The Joe Rogan Experience - #1865 - Aaron Rodgers

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Aaron Rodgers is a quarterback for the Green Bay Packers and 4-time winner of the NFL Most Valuable Player. www.nfl.com/players/aaron-rodgers/

the Joe Rogan experience so it's good to see you man good to see you man thanks how you doing my pleasure how you doing I'm doing great yeah it's been an interesting uh year or so but man it's been it's been a good year what was the the craziness like? Like when all the people were calling you a plague rat? I mean, it's you and how do you say the guy's name? The tennis player? Novak

Djokovic. Yeah, Djokovic. I mean, we talk about the healthiest human beings on Earth. Professional athletes. We should have planned in the U.S. Open now. Yeah, I know. Because of this. Which is bananas. The guy's already talk about the healthiest human beings on earth professional playing in the u.s open now yeah i know because of this which is bananas the guy's already had covid recovered from it i think he had it twice yeah and he's one of the best athletes in the world i mean the guy's body's in tip-top condition players are oh credible fitness incredible yeah yeah and no you can't come

you didn't follow the rules like it defies science, defies logic. It doesn't make any sense. None of it makes sense, especially at this stage of the pandemic, air quotes. I mean, what the fuck, man? What was it like for you? It was really difficult for sure, and a lot of different reasons. I think Really difficult, for sure, and a lot of different reasons. I think I knew that this was coming down, that at some point I was going to talk about my status because I'd chosen to not get vaxxed for reasons that you talked about on your show and I talked about. We should just say it because it's kind of important. You're allergic to a medication or a part of the vaccine. Right.

What is it called? PEG, polyethylene glycol. And so I did my research. Now, I think typically speaking, because I'm healthy and I take care of myself, getting vaccinated was not on the top of my list. But, you know, I wanted to look into it because everybody was doing it and talking about it and trying to be safe. And I wanted to make sure I was, you know, doing my part, if that's what was necessary, to keep myself safe and my loved ones safe and my teammates safe. And I looked into it. And at the time, I went on the CDC website, and they specifically said, you know, if you're allergic to PEG, we do not recommend you get vaccinated with the mRNA vaccinations. So the only other one available was Johnson & Johnson,

and it had just got pulled at the time for blood clots. So I looked into other options which included an immunization process through a holistic doctor and I researched and talked to probably a dozen different MDs and found a protocol that I felt like was the best available. And what's involved in that protocol? It involved basically a couple month process of taking a diluted strand of the virus. So I was doing basically what the vaccine is supposed to do without- How did they do that?

I don't know that the exact way that they did that but but it was by injection no no it was it was it was oral and how are they even getting a diluted strand of the virus I don't I don't know that exactly or want to get into that exactly. But, um, but there was, uh, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people that I knew in this circle that, that we're using that have been doing this to protect ourselves. Cause we were thinking, Hey, look, uh, you know, for me, I didn't want to risk anaphylactic shock, uh, or any type of clotting with, you know, shock or any type of clotting associated with the vaccine. So that was my only option,

either do nothing or do this process. And I felt like that this was the best way to protect myself and my teammates and that the NFL would understand and maybe grant me a waiver because one of the most difficult parts about the whole process was that there was clearly two classes of player at the facility. There was the vaxxed and the unvaxxed. And the vaxxed had full privileges. They tested once every two weeks. They had full privileges on the road. They could go out to dinner on the road, they could go to a concert in town, they could go to a comedy show that was in town, they could be at any place they wanted to and live life normally. Non-vaxxed, fully masked, zero privileges on the road, could not go into establishments with more than 15 people,

you could not be around more than three individuals from the team outside the facility. All these different, what I think now we all realize were crazy policies. And that's what actually got me into trouble was that I attended a Halloween party in a 10,000 square foot warehouse with 18 other individuals, all fully vaccinated and myself not vaxxed and was eventually fined for that. Ended up getting COVID from a vaccinated teammate of mine who contracted COVID and spread it. And that's where it gets a little bit crazy. And I told this story, I think on the McAfee show, but I said, when I came to camp,

they knew I was not vaccinated, right? So you had to submit a vaccination card. That went to the system with the NFL and obviously I didn't have one. So I was given, we were given wristbands too. So everybody in the facility knew who was vaxxed and who wasn't vaxxed. Vaxxed was green, non-vaxxed was yellow. So already it's weird, you know, like wearing your colors out there. And I think, you know, to do an aside here, there was a lot of shaming involved in it.

There was a lot of public shaming that was attempted to coerce people to get vaccinated. Because not only are you wearing a yellow wristband, you're the only ones wearing masks. And you have to work out by yourself. Can't work out with your teammates. So no drills, nothing? yourself. Can't work out with your teammates. So no drills, nothing? Well, you could at practice, but weight room stuff or our weight room every day, we're working out on the side, just the seven of us not vaccinated. Is it because practice is outside and the weight room is inside? Supposedly, yeah. So they knew my vaccination status from the start, as did all my teammates. There was a lot of talk about I

endangered my teammates and, you know, I lied to my teammates or my team from day one that I returned, which was July 25th, probably, of 2021. They knew where I was at. Everybody did. Also on the side, I had an appeal going with the NFL because I said, look, here's my health issues. Here's the protocol I went through. Here's the research behind it. Give them 500 pages of research from a number of people that put together case reviewed studies around homeopathy and. And immunizations and safety in them and also the efficacy of them. and immunizations and the safety in them and also the efficacy of them.

And then I had a conversation with the league and the league said in this conversation, this is what I knew that my appeal was definitely not going to happen, was they said it's not possible for a vaccinated player, a person, sorry, to contract or transmit COVID if they've been vaccinated. And I said, you got to be kidding me. Because I showed up and five people, non-players, five people fully vaxxed are out with COVID. So what are you talking about? And he said, you're a conspiracy theorist.

Oh, boy. And I said, no, I just think I'm a realist. I'm just looking at the facts here. What point in the pandemic was this? This was like beginning of August 2021. So by then they had already known that breakthrough infections were real. By then it had already, I mean, the vaccines started being rolled out. Was it, when, what was the first year?

It was January of 2020 where they started getting them to older people, right? No, no, that's when it started. Right, I'm sorry. January of 2021, rather. Sorry. January of 2021, they started giving out to older people, wasn't that? They started rolling them out in March and April, because that's when i was going through the process of researching and looking into what i could do to protect myself having the you know the allergy and by august people were still they were already

getting it even though they had been vaccinated so this was not you know it wasn't talked about i don't think a whole lot right but it was four months it was definitely happening so it was definitely happening yeah yeah i had only known one person at that time somewhere around April that had been vaccinated and also got COVID and I just thought it was an aberration I didn't based on what I saw in the first few weeks at the facility and that's why I thought there was an opportunity. But it was difficult because we were separated. There was a whole other situation that was going on that, you know, also was going on in the rest of society is that my non-vax teammates who were on the bubble, right? So 53 guys make the active roster, 16 on the practice squad.

So there's 69 guys on the squad. There's 90 in camp, right? So of the, I said seven, I think it was about 10 guys not vaxxed, only a few of us were guaranteed roster spots, like we were going to be on the team. And there's a lot of bubble guys. The general managers, and there was talk around the league of general managers were not going to keep bubble non-vax players, right? So they're already up against it. Not only did non-vax players have a harder chance

of making the squad, but they also had an almost 0% opportunity to get a workout afterwards. So if you get cut, right, and the season starts every Tuesday during the football season, most teams will bring in anywhere from five to 15 guys for workouts just to see who's out there. Is there any players they can add to the roster? So if you weren't vaxxed, you had a very low percentage, not just of keeping a job, but even getting a job opportunity, like a, you know, a workout, which is wild. And so after this conversation with the league, I knew that my appeal was going away.

And they were doing this, I call it a witch hunt, you know, where they were asking every single player, are you vaccinated? You know, they're asking a bunch of big quarterbacks and some guys were saying, you know, it's, you know, you know, it's personal or whatever, you know, I didn't want to talk about their status and I'd almost guaranteed you weren't vaccinated. Right. So then they were getting ripped and certain guys said, yes, I'm vaccinated. And you know, then they tried to get them to say shit about their teammates, you know, who weren't vaccinated, like dog their teammates out. So I've been ready the entire time for this question and had thought about how I wanted to answer it. And I had come to the conclusion, I'm going to say I've been immunized. And if there's a follow-up, then talk about my process.

But thought there's a possibility that I say I'm immunized. Maybe they understand what that means. Maybe they don't. Maybe they follow up. They didn't follow up. So then I go the season, them thinking, some of them, that I was vaccinated. Because the only follow-up they asked was basically asking me to rip on my teammates.

Like, what do you say to your teammates who aren't vaccinated? Like, what kind of example do you feel like you're setting, you know, to your teammates who aren't vaccinated? I said, hey, it's everybody's own decision with their body, and we're super healthy individuals. We take care of ourselves. We understand what goes in our bodies,

and I don't have any judgment on any decision that a guy makes with their own body. Right. But I knew at some point if I contracted COVID or if word got out because it's the NFL and there's leaks everywhere, it was possible I'd have to answer the questions. And then sure enough, I contract COVID in the beginning of November, end of October. And that's when the shitstorm hit because now I'm a liar. I'm endangering the community, my teammates, all these people. And the attempted takedown of me and my word and, my word and my integrity, uh, began. But, um, so that was, that was difficult, but I will say, and I'm thankful to be on this show. Like I really appreciate you and you helping me out during that time. I reached out to you, uh, I think

beginning of the season, I feel like, and just said, Hey, cause you had talked about in your podcast a little bit, you'd had some, um and just said, hey, because you had talked about it on your podcast a little bit. You'd had some, you know, controversial, maybe less controversial now. People on there talking about it. Quite a bit less controversial now. Talking about their, you know, people, experts in the field talking about, you know, their own ideas about COVID. And, you know, you helped me with a, you know, a game plan to be ready in case I did get COVID. And, and I followed it to a tee. And when I got COVID, you know,

within 36 hours, I was, you know, symptom free and feeling amazing. But the protocols was you're off for 10 days. So I missed a game. We lost a football game. I came back, had to answer a ton of questions about it. Obviously I had my, you know, basically I lost, you know, the majority of allies I thought I had in the media. The good thing is it drew a real line in the sand and everybody who wanted to jump on me and trash me did and showed their true colors. And very few people, you know, kind of in the media at least, stuck by me. Well, it was like McCarthyism at a certain point in time. It was like a red scare.

