince William Sound.

Orcas are the animal that I always point to that if they didn't exist and there was a legend of them, it would be way more fascinating than Bigfoot. If somebody told you that there's some mammal that lives in the ocean and they communicate with each other through a complex series of sounds

that we to this day can't understand. And that there's several tons. And they have accents. They have accents. Yeah. They have dialects. They leap through the air and smash. They stay together in pods for life.

And they have a very strong family bond. If they didn't exist, if this was just like some Bigfoot type myth, it would be way more interesting than Bigfoot. Because what does Bigfoot do? It just wanders around the woods. It's because Bigfoot looks like a human. You know, so it's that wild. It's the dogs fascinated by the wolf, you know? Right. Yeah.

Exactly, right? That is exactly what it is. Like, that could have been us. You know about this sub-genre of women who read Bigfoot erotic literature? There's so much of it! There's a lot of it, man! Yeah, you should write some, Joe. I should. That should be my move. Maybe that's what I a lot of it yeah you should write some joe that should be my move maybe that's all right just what you're right really like you can't like i'll write i'll

write a blurb for you nice for sure yeah i'll blur the lines between erotica and just like horrible hunting primal like slaughtering slaughtering of villagers and then fucking the women like it'd be like some weird murder porn like you would uh yeah storm into some weird log cabin and you do that that famous photo of you you know looking all badass and black and white that's the back one for the author yeah that's your author photo for sure it drinks way too much coffee it's getting me wet just thinking about it wow you get wet yeah a little bit I'm about 56 years old, Joe. Got a little leakage.

By the way, last week, big, big event in my life. What happened? First prostate exam, bitches. Ooh, how was that? It was fabulous. Did it feel good? No. No. No, but-

But you look very healthy. Can I just say that? Thank you. You look, right now, you look rested and healthy. Last time I saw you, you and me and Duncan were here. It's maybe three months ago. There was a moment we were talking about something and you said, you know, going to yoga two days a week can change your life. And you looked at me, and I don't know that this was happening on your end, but on my end, it felt significant. It felt like you were saying, Chris, Chris, you know, just two yoga classes a week could

change your life. And I started going to yoga and I feel much better. Oh, look at that. That's why you're all healthy looking. That and my urologist. That's beautiful. So I got to tell you about this urologist though. Okay.

Super cool guy. Would you give him four stars on Yelp? I'd give him five. Wow. Yeah. And in fact, I've invited him on my podcast. Oh, wow. But he's hesitant to do it.

And I understand why. He works for a big hospital and he doesn't want to- Become a rock star. But we ended up hanging out in his office talking for a while. This dude gave himself a vasectomy. Ooh. And he told me, he's like- That's how bad he didn't want to have kids.

He pried his dick hole open and chopped away he was just like you know i do it i've done a lot of them i want to see how i could do it and he said you know my wife wasn't into the idea but she insisted that i have a colleague standing by in case i got into trouble so that made sense i did the guy was going a little to the left. To give himself a fucking vasectomy. That is the most badass thing I think I've ever heard. Did he like, what did he do with his feet? I don't know the position. Feet back like this here. Like way back.

Like a contortionist and just digging in. He said it's on the side of the scrotum. Maybe yours, bro. Not mine. Oh, you got yours up your butt? That's what people are proud of. They told me I had the biggest pipe. Well, this dude.

They tied my tubes. They said they never saw tubes like mine. They never saw them like a fucking garden hose, bro. He said to me afterwards, he said, you got the prostate of a 20-year-old. Oh, nice. I love you, brother. That's good. That's good to hear.

