The Joe Rogan Experience - #162 - Daniele Bolelli

Episode Date: November 29, 2011

Joe sits down with Daniele Bolelli.

Kick it, Brian. Where's the music? What did you do? What is this? This is like a remote version of the song? It doesn't go through the speaker for some reason? I forgot to plug that in. We've got to get a new computer, folks.

We've got to get a new computer. It's only a few years old but try running a computer from four years ago with today's operating systems and all this stuff it's it's you notice the difference you notice a big difference in how fast it works especially when you're not just like using iPhoto yeah yeah yeah for like for regular stuff it's almost like they make things more complicated so you actually need you know a bigger hard drive and a bigger you know a faster processor but you know for like just web browsing how much that's what most people do it's the most intensive thing most people do yeah i don't think

many people are editing podcasts and videos and this and this one this is the old what's the power mac is what what's it called that shit is like the noisiest thing in the whole entire world it's like that's supposed to be that top of the line thing. But there's 17 fans on there and the thing just sounds like it's going to take. It's not meant for being in the room with sensitive mics. Yeah. Podcasts. It's meant for, you know, some serious work.

Yeah. Our friend we have here today, ladies and gentlemen, is a serious author. A man. His name is Daniel Bolelli. Did I say right? Yep. And he wrote a book about martial arts called On the Warrior's Path and also A serious author, a man, his name is Daniel Bolelli. Did I say it right? Yep. And he wrote a book about martial arts called On the Warrior's Path and also wrote a book about religion called 50 – what is it?

The 50 Things They Don't Want. 50 Things They Are Not Supposed to Know, Religion. Yeah, and you wrote it for disinformation. Yep. So disinfo.com, guys, which I really – I'm a fan of their stuff. I love the You're Being being lied to books they're great really really awesome stuff and really like great toilet reading you know like the fifth person who tells me that yeah you know because you're being lied to is like really short paragraphs

and you know you might if you're healthy you probably won't get through a whole paragraph and a shit if you get through a whole paragraph in a shit you might want to put some broccoli in your diet you know but they're they're they're good like short pieces brian what the fuck what the fuck brian i don't know what the fuck um but they're they're good short pieces that um they're you know they're really eye-opening and enlightening so in disinfo they put out a lot of cool stuff and so they've gotten behind i think they put out a lot of cool stuff. And so they've gotten behind. I think they put out some of Graham Hancock's stuff too, didn't they? Yeah, that was kind of like

the formula for this book too. Like their whole idea was I submitted to them this giant book I've been working on, 400 pages long with footnotes, all this stuff about religion.

And they were like, yeah, that's sweet and all, but seriously, can you give us something quick and that funny, weird, that has an impact right away that people, as you put it, can read on us something quick and that funny, weird, that has an impact right away, that people, as you put it, can read on the toilet and get on something intense but quick? It's very difficult for people to discipline themselves to read any serious piece of work on anything.

It's just when you're just simply stating the facts and documenting things, it's oftentimes a dry read you know even though it's fascinating information so they're really clever in their idea of just you know figuring out a way to get it and then you know probably once people read this book get familiar with your writing get into you then maybe they'll dive into like some of your more serious stuff right yeah even serious is a big word because i had even in the big book i had one of the chapters about the existence of God begins with a woman having a screaming orgasm.

So, I mean, it can only be so serious. Right. But I guess the idea was, no, let's do something else. They have a serious going. The 50 things you're not supposed to know. It works well for them. They want to do something on religion. And initially, because I was so attached to the other project,

I was like, ah, screw it. I don't want to do it. When they told me the magic word advance, suddenly I was so attached to the other project I was like ah screw it I don't want to do it I want to when they told me the magic word advance suddenly I was yeah a little money always greases the wheels like what you want me to be weird and funny and quick about religion no problem no problem now you are you from Italy yeah what part of Italy you're from Milan which by the way I want to apologize to your listener because I've been living here believe it or not I've been living here 20 years. And when I first moved here, I swear I was speaking almost decent English. But then somebody brought to my attention that many American women like my weird Italian accent.

So you kept it. I was supposed to work hard. Yeah, that's a good one to have, man. I'll tell you what, if I talked like you, I'd keep that shit too. I can understand you. I mean, it's not like you're not, you know, it's not, you know, like you're difficult to understand. You're very clear.

You just have a very distinct Italian flavor. It's like reading cursive writing. Exactly. Like cursive, like typing. If you, if you have a typing program that type in cursive. Yeah. That's how I figure, you know, being understood versus being liked by women. No, I think I take being liked by women.

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, women are like, well, men do too, man. You hear a girl with an English accent, you're like, ooh, listen to that, you know? Australian, English, anything. You know, it's why is that? Everyone's dissatisfied with what they are. Everyone is looking for something different. Everyone wishes they were someone else.

Everyone sees the grass greener. Everyone goes, God damn, I wish I had an accent like that guy. Hey, it works for me. It's one of the biggest sins, right,

when you fake an accent. Can there be a more douchey thing to do? Like, remember when Madonna was talking English? Oh, yeah. Do you remember that, Brian? Yeah.

She only did it for like a little bit until people started calling her on it. Britney Spears also did it for a while, it seems like. Yeah, but nobody takes Britney Spears seriously. You know, Britney Spears is a crazy person.

Madonna's like a legit artist who just got a little carried away. Yeah, there's a lot of people that do that. I should try it. We should all try it. I should not have caffeine for a while and fake an accent for a while. This is my sixth or seventh day of no caffeine. Yeah, that's crazy. Fascinating, sixth or seventh day of no caffeine. Yeah. That's fascinating, man.

I want to do that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a junkie. I didn't even know I was a junkie. I feel great now, but I'm not convinced that I'm going to stay off the coffee. You know? It's just like, now I know what it's like to be a person who's hooked on cigarettes. Yeah, is it like a cigarette? No.

And you see this coffee right now, and you're like, oh, that looks delicious. No, because the physical pull's not the same. The physical pull, and I can substitute it. Like, I'll drink, like, a chai tea latte, which has, like, the tiniest amount of caffeine, nothing like a coffee. Yeah, but you have 42 of them per day, don't you? I mainline them.

I just take them right into my fucking veins. But do you drink coffee, brother? You had a really good point. You were saying before the podcast about this. We were speaking about this. Yeah, I try to use it the same way somebody always uses hard drugs. I'll try just when I absolutely need it, then I'm wired for 10 hours. I'm not even going to drink coffee.

I'm just going to have a double espresso when I need it. Just go with my hair sticking out in 10 directions and speak 50 miles an hour for 10 hours and then pass out and not touch it for three months. That's scary such a smart move that's such a smart move that scares me well the reason why i did this in the first was because i took i took a few days off just randomly just i i you know decided i just didn't want any coffee and then i had a cup of coffee and oh my god it was my heart was pounding i was like wow this is crazy it just took a couple days, maybe three days, and my tolerance had broken down. I don't know why or how that happens that quick

or if I just got a really good batch at Starbucks. And then I started thinking about it like, wow, how much resources is my body using to fight off this stimulant every day? How normal is this? How healthy is this? It can't be. And I get the same feeling like when I'm drinking coffee that I do when I smoke too much cigarettes where it feels like my body is craving it can't be and i i get the same feeling like when when i'm drinking coffee that i do when i smoke too much cigarettes where it feels like my body is like craving it but i get a headache

kind of from it like i can feel it right yeah you feel like you're poisoned yeah and you're you're addicted you know yeah i'm most certainly i'm addicted to coffee i see it and i smell it but i can get around it with tea and tea doesn't't wire me like that. It doesn't work for me. It doesn't? Really? I mean, iced tea, I drink shitloads of iced tea, but that is like as bad as drinking coffee, I think. Really? Yeah. There's a lot of caffeine. Yeah, but you know, you could drink herbal tea, too.

I like herbal tea. You know, you could have like, you know, there's a lot of different types of herbal tea that have no caffeine in them. For me, it's like Tate Fletcher, our buddy, said it best. He said it's like drinking a cup of coffee is like having a warm hug. Yeah. You know? It's like I'm not really looking to be wired from the coffee i just want some warm liquid that tastes good and i like the taste of coffee yeah i think you need more love man i need more love i think you got a good point brother i like the way this guy thinks so you uh you wrote this book on religion and you wrote also a book on martial arts so you and i

have a lot in common, man. We have a lot of very similar interests. How did you get involved in religion? Were you raised religious? No. No, I'm fascinated by it because you see how much it means to people, how much their whole worldview, their life, their priorities, who they marry, who they want to hang out with.

Everything depends on the kind of stuff they put in their head based on religion so it's powerful stuff it's amazing that it still works yeah isn't it 2011 it's it's you know with it's very difficult to have pure objective thinking but then again you know the thing is the stuff that drives all these is that people are scared of dying and rightfully so because you know we don't control jack shit we don't know anything about anything really about how the universe works. A friend of ours just died. So we should say rest in peace to Patrice O'Neill, who is a great guy and a great comedian.

He's an awesome dude, an awesome thinker. He's a warm, friendly guy. I always love seeing that guy. And I'm going to miss him. I'm going to miss him a lot. He was a great comedian he was a great guy you know just sucks it just he had poor health you know he had diabetes and he had a I guess he just didn't really take care of himself he ate too much and he wound up having a stroke

and he was in a coma for a little while I guess and then you know he was it was really difficult to get the information out because the family was sort of protecting it and rightly so we don't know exactly the details of it so this is all really what I'm repeating is just stuff that I heard on the internet I have you know I'm so sad about I don't want to call anybody and talk to anybody about it you know I talked to Stan about it today. We talked for just a minute. What can you say? It sucks.

We both just said that. We really didn't even say anything other than it sucks. I asked him, I go, did you hear about Patrice? He goes, yeah, it sucks. I go, yeah, it sucks. Can't even say anything else. Anything else is cliche. Hey, it's going to happen to all of us someday.

It's like the real moment of actually dealing with loss is really intense. It's real hard to deal with. Patrice, we're going to miss you. We'll miss you a lot, man. He's one of those comics that was so quick. Just seeing him on Opie and Anthony all the time, that was the one thing that I could just – he was really fast and hilarious, like powerful.

He's a comic, man. He's a real comic. My favorite Patrice thing wasn't even of him doing stand-up. My favorite Patrice thing was him on one of those like Fox, it was either Fox News or one of those talk shows where someone had said something inappropriate and gotten in trouble. I believe it was like Opie and Anthony. I think it was the incident where they had some crackhead on their show and the crackhead was talked about he wanted to rape condoleezza rice and like it was it was just they had a crazy person on their show and

like and they got suspended for it i think that was what he was defending but there was a woman on who was with him and this woman was like talking about how you shouldn't have said this you shouldn't have said that and patrice is just clowning her he's just like you don't understand funny you guys don't understand funny it all comes from the same place and the way he said it was so honest and so well thought out and it made them look so silly it made people criticizing people who stepped across the line with comedy, criticizing them, you know, as if what their comedy was, was like an actual statement of their real beliefs. No, it's comedy, you know, and it all comes from the same place that the ability or the attempt

rather to try to make people laugh. And he broke it down so well. And it was so funny the way he did it, the way he handled it was so brilliant. He was just a real quick guy, a real unique thinker, and a guy who you know i always really loved to see and whenever i ran into him i was always happy you know comedians are a rare animal there's not that many of us is this the video right here that that that you're talking about um i don't think so no it was yeah that's it yeah absolutely he just totally clowned this lady osario she took part in a recent protest calling for radio stations to stop stop supporting No, it was, yeah, that's it. Yeah, absolutely. He just totally clowned this lady. Tonya Osorio. She took part in a recent protest calling for radio stations to stop supporting negative language in music and talk radio.