Like everybody was looking for communists. They were just looking for non-vaxxers. scare like everybody was looking for communists they were just looking for non-vaxxers it was it was like a fever in the air because people had been convinced that this was the thing that was going to get us out of the pandemic and if you didn't follow that thing that you were the enemy of it so i could kind of understand why people had that perspective if they hadn't looked into it which is a weird term or at least if they hadn't, you know, it's kind of a shallow term, but if they hadn't, you know, consulted with real experts, especially in your case, that when you had an actual allergy, it's a particular issue and the desire

to not take the medication that was pulled for clots that seems pretty fucking reasonable but reason was out the window at that point in time well that's what was crazy to me was people just saying oh just get the jab you know the keith olbermann's of the world just get the damn jab and i'm like that guy is the gift that keeps giving he is fucking hilarious unintentionally hilarious like he's a character in a movie i I love it. I hope he keeps talking. But that was the sentiment. I'm like, anaphylactic shock. Also, I'm super healthy and take care of myself really well.

Oh, by the way, I just went from woke up, really bad symptoms to 36 hours later, I feel great. And no one wanted to hear that. No one wanted to hear that there was a way that you could get through it without being vaccinated and that you would recover very quickly. No one wanted to hear that. And they were coming with all sorts of reasons why you shouldn't even say that. Oh, and they came after you about horse dewormer and Sanjay was on here and you mopped the floor with them. And, you know, and then, you know, then he goes back on CNN and basically, you know, tries to rip you.

It's just like it was it was ridiculous. But let me just say this point, because I think this is really important. The you know, the two main things against me that they want to say one that i lied i didn't i didn't you didn't ask me a follow-up but i said i was immunized and i went through an immunization process so i don't know how you would classify that other than say i was immunized but that to me was the truth is the truth you didn't have to follow up you have to follow up i tell you what i mean that that's one number two that i really I really don't like and didn't like the characterization, that I put people in danger, right? That I endangered my teammates. I lied to my teammates.

And I already said from day one, they knew the medical staff, everybody in the organization, everybody knew I'm wearing a yellow wristband. I'm not vaxxed. Everybody knew my status. But number two, what non-vaxxed players had to do is we had to test every single morning. So vaccinated players testing once every two weeks, right? Non-vaxxed every single morning, every off day, every day of the bye week, off for a week while everybody else is off traveling and enjoying their life. We stay in Green Bay and we test every single day. So every day that you saw me, and I've said it before, I go to about two places in Green Bay.

I go to the grocery store and I go to Barnes and Noble. I love to read and I got to get my groceries. If you saw me at those two places, you can be 100% sure that I tested that morning and then I tested negative. Before I even could walk into the facility, I had to test, wait in my car, and then wait for 30 minutes for them to text me and say that you're negative, you can enter the building. So every single day I was at the facility, every single day that any of my teammates saw me, any of my coaches, every single day that you saw me at Barnes and Noble or at the grocery store, I was negative for that day. Like I took it seriously because obviously there was a lot going on. Now, I didn't believe in wearing a mask at a press conference. You have a room full of reporters who are fully vaxxed,

wearing masks, sitting 30 feet away from me. And again, this goes to the shame. They wanted me as a non-vaxxed player to wear a mask for an interview. While you're negative, you were tested that day. While I'm negative that morning in a room full of fully vaccinated people who are, none of them are closer than 30 feet away from me. I don't think during a pandemic, there's anything wrong with testing people every day.

I mean, I think if you want to keep people safe and you want to keep that from spreading throughout the team, that's probably the best way to approach it. But everything else just seems so nuts. But we're looking at it, you know, hindsight is 20-20, right? We're looking at it from after it's over. And so many people, they just bought the narrative that was being promoted by CNN

and MSNBC and wherever that if you get vaccinated, you can't get COVID, you can't spread COVID. That was the narrative. And that's my thing. Listen, I get it. Like, you want to test everybody every day?

Cool. That's fine. You don't want to keep people safe. That's the benchmark for it. But as we look back now, let's not revise history. Let's not revise history on what actually happened and what was said. Because what was said was, you get the vax, you can't spread it or contract it. And no one seems upset that that was a lie, including Birx, who has said that she had always known that it was not going to stop transmission and it was not going to stop people from spreading it, which is wild. She would say, we knew that you were still going to get it, even if you got vaccinated, which is, no one said that. No.

Pandemic of the unvaccinated. Yeah. What do they call the winter? Winter of death or whatever for the non-vaxxed? I saved that. Winter of death and suffering. Yeah. It's like they were Game of Thrones.

They were talking about the fucking White Walkers coming. Winter of death. I mean, Jesus Christ. It's so wild because at that point when they had said that, we had already realized like, oh, this is 78% of the people hospitalized were obese. Most of the people that died were either obese or very overweight or uh rather uh very old comorbidities yeah four comorbidities at least four for like more than 50 of the people yeah but people love to look at someone to be mad at that's one of the things if they can find a guy like you is killing it and our our league is one of the greatest you know books every single year that's written you know it's it's it's a mystery novel you never know what's going to happen but in a great epic novel you need your protagonist and your antagonist you need your heroes and your villains and i think they like, we're going to make this guy the villain because he's been so good for so long, and he's not vexed.

But I think it ultimately didn't hurt me because at the end of the season, I was playing really well. I came back from COVID, played Seahawks, we won, and I didn't have a great game that game, but the last, like, six, seven games, I played really, really well. And then there was a reporter out of Chicago who said that I'm the biggest jerk in the league and he wouldn't vote for me for MVP because of my VAC status.

So it kind of put the rest of the other 49 MVP voters, I think, on notice going, The other 49 MVP voters, I think, got noticed going, oh, are you going to let your personal political bias enter into a conversation about who the most valuable player of the league is and not vote for this guy because he's not vaxxed? I think that played into at least some of their minds at some point because they would have to answer, how do you justify not voting for this guy for MVP? Right. So ultimately, you came out ahead. Yeah. I think so. How long was it before you were treated normally?

Oh, this is the best part. Once the playoffs happened, it went from non-vax testing every single day, and vax at that point had to test once a week now so it went down from two weeks to one week but once you got in the playoffs you only test if you're symptomatic vaxed or not vaxed yeah they didn't want to take any chances once you're in the playoffs they want everybody to play of course A lot of money on the line, baby. When did they start treating you normally, though? Like, did you feel like with the press and with, I mean, now it's. There's still that mark, I think.

Really? Yeah. Really? Some of those reporters are such cunts. It's just like there's a thing in sports where there's way less of it in MMA, but there's a thing in sports where it's par for the course to be a douchebag to players, to treat them badly and to talk about them badly. Because I guess they have this very special role in society where they get to be professional athletes. So you're allowed to, you know, if there's a dropped ball or there's a play that doesn't go well, you can say all sorts of personal things about them

and disparage their character and call them lazy and call them entitled and all these different things that they love to do. And it's really like ramped up in sports more than anywhere. And I think it's because of sports fans. Like sports fans have been doing that forever, you know, when they're at work. You know, you show up at the job and you're like, see that fucking game last night? That guy sucks. You know, and there's this like attitude that they like i think repeated and it's really these uh clunky personalities they're not good reporters they're not they're not like brilliant people they just have found this thing that they do they just act like a cunt you know what i mean yeah and some of them use my name for a long time to

to stay on some of their networks. Yeah. And you never forget. It's just, you know, I think the interesting thing for me is to see how it changed and whether and how my vaccination status, they couldn't get past that. They couldn't get past years of friendship and me doing favors for them, doing interviews with them if they needed something, making sure I made time to give them a soundbite or do an interview or come on their show. And I'm talking about probably a dozen that I thought were allies in the media meaning friendly to me and that they knew like if if they needed a guest or something and i had the time i would always

make time for them and haven't heard from any of them i think you got off light that's good cut them out if that's the kind of people they are you know either they should apologize to you and learn and grow or get them out of your fucking life. That's why I said it was a blessing. It really was because it made it clear who is in my corner and who is not. Yeah. I mean, whatever happened to being like a charitable, forgiving person? Isn't that like a quality?

There's none of that. If you don't follow the mainstream narrative or if you don't agree with me take out the mainstream narrative you don't agree with me i can't be friends with you because i can only i get to live in an echo chamber and that's what society and social media has done i think on so many levels like you're saying earlier 20 years ago the guy bitching it you know about his favorite player played bad is bitching to his buddies at work, and now they're all on social media going nuts and stirring up. Like we were talking about earlier, it takes just a couple people with an opinion that can sway something in a direction and then start this landslide of negativity around something.

Yeah, that's why I don't go on those things. I just post and ghost. I post and I get the fuck out of there. I mean, it's very, it's valuable for me, social medias, for, you know, podcasts and comedy and stuff like that. And, you know, occasionally I like to point out cool stuff. Like they found some. Yeah, you do.

Every time. Some of the robot stuff's really fucking. It's coming. We're fucked. We're fucked. We're fucked. They're coming. I mean, whether they're using them for military or they're going to use them for law enforcement, but we're going to have robots wandering through the streets telling you, show your papers.

I robot, man. Yeah. It's going to happen. I remember that movie used to be so fun because I used to think of it as like, oh, wow, this is never going to happen, but this is kind of crazy if it did and now I'm like Jesus when is that going to happen because you see those those Boston Dynamics robots like my friend Lex Friedman has one and it was over his house I was like Jesus man it's like it's like someone having a werewolf in their house like what are you doing with this fucking thing get this out of here like I saw a robot video the other day of robots

shooting at targets and they were fucking with it yeah hitting in the back and messing around and it still find its range and you know I think that's fake isn't that one fake because there's there's a series of guys that do these amazing CGI things and I think that's one of the things they did I think they're trying because that was scary yeah it's scary but some of the little dog did. I hope it's fake because that was scary. Yeah, it's scary. But some of the little dog robots that open doors and stuff. Have you ever seen that, I think it's called Heavy Metal.