Yeah. It was really funny are you fixed no you're not still shooting live loads who knows who knows how live they are

at this point well now you you got defects in your loads yeah you get older you get defects that's right

yeah so dude you really do look healthier like I'm not bullshitting like I saw that like instantly so two yoga classes a day or a week two yoga classes a day

Or a week rather A week A day of probably crippled It's not getting crazy Probably coming here emaciated But two a week Really can change your life Yeah and I'm doing the like

Old lady classes too Those old ladies are tough as fuck That's how they got to be old ladies Dude like plank position I'm like lady come on My arms are shaking There's some old ladies in my class That humble me

I take yoga with these old ladies in my class that humble me. I take yoga with these old ladies, old housewives, and they're fucking tough as shit, and they're in there every day. I come there a couple days a week, and they look at me like, oh, decided to drop in. They're there every day. Every day. You see their progress, too. Especially it's very impressive to me when you see flexibility progress in old people and you realize like most of what we take for what we decide like oh this is how far your

body should move when you're 60 or this is how your body should move you're 70 it's based on the average person it doesn't do a goddamn thing with their body you don't go hiking you don't eat right again it's based on what you see around you. Yes. In Spain, everybody goes for a walk after dinner. You can be 90 years old. They're out there walking after dinner. It's a way to go too. It's nice. If you go to a nice place, it feels good to have a meal and then walk around. That's why it's like, you ever eat in Malibu? There's a Malibu seafood. Do you ever see that? You know what that place is? Yeah. Right on the PCH. Yeah. You eat outside. It's really good, and they have fresh seafood there all the time. Are you talking about the Real Inn?

No, no, no. I think it's called Malibu Seafood. I think that's what it's called. But anyway, the problem is getting across the PCH. You've got to get across the PCH. That's death-defying. Oh, you park on one side and run across? Yeah, you've got to run across, especially with little kids.

That's fucking scary. You should go to the Real Inn. It's on the PCH down near Topanga. I've heard that's good. It is good. And they've got tables outside. You can bring a dog in. It's kind of picnic tables.

Anyway, we talk about this after. Yeah. But there's something about, there's another restaurant on Malibu, too, that's a really good spot. It's like right on the beach. You can eat and then just go walk. Yeah. It's like walking on the beach or just going for a walk like right after a meal.

That's what everybody's supposed to do. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Helps digestion. And when you live in a, you know, I saw this so much in Spain,

when you live in a culture that's healthy, you're healthy. You know what my favorite example is? Boulder, Colorado. Oh, yeah. You go to Boulder, everybody's got fucking

Patagonia jackets on. They're running up hills and dirt bike riding. There's a yoga place every corner. And people are having fun. Having a good time. It's not work. No.

It's fun. Well, exercise is fun. That's what people don't understand. It's not fun to be unhealthy. And when you try to exercise when you're unhealthy, it feels like shit because your body feels like shit. healthy it feels like shit because your body feels like shit but once you get the dust knocked off of it and get it moving and i'm not talking about crossfit or fucking mma training or jiu-jitsu i'm just talking about any kind of exercise just get that blood flowing you'll be a you'll be a better version of you i got a a bike i don't know if you know i've talked about this it's this

electric assist mountain bike oh yeah my friend john dudley has those fuck is that great they're amazing so much fun yeah and where i live it's like uphill to get to any of the fire roads right so a normal bike i'm just not gonna do it you know because it's like a half hour of hell to get anywhere interesting yeah but this thing it it only assists when you pedal right so there's no throttle or anything right uh the specialized gave it to me because i i had this dude on my podcast who's um uh professional mountain bike racer and he was like dude you gotta get a bike you're in topanga this is you know heaven here and i was like yeah but like that's where i would ride you know way the fuck up there and he's like yeah let me talk to some people well my buddy john Dudley uses those for deer hunting.

Oh, right. Because when you walk on the ground. A little more. Well, not just that. When you walk on the ground, you leave scent. Oh. So instead of doing that, he rides a bike. So when you ride a bike, deer's nose is so much stronger and more powerful than ours that if the wind is at your back and the deer's in front of you, you're fucked.

You're just fucked. But if you play the wind correctly, one of the best ways to avoid leaving scent if a deer passes by after you've been there is to ride a bike. But you don't want to ride a bike and exert yourself because then you'll be sweaty and you have to sit in a tree stand. You'll freeze your fucking ass off. So instead he has these electric assist bikes

and they're fucking amazing. And when I was in Iowa, we took these suckers out into the woods fun oh it's amazing like uphill uphill doesn't matter just up the hill no problem yeah and it's still an effort but it's not like you don't it's just like like a light walk yeah they're awesome i took it out to utah i was out in the van scarlett joe vanson and I were out in Canyonlands. It's so nice, man. That's so pretty. And there was this one ride.