And also, our favorite stand-up comic, Patrice O'Neal. Thank you, sir. Patrice, are ONA next? I hope not. I hope JV, I wish JV and I was going to lose their job. Or Imus. It's funny. this is the thing. I don't know her, but I'm assuming that she has nothing to do with funny.

So I'm going to speak as the expert on funny. Funny people should just be left to try to be funny. What if they're not funny? Then you made a mistake. Listen, how many times has unfunny rape jokes lead to rape? I don't know how many jokes about rape there are. There's a lot. But your world is not funny.

Your world is... Next on the big story. My world is people trying to be funny. Well, I mean, you think it's okay to try to make jokes about rape? I'm diabetic. I make fun of that. I'm a victim. I might lose a toe.

I'm trying to make fun of anything I think I can make fun of. Sonia? You know, what's happening now is the marketplace is deciding what's appropriate or what's not appropriate. I think the nation is just tired. There's a new mood in the nation. What nation? The nation. You know what? We're tired of things that are just awful. It's just the nation, Miss Paper, and you. I'm not the nation. I'm just speaking for me and funny. You're speaking for the nation or are you speaking for... Yeah, you know why? Because I remember six

years ago doing something against Anthony Opie because they were just so outrageous and their violent images that they put out to women was just uncalled for. And now, now, I think people... You think they were trying to be funny? I think now people in this country are tired. Do you think they were trying to be funny? You know what? I don't care if they're trying to be funny. That's what I'm saying. Why are you in that business? I've been to your show once and it wasn't very funny being a woman in your show.

It was hilarious. You talked about it. That's why she don't like me. I was in the paper with her, and the joke is hilarious. It's called the angry pirate. And the lady who wrote it in her outrage didn't even know what it meant. And anybody who read it laughed because they know what funny. You're not living in the context of funny.

You're living in the context of fire. All these guys have every right to be as funny as they want. They can go out and try to be as funny as they want make as much funny make as much money being as funny as they want this is what's happening there is a change in this country people are realizing they have an opportunity to speak out and advertisers are listening to who i talk to and you're not going to get paid as much money anymore. Sonia and Patrice, look at this. You're not going to get paid as much money anymore. They've been on a tear lately. Are they cleaning house, or is this the PC cops run amok?

You know what it is, John. You know what it is while you're reading that paper. It's the PC cops run amok. Who do you think she's the PC cops? Of course she is. She has an entire encyclopedia of her stance on it, but it's no passion involved. It's not a real... This is just what she has to say.

We are outraged and fired and fired and fired. He's an absolute fool. Name calling. I'm outraged. I am outraged. You should be outraged. I am a fool. Now, if I called you a fool, ahhh!

You know what? Who are these people? Who are these people in this country? Who are the people? A new sense of entitlement to the deceased. Who are these people? Who are the people? A new sense of entitlement to the deceased.

Here's my question. How can you justify a bad joke, a joke that isn't funny... Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. Go ahead. An attempt that isn't funny, doesn't get any laughs, and is about raping the first black woman to ever become the Secretary of State of the United States. Well, don't throw that at me.

Well, why not? The attempt is what I'm trying to fight for. The joke may or may not... Funny jokes and unfunny jokes come out of the same birth. You don't know if anything is going to be funny. You should attempt to be able to make anything funny. Don't you think a joke about rape is doomed to be not funny? It's possible, but I've heard them.

You've heard a funny rape joke? I say a couple. Watch my sales special. I'm pretty good at it. Yeah, Patrice says that if you're having sex with a woman, doggy style, and if you... Oh, she's saying doggy style. ... wrong, you're in an interlude at just the right time. No, it's ejaculate in her eye and kick her in the shin and she walks around like it's the angry pirate no that's what she was

trying to say hitting her in the back of her head her body don't be punch which will then why are you laughing it's called humor that she has no clue what it is. We have the same problem that Opie and Anthony does. You can't say just anything on the air. You can say anything you want. It might not be funny. You might get in trouble for it, but you should be able to be attempting. And plus, when is a crazy bum going to get an opportunity to rape the president's wife, John? It was trying to be funny.

All right, Patrice, why aren't I hearing Al Sharpton complain about this thing involving Congress? Because it wasn't involving young black women. Well, it was involving a very prominent black woman. Well, where was she during young black... Everybody has their agenda. I was there. I was there. Oh, I'm sorry.

All right, excuse me. But why am I not hearing from Sharpton? Because it doesn't concern him. It's not concerning him. It's black. It's, you know, come on now, you know Al Sharpton has his agenda and it was perfect for Al. Young black women. And now she's representing just women in general.

She's not representing the nappy hole part. She's representing just the hole. The nappy head part, she has nothing to do with it. Just the hole. Sonia. You know what? Just a hoe. The nabby head part, she has nothing to do with it. Just a hoe. You know what? Women have been abused publicly in the media for too long, and people are tired of it. This has been a beautiful response of just the general public saying to advertisers, we're your consumers.

She's awesome. We don't want to have to avoid everything in the street. We don't want to have to worry about what radio station we turn on and there is some really derogatory violent you're going to be able to information on them is second hand from someone making you uh... aware that someone may said something that you should be upset about that's a shame

you're just interested in the people you represent aren't all victims. I gotta go. Teresa O'Neill, thank you very much. Sonia Osorio, thanks. The both of you appreciate it. Time for Big Pops. I love dumb people who talk ridiculous and try to sound intelligent. She's speaking for the entire country.

We are fed up. Whoa, whoa. How preposterous. How beautiful was he in that though? He was beautiful. I love that dude. We miss fed up. And we're like, whoa, whoa. How preposterous. How beautiful was he in that, though? Yeah, that was beautiful. He was beautiful. I love that dude. He is. We miss you, buddy.

That's it. That's it. Rest in peace. See you on the other side. Peace out. All right. Daniel, back to you, brother. Yep.

So, Danielle. How do you say it? Danielle. In Italian, it would be Daniele. In Daniele. Daniele in Italian? danielle you slick bastard i love the fact that you admitted you kept it kept that accent that's fantastic so um i don't know how we got into this about people being afraid to die that's what it was and then uh yeah because i mean with religion if you read even like early 1900s people are

thinking okay now with modernity we're in a modern world, a more secular world, all the kind of more traditional superstitions are all going to phase out. And I mean, it makes sense on the surface, but not really, because until you have the answers to the things that make people really freak out, dying, grief, what the hell, you know, because I mean, our life is so short and we don't know jack shit about before or after. Until you give some people some answers, people are not comfortable having no answers. No matter how bullshit those answers are, they need them.

It's almost like religion is some sort of an evolutionary device, like a bridge to take us from being monkeys to being enlightened beings. Like we need some horse shit to get us through this. We need a belief. Otherwise, you know, the idea of, no one ever wants to think of, you know, the concept of life being that it may be that you have lived this exact life before and you will live it over and over again

until you get it right. And the idea that this could go on into infinity. Right. You know, and that might be what life really is. And we don't think of it as being possible because it's too hard for our minds to wrap around and too alien to what we absolutely know to exist like you know birth and death and you know having a certain amount of time here to get things done and seeing people die you know but the actual possibility is almost like it's too fucked up for us so

somebody had to invent religion in order to just patch up the road till we make it there yeah because i mean in reality we don't really control yeah pretty much anything in life and we're conscious and we're conscious so that's the quagmire in the universe yeah the the universe itself you know i had a bit in one of my past albums about if you ever, you know, are starting to take your life seriously, just stand out and go outside and just look up at space and just really wrap your head. I mean, everybody looks, oh, there's a star. Stars are bright tonight.

But very few people actually look up and go, wow, you know, that literally is infinity. Like we're floating in infinity, and it's the majority of what I see. All around the top, it's easier to see infinity than it is to see the ground. I have more view of the infinity. It's amazing how rarely that comes up, that no one talks about it. It's too much. So we just sort of accept that we live in space and accept that we look at the clouds what is the first religion what's the first known religion

i mean if you look at the i have a chapter in there that i had a half of the fun of doing this book was coming up with the titles because in like in a few words you just throw out something outrageous and weird right get things going and let me see if I remember what this one exact was, because I had a blast with the origins of religion. Let me see. When will this book be released? It should be this week. This week on disinfo.com.

You can pick it up. And then Amazon. Amazon. Oh, yeah. This one I have a chapter entitled Mammoth Porn and the Caveman's Hip Hop, the origins of religion. Because the very first evidence that archaeologists suggest these may be the

beginning of religious behavior, they see these cave paintings left by cavemen where the main things that these guys were drawing were hunting scenes and animals having sex. The idea being these guys were doing these rituals because their life was on the line to ensure success

in the hunt, and then animals are dead dead so you need to make sure there are more for the next time around so you're trying to send out the vibe so that the animals have sex there's more of them and so on and what they would do again this is pure speculation because who the hell knows but it's a fun speculation archaeologists suggest that they would have these rituals in front of this painting where they would mimic hunting and then they would mimic you know caveman and cavewoman have a grindy sweaty dancing semi-sex kind of like modern hip-hop kind of thing and that would be the beginning of religion because they are trying to influence the universe so that the animals have more sex and there's more of them to come along the next time. Wow. And I thought, could be total bullshit

because, I mean, how do you know really? Right, how do you know? An archaeologist basing it on three pieces of information left 15,000 years ago, but it sounds fun. And we should clarify that you actually know what you're talking about, unlike most of the time these discussions get brought up on this podcast.

You're actually a professor. Right. You teach, where do you teach at? I teach at Santa Monica College and Cal State Long Beach. And what is your education? I started out, when I came here, I did my BA in anthropology, but then I hated it. And then I did an MA in American Indian studies, of all things. Oh, wow.

And I did a second MA in history. And really, I mean, bottom line is there was mandatory military service in Italy, and you could defer it as long as you were in school. So I was like, I'll do another master's. No problem. Well, the Indian studies must have been interesting. Yeah, that's fun. It was a lot of fun.

Yeah, I got really into American Indian history a few years back, and I read quite a few books on it. It's an amazing case of genocide. Absolutely. I mean, people really can't even wrap their head around how many american indians died yeah 90 percent of the whole population wiped out oh and horrific horrific stories you know i read some soldiers accounts of what they did to you know american indians and uh it's uh it's horrific you know it got really terrifying like serial killer

stuff you know what they would do just heartless ruth like they treated them like they were not It's horrific. It got really terrifying, like serial killer stuff. They would do just heartless, Ruth, like they treated them like they were not even vermin. A lot of that is actually tied to religion because the first way to kind of dehumanize somebody is, I mean, with all Western religions, they have this division between God and the devil, absolute good and absolute evil, heaven and hell. So there are the good guys who follow God, and then there's everybody else. Because, I mean, if there's only one right way, then the idea is anybody who doesn't follow ours, by default, is on the wrong side. And if you take that a couple of steps further, then that's what it leads to. In the idea of you guys are the servants of the devil. You're not really human anyway.

Wow. So this lottery in your left and right and right is an act of justice. That's one of my favorite... I use this in class all the time because I have a blast. Everybody, even if they never read any of this stuff, have heard about the whole story about Moses and the Ten Commandments and so on. And after that I ask my students about what happens right after that story because that's where it gets juicy and they're like I don't know

there wasn't golden calf or some crap like some of the Jews are not worshipping the one God I'm like yeah yeah that's right and what does Moses do about it right after getting the Ten Commandments I don't know he gathers the loyalists

the strict monotheistic people who are still on his side he tells them hey guys those are our friends they are our neighbors some of them are family He gathers the loyalists, you know, the strict monotheistic people who are still on his side. He tells them, hey guys, you know, those are our friends, they are our neighbors, some of them are family, but they are worshipping other gods. We can't have that, so you know what to do. Got your weapons, let's go from one side to the camp of the other and kill them all. And so right after the Ten Commandments, you have a nice story of some 3,000 Jewish tribes being hacked to death by the monotheistic

Jews against the polytheistic Jews. Jesus Christ. A nice religious massacre right off the bat. Wow. And Moses ordered this. Oh my God. That is ridiculous. That's amazing.