It's an episode of Black Mirror. Yeah. Have you ever seen that episode where the robot's chasing after the lady? That is so possible. So possible. Probably.

All you have to do is be able, yeah, and if it's tracking with satellite and if you have a fucking RFID chip that they can track or some sort of a Bluetooth locator, like an AirTag, and they know where you are at all times. We're about a decade away from a very strange world. And we're all eating insects? Yeah. We're either insects or Bill Gates' fake meat. He's going to make us eat his fake meat so we look like him.

He's a non-health expert. He's really unhealthy people that want to tell people how to be healthy. It's very strange. And they all want to use climate change as this is the main reason why you have to follow this rule that's going to enrich them beyond imagination. If they can really get you to get off of meat and start eating a plant-based burger that their company develops or a bug-based burger. I'm not opposed to eating bugs. I was the host of Fear Factor, and I've eaten a lot of bugs. And when I, last time I went to Mexico, actually, um, when we, we went to this resort and we got to this place and they had a bowl of like stir fried crickets that, uh, it was

like a teriyaki flavored stir fried cricket. I was like, what the fuck is this? This is like a few years back before the pandemic. And I tried it. It was like, it's not bad. It's kind of salty. They were good. It's like, just a bug bad. It's kind of salty. They were good. It's like just a bug is no different than a crab. Crabs are delicious. They're just big bugs. That's what they are. In fact, one of the things that we found out from Fear Factor is that people that are allergic to shellfish are also allergic to roaches. And we found that out the hard way. I ate a roach. I ate a roach. That was a great show, by the way.

It's a fun show. Yeah. But roaches don't taste bad. They don't. They taste like almost nothing. It's like a flavor. It's gross that you're eating a roach. But when you're eating it, I was like, this is nothing.

There's not much going on here. If I had to eat roaches to stay alive, I'd eat roaches. If I was trapped somewhere, I'd eat roaches. It's fast. Nah. Nah. I'd eat roaches. If I was trapped somewhere, I'd eat roaches. It's fast. Nah. Nah. I'd rather be full. I'd rather eat meat.

I have a distorted perception of food, obviously, because of Fairfactor, I think. I know what you can eat and what you can't eat. Most of it's psychological. And a lot of the things that we serve people, in fact, were delicacies in other countries. In fact, we're delicacies in other countries. Like I had a lot of Filipino friends and we serve balut, which is, I believe it's a duck. It's a fertilized duck egg. And so it has like the embryo in the egg and it's a delicacy in the Philippines.

And so my Filipino friends were like, that's hilarious. We eat that all the time. We love it. Have you ever seen balut? Yeah, I have now. I feel like I've seen the episode. I used to watch eat that all the time. We love it. Have you ever seen Balut? Yeah, I have now. I feel like I've seen the episode. I used to watch the show all the time. Yeah, it's not bad.

It's just in your head. But it's like, it's a real like, kind of almost fully. Feathers and everything. That's it. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So they had to eat that. That little fertilized duck.

Yeah, I don't know how that ever became a delicacy it's probably very nutritious if i had to guess i mean it's got all the organs and everything in there it's probably very rich in protein and yeah i didn't eat one of those but they served them what did you eat though spiders and everything, the, on the very first episode I ate a sheep's eyeball. That was not that bad either. That's all in your head. Um, I ate a tomato horn worm. Not that bad. Didn't taste bad. Uh, I ate, um, an Iraqi cave dwelling spider. I ate live or dead. Yeah., before he got in my teeth. He was dead when I swallowed him.

I ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach. That's one of the big ones. That was, again, it was nothing. It didn't taste like anything. It was, like, very bland. Would you put a little Tabasco or something? No, I think that was an episode where there was a woman who was scared to do it. She wouldn't do it. It was, I believe it was celebrity fear factor and she wouldn't do it.

And so I said, listen, if you do it, I'll do it. Oh yeah. And so I said, look, I'm going to, I'll do it. It's no big deal. I just trying to, wanted to get her to move on. I'm like, come on, you can do this. Like, but I'm so jaded by it at this point. And now?

Yeah. Same thing. Doesn't bother me. Like people could throw up right in front of me. There it is. So that's the Madagascar hit. Look at me, a full head of hair. Back in the day.

So it was no big deal, man. Is that Kevin Federline? That's me, buddy. No, no, no. Oh, the other guy? Oh, no, no. Yeah. That's the other guy.

Yeah, one of the Backstreet Boys. Yeah. Which one is it? Kevin. Same from Backstreet Boys. Kevin, but that's a better line. Allie Landry. It was fun.

Stephen Baldwin. But no big deal. It's just, it's in your head. It's like, what am I eating? But really, if you had to eat a bowl of them and stay alive, it's not hard. You're not convinced. I mean, people ate animal dicks on that show. We served them buffalo penis. Ladies, man.

Deer penis. Yeah. Guys had to eat, too. It was a weird show. It was awesome. But yeah, eat the bugs. Eat ze bugs. Yeah, I don't understand that. I guess it's because, I mean, it is a good source of protein. The thing is, like cricket protein, I know guys who eat that. They have cricket protein shakes, although there's like a powdered cricket protein. Apparently it's like a good source of protein.

They eat it as a protein shake. Well, still on the fence. You should be. It's not as good. Nice ribeye is better. Yeah. You know? Nice elk steak, nice buffalo ribeye.

That's better. Something that you shoot, too. Yeah. That's even better. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, it's just to what we're saying, this is a weird time in terms of like control and in terms of the influence of these forces with amazing resources that are trying to lean society into a very specific direction.

You know, the World Economic Forum's article or the rather advertisement where they're like, you will own nothing and you'll be happy and be happy yeah just imagine saying that to people because that doesn't even make any sense because someone's going to own these things so who owns it the state the state owns it what about you do you own anything are people renting these things how's that work does someone own it no one owns it no so everybody could just take whatever you want but you're gonna be happy joe you're gonna be happy you're gonna be really what if I'm already happy? You will give us your land imagine being able to say that this is going to make you happy

Like how the fuck do you know it makes people happy? I think when whenever I reach a point where I think That I you know, I really don't give any fucks then I think about the world economic economic for I really don't give any fucks. Then I think about the World Economic Forum. Yeah, that is a strange thing because I never even knew that was a thing until a couple of years ago. And then I started watching. Nothing to see here, just the world leaders talking about policy for the entire world. Yeah, no big deal. Nothing to worry about.

The CEO of Pfizer was on that and he was talking about a medication that you swallow that has some sort of a chip in there that can tell people whether or not you actually took the medication. And he says, imagine the compliance. And this is a guy that profits at an extraordinary level from these medications. I mean, he is insanely wealthy. He is the CEO of one of the biggest corporations on planet Earth. And he's saying, imagine the compliance. Compliance.

Yeah. He's not saying, imagine how many healthy people we could have. Imagine how many diseases we can cure. Of all the words to use there. Yes, yes. Compliance. Compliance is amazing. Because that's, look, if it's about his bottom line,

which it most certainly is, the bottom line requires compliance. The more compliance, the more sales. Gotta make sure they're taking those pills. Yeah, it's fucking wild. Brought to you by Pfizer. 75% of all television advertisement is all pharmaceutical drugs.

And aren't we one of the few countries that allows for- Only two. Only two, right? Only two. And the other one is New Zealand. And New Zealand is far more restricted than us. Yeah. But all those other countries, they think that we're out of our fucking minds.

Advertising for all these things are going to make you happy. There's a girl running through a wheat field and there's great music playing and she was- And here's the side effects. Yeah. But then we're going to finish with a happy thought running through a wheat field and there's great music playing and she was here's the side effects yeah but then we're gonna finish with a happy thought running through a meadow the side effects are crazy playing with your grandson yeah it's a strange time man it's a strange time because our information our media has been co-opted by money and the money that comes from selling pharmaceutical drugs and we all all know, look, I remember I went and I got my nose fixed. I had a deviated septum and I walked out of there and the doctor tried to give me two different painkillers. I said, but I'm not in pain. And he said, but you will be.

And I said, well, how's it going to get worse? How's it going to get worse than this? Like, it's really not that big a deal. Like I I've been hit in the nose fucking 200 times. I have no idea. It was broken. I broke my nose at least half a dozen, a dozen times. I don't even know how many times I broke it. Because, I mean, in training, you leave and you have a bloody nose. It's totally normal.

Because we're talking about, like, the deviation of cartilage. I mean, it didn't break the physical structure of my nose more than twice that I know of, like the actual bone itself. But the cartilage was separated and there was blood in there all the time so it was normal So this guy telling me that it's gonna be worse than what I normally experience I was like how but he was like pushing these on me. I never took anything. It never even hurt Never bought me woke up in the morning waiting for the pain Nothing all I could do is breathe. You know I had some stuff some big foam tube stuck up there for a couple weeks i think and then it was nothing

yeah i mean the pain management especially with our sport is fascinating to see how things are treated and i use quotations untreated because um up until probably a decade ago you know it was easily accessible to get oxy per Percocet, Vicodin, whatever you wanted. Did they make sure you weren't playing on that stuff? No, you played definitely. Wow. And did you ever play on it? Yeah.

What did you play on? Percocet. And what was the impact on your physical performance? I mean, it was more for pain management, so I wasn't taking like, uh, you know, any high dosage, but, um, stupid ultimately, you know, just, you know, here's the thing I've had, I had knee issues for a long time and, you know, you take anti-inflammatories, right? So you're taking anti-inflammatories that all come with a warning. If you take this more than a few weeks, you got to get your blood tested, right? Because it can do damage to your liver. There is so many different things you can take now for anti-inflammatory

things that are natural, that don't cause damage to your body. Right. CBD. Yeah. Yeah. But CBD is frowned upon and it's always said, well, there's not enough research yet about, you know, CBD and any, you know, positive, you know, uh, you know, uh, help that it can do for your body, but we're still giving out painkillers way less. And it's actually monitored now. Cause there were a few teams that were abusing that. Again, this was over a decade ago, I think, when they really changed the policy. But no, it's ass backwards, the whole treatment of the professional.