It was like 20 miles, I think, out on this Jeep track. You could never go on, I mean, even in a Jeep, like a serious four-wheel drive, you're going two miles an hour on some of these. Furious four-wheel drive, you're going two miles an hour on some of these. But on this bike, just cruising 20 miles out to where the Colorado and the Green River converge. It's this canyon, nobody out there, and I'm just cruising. It's like riding a horse. It's so cool. Wow. Oh, I did think at one point when I was going through this field with tall grasses, to a cougar, I would have looked like.

Impossible to resist. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Top speeds, 20 miles an hour. So it would have got me. Most cougars are not really into attacking people, but they have attacked people on mountain bikes before.

Sure. Mostly. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like a yarn thing, like a ball yarn. Yeah. A kitten. Right.

You just can't help it. Well, you've got cats, right? Yeah. Somehow I feel like cats are similar enough that if I saw a cougar, I would know how to deal with it just because I know cats. Man, good luck with all that. You can bluff a cat. Did you see the video I posted up today where a guy in Boulder saw four fucking mountain lions on a street walking together? A family must have been.

Big ones. Four full-grown fucking mountain lions. Not a mother and young. No. But they don street walking together. A family must have been. Big ones. Four full-grown fucking mountain lions. Not a mother and young. But they don't hang together. They do. They're solitary. Not according to this fucking video. Go full screen and freak us out, Jamie.

They're not pack animals. Look at this. Yeah, but there's two. Or prides. Look at that. Two big-ass, grown-ass mountain lions, and they go down the street. Look, what do we have at the end of the road? Big-ass, grown-ass mountain lions, and they go down the street.

Look, what do we have at the end of the road? Oh, another big-ass, grown-ass mountain lion, and another one lying on its back over there. Wow. Imagine turning that corner in your fucking electric bike. Did you imagine? They're in the road. They're in the fucking road. So this guy, this is his house.

This guy's looking out of his house. I guess he's outside of Boulder. Mountain lions don't give a shit. That's where a mountain lion ate my dog in Boulder. Really? Yeah. They get dogs all the time. Yeah, they get them.

They hang around near your house. They start targeting your dogs. It's an easy prey. It's hard to get a deer. My wife's dog got eaten by a lion, a real African lion. Oh, shit. That's more scary. Yeah. Yeah, it's Africa.

Fuck. What kind of dog was it was a small pomeranian american eskimo mix it's a sweetheart of a dog he was a great dog worst ways to go yeah look there's just some stuff out there man between the bears and the dogs or the cats and also the foxes. Foxes are amazing. I mean, I love foxes. I mean, I think they're really interesting animals. And they're one of the few animals in the wild that will, if you live in a certain area for long enough, they will almost become domesticated. They get close to you and hang out with you and you could feed them. They'll walk with you and hang out with you like real close by.

They're a weird animal. They're not quite a wolf and they're not like a coyote. Like a fox, our relationship with foxes is very playful. You know? Have you ever seen Grizzly Man?

Yeah, sure. Remember his relationship with the fox? Hung around the campsite or something? Took his hat, stole his hat, ran away.

They were playing. Like the fox used to sit on his tent and he'd be be right there he'd be like how are you good morning today like they would just hang with them and walk with them there's that lady sue akins who lives uh she lives 200 plus miles above the arctic circle she's on that show life below zero there it is there's the grizzly man like look at this fucking animal yeah hanging with him, man. I mean, it's messing with his tripod. And that's Alaska. That's way the fuck out. Yep. Way the fuck out. But once they get accustomed to you, they're very intelligent.

And they realize, like, this guy's not going to hurt me. Then they become like your little buddy. And if you give them food, I mean, this is essentially how animals got domesticated. Right. Right? This is how wolves became dogs. They just hung around with us long enough that they were outside the edge of the campfire, and we gave them food to keep them from attacking us or whatever.

But foxes in particular, they'll kill the shit out of your cat. They'll kill your dog. Foxes will kill a lot of things. They kill a lot of fawns. I saw a fox on the internet with a fawn that was almost as big as its body. And it was dragging this fawn across this, uh, this road.