That's amazing. And this is the Old Testament? God. The Old Testament is so freaky. The Old Testament is just filled with freaky. It's like one of the most psychedelic, bizarre books. You know, all the stories, just Genesis, and there's so much in there that's like, wait a minute, what? There was a fucking talking snake? Like, come on, man. The devil appeared as a talking snake

and talked him into eating a fruit it was just a piece of fruit that's all they had to do just a piece of fruit it's hilarious you know that god is just his rules are so fucking serious you eat my fucking apples bitch i'm not just gonna punish you i'm gonna punish every fucking person from now till eternity as long as they're, the people are fucked because one dumb bitch ate an apple. It's my fucking apple. Isn't that amazing? That's when you don't understand funny, I'm afraid. It's when God should mellow out a little.

God, what the fuck, man? God, you need to smoke a joint. Use some of your own creation. It's amazing how ruthless, like when you you go back in history how ruthless gods were absolutely no that's why it cracks me up when you hear like christian fundamentalist complaining about hollywood about all the sex and violence because if you look at the bible there's i mean it's awesome there's more sex and violence in the bible than any hollywood movie i can think of you know it gets so insanely graphic that it's like damn really this is what yeah it's amazing too how many of

the stories are like really similar to all older stories from other religions you know like the one the one that always got me was the epic of gilgamesh and the story of noah and the ark they're so similar yeah it's like it's like really it's like i wonder what really happened and my speculation is totally speculation is there probably was some sort of a great catastrophe a long time ago but of course in every giant tsunami or flood it's not everyone that dies some people are going to live and the people that live they're going to have to have some story for how they lived and you know a couple generations in when everybody's still living like a monkey, running around collecting fruit, trying to get their goats to fuck so they can kill them and eat them,

and just wondering how they got. We seem really intelligent. How did we get to this shitty point? How come none of you fucks have figured out tools or clothing or houses or anything yet? Well, a long time ago, Noah was the only person. We are the children of Noah. They don't even take into account how many people were with Noah.

Everybody came from Noah. Where does black people come from? What about Chinese people? How does that happen? How long does it take before... I mean, Noah only supposedly was a couple thousand years ago, right? What was that, 3,000 years ago

or something like that? Suddenly you have like 6 billion people. How is that possible? The fuck is that? That's the dumbest shit ever. But it's probably the original story was probably an actual event. I think most of those

depictions were actual events that just got distorted. You know, the telephone game, like you tell a friend and he tells a friend. What is it called? Operator. By the time you get to the last person this you know that's actually funny that you bring it up because it's one of the ways in which i bring up sources when we talk about religion in class and i bring up when i speak of the bible i tell them you know how do you come out how do you know that this is the real stuff and i tell them you know really we have been

talking about an oral traditions for generations before anybody write them down. And so I ask them, have you guys ever played operator? Do you know how that works? And then you end up, so picture playing operator for maybe 50 years, and then you record all the answers. And then 200 years later, somebody come around and look at the answer and decide which ones are true and which ones are not.

And that's the word of God for you. Yeah, like, wow. at the answer and decide which ones are true and which ones are not and that's the word of god for you yeah like wow try deciphering that and then people will fight to the death over those those beliefs a little coma puts here or there that change the meaning that's i need to cut off your bolts and burn the steak well how about the fact you know, like even the shit that was written down, when they wrote it down in ancient Hebrew, ancient Hebrew is a very bizarre language, and it doesn't have, they don't have numbers. So letters double as numbers. So there's a numerical meaning to words.

There's a different grasp to the words that we can really barely comprehend. And these words, numerical content was very important for the actual meaning. Like the word God and the word love, they have the same numerical content. And there was a translation from that to Latin and then to Greek.

Right. And if they're doing that, I mean, Jesus Christ, what are they going to... I mean, how do you even know what the fuck was the original work? Oh, yeah, exactly. On the telephone after you play it for that long and somebody decides, then you translate it in a bunch of languages.

And then it's like, no, there are so many filters to go through that who the hell knows what it was at the beginning. And people have to make decisions. They have to decide what goes in and what goes out. And people have to make decisions. Yep. You know, like, they have to decide, like, what goes in and what goes out. Yep. You know, and how to, like, the King James Version. And, you know, the whole idea behind the New Testament is just so preposterous. If you find out how it was created, it was Constantine.

Right. A bunch of bishops, right? I mean, Constantine was a gangster, basically. Yeah. Because he was just about, you know, controlling powers. Yeah. He was just about controlling enemies. And he's the guy who pushed the religious reform

that bring Christianity as one. It's like, I don't know, that's the guy you want to have in your corner. Yeah, that's the guy that's creating the Bible? Are you fucking crazy? It's amazing because people will say, if you bring up the Bible, bring up crazy stuff. Oh, that's the Old Testament.

We go by the New Testament. The New Testament was written by a fucking murderer. And even that is bullshit because they only say that about the Old Testament when the Old Testament is so obviously over the top nuts that it's embarrassing. But then anytime it says something that they want that's not in the New Testament, it's like, hey, it's in the Bible. But I'm like, no way, that's the book you just told me that it doesn't count. But when it says something I like, then it counts. How do you deal with that as, you know, when you're trying to, when people are teaching

it and when you're trying to, you know, study theology, how do you, I mean, how does anybody go, why, I mean, it's, how many people who are actually studying theology are religious? And how many of them get to a point where they become agnostic? I guess it depends where they do it. You know, if they do it as some hardcore Christian school, well, that's going to be one type of clientele. If they do it more in public schools. When I first started teaching the history of religions class, I thought, shit, what did I get myself into? I was all excited until five minutes before, and then I'm like, they are going to kill me.

Do you worry about that? Muslims are the most reactionary. The reality is that the people who take that stuff are already open-minded. Otherwise, they wouldn't be taking it because they don't want to hear it. So most of the people who do show up are the ones who have a more open-minded approach and so on so they they are cool you know they there are people who are willing to chat and engage and so on if you if you have a mind and if you can think and you start studying religion it's almost impossible to not be agnostic yeah i mean it's almost realistically again nobody knows yeah wanting some kind of absolute answer where there is none.

It's just showed that you are so damn fearful that you just want to ignore any evidence in order to decide, uh, I need some certain. It's also a very weird characteristic that people have to need closure and to need a side to be on. Yeah. Even though there's no answer yet, we haven't reached that point yet.

There's, there's a door you have to open. That door is death. When that door opens, you'll get some more information, but who knows? You might not even. Maybe not. You might just be a baby in 1950.

Seriously. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, it's bizarre enough that you're a person. It's bizarre enough that you use your eyeballs to judge distance. You have these fucking organs inside your skull that measure light and distance. And they figure out exactly, precisely how far away you are from things. And that allows you to get in metal boxes with rubber wheels.

And that's just as bizarre as coming back as a baby in the 50s. Everything we do is bizarre. No, in fact, the universe is amazing. I mean, it's so damn weird that it's beyond anything I can understand. And precisely because I respect it and I'm in awe of it, trying to make it all fit in my little box of how everything is supposed to work is bullshit. The best quote I ever heard of it from JDS Haldane, who said, not only is the universe queerer than you suppose, it's queerer than you can suppose.

I can sign up for that. Yeah, that's it it right yeah that's it it's fucking what it's what the fuck is that yeah ridiculous so when you you got involved in religion did you originally get involved with it because from an archaeological standpoint no it was uh it was like i got involved with just about everything else completely by chance i mean i was into it i would read it for myself. I would read mainly a lot of Eastern philosophy and stuff like that that I was into, but I would read

for the hell of it. Somebody then one day asked me, hey man, we need somebody to teach this thing. Can you do it? I'm like, no, not really. And they're like, no, but come on. You're kind of in the Renaissance, man. You know a lot of shit. Do it. I'm like, okay, sure. And I jump on and I'm like hey i

love this stuff this is fun i got to talk about all the stuff i like and this is awesome and so then i started reading more and more and uh but i mean yeah i mean i read my stuff before to begin with you know in a moment of pure perversion i decided to read the entire bible cover to cover when i was 18 one of the most painful experiences of my life. But it's... It woke me up, though, when I got to this part, The Song of Solomon. I don't know how the hell

that book ended up in the Bible. It's awesome. It's like one of the best things. All of a sudden, you have 10, 15, I forgot how many pages, where they don't mention God once. They don't mention priests.

They don't mention anything. It's just this super passionate, erotic love poem between a man and a woman a woman who enjoys sex as well is also from her point of view which is completely unheard of in the rest of the bible and it's just this celebration of sex essentially and it's just like always like how the hell did this end up in there you know and wow my theory is that one of the guys were copying all the scriptures got drunk one night and took the wrong scroll and got his homemade porn there and put it there by mistake. It's homemade porn.

It's awesome. You know, it's amazing. Do you know of John Marco Allegro's work? I heard of him. I heard of him a bunch, but I haven't read him actually directly. He's a guy that was one of the people that was working on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was working on deciphering it. And he was the only agnostic out of the group.

And he wrote a book called, we wrote a couple of them. One of them was called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. And the first one was called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. And that one's a fascinating book. He believes that the entire works of the Christian religion were originally mushroom. It was about mushroom eating and

psychedelic drugs and ritual sex. And about fertility rituals. And making sure that they kept breeding. And that women kept having babies. Shit, those things went wrong. Isn't that amazing, though?

From such a promising start. He tracks down the word mushroom, or the word Jesus, rather, to an ancient Sumerian word, the roots of it being an ancient Sumerian word that means a mushroom covered in God's semen. And that the idea, he believes, and this is, I mean, he's making a big reach that I don't think unless you have some sort of serious education in language history you could totally even grasp the argument but what he's saying is that what they used to call mushrooms it was it

was like God would come on the earth when it would rain. And then mushrooms would grow out of that. They would eat them. They'd have these incredible psychedelic experiences because of that. And so that was Christ. So Christ was a mushroom that was covered in God's semen. Well, I mean, you have stuff. You have religions around the world where anything from peyote to ayahuasca to a lot of psychedelic substances, amanita muscaria, the mushroom itself,

a bunch of things that have been central to people's religion because they open up all these words and so on. And probably the origins of a lot of the stories and a lot of the experiences. No wonder you start seeing weird gods flying around. Especially back when it was hard to get food. It was difficult. When people were hunter-gatherers, essentially before religion was written down, they were supposed to be hunter-gatherers up until like,

what, 10,000 years ago? Yeah, yeah. 10,000 years, something like that? Yeah. Although that's coming into dispute. They found a fucking fishing hooks and fishing line

and tuna bones, tuna, from 40,000 years ago. Weird. And they don't know, they've never thought that people were capable of doing this,

but now they're thinking that up to 40,000 years ago, people were getting in boats and they were going hundreds of miles into the ocean. Yep. And they were catching tuna, dude. Tuna!

40,000 years ago, they were in boats catching tuna. Like, they have no idea that people were doing that. This is a complete, like, new revelation. It's like going to rewrite history. Because, I mean, what kind of fishing line do you have that you're making 42,000 years ago that you can pull a fucking thousand pound tuna out of hundreds of feet of water and you've got a hook and some meat?