Definitely in our sport, we're still giving out that kind of stuff. When did they stop doing it as frequently? Was it when the opioid crisis kicked in? No, I think there was one team that people were kind of raiding the cupboards, and then they put a stop to it. So now it's more of a pharmacy-based thing where you've got to sign in and sign out, and it's monitored and different things.

But they don't discourage players from playing on pain pills? No, I don't think so. I mean, I can't imagine someone fighting on that stuff. I mean that the USADA is very strict in terms of like what you're allowed to take and what you're not allowed to take and you know they test people very frequently so much so that you know Paulo Costa just fought in the last UFC they actually tested him the day of the weigh-in which caused a huge outrage because this guy cuts a lot of weight, he was dehydrating himself, and they show up at his house at 6 o'clock in the morning and asked him to test, which is egregious, ridiculous, and they'll never happen again.

They put a stop to it and made sure USADA doesn't step out of line, but at least they stop people from competing on things. Which they should. Yeah, because I can imagine. In the NFL, for years, 70s and 80s, there was a lot of stuff. Guys were taking some crazy stuff. Even when I was in high school, people were taking rip fuel, which is basically speed, playing on that.

But like, tortle shots up until recently were really, across the league, kind of standard. And tortles are anti-inflammatory, right? Right. But like, but some of the pain management, you know, it's been a little bit wild for a while. And I just don't understand why there isn't more natural options looked into that are out there that have research behind it. And we're still pushing the same you know percocet, vicodin, oxy if you have pain and yeah you know it's i i saw uh at one point a

teammate of mine who was unable to get treatment on a post-surgical operation without being put under anesthesia because of an addiction to pain medicine. Wow. So he was so addicted that they couldn't even risk him trying it. Yeah, and I know of multiple teammates over the years, I'm talking about high school, college, and pros, who have dealt with their own relapses

around addiction to pain pills. But see, they're so addictive. And that's another thing that the pharmaceutical company tried to lie about. The pharmaceutical companies tried to lie. I mean, that's dope sick. That's the premise of that whole show. They were lying about whether or not these things were addictive when they knew they were. This is the same people.

The same people that were telling you that you had to get jabbed are the same people that were telling you that opioids were not addictive. That paid out $2.3 billion in the biggest fraud case in the history of the world. Yeah, and then there's the Vioxx case that killed more than 60,000 Americans.

Which, when I was in college, everybody was taking Vioxx. Everybody. All my teammates were taking Vioxx. It's dangerous shit. I know a guy who had a stroke from it. A guy who fought in the UFC. Chantix, right?

Yep. As well. I think you said on your show, but there's something crazy. I can't remember the exact number, but how many different products get pulled every single month that were FDA approved? Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah. that were FDA approved? Yeah, it's a lot. That was with John Abramson, who is a doctor who's worked to litigate

against pharmaceutical companies, and in particular against Vioxx when they were doing that. They had clear information that Vioxx was going to be damaging to people. They knew there was problems, and they literally said there's going to be some issues, but we're going to do very well. That's literally internal memo saying we're going to do well financially,

but people are going to have, like, those kind of issues, like cardiovascular issues, blood clotting issues, strokes, they knew it was going to kill people. They knew it. And they got charged. I believe what happened was they made $12 billion and they were fined $5 billion. Which is a good profit margin. It's just crazy that you could have any profit margin off of killing 60,000 people. And these are the people we're supposed to trust?

Like all of a sudden people put aside all of their thoughts that they had kept. You talk to anyone about whether or not the pharmaceutical companies were ethical, whether or not they were telling the truth, whether or not they promoted dangerous medications that were unnecessary, and everybody would say yes. Those same people were calling you a plague rat. It's kind of funny now that it's over.

But in the heat of it was exactly the healthiest swath of the population either that was that was coming after oh no no the people that came after me the hardest were fat it was it was hilarious and i was like do you understand that whatever you're doing to your body is way way worse than what k COVID's going to do to you. Like what you're doing to your body by being fat like this, like if you think you're going to prevent that with some medication that just keeps you from getting COVID and it didn't, it's still, you're fucking dying, man. You're eating yourself to death.

You're eating shitty food and you have a sedentary lifestyle and you're probably taking all sorts of pharmaceutical medication for anxiety and depression and all these other things that are fucking with your head. It's wild, man. It's a wild time because people really are conditioned to think that they can take a medication and cure all their ills and cure almost instantaneously something that has become a problem from lifestyle choices that you've built up over years and years and years of body abuse. So if you abuse your body for so long, and then you think that all of a sudden a pain pill or a this pill or a that pill is going to fix all that.

And no one's telling you, hey, you got to lose weight. Hey, you got to drink water. Hey, you should really exercise on a regular basis. Hey, what about vitamins? Do you know about vitamin D? Go out in the sun. Yeah. 90% of the population is vitamin D deficient, something like that.

Yeah, it's very high, very high. Might not be 90, but I don't want to get fact-checked on that one. I think it's in the high 70s. Okay. Let's find out what percentage of the population. It's probably diminished because there has been quite a bit of publicity during the pandemic about vitamin D deficiency because they showed what percentage of people who are in the ICU, I think it was at one point in time, it was 84% of the people who were in the ICU were insufficient or deficient

in vitamin D. I think that's got to be low there, 42%. Vitamin, hmm, interesting. It's only 42. I thought it was a lot higher than that. That's 2018. I don't think that's accurate. I think it's higher than that.

I don't know. I think it's pulling from a different age group. That's a Cleveland Clinic. Over 65. I would say something you just said a second ago, I would frame it slightly differently. I think you said people are conditioned to think. I think people are conditioned not to think anymore.

They're conditioned to do exactly what they're told by their news station, by their politician. People don't want to think for themselves anymore. Well, they're conditioned at work. Think about if you have a job, the majority of people in this country have a job where you have a boss. The bosses are very small minority. The majority of people work for that boss. If you work for a corporation, they have very strict rules that they'd like you to follow. There's behavior rules. There's language rules. There's dress rules. There's rules about the time you're supposed to be there and the amount of work you're supposed to do and what you're supposed to take home and what's required of you. People

are conditioned to have someone tell them what they can and can't do. And then they get off on Friday and they can't wait to get drunk. And that's part of why they want to get drunk is they want to escape. They want to escape this grind of a world. A person who can become autonomous, a person who can have their own job where it's their business or it's their product that they're selling or their art that they're selling or something where you can be self-sufficient. That is the biggest freedom that a person can have in this culture. And most people don't have that freedom. So most people are conditioned to have someone lay the rules out for them, tell them when they're supposed to be there, tell them what they get when they work for

an hour that most people don't have the ability to just think for themselves. It's been taken away from them because they want to make a living. Yeah. Then you get into student loans. Well, that's the craziest one, right? Because you can't even get rid of those. Right. Every other loan you can bankrupt except for student loans I know of people that are getting social security docked

their social security money is being docked because they owe student loans so you're at the finish line it's the end of your life and you owe money for loans you took out when you were 18. And now you're 65. That's a rough way to leave this life.

It's a rough, and the amount of interest based on it. I was reading about this woman who took out $150,000 in student loans. And now she owes $250,000 because of all the interest and all the time. Yeah. And how much over the course of that loan, what are you paying? Seven figures for sure. Right. I mean, it's a fucking business. And it's also for many people, something that they're not going to use for whatever occupation they choose. I mean, maybe it will help them get a job if it shows that they have a bachelor's in this or a master's in that, but there's a large amount of people out there that are

out there working in a field that is not even their field of study in college. So they have this student loan that didn't even apply to what they wound up doing for a living and then they have to pay it off forever. And it's subsidized by the government. So it's an extraordinarily expensive endeavor. And you're making this choice when you're 18, and you don't know what the fuck you're doing. No.

You have zero idea. It's the most vulnerable time in your life before your frontal lobe forms. You're not even 25 years old, and you're making these life decisions that will affect you forever but it's not pushed uh you know it's shame you're shamed almost if you don't go to college right oh yeah it's never pushed like hey go learn a technical skill right where you can do a year of apprenticeship or college or study and then go make some six figures in a job one of the biggest times in my life where i felt like a loser was right out of high school. Because I took a year off. And I remember just telling people that I was going to take a year off.

And they're like, how could you? So this is Boston, too. Which is very hardcore blue collar workers and educated people that work hard. Like, everybody works hard in Boston. It's cold as fuck in the winter and you got to work. Like, everybody works. And so me taking a year off is like, oh man, you're ruining your fucking life. Joe's going to be a loser. So I really only went to college so that people didn't think I was a loser. That's true. And what'd you study? Well, um, I, I went to, uh, UMass Boston and it was, uh, one of those deals where you didn't have to have your SATs

because it was like continuing education program. So I just started taking courses there and I did it for three years. And then I was like, what am I doing? And then I quit. Yeah. Nice. Worked out. It did, but it didn't have to.

But I mean, nothing I studied was interesting to me. I mean, in terms of something to do for a living, I thought, you know, what am I going to do? I just couldn't figure out anything that was like a traditional job that seemed even remotely appealing. Everything looked like death. It just looked like the death of fun, the death of hopes and dreams. It was just. But also you're 18, 19, and 20. I was so full of energy, too.

And I just wanted to go do stuff. Yeah. I just did the last thing I wanted to do is sit in some fucking classroom and listen to some nonsense and memorize it. That's what I like about friends in Australia or Europe. Most of those kids, they finish school and then they take a year. They save up their money and then they take a year of traveling, going to different cultures different cultures areas come to

the states different parts of europe asia whatever and like go to different cultures think about things yeah find out what's attractive to you yeah what they're what they're into yeah different people yeah that's one of the great things about social media now is that people are able to make a living off of things that were very difficult to pursue like art. Like if you have like really good art, you can post it on social media and people share it. And the next thing you know, you have orders coming in and you're painting for a living. Yeah. I love it. It's great. It's amazing. It's one of the beautiful things about our time. The more people can escape a

system where someone tells you what to do, I think the better. I I mean there's some people that want that and that's fine nothing nothing wrong with wanting a good job there's great jobs out there nothing wrong with that but if you're one of those people like me they just can't fucking sit still and that seemed impossible to you you know back then you know you just felt like a loser it's felt like a fool yeah for sure I mean it was what colleges did you get in I didn't get in this one yeah you know didn you just felt like a loser. You felt like a fool. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was what colleges did you get in? Oh, I didn't get in this one. Yeah. You know, didn't get in the UC.