And I was like, Oh, I never thought it would kill something that big. I would thought they'd get rats. Like, yeah, well, they do generally,

right? Marmot or not marmots, uh, moles and stuff. You ever see how they jump? They, they hear so well they can locate it under the snow and just, well,

here's something fucked up i had a coyote kill one of my chickens recently and i buried the chicken and um i was in the yard the other day i heard this noise and my golden retriever who has zero killer instinct i mean he'll he'll kill like a a bird or something if he gets a hold of it but he's not like a guard dog he's a sweetie and he's's like, what is going on over there? And these coyotes are on the roof of the fucking hen house trying to pry away the chicken wire. And I hear this clink, clink.

And the clink, clink is the coyotes biting the chicken wire, trying to break it open to get into the chickens. So they killed one chicken. I chased him off. I got a video of it. I was going to post it, but I was like, this is too gross. Chicken that got fucked up by this coyote. Plus, it's sad.

I love those chickens. They're like a pet, you know? Yeah. So I dug a hole, buried the chicken, and the coyote dug the fucking hole up and found the chicken. And it was like a couple feet down. Yeah. You know, it wasn't a super shallow grave. I mean, that coyote smelled that chicken through two feet of dirt and went and dug it out.

I went out there a couple days later and I was like, where's the fucking chicken? There's just a hole there. I was like, whoa, this is crazy. They could smell through the dirt, man. They knew the chicken was down there. It's crazy. That's crazy. Do you ever have strange experience with wild animals while you

were tripping never i've had zero experience with animals while tripping yeah yeah i've had a lot because i trip in the woods a lot yeah man i know too much about the woods i'm not i want to trip inside an arm compound well that'll be safe. Loaded guns nearby. Yeah. I just... You got a fear fetish. No, I don't. I'm only joking around. Half of it is for entertainment.

Yeah. I mean, I've done mushrooms in a field before. It didn't freak me out. Baseball field. When Aubrey and I went bear hunting, he took mushrooms one of the days. Hmm. I didn't. I wasn't with him.

You know, when you go to your own little area of the woods by yourself. I'd find it hard to shoot anything if I were tripping. You wouldn't if you were hungry. The thing about those things is, like, bear hunting is a weird one, man. Because they need to control the populations. Because if they don't control the populations, the bears decimate the moose and the deer. And they eat 50% of the fawns as it is. Although the deer population is out of control.

In a lot of places. Not in Alberta. Is that where you are? Yeah. Pennsylvania. It's a healthy balance. But it's only apparently a healthy balance according to biologists. And this is not according to vegans or hunters.

But according to biologists, it's only healthy if the bear population is kept to a certain number. If it gets too crazy then they run out of food and then there's a lot of cannibalism already but then it gets even worse and you know then they start encroaching on cities and towns and it gets it gets weird but they're they treat it in terms of like a number thing instead of looking at it from like a moral standpoint like should you kill an animal they're like well if you don't kill an animal this animal is overbalanced this is overpopulated this animal is going to be underpopulated now because they're going to go after them and they're going to kill a disproportionate number of them they try to keep this so but bears are apex

predators so who was killing bears other bears grizzlies so then the sort of the ultimate balance is to just leave the bears and let the other bears kill them. That's a good balance. But then you're living in a world where you have 11-foot, 12-foot grizzlies everywhere you go. Wandering into town. Because if you live in a place like Alberta, right? In some areas of Alberta, you have a good population of elk and moose and deer. Well, that means you're going to have a good population of monsters.

population of elk and moose and deer well that means you're gonna have a good population of monsters so if you're comfortable with that you just you just have to decide like how much risk do you want to have yeah because once the bears chew through them they're gonna go after you you shoot uh boars with the bow boars yeah i've done that yeah yeah a friend of mine invited me to go uh do that in hawaii hawaii has to do it that's a good place because of that they don't have any predators and they fuck up he was explaining um that the boars fuck up the coral reefs because they dig up all the dirt and then it runs off in the rain and it contaminates the bays oh that makes sense yeah so it's a really big thing in hawaii that they have to really go after the boars as much as possible.