What is going on, man? How is that possible? We might have to like rewire or rewrite the whole i mean i i have a very strong feeling that over the next few years there's going to be more and more evidence like this that makes people want to push back the origins have you heard of gobekli tepe this this new structure that they found in turkey there's another one where they're they're thinking they're going to have to push back the uh the origins of civilization because it's at least 12,000 years old. And it's these huge, like, sculpted stone columns.

And they have all these animals that are drawn on it that don't even exist in Turkey. So these animals weren't even supposed to be in the fossil record from back then. So the belief is, what they're trying to say now is that this was made by hunter and gatherers. And a lot of people are going, come on going come on man like what the fuck is this this is giant yeah did just the fact that someone made something like this

13,000 years ago when we never thought people were making stuff like this right you might have to go wait a minute how much of this is really left over is there a bunch of stuff we haven't found yet and if there is and we do find it eventually there's going to be a point in time when they're going to have to say I think we've been around longer than we think not thought of him and we haven't found yet. And if there is, and we do find it, eventually there's going to be a point in time where they're going to have to say, I think we've been around longer than we think. No, totally. And it goes back to the

we don't know shit, right? Yeah. That's why we are rewriting history all the time because, I mean, that's why, you know, you read the history books and you have, like,

the last 50 years is this thick and then the first 20,000 years is like, okay, we were here for a while and then 50 years ago this happened. And it's like, okay. Because we don't

know much well we also we look so much different than anything else here you know we are we're some kind of an ape but god damn we look different than the rest of the apes how long did this take how long did it take for us to look like this you know for are you sure are you sure it's been a million years is it maybe it's been two and if it's been two that changes a lot of shit yeah you know we don't really know this is a lot of guessing going on man and how many i mean did do was it a clean separation between us and the apes no or maybe that ape still look hot what if there's something super advanced more advanced than us we just haven't met it yet right and it's here just hiding from us like oh those crazy monkeys yep it's Right. And it's here just hiding from us like, oh, those crazy monkeys.

Yep. It's just, you know, it's another couple thousand years ahead of us. Maybe that's what the aliens are. Probably not, right? So this Marco Allegro guy met a lot of controversy when he was trying to propose that religion might have had its roots in psychedelic experiences. Why do you think people are so reluctant to take in that possibility? Because I think any kind of psychedelic experience is very individual. You know, it's hard to build that church on it in a sense that it's hard to have a dogma

because it changes so much from one experience to the next, from one person to the next. And people, bottom line, love dogma. That's the thing that reassures them. Direct experience doesn't reassure them because they have to base it on their own feelings, on their own instinct, on their own, and it's too scary for people. You know, you hear people talk so much shit

about how we like freedom. Most people are terrified of freedom. Most people hate freedom. You know, they like the idea of being free, but they run to their chains anytime they can because they need something to keep them safe to make them feel like they are okay little boy you're gonna be fine you need ritual so i mean anything based on direct experience i mean think about martial arts how long it took for people

super attached to this is how we do things this is the truth of combat when in martial arts you can try it you know it's not like a religion where there's not as much direct evidence. You can try it and still people would stick their head in the sand and not want to see it, that some shit just didn't work. Well, it's fascinating that it's one of the most fundamental forms of competition, and yet we're way better at it now, and we have evolved it now over the last 20 years more than at any time in human history. Absolutely.

So you've got to think people should have known a long time ago, but not really. Right. Because fighting is difficult, and it's dangerous, and it's scary, and most people try to avoid it if and whenever possible. So there's not a lot of testing it out. Right. And it wasn't until something like the Ultimate Fighting Championship came along that we really found out what actually works. Now we know what fighting is. Now we really know what fighting is.

That's amazing when you think about it just as an archaeological thing. You know, the fact that over the last 20 years they figured it out. That's amazing. It's amazing. Even though the other day, I totally agree with what you said,

but I just saw this scene that cracked me up. I saw this Roman sculpture a few days ago in a picture where there's this... The naked guys wrestling? No, not even. There's like this half man, half horse. How are those called in English? Centaur.

Centaur. Yeah. Who's putting some dude in a heel hook. What's a minotaur and what's a centaur? Is a centaur a bull? A minotaur is the one with the bull. The centaur is the half horse. That's my favorite.

The centaur is the best. Yeah. And that guy is putting a heel hook onto somebody. Oh, really? Really? A heel hook by a cent or 2,000 years ago? That's awesome. Yeah, I bet they knew a lot of submissions back then.

I bet they had a couple of them. There were some pretty cool things. But no, I agree with you. I mean, the evolution of the last 20 years is unparalleled with anything else before. That's why my dream would be to be able to have the UFC of religions where rather than these people going off forever about, Islam is awesome.

No, you suck buddhism is great he's like just shut up get in a cage i sit back have a beer see what happens and then we can stop whining forever nobody accepts losses though no people always that department they always think the guy got lucky and they want to come back and you know islam's gonna make a comeback bitch yeah exactly but wouldn't that be fun that'd be awesome well it's very strange to me when guys switch religions. Like a dude will convert and become a Jew or convert and become something else or a Christian or a Catholic. Based on what?

More evidence? Well, they found a better group of people to hang out with. Yeah, I think. That's what it is. It's like when you change nationalities. It's a very controversial thing. You know, when you become a U.S. citizen or, you know, did you become a U.S. citizen? Yeah.

Yeah. Was that a weird thing for you? Not really. I mean, for one, I didn't have to give up Italian citizenship. So it really doesn't change much. I can still travel. I can still go back to. See, that's badass if you get dual citizenship.

Yeah. It's cool. Because that way I didn't have this weird like, oh, shit, I'm cutting the bridges with the past that's so i didn't have to do that so it wasn't too weird you know it's just like a stupid piece of paper that i can go in line faster next time i got a friend of mine who's got that canadian american dual citizenship thing yeah that's dope he goes back and forth with no problems you can work over there and work over here it's beautiful yeah yeah yeah that's a very good gig. But when you signed up to the evil empire,

when you signed up the final documents, we were like, oh, my goodness. Look what I've just joined up with. I just joined up with the baddest gang in human history. And that's really what you joined. You joined the United States. I always say that the people in the United States, that we are living inside the balls of the dick

that's fucking the world. I like your imagery. Play it. That's who we don't we're not a part of it but we we essentially you know take residence inside the balls of the great dick that's fucking the world 100 different military bases in 100 different countries or whatever the fuck we've got now i'll have to write that down that's awesome that's what it is you know you just joined the best bot this is the best bot it's safe here man we're just throwing a lot of punches everybody's backing the fuck up we've got this thing circled everywhere else is quite dangerous so um you you got into this religion you started teaching and you wrote this book now in in writing this book um was there anything that you found that shocked even you

with all the shit that you know about religion? No, I mean, I've seen enough stuff that by now it's kind of hard. Do you ever get into arguments with fundamentalist people? No, because I think one of the things I tell them is that, hey man, I'm not telling you anything

about any single one religion because within any religion, there's so much variation that they disagree just about everything among Christians, among Muslims. I'm just making a general point about where a certain belief has led to. You want to identify with that? Good for you. You don't, but I'm not saying your religion equals this.

I'm saying that has been the... This is the contents of your religion. So people mellow out a little because they don't take it as personal. And then I try to make it kind of funny and just play and laugh about it. So having a sense of humor usually mellow them out a little because they don't take it as personal. And then I try to make it kind of funny and just play and laugh about it. So having a sense of humor usually mellow them out a little. So it doesn't get too... I've even had some hardcore weird fundamentals that I thought they were out to kill me that suddenly they love me by the end of class.

And I'm like, really? Have you been listening to... And that's where I think the Italian accent come in. I don't think they understood a thing I said, but it sounded cool. Well, you're a smooth talker and you obviously are well-educated, so the words come out nice. Right. And you're basically talking about the Bible, and their little brains lock up. Yeah, yeah. That is a problem, too.

Isn't it a problem that some people are just dumb? Yep. I mean, I'm afraid that's the majority of people. Yeah, and I think a lot of people don't want to believe that it's a biological issue. A lot of people want to believe that it's an education issue or an environmental issue or a cultural issue. And it may be, but it also might be biological. Look, there's people that are born and they're seven feet tall. There's people that are born and they have giant dicks.

There's a great variation of human beings. When I just see this giant wave of sloth, born they have giant dicks there's the you know there's a great variation of human beings when i just see this just a giant wave of sloth you know you see like a giant percentage of people in this country i don't know if it's 20 i don't know what the number is we just look at them like my god you're like barely thinking right you're barely a person like are you just lazy or do you have like a nine volt battery kicking inside your fucking head you know they might have a nine volt battery they might have shit genes and a poor like database to draw from genetically no one in their you know yeah their their genes their ancestries have been any different than them and they've gotten this far so there's no need to adapt no yeah so it's like

you know you come across a wild pig or you come across a pig that's in a pen, and they're completely different animals. Yeah, completely. Absolutely. Maybe that's what's going on. In that case, we're fucked. Yeah. Maybe that's why wars keep going on.

Maybe that's why religion keeps working. Yeah, maybe it's almost impossible. Have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy? No, I haven't seen it, but I heard it's funny. You really need to see that movie by now, Joe. I know. I got upset because a couple of people accused me of stealing the idea for that bit that I had for my special, the bit about dumb people outbreeding smart people.

Right. First of all, that's not an original concept. People have been thinking that forever. Of course. And second of all, my special came out before that movie came out. And it was something I worked on for years before the special it's just a you know everybody's had that thought so because of that i bought it and i never watched it like right i didn't want to see how close it is to my shit you are pissed about it well you know you get in these um these defending

yourself right you know there's no need to defend yourself it's gross when you that's one of the the the things about communicating with people online is the anonymity and the, you know, sometimes you're dealing with people, you're just dealing with, like, why are you behaving this way? Like, why are you communicating this way? This is the only way you do it. The only reason why people would communicate that way

is because there's a lack of social repercussions. There's no... You can say anything and get away with it. You don't feel it. You don't feel it. It's like the reason why people in their car can give you the fuck you and fucking when they wouldn't do that if they were just in the street a few feet from you. But in a car

right next to you, because there's a window and because there's a door and a window and a door and some space in between that they're like, fuck you, you fucking bitch. Why you wouldn't do that in person? You'd be a crazy person to do that in person but there's a detachment because of the automobiles we can't feel each other right we don't see each other you know we see we're separated by some shit we know that it's safe it's the same feeling that you feel when you're at the zoo and you know

you don't feel uncomfortable when you're standing next to a fucking bear you're supposed to be shitting your pants when you're looking at a bear man that is not normal to get a comfortable looking at a bear you should be terrified man that fucking thing is only a few feet from you trust that glass let's get out of here yeah yeah man uh it's uh the repercussions of dealing with people on the internet it's very annoying do you uh do you post stuff on the internet do you have blogs or anything like that not i mean my life has been so damn crazy lately that i've just um constantly teaching and writing teaching a bunch i mean i let a lot of bad shit happen because my um my wife died a few months ago oh i'm sorry to hear that man two-year-old baby so you know you can imagine that alone takes a hell of a lot of time and energy and everything

and then you know still working teaching writing. So I'm just like... Wow. I'll keep up on email, Facebook kind of stuff, but I've been trying to save whatever energy I've left because there's not a whole lot by the end of the day if you're doing 7 million things at once. Yeah, do you take a lot of vitamins and eat healthy? Yeah, I'm trying to work on that

because I feel it in my body in the last few months. It's just too much stress, too much everything. So I'm just trying. I've been used to, you know, I worked out forever for 20 years. Now this last year I've hardly been able to. And so, of course, you know, all of this stuff then takes a toll. So I'm trying to, you know, not become, you know, the Unabomber or something, cutting away from everything and everybody,

but at the same time save some energy for just breathing you know yeah that's important man it's important it's very hard especially people with children what people don't understand when they have a baby uh is you you now have a human being you're taking care of it's not like a pet no like you have to be with it 24 hours a day if it's little and you have to take a shit you know you have to do you have to lock it in the room with you while you're taking a shit and you have to like keep it 24 hours a day. If it's little and you have to take a shit, you know what you have to do? You have to lock it in the room with you while you're taking a shit. Of course. And you have to like keep it

from pulling the things out of the drawers and killing itself by climbing up on something that it can't support. You know, it's like, it's a constant, like it's a lot of work. Yeah. I'm amazed that anybody has kids. I'm like, how the hell does anybody do this?