There's so much pressure on people. And there's zero, I mean, when you were a kid and you were playing football, what was the attitude about playing in the NFL? Was it that this was a pipe dream? Was it something that was realistic because you? Was it was something that was realistic because you were talented? Like how did, how did people approach that? I was on a, uh, spring break trip with a buddy of mine. I remember, and yes, we're 15 hours in a 15 passenger van going down to Mexico, doing some like humanitarian work down there. That was how I'd

spent my sophomore year. And I remember we, And I remember you're talking about who knows what, because back then you might have had a Walkman, but other than that, you didn't have any technology. And my buddy said, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to play in the NFL. He's like, yeah, right. You should never make it. You should call that dude up every month.

But it was a pipe dream. It was a dream for sure, but a pipe dream. One of my favorite stories about somebody who didn't believe in me was I had this teacher at Cal and I wrote this paper in a food appreciation class. That was the class, food appreciation. I could go to that class. And there was like 15 kids on the team in that class, class of like, let's say, 120 people, right? And I wrote a paper, and she said I cited incorrectly. So we had these breakout classes. Of the 120, there'd be like six breakout classes of 20.

So in my class of 20, uh, let's say 15, it was like three, four. So 15 of the kids didn't cite it exactly how she said 14 of them got to rewrite the paper, not me. So I said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to go see her at her, at her hours. Right. So at at Cal, we had practice at 2 o'clock. So you had to be up top at the football facility at 2 o'clock. So I told my quarterback coach, I'm going to be late this day. I've got to go to this teacher's. Hours would start at 2 o'clock.

So I went to her office, and she was ready for me. She had my paper out. I said, look, I'm not asking for a special privilege here, but the other 14 kids who got an F on the paper got to rewrite the paper and I didn't. And she ripped me apart. You are an entitled athlete. You expect things to be given to you. What are you going to do with your life?

I said, I'm going to play in the NFL. She said, no way in hell. No way in hell? You won't make it. You'll get hurt. You'll never make it. Whoa. You will need your education and You won't make it. You'll get hurt. You'll never make it. Whoa. You will need your education, and you will never make it.

And what I've seen from you is you won't amount to anything. Oh, my God. And I said, watch me. What a terrible thing to say to a kid. So big props to that food appreciation teacher at Cal for trying to ruin my life and my dreams, and you just gave me some ammo what a just irresponsible way to communicate with someone who's young and has their whole life ahead of them but then again that's part of the problem is that people don't have their whole life ahead of them anymore and then they see people coming up and they they get upset they're they're upset

by people that they deem to be privileged are they deemed to have a better place in life than they had? The crazy thing is I was probably the best athlete student in that class. And the one that was actually trying to take it seriously. So she specifically singled you out just because you're an athlete and didn't allow you to. So she wanted to damage your grades. The best part is, so I'm late to my QB meeting. And I have a meeting after practice that day with the liaison. He was, I don't know what his exact title was, but he was the liaison between the players and the school, basically.

And I said, hey, look, here's what happened. I went in this office. I told the whole story. I was trying to get the same treatment as the other 14 kids who got to rewrite the paper, and she kind of ripped my ass and was a little derogatory. I didn't think that was, you know, fair or appropriate. They brought some heat down on her. So she had a vendetta against me. At the end of the semester, she wrote up a three-page paper trying to get me expelled from campus. I had to go in front of the Judicial Affairs Board at Cal

in some kangaroo court and ended up having to write, it was two options. One, expulsion, or two, I could write an apology letter to this teacher. She made up all this great shit. I was late to class every day.

I was disruptive. I literally was on time every day. I was disruptive. I literally was on time every day, sat in the middle of the row, and was probably one of the only football players actually taking notes and paying attention. So she just lied? Yeah. Wow.

Maybe she had a thing with football players. I don't know. It's so sad that there's people like that out there. But isn't that social media to an extent now? It's people who are upset and bitter and want to be offended by something. And so they'll do anything to make themselves feel better. If I can put somebody down, if I can rip somebody apart, if I can find somebody to be offended about, and then yeah away we go that's that old expression right hurt people hurt people yeah

she's a damaged lady when she decided to take it out on you took it out on the wrong person though I bet you took it out on a lot of people that were the right person it's probably pretty effective with those tactics it's like hey lady, you're teaching a fucking food appreciation class. What do you learn in food appreciation? Yeah. Is it just like a appreciation of different culinary styles? Like what are you, what are you learning? Couldn't tell you. Nothing stuck with me. Except for attitude. Yeah. That's unfortunate, man. That's a, there's a lot of people like that. And some of them, uh, they ruin lives and some of them, they, they just give people fuel. They

give people anger and determination to prove that person wrong. Yeah. But the shit part is, like you said, for me, it made me just work that much harder. Cause I'm like another person that I can prove wrong. Yeah. But for people not as mentally tough or more easily offended or hurt by something like that, I mean, it's possible, like you said, that she could have, you know, been detrimental to other people. Why? Because you have some tiny position of power. Yeah. And you have some sort of vendetta against, what, the world that you're teaching a food appreciation class?

Yeah, the power. That's the big one, right? The fact that she had that ability. That is so intoxicating for people when they have control over folks. When I talk about power, I talk about the head of a homeowners association. Homeowners association? Like HOA. Oh, yeah.

The people that run those things. homeowners association hoa oh yeah people that run those things i was in it i was in a hoa and years ago and and i was trying to get a fence built behind my house because there was like a running trail behind it and i like my privacy and i went to this meeting and the guy in front of me poor guy he had to paint five different colors on his garage of the color he wanted to paint his house and had to have people from the community come by and vote on it oh my god come by this was the second month that he had came by and this 80 year old woman who has just an ounce of power in the community he was running the hoa goes i'm sorry sir you don't have enough votes you got to come back next month

this fucking guy just trying to paint his you know his, his fucking house. And he's got like, you know, it's five shades of like between tan and Brown, you know, it's all the same goddamn color. Oh God. Come on, man. That's hilarious. Yeah. I've, I've seen people get very upset about that. In fact, this community that I lived in, there was a homeowners association dispute and then somebody poisoned the dogs of people that were running the homeowners association. So like two different dogs got poisoned and they never figured out who did it. They don't know what happened, but this person, whoever it was, killed people's dogs because they didn't like the way they were being treated by the homeowners association. Yeah, man.

Fucking some people need conflict in their life you know and that you know and and being told what to do by someone in the homeowners association it's a fucking oh yeah yeah it's a strange thing man power power is a weird weird weapon that people wield. They really enjoy it. When you're the boss of an office building or you're the person that gets to tell a student that they can't rewrite their paper, there's people that get off on that shit. It's the most intoxicating drug, I think, probably. Yeah. There's some other ones, though, that are pretty intoxicating.

Yeah, there's other ones. Yeah. Sometimes they mix them. Sometimes they're on one when they're getting the natural one from telling you what to do. Yeah. It's awful. But again, there's always those stories, right? There's always those stories of people that try to hold someone back and it doesn't work and then you get to tell people about it. It's great. Yeah. I'm thankful for it. Yeah. Right. There's people in your life that their shitty attitude gives you fuel.

Yeah. And it also, it's a lesson to never behave that way. I mean, not that you ever would, but it's like a real affirmation of that. Yeah. It doesn't take a whole lot to show a little bit of kindness. No. And it's great for you too. That's what people need to understand. They think that by being kind, you're just being good to that person at the

detriment of yourself or at your own expense. But no, it's the opposite. It's actually selfish to be nice because it feels great to be kind and generous. It feels great. It's amazing. It's nice. It's the best. Yeah. Nothing wrong with it. and generous feels great it's amazing it's nice it's the best yeah nothing wrong with it yeah so it's just people need to learn that they you know there's so many examples that they see that they at least they think that this is what's happening where this mean shitty person who tells everybody what to do and is a dictator that person ahead. So they think that they have to be like that. You know, that has always been the Hollywood way, right? That's like Ari Gold from Entourage.

You know, you succeed by telling everybody to fuck off and yell at everybody and kick them out. And I think there's a lot of people that like want to get to that place where they could do that to people, where they have to listen. Everybody has to kiss my ass. I love it. That's what's glorified in tv shows and movies right is that is that archetype of the you know the don't give a fuck leader who yeah gets everybody to do exactly what he wants them to do or she wants them to do it's like there's other ways of maybe living and doing things yeah there are but not if you have shitty employees.

Then there's that problem. There's people that don't want to listen, they're not good, and you have to crack the whip, and then I think over time, it becomes easier to be that sort of shitty dictator than it is to have this sort of balanced, nuanced approach

to people and communicate with them and try to help them do better. Can't you just fire those people? You should. Yeah, you should probably just fire those people. And you're gone. And then you get sued. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And this day and age, people decide you singled them out because of their sexual orientation or the way they look or what part of the world they're from. And it's like, whew. It's a strange time. It's a time of a lot of information, a lot of communication, but also a lot of chaos. There's got to be a reset, though.