Yeah. There's a project right now in Maui where they're going to fence in an area. And the area that they're fenced in, they have to. It's like 5,000 acres, I think it is, where they have to eradicate the deer that are in this one particular area. Because they're trying to reclaim the forest land. And a lot of these deer all of the deer most of the large mammals in hawaii are non-native right and so these invasive species access deer from asia actually are just they eat everything nothing gets to grow like there's not going to

be a forest because the little things grow and they just eat them yeah they eat them right when they're coming up and they just there's so many of them so they also have a problem with people you know needing food so what they're doing is they also have a problem with people, you know, needing food. So what they're doing is they have this project where they're going out and they're hunting these animals, killing them, and then giving the food to people for free. And so they've set it up like this so they have a real sustainable food source for all these poor people, which is the best meat in the world. It's so delicious. That's what I was going to say. Much better than, you know, industrial shit.

Sure. Yeah. Well, it's really good. I mean, even in terms of wild game animal, they have the most delicious game animal. There's like two thoughts. Usually it's either elk or axis deer. Those are the two that go back and forth.

I've had both. They're both amazing. But axis deer are fucking everywhere. Have you ever had bison? Yes. Free range bison is amazing. It's amazing. A cool animal too. It's pretty tasty. Yeah, free-range bison is amazing. Yeah. It's amazing. A cool animal, too, to see in the wild. Yeah, it's like a fucking truck.

Star Wars animal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we saw them in Yellowstone. Big herd of them just chilling. But it was weird because they were so accustomed to people. Yeah. They're just lounging like 100 yards from folks. Can you imagine before they shot them all, the oceans of those things?

Crazy. Do you know where that came from? That's another one that's a weird one that I didn't know. Dan Flores is a fascinating guy. He wrote a great book on coyotes called Coyote America. But he wrote a – it was a paper. It was Bison Diplomacy, Bison Ecology. That's the name of it.

But it was basically saying that what happened was when the Europeans came to America and the Europeans spread disease, it decimated the Native American population by as much as 90%. That is when the bison boom happened. Right. Yeah. Bison ecology and bison diplomacy, the southern plains from 1800 to 1850. His take is that the overpopulation of bison was a direct result of these Native American people being decimated. Because their population dropped by 90%. No one was hunting the buffalo. So the buffalo just went crazy.

And there's like with no hunters chasing after them. One, two, three decades later, you've got a shit ton of bison just running around everywhere. And he points to early settlers that described in great detail all of the various game animals that they came across, but nary a mention of the bison. And certainly not a mention of like these gigantic million strong herds of bison roaming the plains. that's a direct result of all their predators, the Native Americans, who had gotten really good at hunting them and even surplus hunting them where they drive them off cliffs and just take what they could that was at the bottom. Yeah. Although it's also interesting to think how the introduction of horses would have affected that. Oh, that changed everything. Horses and guns. What Dan Flores says that is that just with wild, just forget about European settlers, says that is that just with just with why just forget about european settlers just the native americans with horses and rifles were on their way to extirpating the bison yeah crazy so we i mean

this is does not like exonerate all the europeans that had the stacks of bones and that killed them in mass they certainly did that there's no doubt about it and that's what almost caused the uh the complete extinction that's it was at the end it was the europeans it was us the settlers well but starve out the indians yeah well no it wasn't even that because that's another thing that they think that there's not there was not a concerted effort to starve out the indians they wanted it for surplus for food they wanted the tongues yeah what i read is they buffalo bill and those dudes were shooting them and just leaving the bodies out there. It was to wipe out the Lakota because they couldn't fucking beat the Lakota. That might have been done as well.

And the Cheyenne. But that's not what killed them off. I mean, when you see these giant stacks of skulls, they were doing that, using them as a commodity. A lot of it was just for their tongues, believe it or not. Their tongues were a very valuable delicacy. And then it was for their skins. And, you know, when they, they had meat hunting, what they called market hunting,

where they'd take guys who came back from the war and they were looking for a job, but one of the best jobs they can get, are you a good shot? Great. You could be a hunter. And they would go and shoot fucking everything, everything that moved.