And I love her. I mean, she's not even a hard baby. You know, she's an easy, sweet baby. But still, Jesus Christ, it takes so much energy. Yeah, it takes a lot of energy. And what you get out of it, they're little drug dispensers. What you get out of it is love in the purest form possible, cut straight from the source.

The love that you get from babies, man. Oh, my God. People who don't have kids really never truly understand this experience because you can think you love a dog because you do i love my dogs i see them they're sweet and they give me kisses and i'm happy but you don't there's a feeling that you get when it's a baby that's your own flesh and blood yeah and they're just little bundles of love and they're little bundles of happiness and you can directly influence them you can directly you know shape their life and and they're looking for you to do that and they need you around all the time and they constantly want you to hold them and pick them up and touch

them you know they're constantly screaming for you to touch them you know it's amazing to watch that from the source you know to see an uh you know a a life form a unique life form with no language that's communicating with just intent and noises. It wants you to do things for it. And what it wants you to do is real simple. It wants love. It wants to play. It doesn't want to be left alone. Makes sense.

Absolutely. So much work. Yeah. So how do you keep sane? Do you have like a workout you do or meditation or yoga or anything? I think honestly right now I've been burning the candle on both ends. So I don't know that I have to answer to that because I don't think I've been doing a great job at it. I think I've been handling things, but I'm feeling lately my body kind of giving me signals like,

hey man, you're going over the edge. You need to tone it down. You don't smoke cigarettes or anything, do you? No, I don't. So, no, I mean, the workout has always been my thing. But then again, when you don't have the physical time anymore and everything, so I need to find the times to do it. And so that's kind of what I'm working on,

on being able to just train again and do all this stuff. Because, I mean, with martial arts, I've been doing it 20 years. It's been like one of the things that you do day in and day out forever and suddenly you don't do that anymore you're like oh shit your body goes through withdrawal you know you feel weird you feel so it's key to do it because it doesn't matter how busy you get it's key to your health in a way yeah I remember I tore a ligament in my leg it was the first like real serious injury that took me out for months and months I tore a knee ligament and I had to get it reconstructed and then I didn't work out for a long time.

And it was the first time in my life that I hadn't done that. And I had always used martial arts for blowing off steam. And now all of a sudden I was at this place where I was like, wow, I'm not in control of my emotions as well. I have short temper. I don't feel my body the same way. When you use your body a lot, you develop this real tight relationship

with your body, like how it moves. And it makes you want to eat healthy. It makes you want to take care of it because you realize that it's communicating with you. It's communicating with you through movement,

through your desire and intent to do something and its actual ability to perform what your desire and intent is. And you get this relationship with your body. And I didn't have it anymore. I had no relationship with my body. I was like, wow, this is weird. Every day I just wake up and eat and piss and go through.

You know what I'm saying? That's what I'm using my body for. It's just a vehicle. I'm not communicating with it anymore. Welcome to the life of most people in the world right now. You communicate with your body through things, through sex, through martial arts, through dance. You communicate when you require your body to move in very specific ways. And there's a consciousness to that that's very uniquely its own.

The consciousness of the full focus and concentration of someone utilizing their body you know because i really do believe that that is an element of the whole and that you have to in order to be optimally healthy you have to have the whole together you have to have the mind must be healthy the consciousness must be healthy the body must be healthy yeah and i went through a long period it's like six months you know rehabbing my knee after the surgery and everything like that where i still couldn't kick a bag i couldn't box i couldn't sucks couldn't run that really sucks yeah it makes you realize it makes you really fucking appreciate your body when you can though seriously so what martial arts were you doing it's funny i started out originally, you know, with watching the Kung Fu TV series too many times.

So I was just like, I want to go on a mountain with Master Yoda showing me how to fly in the air. And, you know, so I started out with a lot of Chinese martial arts and then I progressively moved to more self-defense oriented thing. And then kind of the opposite of what most people do. We start out with very aggressive and then they mellow out. I started out, oh, it's all about Zen and poetry and thing and now I'm just like shut up let just wrestle you know just all about combat sports and submission grappling MMA that kind of thing well I think you know there there is there's definitely a mindset to the Eastern martial arts that is being lost in in the transition to combat sports,

to look at it in combat sports. There's something to be gained from that mindset. What people don't understand is that the ancient Japanese martial arts masters, the reason why they practiced Zen thinking wasn't because it's just a thing they did that really doesn't need to be replicated today. No, what they were doing was in order to have a way, in order to have a way of thinking of life, they were disciplining the mind to behave on very specific frequencies

and to have control over itself. And that in your discipline and in your honor and your code, you have control over your emotions, you have control over your emotions. You have control over your body better. You have control over your psyche better because you have an ethic, because you have a code. And that there's a reason for that. It benefits you in combat.

It benefits you to be sturdy of mind. So in order to practice this mental discipline, it actually puts you in a better position for victory. It's why it's there. Shit, I've done, I remember, I'm not, I think I'm kind of a wimp at heart. So every time I've competed. A wimp at heart? Yeah.

No, I get freaked out. I get scared when I have to fight. Oh, really? Some guys are, you know, you read Chuck Liddell or Randy, these guys who speak, they don't know what it means to be afraid. I'm like, what the fuck do you mean? It's like the scariest thing in the world. There's this guy who's been training forever to knock your head off so i walked up and the days before the time when i step on the mat i feel like everything

in my body shutting down i'm about to die kind of feeling you know everything freezes and and so i can see how you know the whole zen thing is not about having some strange mystical thought. It's about how do you deal with the fact that this is what you're going to do. And you do it without too much attachment. Because attachment will breed fear. Fear will shut you down. And then you'll get killed. Yeah, you've got to control your body. That's really ultimately what it is.

And the ability to control your mind is the same as the ability to control your body. Because if you can't control your mind, you can't control your emotions. They can run amok, your possibilities. The real problem is you're intelligent. That's the real problem. And it's true. And when you're intelligent, you realize, hey, we don't have to do this. This is an elective choice you're making to go and enter your body into some physical combat with another man. Let's get the fuck out of here.

That's intelligent. Let's go eat out of here. That's intelligent. Let's go eat something. Exactly. That's intelligent. You're a smart person to think that way. Your body thinks it's going to fight, you know, and your body doesn't want to do it. So it starts, you know, just essentially trying to pull you out of it.

But at the same time, it's like the most instructive thing in the world because it teaches you to get rid of attachments because, you know, you live with attachment of fears and all these things about you hope that the universe is not gonna do this and that to you and that you can and the reality is in combat like in life you don't control jack shit you do the best you can and then it's out of your hands and you need to be able to live through it despite the obvious fear that kicks in from self-preservation and so it's like hey man brit maybe you die in a second so what yeah it's not good it doesn't feelpreservation. And so it's like, hey, man, maybe you die in a second. So what?

Yeah, it's not good. It doesn't feel good to work hard, but it's good to work hard. It's good to train hard. It's good to push your body and your spirit. And that is a part of it, your spirit. I have friends that are men, and I'm not talking about you, Brian, that have no experience whatsoever in um in any sort of difficult physical endeavor and it haunts them it haunts them like they get insecure when

they're around guys who are athletic they'll say you know dicky things and it's like to disarm this person of their masculinity because they've never truly faced their own physicality and they're terrified of it it's fascinating it's fascinating to watch watch them have like these little weird sort of semi meltdowns and they're around you know strong men it's like the least you train the tougher you think you are that's the way it goes usually you know it's like you can build all these stories about oh i'm this tough guy then when you step up you quickly find out those guys are funny when they want to talk about i I'm undefeated in bar fights. Tell you that, I fought 15 times.

It's like, yeah, fine. You fought 15 people that don't know what the fuck they're doing. Or you're sucker punching people. When your friend is distracting them. You don't train at all and you've been knocking out 15 dudes? Okay. You're going to get fucked up if you keep this up. One day you're going to run into Boss Rootin' at the bar

and he's going to fucking do one of those instructional videos on your head. Bang! Bang! Zag! Can you imagine? You're like, put your fingers in your arse. Bully asshole, and you run into a guy like Boss Rootin' at a bar. Oh, what a mistake. Especially if he tries to be nice to you, and you mistake that for him being weak.

Whoopsies. Yeah, we were watching. I had Eddie Bravo in here the other day and we were watching Minotaur Noguera versus Bob Sapp. Oh, that's awesome. That's classic. Isn't that classic? Brian, you saw it too. It's really

a cartoon fight. A real cartoon fight. And one of the, in my opinions, the best example of technique over power that this guy, Minotaurro, this 230-pound guy, was able to beat this 350-plus-pound monster of a man who didn't even look real. That is an amazing, amazing fight.

And that's a guy, Minotauro, he's a real martial artist. Seriously. He's a real, like, true warrior. You know, a guy who became a master of jiu-jitsu and then became a great striker to add on to it and was just willing to fight anybody. And I think it started way back in the day because, I mean, when he was, I forget, 10, 11, whatever,

when he had the car accident and he was in the hospital for a year where they tell him you'll never walk again maybe you'll walk but maybe definitely no sports and the guy goes on to become an mma champion and say then say something about the guy's personality i remember when he was at the top of his game man when he was triangling everybody and you know you just saw jujitsu on a level that you had never seen before like all of a sudden this badass heavyweight who was tough as fuck who had a wicked guard a wicked jujitsu game was hitting anaconda chokes on dudes and fucking strangling from his back and you're like whoa this dude is on another level that was like

to me like a real victory for technique yeah and mixed martial arts in my opinion minotaur like embodiesodies this era where people learn, whoa, that's possible too. We were not seeing guys on the highest levels submitting guys the way Minotaur was. He's so awesome. How about the Crow Cop fight? He gets battered by Crow Cop in the first round.

Fucking smashed. He gets head kicked by the guy who knocked out everybody with head kicks. And somehow or another, he eats it and he's okay. And he gets up at the bottom of the round. At the end of the round, he gets head kicked and dropped like seconds before the round ends. And he thought the referee stopped the fight.

And the referee's like, nope, the round's over. He's like, okay, he didn't stop this fucking fight. And he goes back and he takes him down and he arm bars him in the second round. But he took a beating in that first round. Like, God damn, that dude is tough. You got to love those guys. Or Sakuraba or those guys. Oh, my God.

Crazy wars. Sakuraba, by the time his career was over, he was essentially going in to the ring with his legs mummified. Yeah. His knees were so bad that he would have tape that would go all the way up to the top of his thigh and all the way down to his ankles. It was crazy. That was another guy that was like a real classic technique and heart oversized guy. Remember when he fought Quinton Jackson and Quinton kept his legs over and over? Yeah, and he got his back.

Sacco was all relaxed and just flowing. I'm like, Jesus, how do you stay relaxed when some monster is lifting you? Yeah, well, his jujitsu was beautiful. He was so tough. He was so,

like, willing to take punishment. You know, he was technical, but he was also brave. You know, he's willing to take punishment. And essentially,

really, he should have been a 170 pounder. Yep. I mean, he was walking around at 189 pounds without cutting any weight at all

and he was a little fat. And he was taking on heavy weights. Can you imagine at 141.70 what kind of a career he would have had? Dude, that guy fucking beat Conan Silveira with an armbar. Remember that shit? Conan went for a fucking Kimura. He spun around, caught him at an armbar. Bang!