I feel like there's got to be rebalancing at some point. I feel like it's happening. Yeah? Yeah. How so? I just think people are fed up. I think there's a large percentage of the population that realize that a lot of the behavior that you're seeing people exhibit and a lot of the chaos of this online mob

culture, it's negative. It's not helpful. And maybe they've been through it or no one has been through it, or maybe they even participated in it and they feel terrible and they don't want it anymore. I hope so for like comedy. Yeah. And what it's the attack on comedy and college campus safe spaces. Yeah. That's where I worry about it. Because remember, I was talking years ago, like back 2014, 2015, we're mocking these stories that are coming out of colleges and the way people are behaving. that are coming out of colleges and the way people are behaving and just the general,

the rules of discourse, the way they were limiting the way people communicate about things. And I was saying that I think this is a real problem. People say, well, why do you care about that? This has nothing to do with you. You know, you're a middle-aged comedian. This is not going to affect your life. I'm like, that's going to, those guys are going to graduate. These people that have this attitude are going to graduate,

and then they're going to infect corporations. Then it's going to spread, and that's exactly what happened. Yeah. And I wasn't the only one that was thinking this either. There was a lot of people that were sort of sounding the alarm early on. Some of the funniest ones were Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay. They put together these grievance studies, these fake studies. And one was homoerotic behavior and rape culture in dog parks. So they put together these fake, and they got awards for these studies. And one of them was fat bodybuilding they yeah, they put together a fat bodybuilding study and

These studies were peer-reviewed and they they they got applause for these things and praise and then You know, they all got in trouble when it turned out that These these were fake studies, but they were trying to highlight a real problem with nonsense, ridiculous coddling and nonsense of terrible ideas. And that these ideologies were not objective or they're not rational and they were trying to express that and they did it through humor and people were very, very upset that they got duped. And even then I remember people saying like, why do you they got duped. And even then, I remember

people saying like, why do you care? I'm like, what do you mean? Why do I care? This is going to, it's going to spread. I have children. They're going to go to these schools. They're going to, they're going to learn this stuff. Like this is not good. And you think it's changing? You think it's, I think so. I don't think it's changing that much in colleges and colleges. I think it's probably doubling down. I think colleges are going to be the, that's the real breeding ground for those sort of mental diseases.

So what, what has to change, do you think? People stop going to college. I don't know. No, I think, um, well now they got

their loans paid for, so. Yeah. Well, they only got 10,000 bucks worth. It was a fucking, a weird gesture. Well, they didn't have much money left after they sent all that money to10,000 worth. It was a fucking weird gesture.

Well, they didn't have much money left after they sent all that money to Ukraine. Yeah. And to hire 87,000 IRS agents. And arm them. Yeah. That was one of the best things about the ad when they were calling out for people that you might have to use lethal force. Like, since when does a fucking IRS agent shoot people? Like, aren't you just supposed to collect money?

Like, why are you shooting people? Why is that in the job description? I don't know if you remember this, and maybe Jamie can look it up so he verifies this, but I believe a few years ago when there was an ammo shortage, there was conversation around the fact that, kind of bizarrely, the government, and I believely the government,

and I believe at the time the IRS had bought up something like over a billion or a couple billion rounds of ammunition. I remember thinking at the time, maybe it's TSA as well. I remember thinking, but I feel like IRS, what do they need ammunition for? That's kind of strange, right? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know why what do they need ammunition for? That's kind of strange, right? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know why the IRS would need ammunition. Unless there's some person who won't pay taxes and is holed up. GOP wants answers on IRS's $700,000 ammo stockpile.

$700,000 ammo stockpile as Dems okay 80 billion for agency enforcement and this is in August of 2020 I'm talking about is just a 5 6 7 years ago. Well, this is just a week ago. Yeah Yeah, that's a lot of ammo For what isn't a bunch of CPAs and yeah They'd like to be strapped. Yeah, just in case someone comes for the files I would imagine there would be a situation where someone was a They like to be strapped. Yeah. Just in case someone comes for the files. I would imagine there would be a situation where someone was a criminal and they were hiding their taxes. And the IRS agents were in danger because they were going to target the IRS agent that was investigating their case.

I could imagine that. But I think that would be a rare thing and you would involve traditional law enforcement. They're not law enforcement. IRS isn't, right? Unless they're under that. I mean, are they technically law enforcement? What's the technical definition of IRS? It's not law enforcement, is it? I guess so, right?

Kind of. Revenue service. Revenue service. Responsible for collecting taxes and administering their internal revenue code, the main body of the federal statutory tax law. Strapped. Strapped. Looking like John Wick showing up at your house, looking for that extra $2,000.

Jeez. I mean, it all comes down to glorified revenue collectors. I mean, that's, that's what, unfortunately, that's what they turned a lot of police officers into too. You see all these, you know, these, um, speed traps and traffic stops and all that. I mean, they're just, they're glorified revenue collectors in some places. Yeah. How does that change? How does that get better? How do we flip that?

Well, I mean, anarchists, their solution is that, I mean, I saw Michael Malice actually talking about this the other day, and he was making some very good points. And he was saying that there's no accountability when it comes to the police in that if they were a private institution, they would have accountability. Like if it was a private institution that was hired to take care of things, they would be able to say, hey, you've done a terrible job of enforcing crime. Look at all this crime. Like what justifies your pay? You've done a terrible job of this. You've confiscated resources from people and not returned them. You owe them that. That was one of the things they were doing in the South. In Florida. Yeah. A couple of states were doing it, where they would pull you over. And say if you were

on your way to go buy a car and you had $25,000 in a bag, they would just confiscate that money. You would have to prove, even if you had a job, like you say, look, I make $100,000 a year, I saved up 25 grand, I'm going to go buy this 69 Camaro. No, no, no. We take that money and then you have to prove. So you have to wait in court and then you have to somehow or another get a court order to give you that money back.

And I think a large percentage of that money was never returned. And so it would go in the coffers- They can pound your vehicle and then sell your vehicle? Yes. Yes. And you would have to prove all these things that you weren't just... I mean, it's just cash. Meanwhile, if you have the exact same amount in the bank, oh, you're a good guy.

You saved up your money. You're probably frugal. Look at it. He's got all this money in the bank. Great. But how long before that happens? Like, why do you have all this money in the bank? Right. You know, well, you have $25,000 in the bank. Well, we're going to freeze that money until we investigate how you acquired $25,000. I mean, all of these different draconian measures that they use to make their life easier and their life more convenient and certainly enrich the coffers of these states and their budgets. That all would be eliminated if they were accountable and if there was like some sort of a privatized version of the police.

He was making a very interesting argument about it that I'd never really considered before. And, you know, I don't know if that's the solution, but something has to change. I don't think private prisons are the solution. That's definitely not the solution. No, that's definitely not the solution. That's incentivizing people to create ways

where people are doing something illegal. And that's what we found when you look into marijuana legalization. One of the biggest opponents of marijuana legalization was prison guard unions. Prison guard unions wanted no part of that because that's going to have less people in prison, so there's going to be less jobs for prison guards, which is fucking wild. So you're basically using people as a battery to generate money you're basically using human beings and you're coming up with reasons to lock them up and put them in a cage and that

generates revenue for your company and you're actively trying to make sure that laws stay in place that are unjust because those laws as they are now are profitable for you No, we were Reading about this case of this guy who he was selling pot to an undercover cop He sold on four different occasions He sold pot to an undercover cop and when you add up all the amount of pot that he sold it was about an ounce and they put him in jail for 15 years and this is in phoenix which is where marijuana is now legal so this guy is in jail in phoenix for 15 years for selling something that you can now buy at a store is he out now no they denied his clemency because of his past record, which I think is really ridiculous.

Because if someone gets arrested and they do something and they get out, in my mind, they did their time. This is a person that was punished for whatever crime. You can't apply this other crime that they've already been punished for to some new crime that, in my eyes, shouldn't be a crime at all. Not violent crimes. No. That's a large percentage of the people that are in jail in this country. That's why the hypocrisy about the Brittany Griner situation was so egregious in this country, where Kamala Harris is talking about how horrible it is that Brittany Griner's

in jail. Well, you put people in jail. You did. Thousands of people in jail for marijuana. Yeah, it's crazy. Hello. Yeah, and that was like the student loan debt forgiveness. That's great.

But how come you guys didn't exonerate people that were in jail for marijuana when you said you were going to? They said that they were going to make marijuana federally legal. They said they were going to exonerate prisoners who were in jail for nonviolent drug offenses. That's what they said. None of that has happened. You mean a politician said something they ran on and then didn't actually enact that said policy? I know it's crazy. It rarely happens, but occasionally you catch them. Yeah, it's just- I'll tell you what gets me, and I don't really want to dwell too much on the COVID stuff anymore,

but one thing that really sticks with me when you're talking about things that the government could do to make people's lives better is, you know, I'm 38. People that, you know, around my age I grew up with, went to high school with, college with, a lot of them are in that age group now where people are starting their own business. They've worked in corporate maybe. They've figured out exactly what they want to do. They start their own small business. And small business is the backbone of America, right?

And how many thousands and thousands and thousands of small businesses closed and never opened again? Restaurants, bars, establishments like that because of COVID, right? Yeah. And safety, you know, started as two weeks to flatten the curve and then went to lockdowns. Yeah. In places like Chico, California, where I'm from, where there were multiple stretches of time where there were zero cases in the entire city of 80,000, or hardly any, you know, less than 100. And you got small businesses in a small town, college town, that could not open their doors.

And many of the establishments that I went to in high school and college and going back and visiting never opened again. Yeah, some of my favorite restaurants in la are gone i think at one point in time la had lost 75 of its restaurants which is insane it's insanity it's so hard to run a restaurant already you know and so what are they going to do for those those people yeah what nothing nothing nothing yeah nothing and no accountability no accountability for these decisions that show there was no science behind it. John Hopkins comes out of the study talking about these lockdowns and the more detriment than good.

Yeah. And they're not the only research place that's done these type of studies. But are they going to go back and reverse anything? Say, oh, tough shit. Sorry. Because I think on one level, it's really one of two extremes, right? Either they really thought they were doing the right thing or there's some coordinated plan.

Maybe it's somewhere in the middle. I don't think there's a coordinated plan. I think people were trying to- I'm just saying what people think, right? Well, I have a friend and his brother works for the COVID response, whatever it is in California. And you remember when they had made a decision to close outdoor dining and it turned out that one of the people that made that decision the day she did it went out and was dining outdoors.