And they wiped out all the antelope, all the elk, all the bison. It wasn't just the bison. It's just the bison is such an iconic thing. And then obviously those piles of skulls, it was unusual the amount of effort they put into killing them. But I don't think it was necessarily just to wipe out them so that the Native Americans would starve. I'm sure they did that locally in some spots. my heart at wounded knee no i don't think i did it's a beautiful book it's a really interesting book about the sort of final chapter of different tribes in north america geronimo and the apaches and you know sitting Bull and all these people. It's just really interesting, the story of the sort of contact and the characters and the different things that happen.

Yeah, I read that when I was very young, when I was running around in a loincloth throwing apples at rabbits. If you look at human history, what is this here? They used to shoot them from trains. Yeah, from trains. They did it for fun too yeah crazy yeah there were so many of them they just thought they could just shoot them what a relationship with the natural world that represents you know well what this is what i was going to say is like has there ever been anything like that other than i mean anything in terms of

the impact of a group of people landing on a continent. Like nothing that we've ever observed. It's the greatest mortality in history for sure. And the greatest change too. Not only that, but this weird movement to the West and landing on this weird continent that was filled with these people that lived in a completely different way. I mean, what are the odds that you're going to get to a place, you think of where Europe

was in the 1700s, the 1400s, you know, when they first started arriving, and think of the sophistication with the boats and the written language and all the different things, and then they show up, go across the ocean, and land to a place that has zero cities. No, there were cities. Tenochtitlan was bigger than almost all European cities when Cortez walked into it. That's in Mexico? In Mexico. That's where the Aztecs were.

Right, right. And they also had sewage and lit streets. Well, they did more in South America than they did in North America, right? Yeah, no. I mean, you're talking about America, Canada. There was nothing comparable at that point. Yeah. That's what I meant.

I mean, like when they're landing here and they made their way all the way to California, they're not encountering a single city. Right. I mean, that's just fucking bananas. You've got thousands of miles of just natural people living in tents. Yeah. You know? Crazy.

You ever sleep in a teepee? No. This place in Terlingua, I stayed in tents. Yeah. You know, crazy. You ever sleep in a teepee? No. This place in Terlingua, I stayed in a teepee. Jeff, the microbiology guy, he's got a bunch of, or microbiome guy, he's got a bunch of teepees. They're like luxury, beautiful teepees. Luxury teepees? Fucking great, yeah. What's a luxury teepee?

Jamie, Base Camp Terlingua. You'll see. I spelled that. Fucking beautiful. Base Camp and Terlingua, T-E-R-L-I-N-G-U-A, Terlingua. Yeah, they're fucking sweet. They've got like a concrete base and maybe a three-foot wall around it, and then the teepees on top so the wind doesn't blow right under them.

Oh, nice. And then he showed me the design of teepees is really interesting. It's like they're designed so the wind comes under the teepee. Yeah, there you go. Oh, that's dope. Check that out. Isn't that sweet? Oh, so they rent those out?

Yeah. Oh, this is crazy. We offer a once of a kind, one of a kind. 26-foot teepee. Teepee experience with our massive 26-foot teepee over the top of a sunken kiva. Kiva. What's a kiva? Kiva is like a Hopi dwelling that's semi-submerged.

Each of our three luxury, hold on. Each of our three luxury teepees has a comfy king-size bed, fold-out couch, plenty of seating, rugs throughout, sink, under-counter fridge, Keurig, coffee maker, microwave, oh, you can make microwave popcorn, outdoor fire pit. I think outdoor is one word there, isn't it? It should be.

And house private bath. House private. Hey, Jeff, get with the fucking typos here. Chisos Mountains. Yeah. It's a beautiful area. It looks like it. Man, that looks badass.

Isn't it nice? Wow. I slept in both of those houses. That's cool. 100-year-old. Hold on, Jamie. Rebolt. year old ruin located in the heart

of Terlingua ghost town wow that's amazing dude we gotta wrap this up yeah I gotta piss like a racehorse I'm sure you do

tangentially reading it's out now anybody can get it everywhere all the places that they sell books and of course tangentially speaking all the places that they sell books and of course tangentially speaking all the places you get podcasts it is this man i'm glad you did this i'm glad you became

a podcast guy yeah the podcast world is richer for it well thank you i appreciate it i'm richer for it thanks to you and duncan chris ronan motherfuckers that's. See you guys tomorrow. Bye.