That was a pure victory of technique over size. That was a clear example of that. He was an amazing fighter. And another one who embodied that Japanese warrior spirit. And that's what they loved about him. His willingness to go out there and throw down with anybody. Even Vanderlei Silva, who beat the fuck out of him three times. He kept stepping up.

He kept stepping up, man. And that last one when he got knocked out, and Vanderlei caught, who beat the fuck out of him three times. He kept stepping up. He kept stepping up, man. And that last one when he got knocked out, and Vanderlei caught him with two punches, and literally sent him flying through the air as he skid unconscious on his back. Scary. Wow. Scary, scary.

The Melvin Manhoof fight, when he fought Melvin Manhoof. I know, Jesus. I feel bad for the guy. He just took so many beatings. Oh, my God. No one's taking more beatings than Sakuraba. Dude, Melvin Manhoof is a destroyer when that guy starts teeing off on you he's one of the most terrifying strikers in any martial art you know when he's attacking he's just so strong and fast and just blasting

sakuraba and the guy came back after that he kept fighting right i mean he's he's still fighting yeah i know i mean i feel it's weird it's perverted like well i want to see him fight but then i want him to retire you know oh i would love him to retire we can watch his old fights yeah so many classics yeah yeah he was involved in so many fight of the year candidates you know i mean even when he was broken up when was that like a year ago or two years ago when he had the fight with galesic i think he was yeah he put the guy in a knee bar and the guy hit him like 50 straight times. Yeah. No protection.

And the guy stayed with it so he could get to the knee bar and win the fight. Yeah. How do you stay with a technique when you're getting hit for... It's amazing. He's got unbelievable determination. What about the Zoromskis fight where his ear fell off? His ear literally... The Sakuraba has these gigantic cauliflowered ears and for

people who don't know what that means when you wrestle a lot or you get hit in the ear a lot when it breaks up the tissue it fills up with fluid and blood and then it hardens it like it becomes like almost like cartilage like really thick stuff like you have to have that shit cut out and a lot of guys they get an ear that becomes like this. I mean, it literally looks like a mouse is under their skin. And that's what it looked like with Sakuraba. The whole thing was deformed. Randy Couture actually uses his in grappling because it's hard.

So when he takes guys down, he'll actually, like, shove his ear into parts of them and make them uncomfortable. He'll fucking jab them with his ears, man. Those are hard weapons on the side of his head it's really kind of crazy but uh sakuraba's ear was really fucked up and it had always had tape on it was always getting cut in training and shit and this dude hit him with something i forget what he hit him with but the fucking ear was hanging off of his head yeah it was just hanging off and zaramskis was like dude you're fucking here like he even stopped fighting he was like whoa dude you might want to look at that what's going on here they stitched it up has he fought since then uh he did he's you know i hope he stops because he's

not gonna stop yeah he's not gonna stop but they're not gonna have him stop right they're gonna they're gonna keep asking him to keep doing it and he'll keep doing it but i mean if they were smart at least they would pair him with like old legends and then mellow matches. That would even make sense at least. They throw him in with werewolves.

Yeah, that's just fucked up. Is he, does he still smoke? You know, I never know the reality. You'd always hear the story about him chain smoking

and drinking all the time. That's what I always heard. I think that's true, man. Yeah, you think he's the... Yeah, he trained hard but I'm pretty sure

he actually chain smoked and drank. I love that. I, man. Yeah, you think he's the... Yeah, he trained hard, but I'm pretty sure he actually chain-smoked and drank. I love that. They need to make a movie about that guy. He's amazing. You know, there's something funny about Japanese culture because they are so by the book in so many ways, but when the guys go off the model, they really go off.

Yeah, they get mohawks and tattoo their whole body. There's one guy I had I love this guy that I put in the book His name is EQ is the Zen master from like I want to say the 1300s 1400 something like that And this is your book on the Warriors path. No, this one is the other one that's coming out this week Yeah in the religion book. This dude was the illegitimate son of the emperor of Japan. And so they had to kind of, his mom just hid him in a monastery somewhere so that he wouldn't get killed in Palance conspiracy,

trying to get rid of the possible hair. So, you know, this poor kid grew up in the middle of this fucked up Zen monastery in the cold and whatever, just trying to stay alive. And so, fine, you know, not the most fun in the world, but he grows up that way. Absolute genius. Everybody said, Jesus, nobody grasps Zen the way this guy does. so fine you know not the most fun in the world but he grows up that way absolute genius everybody said jesus nobody grasps and the way this guy does he's so smart he's so this is so that but precisely because he's so smart he just flipped them off one day and he decided when they give

him in in zan they have this thing they call the certificate of enlightenment where a master certified that you are truly enlightened wow he picked it up and he was like, certificate of enlightenment? Are you fucking kidding me? You know, he burned it. And he was like, come on, you know. That is pretty preposterous. They were trying to really mean and trying to keep him in the fold by giving him,

you know, we'll make you abbot of this monastery and stuff. A week later, nobody can find him. They find this poem that he left behind saying basically how, Jesus, a week in this monastery, I can't take it anymore. If anybody's looking for me, I'm either at the brothel or at the sake shop. And that's the rest of his life. He goes off being this kind of wandering teacher whose main passions are Zen,

hookers, and sake. And that's all that he loves. What is his name? Ikkyu is I-K-K-Y-U. Wow. It's my all-time hero. I love the guy. Oh, I love that.

He figured it out. It sounds like my friend Bad Bobby. Bad Bobby from Vancouver. He figured it out. Hookers and just sake. Yeah, basically. And to him, Zen and it was all... To him, real Zen was living life with full awareness.

That's Zen. You can do it meditating in a mountain if that makes you feel good. You can do it in a brothel if that makes you feel good. It's about having full awareness. It's not about what you're doing as much. It's about whether you're awake and you're alive to what's going on. Right. Or whether you're going through the motion and you're not really there.

And whether or not you're just reacting to every single thing mindlessly around you but by the way there really is no true enlightenment because even true enlightenment for a human is just true enlightenment for a human our little brains can't really we're not set up right we have we have we are essentially just like this old shitty computer we have that's running all this equipment we really do not have the hardware to deal with the scenario at hand. We're fucked. So even enlightenment for

a person is just enlightenment for a person. The best you can do is keep it together mildly. It's so funny. Everybody is searching for that. What you're searching for is ultimately a better feeling about your experience here. That's what we're all searching for is you know ultimately a better feeling about your

experience here right you know that's what we're all searching for whether it's through religion or through meditation or through yoga i have a friend who uh their family was very religious uh until recently a few years ago they started to kind of i don't know what what brought them out of it but they started kind of see it differently and now they're experiencing their first year or two years are completely away from their church and the wife is starting to get into yoga and you know the dude is like we experiment with a bunch of different things and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in the world but it's weird to watch someone come out of it it's weird to watch someone go

you know what maybe maybe this is a mistake here well you guys are nice i enjoy hanging out with you but shit come on like their their own mind has evolved their their their personal consciousness has evolved past an ideology right yeah that's a big decision to make very hard huge it's bigger than breaking up with a girlfriend it's right i don't know about that but no no close it depends on how religion you are religious you are but if you're like really active with the church and then you're gonna leave them it's enormous it doesn't get any bigger it also depends how tight that girl is yeah yeah that's true right and whether or not she's a freak whether or not you know just turn her loose for one day like she's loyal but you turn her loose for one day and she's in a fucking

gangbang and you can't take that gangbang back. And there's that thing where she always really wanted to get with a black eye, but she never had. And you know, the moment she's loose. Joe, did you see that video of that octopus walking out of the water? Yeah. How creepy is that? Well, you know, there's a video of an octopus climbing out of its aquarium, walking across the floor, and going up to another aquarium that's in the same room and eating fish and then climbing back in his aquarium.

Yeah. The reason why I know this, I haven't seen it, but the reason why I know this is because a friend was trying to explain to me how intelligent octopuses are, that they can take food and put it in a jar and the octopus will unscrew the jar and get at the food. And that a guy was missing some of his tropical fish and he had a couple of fish tanks and one of them was right next to,

you know, the octopus was right next to this one with like this really expensive fish. This fucking octopus was climbing out, climbing up into the next tank, lifting the fucking lid up and getting inside

and eating the fish. And then climbing back to his place. So like nobody knows. He thought about it. He's like, listen, if I hang out here, this motherfucker's going to know that I get into this tank. So the dude had to set up a camera.

He set up a camera and caught this octopus doing this. I haven't seen the video, though. So it might be horseshit. It might be internet legend. Tweet it. Yeah, tweet it. It's a good story. Whoever's listening, there's enough people listening.

We don't need to tweet this. This is ridiculous. I'm going to leave it at that, Brian. No, I mean tweet it so I can see it. I don't know. Somebody, yeah, if they find it, folks, tweet it. Yeah, somebody, if it's out there. It might not be out there.

It might not be real. But how do we get on the subject of octopuses killing things, climbing out and being intelligent? subject of octopuses killing things climbing out being intelligent yeah you ever have you seen the the evidence for a kraken have you seen the evidence for a giant octopus of legend you know there's always been a legend of an octopus that can devour ships and you know a huge whale eating right well they actually have found evidence of this thing. Like a wooden boy inside the octopus? No, they actually found whale bones, and the whale bones are fucked up. And so that means there's something that is big enough to go kill a goddamn whale.

And they also found fossilized imprints of giant suction cups. And that's what leads them to believe that the possibility. See, the thing about an octopus is there's no bones, really. There's nothing going to be left. There's no fossilized octopus. It's not like a bird or something else where you can get the structure of the animal.

It's essentially all soft tissue except for its beak. So it dissolves. It doesn't exist anymore. But it was on the ocean floor that they had these imprints, these fossilized imprints of what looked like massive suction cups of a huge tentacle. And by

that, they're making this pretty reasonable hypothesis. And the bones of the whale being all fucked up and then these giant suction cups. They're like, oh, there probably was this real monster that lived. I mean, if there's a whale, just a whale is ridiculous enough.

It's weird as it gets, man. A super smart giant big thing that can't do anything, and it has to breathe air. It lives in the ocean, and it breathes air. Like, what? That's so stupid. The design there didn't quite work out. It's ridiculous.

It lives in the water but yet can't it can go down the water for a little bit but it's got to come up for air and it can't even stop it can't stop because if it stops then it'll fucking sink and then it'll drown that's fucking how do they do they even sleep they don't even sleep right they think they like like dolphins they like partially sleep they like shut most of their brain off for a couple hours a day. You see this video of the octopus opening the jar to get the food inside and then shutting the jar? Oh, yeah. I have seen this. Yeah.

Have you seen the octopus jack the shark? No. What? Yeah. There was another one in an aquarium. They were finding a lot of sharks were missing. They were trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. And they put a video camera up and they saw it.

You can watch that. That one definitely exists. If you look for octopus eats shark. And this fucking octopus just jump on this shark and jack him. Damn. It's just jujitsu.

Once they get a hold of his body, he's helpless. And they just eat him. You know, it's really simple. Everybody thinks, oh, who would win, shark or an octopus? Oh, dude, for sure, shark.

The fuck it would. Octopus move fast. Shark is stupid. They try to bite you. You just wrap that bitch up. Watch this shit. It's kind of crazy. It's hard to see on this.

TV behind you. Yeah, there you go. The TV behind you. And I can look at this one back here. But this octopus just fucked the shark up, man. The shark was like, yeah, man, I'm a shark. I'm just going to fuck somebody up today. The shark never thought that anybody was going to eat him.