I thought you meant Gavin Newsom going to French Laundry. Yeah, that was fun. This was a different one, but he had a statement. He was like, while they were talking, he said, well, what evidence is there that it's spread in outdoor dining? And she said, it's about optics. So this was a decision that this politician had decided to make, this bureaucrat decided to make, to show that they're doing something because the numbers had gone up. So we're going to stop outdoor dining, which showed zero transmission. There was no cases that were connecting to outdoor dining, especially in the early days of COVID. I think they've

since revised that with Omicron apparently is so contagious and some of the new strains are more contagious and they think there may be some instances of outdoor spread. But that was not the case back then. Joe, they closed the beaches in California. They closed the beaches where I live in California and all along the coast. Oh yeah. Remember that one guy who was getting arrested by the Coast Guard because he was parasailing

or something? No, he was surfing. Surfing, yeah. Yeah, he was surfing. The Coast Guard. You're out there by yourself. Yeah. On a surfboard. They're supposed to be stopping terrorists.

Passing COVID to the dolphins or what? Come on. What are we doing? It's so dumb. But, you know, I hope there's lessons learned in this because this is a new thing. We had never had this before. But, you know, I hope there's lessons learned in this because this is a new thing. We had never had this before. No one who is alive today had ever experienced a true pandemic.

And I'm hoping that now that this is over, people are going to, you know, recognize that some serious errors were made and not repeat those. That's the best you can get out of it. But as far as compensation for all those people that were forced to close their businesses and keep their doors shuttered and lost everything that they'd worked for decades to build, no, they're just going to be angry. So what do you tell those people? Vote Republican. That's what a lot of them are going to do anyway. Yeah? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, more than a million people transferred over to the Republican party, uh, I think in 2021 alone, find out what that number is. But you know, you look at guys like Ron DeSantis who kept Florida open and had some pretty reasonable

policies in terms of like what, what to do about COVID. And you know, he mapped it out on television. He was, you know, widely criticized for this, where he was saying, like, we need to protect our elders. We need to, you know, make sure that medical care is available for those people and everyone else. You should be able to do whatever you want to do and protect your freedom. Isn't that the point, though, I think, to learn from this? Yeah, I heard this. More than one million voters switched to the GOP, raising alarms for Democrats. The fuck can you think?

A political shift is beginning to hold across the U.S. as tens of thousands of suburban swing voters who helped fuel the Democratic Party's gains in recent years of becoming Republicans. More than one million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year. And that's registered. That's registering as a, that means you could vote in the primary, right? But Joe Biden's the most popular president in history. Yeah, he's the best. I mean, there's no one better. He's best at talking. He's best at walking upstairs. Good handshaker. He's good at riding bikes. He shakes hands with ghosts. I mean- He's not a fan of mine, I don't think. No? No.

Does he say anything about you? One thing. He was in Wisconsin for a rally. He said, tell your quarterback to get vaccinated. I remember there was some crisis that was going on. And I remember, oh, it was a hurricane that was coming. They said, the best thing you can do is get vaccinated. I saw that.

It's like, what? End of quote. Jesus Christ, buddy. You've seen him on the prompter when he said that. Yes. Repeat the quote. Repeat the quote. Yeah.

Yeah. End of sentence. Repeat the quote. Yeah. Democrats got everything. How do we go from Obama to this? Yeah. Well, even Obama said it.

Like, Obama was famously quoted as saying, you know, Joe has an amazing capacity to this? Yeah. Well, even Obama said it like Obama was famously quoted as saying, you know, Joe has an amazing capacity to fuck things up. I mean, he was a dumb guy when he was okay. I mean, he's never a bright guy. I mean, he's very well known as a liar. Like there's, there's all these videos of him lying about his education record, lying about so many different accomplishments that he's achieved in his life. He was always a bullshit artist and not just a bullshit artist, but like a liar, like a flat out liar. I graduated at the top of my class. No, you didn't. How would would you not know that how do you not know you didn't graduate at the top of your class you definitely didn't

you know why are you saying that did somebody hit you over the head and tell you that like what the fuck are you talking about and the fact that he was we used to have Joe Biden night at Stitch's Comedy Club in Boston because he got caught plagiarizing so he got caught plagiarizing when he was running for president in 1988.

So in 1988, we had Joe Biden night, where you would do my act and I would do your act. We would all plagiarize each other. It was for fun, just for comedians, and people would come by and watch. That's wild. That's how well known he was of being alive. That's what, 34 years ago? Yeah. Yeah. But you know what? They just, I think they counted on people's ability to ignore negative press and also

the polarization in this country because people hated Donald Trump so bad that Trump represented an opposition that had to be stopped. And so this was an established Democrat. He'd been around for years and we could probably win with him. It turns out they were right. But see, that's the problem with politics is, you know, now it swings because, you know, you got weekend at Bernie's up there as, you know, trying to read the prompter and then some, you know, Republican steps up and is going to change the country and get us back to, you know, America first and whatever the hell slogan is going to be.

And then four years later, it's going to swing back the other way. That's why I always say politics is a sham, man. Well, it definitely is that. If you always say that, you're right. It is. Because people are always like, you're a right-wing anti-vaxxer, flat-earther. And I'm like, politics is fucking bullshit. Yeah.

Okay? Left, right? I do like Obama. I played golf with him. I do like him. Very, very interesting guy. A lot of charisma. The best president in my lifetime, for sure.

He was the most statesman-like, the most articulate. He was the most reasonable and measured. articulate. He was the most reasonable and measured. He embodied in my mind what I would like to represent the United States. When the world sees the United States, let's have this super educated, clear-minded, just really smooth talker. Seemed like a very nice guy. Put together. Well put together. Plays basketball. See how good he is at basketball? Yeah. He's a good golfer, too. Was he?

Yeah. Did you win? Did you beat him? Yeah. I had one of the rounds of my life. Yeah? Thankfully. I played good.

I burned the first two holes. Oh, nice. But that was a highlight for sure. That's nice. Yeah. Cool story. Let me just tell you this one cool story. So in 2010, we played the Washington Redskins at the time. And one of our

receivers knew a Secret Service agent and got us a White House tour. So we went to DC and got a tour. And Mr. President came back on that Saturday from actually around the golf and they shuttered us into the side where maybe, you know, you can't see the president, you know, get out of the way. And he actually came he heard we were there and he came and met all of us in 2010 which is so cool and then we played golf in 2016 at his last year in office and at the end of the round he was like how you guys getting back and i was with um uh mark kelly who's now the senator in Arizona. And, uh, we're like, Oh, we just Ubered out. He's like, yeah, ride back with, with, uh, with me in the motorcade. I was like,

yeah, sweet. So we ride back in the motorcade, which is the wild experience, like nine cars. One of them's like, you know, got the codes in there or something, I think. And we get back in the white house and we walk in and Mr. President goes goes this is just like the first day we met and i was like how fucking cool is that this dude i met him six years ago on this same thing you know like on a saturday after a golf round and he's like yeah this is like the first time we met wow he's like that's so cool that's pretty just be, be like that present and, and, and aware. And then me and Mark Kelly, who flew a space shuttle three times before his brother spent a year in space, I think he'd spent the most time in space, walked out of the front door of the white house

onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Wow. That was a cool experience. That's pretty dope. Yeah. Well, he was the best we had to offer in terms of what represented. But still, there was a lot of people that didn't appreciate him. He experienced a lot of racism. He experienced a lot of unjust hate. I remember when Fox News was criticizing him because he wore a tan suit. Yeah, you can't do that. It was a beautiful suit, but it was the wrong color.

It's got to be blue, and it's got to be a red tie or a blue tie, right? That's it. That's all you can do. They're like the Homeowners Association of Politics. Like, what the fuck is wrong with this suit? It's a nice suit. You're not going to make anybody happy, man. No.

Yeah, it's not possible. That's why no one wants that job. Because no matter who you are, what you represent, someone's going to decide that you're evil. you are what you represent someone's going to decide that you're evil there's someone's going to even if they don't believe it there's going to be some pundit some you know radio politics personality that's going to talk all kinds of crazy shit about you and make up stories about you and you know i feel like the last 10 years it's really don't you feel that both sides the extremes have gotten farther apart like i feel like for a while it was maybe the right had kind of been more extreme than the left, but I feel like now both sides,

there's a real extreme wing to both sides and there's even a greater divide between the two parties. Yes. Yeah, I think that's in part due to the reaction of Trump. You know, to Trump himself, the way he carries himself. I mean, he's a, you know, he's that guy that got famous from saying you're fired. He got famous and he got all this press from all these crazy statements that he would make.

And they would give him all this press and that's what helped get him elected. But it also just made people so angry. I remember we had an end of the world podcast that we did on 2016 during the election. So we did this live podcast from the comedy store. And I remember we went into the bar after it was all over and we watched CNN. And we were watching Jake Tapper and all these people so depressed. They were so angry. And so just, it was so visibly obvious that these are not objective journalists that are just talking about this thing that happened, but they had

a very clear mandate and they had a very clear role that they were playing. And that role was that we are the people that oppose this terrible thing that has just happened, where we have legally elected because of people's opinions this person who more than half the person or more at least the electoral college votes more than half had decided should be the president so the people had chosen and they were like the people are wrong it was wild it was wild to see because i was like this is interesting because it's like this is one of the clearest examples of it it's just, they're not objective. These are not journalists. These are not people that are just reporting on actual facts. They had to have this opinion, this dour face, and everyone was very upset. Very upset. it if you're not a journalist. I understand if you're just a person and you were a person that thought Hillary Clinton should be president. And then you saw this guy when you're like,

what the fuck? But you're not just a person, you're a fucking journalist, you know, and your job is to tell people what's happening. But that's not, that's not journalism anymore. It's sensationalism. It's, you have 10 words on an ESPN front page to, to try and denote what a story is about to tell you. And how do I get the most clicks on a story is about to tell you. And how do I get the most clicks on this article just written? I better make it the craziest fucking headline possible. Just because if you click on that and you're on the page for one second, that counts as a page view.

But what they didn't understand, I think they recognize now that there's new leadership at CNN, was that that diminishes public trust. CNN Plus doesn't exist anymore. It was a great idea, but unfortunately they lost $300 million in 10 days, and so they pulled the plug. So weird, because I thought it was going to take off. I mean, who wouldn't want to pay for something that no one watches for free? What a fucking genius idea.