Sharks don't even really have any natural predators. You know, I mean, who the fuck's running around eating sharks? Occasionally an orca will kill a shark. But they only do it because the sharks are too close to their babies. They're not, like, trying to eat them. It's pretty rare. Look at this stupid fucking shark. Yeah, man.

I'm just running shit down here. That's a live one right there. That's crazy. He's waiting. How long can an octopus live outside of water, though? When I saw that video, I was like, doesn't he need water? I don't know, but lobsters can live outside a long fucking time. You ever get a lobster in the mail?

No. In the ice? Yeah, you can ever get a lobster in the mail? No. And they're on ice. Yeah, you get lobsters in the mail. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, and they're on ice. Look at it. Here it goes.

Bitch, come here. The shark swims over the octopus. The octopus just wraps this bitch up with some strong jiu-jitsu. Damn. That's total jiu-jitsu, bro. Look at his hooks. Yeah, he's got his back. He's like, oh, no, no, no, no, my friend. Right now, this is De La Riva hooks yeah he's got his back he's like oh no no no no my friend right now

this is de la jiva guard because he's trying to get away looks like he's got him also he's trying to bite him too the shark might bite him a little but you know here's the crazy thing about octopus you can bite their limbs off it doesn't matter bitch grow another one they grow another one they're super they're this the super adaptable so this shark is biting them but so what he's just getting jacked he's getting totally anacondid here spun around yeah their suction cups are badass man it's a badass design you know everything just pulls it into one center where there's a giant fucking beak and that beak just jacks your ass wow that's cool that's nature meanwhile the crazy thing is their eyes and our eyes are very similar they're very similar biologically which is amazing like me somewhere

along the line some hundreds of millions of years ago we were probably cousins of an octopus and we branched off into different ways in the ocean floor you We went one way, they went another way. They went this way of just blending in their environment and jacking sharks. And here we are jacking the world. That's awesome. So back to religion. Let's go back to religion. Did I ask you what was the oldest religion?

Yeah, I mean, I guess some form of animism is basically... So you were telling me about the cave guys. Yeah, for lack of a better term, scholars call it animism or shamanism or whatever you want to call it. It's basically tribal religions. And they have, you know, enormous variation from one tribe to another,

but they have some common themes. They tend to see, like, the nature as alive, you know, in nature as alive with spirits, spirits in everything from trees to animals to all sorts of stuff. The idea, kind of like Star Wars, that there's a power in everything. A force to it all. Much like the force, exactly, that you can tap into.

And it has no morality. It's not about you have to be a good person. Right. So there's some cool stuff out there. But yeah, it varies tremendously from one tribe to the next. It wasn't written down. It wasn't an organizer, in that sense. Some of that still exists to this day you know in some tribal culture that's still what's going on what's the official uh belief as far as like

you know what's taught in schools when it comes to cattle worship why are there so many cattle worshiping tribes because it's delicious yeah exactly that's true that's definitely true that's how they worship them as gods, and they don't even eat them in some parts of the world. Right, India and stuff. How much does that have to do with psychedelic drugs? Well, that's why the theories about Hinduism is about how a lot of it began with Soma,

and Soma was considered to be, some people say it was a Manita Muscaria, you know, the mushroom. They say that. They also say Stropharia Cubensis, and they say it might have been a combination, sort of a cocktail that they put together. Right.

It's amazing that if you know about their religion and the place that Soma played in it, that it was lost. Like, we don't know what it is. Yep. They would talk about Soma being greater than all these different things and Soma being amazing, but, yeah, we don't know what Soma is. Somehow or another, they lost what Soma is. There's that guy, Gordon Wasson.

Actually, I think I put him in the book in there, too, because it was too much of a fun story. Oh, yeah, yeah. I had that chapter entitled Peace Drink. How did that one go? Let me see. And Wasson is the one who initially made psychedelic mushrooms popular with Western America. Oh, yeah. I have a chapter entitled Peace Drinking Draghi Priests Created Hinduism.

Because one of the theories that Wasson has about that is that he believes he was Amanita Muscari at a summer. And the way he figured it out, he went through a bunch of these books referring to summer. And he was saying, you know, they keep talking about a plant, but they don't talk about leaves. They don't talk about, you know, they refer to stem, they refer to some weird crap. Right. And then, so he was thinking, he was starting to go in the mushroom direction. And then he finds out this piece of literature from somewhere else where some shaman in Siberia, I think was talking about how they filter Amanita muscaria. And he had read about this triple filter that they use for Soma,

where they do a couple of things to brew it, and then there's a human filter. And he was like, what the hell is a human filter? He found out that if you take Amanita muscaria, you get the high, but you also get really nauseous and weirded out. And you have to drink your piss. If you drink somebody else's piss,

you get the high, but they get stuck with the cracky part. They get all the side effects. Really? You don't. Well, I know that people drink their own piss when they're tripping, when they're taking aminonidia or when they're taking strephericubensis. They'll drink their own urine, and they blast off, apparently. I talked to this dude.

He was like, I don't want to drink my piss. This is crazy. And I was like, dude, trust me. Drink your your piss like he's like i'm tripping balls and they're telling me i need to drink my piss to get higher than this he goes i don't want to get high in this like trust me right and he goes okay and he goes i drink my piss and he goes and all of a sudden it was like a tornado opened up in front of my eyes and i got sucked through the center of it yeah he said it was the craziest trip and the most enlightening trip of his life but yeah that's at least is

your own in this case is even closer because it's somebody else's just because you don't want to get the side effects but I may or may not have watched people drink animal piss I may or may not have I can't discuss money to pay for that I can't discuss this until now I was did you pay for that? I can't discuss this until... No, it was in person. I didn't pay anything. I actually got paid. But it might not be real. And I can't discuss this until, ironically and totally unrelated,

after Fear Factor starts airing, which airs on December 12th. Cool. The human filter was a popular thing. People would just sell their own would they sell it would they just make a deal like i'll tell you it's like one line in some four thousand year old book or something so nobody really knows and it could be the western is speculating going off the deep end with that could be but it's an interesting it's a fun theory if nothing else amanita muscaria is a very strange mushroom because they believe it's not only variable

genetically but it's variable by location season, and that some of them might not even be psychoactive. Some of them might not even work. Right. You know, I've tried amanita when nothing happened. Right. You know, I tried it. I didn't. I went on a combinatory experience.

We tried the amanita. We tried it for a few hours and nothing took. So then we took some regular mushrooms and then we blasted off. It was a combination of the two of them was ultra potent. The Amanita did something weird, but it wasn't really getting you off. It was just getting you to this

weird head space. I was like, what's going on here? Is this what this stuff is? I just think it wasn't strong enough. It wasn't good enough. I think there's parts of the world where it's like, you know, where they really know how to do it.

In Siberia, especially. Yeah. And especially in this thing about Siberia is how the Amanita Muscaria mushroom is essentially Christmas. It's essentially Santa Claus. Well, people don't know

that the Christmas theme and the mushroom theme are so closely related. They're even the same color. Right. The Amanita mushroom is Santa Claus. It's white and red. You know?

And it has a mycorrhizal relationship with certain carnivorous trees so that it grows only under those trees just like packages under your fucking Christmas tree. That's awesome. I mean, it's really amazing. I mean, and, you know, and people would gather them, and the way to dry them out was they would put them on the fucking trees, on the branches of the trees, so the sun would get them, and it would dry them out. That's awesome.

Like, it's like, that's the ornaments on the trees. It's like, all of it is there. It's like, there's so many connections. And it's been argued that, you know, someone told me that Coca-Cola was the first one to actually make a red and white Santa Claus, and that he was a different color before then. But that's not really true. There's evidence of red and white Santas from a long time ago.

But the Santa doesn't even matter. What really matters is the fucking presence under the tree, the relationship that it has with the tree, the reason why we have Christmas trees, and they're always fucking pine trees, man. I mean, the whole thing, it's like, wow, The relationship is so close. The color of it and the fact that we hang stockings over the fireplace.

And those stockings, when the fuck did you ever get a pair of red and white stockings that you wore? You don't. I don't do that too often. But that's also how they dry mushrooms out in their home. They hang them in front of the fireplace and that's what dries them out. That's right. It's really incredible. You didn't know right. I didn't notice that, actually. You didn't know that?

I didn't notice that at all. It's an incredible series of, whether they're coincidences, or I wouldn't say coincidence. I would say there's evidence that there's a relationship. There's a bunch of people that have studied this.

There's a guy, Andrew Rudigy and Jan Ervin. They've done a lot of study on this stuff. And the great Jack Herrer was actually writing a book about this before he died. The relationship with Christianity and mushrooms

as well. He had all these really cool ancient paintings of people who were naked, dancing in ecstasy, under the very clear, transparent silhouette of the shape of a mushroom. You know, this is really amazing stuff. Yeah.

Like, the idea. And if you ever look at the really old pictures of halos, that's just fascinating, too. Old halos, like, the new halos are like a Frisbee. Right. Or like a hula hoop, rather. Right. Floating around the back of your head. But the old halos were literally on the underside of a mushroom cap oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and it has the strut the lines in it just like a

mushroom does and it's it's really a trip when you see that you go oh my god like this is what they were saying was these people were under the the spell of the mushroom they were enlightened right because they were under the spell of the mushroom. And there's mushroom symbology all throughout ancient buildings and doorways are mushroom-shaped. Literally, these temples had mushroom-shaped doorways. Fuck, man. How many people were on mushrooms back then? No internet, no TV.

You got to keep entertained somehow. Yeah, that's the move, right? God damn, man. So when you're teaching these classes, do you ever get anybody who's angry at you? Do you ever get anybody who wants to talk to you after class and just like, you know, hey, what you're doing is wrong? No, for the most part, they're mellow. I mean, and again, I try to do it in a way that I try not to be offensive to the individual. I may say something hard.

I always say something harsh about the big picture. But on an individual level level it's like hey man it doesn't mean i hate you you know it's like we're playing here we're tossing ideas i'm not attached to my ideas you tell me something that makes sense i'll change my mind right now you know it's like i'm not here to defend an ideologist so who cares we're just playing here you know so people mellow out and once in a while we have discussions i had a muslim student who was a very nice guy, but obviously wasn't too keen. He loved me when I talked shit about other religions, but of course he had some issues when I started picking on the Quran.

And he had this, one thing I picked on was this passage in the Quran that basically justified beating up your wife if she's disobedient. And he's a nice guy, so he doesn't really want to support that but at the same time he doesn't want to go against the quran so he was like struggling trying to figure out what do i do with it he came up with this weird ass theory a week later telling me you know what this is god telling you that you shouldn't beat up women and i'm like yeah that's except that it's saying that you should so what's going on here and he's like no no he's using subtle psychology you know because he's if he tells you not to then you

get peace then you want to do it so first what wait he said first he tells you that uh you should talk to them and then if they don't reform then you banish them to another room and only as a last resort then you can beat them up so really telling you that you shouldn't beat them up but he's doing it in a smart way and i was like oh my fucking god i said can you just take that maybe there's some good stuff in the quran and you cut some crap and can we know they're the most dogmatic the muslims like radical muslims are the most dogmatic about it what do you find to be the most ridiculous is there are they are you religions universally ridiculous?

No, I think all the people, all the ones who believe that there's only one right way that has been revealed by God to them, and so they are super hardcore dogmatic. And mostly, I mean, you're talking about Muslim fundamentalists today, in particular, Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists throughout much of history. They mellowed out a little today. They let you paint them. You can still draw jesus you draw muhammad to fucking shoot you and blow your house up but i think it's all in western western monotheistic religions have the tendency to have the unhealthiest uh more rabid i'll kill you if you disagree kind of mentality most asian things i mean you can agree you can disagree but they are kind of like

you know if you disagree who the hell cares it's right do your thing yeah asian martial arts or asian rather religions what about um what about the idea that the most dogmatic and the most restrictive religions are really the religions that have come from the areas that have like the oldest civilizations. And so almost like, you know, like Sumer, which is where Iraq is. You know, really famously is a part of the world that is still in the dark ages in a lot of ways. You know, the battles we've seen, the Sunnis and the Shiites and just the Kurds and all the shit that happened with Saddam Hussein. Right. And you go back to that area.

I mean, you say, well, you know, this area literally was Sumer. This is Babylon. This is where, you know, literally the first religions about that like the people that are still there they're much more influenced by the deep deep past you know then people that have spread out to all parts of the world as travelers were especially Americans right that's the the first the last example of a new continent that we know that you know just over the last few hundred years has been established yeah I'm kind of scared of anything that comes out of the desert yeah the place i mean it's just some people do well in it but for the most part harsh environment it's harsh man all you want to do is you just squeeze between two rocks and pray

that your brain doesn't start oozing out of your head you know it's like it's brutal and so it's like religions that come out of the desert i can see how they people that come out of the desert you ever drive from like california to vegas yeah, it's a scary business drive from California to Vegas and you get out and you just smell crime, dude You smell fear and anger fear and loathing right exactly Hunter S. Thompson fucking nailed it. I mean it's not a mistake that he drove right in a convertible taking it all in while on ether Right. In a convertible, taking it all in while on ether.

I strongly recommend that, yes. Yeah, that's probably the way to see it correctly. Yeah. No, so that's with religion. I mean, religion comes out from beautiful mountains and rivers and shit. I'm sure it's going to do something to its ideology where they are, maybe, not always, but more likely than not, they're going to have a more mellow view of life. Well, there's only one really mellow religion, right? That's Buddhism. Buddhism is pretty mellow. of life well there's only one really mellow religion right that's buddhism buddhism is pretty mellow in fact i have no problems with

i mean some tag i can disagree with some stuff in buddhism but it's it's pleasant disagreement you know it's like and they are not as uh at least for the most part as our core trying to shove it down your throat so it's a little more relaxed to have a dialogue yeah i really appreciate that i really appreciate religions that don't pros a dialogue yeah i really appreciate that i really appreciate religions that don't proselytize i really appreciate like judaism like nobody's trying to get you to be a jew right right right you know okay you know yeah and you really can't even join you know it's really hard to join right yeah you gotta marry some chick you know that's what my uncle did my uncle converted his name is salvatore di giulando yeah he converted he became jewish

um yeah it's um it's interesting to me that you know there's no uh there's there's no i wouldn't say there's no new religions but there's no new respected religions right there's everything where you can look back and like you know some know, some people take Scientology seriously. But for the most part, it seems to be just a group. You know, you can call it a religion. But no one in that really is believing, at least I don't think they are, believing the stories of Scientology the same way that people believe in the ridiculous. I mean, especially when it's written by a science fiction author. I know.

But because we know more shit today. You know, it's like you can make some great claims about some distant past where nobody knows shit then it's you can spin a story that nobody can disprove today uh you know in three seconds people find out all about you when you're like hey isn't the your prophet the guy who was like renting some child porn the other day and he's like what are you talking about so it's it's a little harder to get away with stuff do you remember the uh ted hagggard documentary they did for HBO? And one of the things, he goes to look for a job. And after he gets out, he goes, I think I'll be okay unless they Google me.

That's what he said. I think I'll be okay. I'll get the job unless they Google me. That's great. That's hilarious, man. That's hilarious. He's back to teaching again. He's got a church now.

Don't you love it those guys who are so hardcore about morality and this and that it's not that they mellow out a little bit which would be healthy no they go all like i'll do methamphetamine with a gay hooker that's like one you're the one who's arguing that masturbation is the ultimate scene and it's like jesus ted haggard he blocked me on twitter yeah he did i made a joke he was talking about church he's like after church maybe uh you know sandwiches and a picnic and then dot dot dot and i wrote meth and blowjobs yeah i mean but he he's he might that he'll come on yeah what the fuck man You can't just leave that out there. No, that's just funny.

He blocked me. Blocked me on Twitter, the fuck. I block people too, but only when they're assholes. Right. You say something that funny, but some people, they've got no sense of humor. Priests that get busted with gay hookers and meth, rarely can they laugh at it. No, usually not. Unfortunately.

Yeah. So the most unreasonable religion would have to be Islam, right? The most... I mean, you can't make fun of them. You can't... Today is pretty tough to do. You know that woman that had to go into hiding and they had to change her name? She was a columnist and she wanted to have a draw Muhammad Monday.

And she had so many threats against her life yeah they're really they will kill you isn't that amazing it's amazing that that's tolerated like that's some bullshit but you need to fucking relax yeah one thing that trips me out is the reaction like when they were the muhammad cartoons when they were even salman rashdi back in the day a bunch of the Western world were saying, yeah, sure, the violence is bad, the Muslim reaction, but really it's terrible and offensive what these people are doing. And I'm just like, are you kidding me? You know, you're giving in to book burners and arguing that people want to squash freedom

of opinion that's in the name of respecting religion. Yeah, if you want to go to war, if the United States wants to go to war, it should go to war with anybody that wants to kill a lady who suggests that you should have a drama home on Monday. That's who we should go to war with. Go to war with them. Have people that pretend to do shit like that. Find out who's ready to kill them and then go get them.

Go get them, boys. Those are the jackasses of the world. Those are the people who you can't bounce that bar that far back from where they are they need to die and come back and live life again and try to learn from this life's experiences because you're not going to bounce back from being a guy who's willing to cut the heart out of a woman who wants to have a drama hamad monday you that guy's never going to be a productive member of society he's not like oh i you know i don't tip well at the restaurant. That's a pretty big flaw right there.

Yeah, there's like a number, like a place where you go where you can't bounce back. You're so much of a piece of shit and so much of a problem in society. I say child molesters. I say anything along those lines. Murderers, like you can't bounce back from that. You can't. You got to stop. We got to clean house.

Yeah. And it's just like you have to prune trees and you have to shoot horses with broken legs. All right? Right, Brian? Yes. What the fuck are we talking about, man? It's supposed to be about religion. So you didn't learn anything doing this book.

You will learn something about the reactions of people. Yeah. You braced yourself for controversy. and even this conversation you know yeah I'm sure there's gonna be people you're lucky you don't have a Twitter seriously do you have a Facebook Facebook you know what is it was your is it Danielle Bellelli yep I have a nice picture of me holding my daughter flipping people off really yes Wow so you're prepared for this response from the show yeah did you do that in response or you had it like that?

I think it was my attitude over the last few months where I was like, I've been through enough shit. That's kind of my feeling toward the universe. You know, one end I'm protective of the only good thing there is. And then the other end, I'm like, fuck you all. Is your go-to karaoke song by R.E.M. by chance? No, it's Pavarotti. That's right. You get that accent, you might as well just bust out some opera go for it right is that you singing over there yeah okay you're all right

don't hurt yourself over there um so your book when is it going to be out i should be this week this week keep giving me different dates i mean amazon has it for like december 20 but amazon always gets it wrong so i talked to the publisher and they told me that should be be this week. This week? They keep giving me different dates. I mean, Amazon has it for like December 20, but Amazon always gets it wrong. So I talked to the publisher and they told me that it should be out this week. And it's Daniel Bolelli. Yep. Exactly. How do you say it in Italian? Daniele?

Daniele Bolelli. Daniele. Daniele Bolelli. Yeah. B-O-L-E-L-L-I. And you can find him on Facebook if you want. Look for the guy holding his daughter, giving you the finger. And this has been fun, man.

Really interesting conversation. Thanks, man. And I hope people buy your book. And you've got to come back again. We'll talk about some more shit. I'm sure. That's the beautiful thing about religion. There's hundreds and hundreds of hours of discussion just on the silliness, right?

Or MMA or drugs or anything. Beautiful. It's been a lot of fun, man. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for being here. All Beautiful. It's been a lot of fun, man. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. That's it, folks. Thank you to The Fleshlight for sponsoring the podcast. Thank you to...

Oh, go to JoeRogan.net. Click on the link for The Fleshlight and enter in the code name ROGAN and you get 15% off. And thanks to Onnit.com, O-N-N-I-T.com for sponsoring us as well. The makers of Alpha Brain, the cognitive enhancing supplement.

I should use some. I've talked too much. It's that caffeine withdrawal. It is, probably. I'm probably half retarded now. The new stuff is New Mood. It's a 5-HTP and L-tryptophan supplement. And we also have Shroom Tech, a cordyceps mushroom and B12 energy supplement

that's fantastic for people who work out really hard. I fucking love it. I'm really getting into that stuff lately. This Wednesday, as in tomorrow, we are having a show here at the Ice House in Pasadena. What time is the show, Brian? I don't know. I haven't figured it out yet. We haven't figured it out yet.

But we'll tweet it. That's how we roll, bitches. It's wild. We're crazy, but it'll be a lot of cool guys. Burt Kreischer's going to be on the show. Burt Kreischer's also going to be on the Ice House Chronicles podcast that we do. Whenever we have a show here at the Ice House, during the time the guys are on stage and before everyone's on stage, we'll do a podcast right here at this Death Squad studio.

And so Kreischer will be on that. And who knows how many other. Hopefully Joey Diaz. Is Joey in town? I don't know Mad Flava bitches we'll have to bring Joey in

we've been having some kick ass shows they're amazing last one was Steve-O Bill Burr who else Ari Shafir

Joey Diaz Brendan Walsh me I mean these are like the craziest shows you can get and it's cheap

what is it 15 bucks? yep yeah 15 bucks and it's a real cool place because it's intimate. It's only 85 seats. And we also have a show Friday every week usually for Death Squad where I take all the other people like Sam Tripoli, Jason Tebow, Tom Segura, and all those guys, and I give them their own separate show too. Yeah, solid shows if you're around and you want to check those out.

I mean, even if you don't know the guys' names, I guarantee you, if they're on these shows, they're solid. And so this weekend's the UFC. Oh, who else we got? We got Doug Stanhope, bitches. Doug Stanhope will be joining us on Thursday. Thursday, Doug Stanhope is going to join us. He's got a show Wednesday and Thursday.

Wednesday is at the Irvine Improv and Thursday is at the Brea Improv. So we're going to bring him down here on Thursday, do a podcast with Doug, get piss-eyed drunk, and then take him out to the Improv in Brea that night. So if you're looking to see him,

go to the Irvine Improv's website. Just Google that shit, son. Go see Doug Stanhope on Wednesday at Irvine and then Thursday in Brea. Doug will be here on Thursday for a podcast. That's it. This fucking show's over. Thank you, Daniela. Daniela, did I say it right?

You got it. Daniela Bilelli, my friend. You've brought us some very interesting topics for conversation here, and I'm going to check out your book. And check out his new book, 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know About Religion religion which should be out this week on info.com disinfo disinfo not info.com info they're a bunch of fucking liars disinfo.com we're telling you the truth uh subscribe to death squad it's the only way on itunes subscribe to it because it's the only way you can get the ice house chronicles which

i think is one of the best podcasts out there it's all of us hanging out pre-shows and after shows and you get some hilarious shit out of it it's a lot of fun everybody's getting amped up for the show and there's a lot of shit talking and it's always fun when you got like 10 comics in a room together the last one was beautiful it was Joey Diaz and Brendan Walsh

and it was everybody and the one before with Yoshi I mean they're really fun alright the fucking show's over love you bitches see ya bye Walsh and it was everybody and the one before with Yoshi I mean they're they're they're really fun all right fucking show's over love you bitches see ya bye