I would have liked to have been in the meeting with those people and just sit down and go, hey guys, look, I know you and I don't see eye to eye on things, but unless you want to lose a lot of fucking money, this is a terrible idea. If you want to make CNN plus free and then- You should be a consultant. Build up advertising revenue ultimately and eventually, yeah. But I think the people that are running CNN now are pretty wise. This's why they got rid of Brian Stelter and everybody else is on the chopping block, because they recognize that this is bad for their bottom line. You

can't have people lose all faith and trust that you're objective. And the editorializing that they were doing is so piss poor. You have these dorks, these people without good social skills and they're not interesting and they're not likable. And they're the ones that are telling you what you should think. That's crazy. People don't like that. And so CNN recognizes that now. And now they've started to get rid of those people. And they want to put in old school objective journalists that are just talking about the facts, because that's what CNN should be. Well, they need Trump back Talk about well. There's plenty of things to talk about the problem is that was their business model That was you look these independent people when you look at like breaking points with Krystal and Sagar

Jimmy door and all these other people that have these independent political shows that are objective they give their opinions I mean they certainly editorial eyes, but they're independent. Because we know they're independent, we know at least if I agree or disagree or like or dislike, at least I know that that's coming from this person. When you would hear these other people talk, you would say, like, you are giving a specific, you've been given a specific mandate. Whether it's from the producers or the executives or whatever, your organization has a very specific slant and you're ignoring reality in order to push this slant and then when people find out that they ignored reality or they find out that this this information is biased and that you've excluded stuff that's contrary to your opinion then people lose trust in it and then the ratings drop off radically they built this fucking entire business unfortunately during the 2016 election, talking

about what an asshole Trump was. And they made that asshole president. I mean, it's a real argument that they made him president. Talking about your all-time backfire. Oh, it's a terrible backfire. But that's what he's great at. He's great at using the media and manipulating him in that way and making them talk about Yeah, fake news have you seen Jamie Foxx impression hits incredible holy shit go to Jamie Foxx

I thought that fucking Shane Gillis had a good Trump impression Jamie Foxx is the most fucking talented guy that's ever lived I agree. He's so goddamn JT Justin Timberlake's up there as well. Yeah, but he can't I agree. He's so goddamn talented. And JT. Justin Timberlake's up there as well. Yeah, but he can't do this. He can't do stand-up. Let me see this. He's a great person. He couldn't vote for me at the time.

Now he can vote for me once he gets out. I love Snoop D. He's a great person. So do you love Death Row records? I love Death Row. I love Death Row. Excuse me. Excuse me.

Excuse me. Fake news. I love death row. What's your favorite death row record, Mr. Trump? All of them. All of the death row records. Don't try to pin me down. Excuse me.

Fake news. Excuse me. Fake news. Fake news. It gets better. They tried to give me the virus. I beat the virus. They tried to give me the virus i beat the virus god damn he's talented His fucking impressions are incredible But I think that

You know that's part of the problem Is that like what he just said With all the dummies Finally the dummies Have a leader He hit a very specific Frequency I'm not saying that all the people that supported Trump are dummies but I'm saying that all

The dummies supported Trump That's not true either Because there's a lot of dummies on the left Yeah But these dummies on the right the ones that just like want a very fucking clean Specific three-word narrative and they you know keep America great again You know like that those people boy he found their fucking vibration and he's clung to it And he's now that he realized but now that we all realize that that's possible and they've woken up this, you know,

group of people that were previously not politically active, it becomes an issue. Yeah, I agree. But yeah, I don't believe that systems can change until you create alternate systems. Like systems don't just change from the inside. You know, unless having a two-party system is one of the craziest fucking things ever.

When you have 300, how many people live in the States? 300 and I think 30, right? 330 million. And you can really only back one of two parties. Yeah. Because no third party can. Independent's never going to win. The only one that had a chance was Ron

Paul. If Ron Paul went independent, because Ross Perot did it. I mean, Ron Paul was a Republican, but I think that if you had a guy like that, that was saying things that resonated with a large swath of people, and he decided to go independent. But Ross Perot did that.

When I was a kid, Ross Perot was running for president. He took the election from Bush Sr. And that's how Clinton won. Because a lot of people that would have voted for Clinton, they were thinking that he made more sense. Because he took out an entire block of time on network television. That's how wealthy he was. He's like, you know, NBC, I'm going to buy

out for an hour. And he just went on television and explained how the federal reserve work and tax codes work and all this. He's like, here's how you're getting fucked. And he did it on television. And that was, that was terrifying to people. And they actually changed the, you know, the standards for debates. They raised the amount of votes that you had to get to participate in debates. So you couldn't have a third party be a part of it? You couldn't have a guy come in and fuck up their rigged game. They have a rigged game.

The rigged game is these enormous special interest groups, they put money into both candidates, which is wild. And they fund their campaigns and they figure out who's going to win, and then when that person wins, then they get in there and then they make sure that they have undue influence on all sorts of things that affect regular people in a negative way. I don't think they carry wins as long as they get what they want. That's the hustle. That's the old Bill Hicks joke. And it's both sides.

Bill Hicks used to have the joke, well, I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking. Well, I support the puppet on the right. And they're like, hey, wait a minute. There's one guy holding both puppets. Yeah. Yeah. Go to bed, America.

We've got you covered. And that's the reality of our political process. And the only way you're going to do that is to take money out of politics. And good fucking luck with that. That's one of those things. It's like once you got herpes, you've got herpes. You can take Valtrex. You can do whatever you got to do.

But you've got herpes, kid. I hate to tell it to you. This is what our country is. I mean, our political process has VD. And I don't know how to get it out. I don't know how to get it out. I don't know how, I mean, look, 300 years ago, they started another country because they're like, look, where we're at, it's fucked. We're getting screwed over. Let's start this experiment in self-government that

became the United States. And, you know, clearly by people that had an understanding of where human nature can go wrong. And they put all these checks and balances in place and they separated powers and they did it in a way that they hoped would be, you know, preparing this country for the future in a way that it would be for the people, by the people. And, you know, it was a good idea. It was a brilliant, amazing idea at the time. Unprecedented. Nothing like it. And it spawned the greatest superpower the world's ever known. The most creative force the world has ever known. I mean, the influence that United States culture has had on the rest of the world is really like nothing else. I mean, it's fucking wild. If you think about the music that's come out of here, the comedy, the films, the sports, the shit that's come out of the United States is bananas. And it came out in many ways because of the freedom that people were given by the

constitution, the bill of rights. Yeah. Which doesn't exist in most countries anywhere. No. Anywhere close to it. Well, that's unfortunately what a lot of people find out when they decide to go against the United States, and then they wind up getting arrested like Brittany Griner did in Russia, and you realize, oh, there's places that are fucking way worse. You don't get a fair trial, and you get treated like a political pawn. And that's where we're at right now. Look, there's a lot of problems in this country.

There's a lot of problems with any group of human beings, especially when those groups get enormous. There's no way you're going to have a group of 333 million people where everybody agrees on everything and everybody gets along great. It doesn't work that way. That's not how human beings are. The people find conflict. There's people that create conflict. It benefits them. It's their work that way. That's not how human beings are. The people find conflict. There's people that create conflict. It benefits them. Their business is conflict.

So you're always going to have conflict. Unless everybody takes mushrooms. That would help a lot. That would help a lot. Isn't it funny that that sounds like a crazy thing to say, but that literally would fix the world. If more people had psychedelic trips and more people had an experience that dissolved their ego and more people had an understanding that community isn't just simply a bunch of people that live together.

It's a bunch of people that care about each other and that we could treat the world like a community. That could be done. It could be done in small groups of people and it could be done in large groups of people. And again, you're not going to resolve all conflict. You're always going to have conflict. No, no chance. But at least we would have a shift in the way people view each other and think about things.

Yeah. I couldn't agree anymore. How much psychedelic use is in the NFL? How many guys are using psychedelics? I don't know. I mean, I talked recently about my own ayahuasca journey. Everybody has an ayahuasca journey, by the way. It's always a journey.

I'm on an ayahuasca journey. What do you call it, ceremony? No, that's even worse. Yeah, plant medicine is where it gets squirrely. But you've done ayahuasca. No, I've not. I've only done DMT. Okay.

I've done DMT. I've done mushrooms. I've done LSD. I've done ayahuasca. No, I've not. I've only done DMT. Okay. I've done DMT. I've done mushrooms. I've done LSD. I've done MDMA. Is that it? I think that's it. No, I've done salvia, and I think that's it.

By far, the most powerful was DMT. By far the most powerful was DMT. By far. It was bizarrely powerful. Where like I feel like there was me and then there was me after DMT. Like a totally different person. I feel the same way about me and then me after ayahuasca. But since I talked about it on Aubrey's podcast, it's been really interesting to see the people reaching out like across the league. And there's been a lot of people outside of league and, and, you know, entertainers, sports people, uh, you know, just friends from the past, um, people at the work at the facility, you know, just the nine to five people all interested in, in, you know, plant medicine. It's been, it's been

really interesting. I think there's a, there's a hunger for, for what I experienced, what you talked about with mushrooms is this like death of the ego, this like realization that we're all connected, this greater sense of like what community is. And I think, I don't know if you've experienced in your DMT journeys and mushrooms, but when you dissolve the ego, the amount of love that you can give back to yourself and then other people, it, it takes away for me so much judgment of myself and others, so much separation between myself and others the the greater sense of connection was overwhelming when i kind of came out of that and got back to like reality or whatever it's like oh shit like now here's the integration like yeah here's me in a different form you know here's my

reflection that i see of myself and you yeah and we're all fucking connected in a such a deeper way and it's just you know doing a plant that's been used for generations yeah you know in the amazon jungles um and i got the same feeling on mushrooms as well i mean it was just just an incredible connection to nature and life, and all sentient beings, and all plants, and fungi, and just the like, you know, of my previous self, I feel like the, you know, the anger, and bitterness, and resentment, and negativity that I'd kind of like standard walk around with. It wasn't like a super high level, but I felt like coming out of those experiences, it's that shit don't even matter yeah like kindness matters yeah it matters matters matters a lot like being present with people having conversations like you know putting your fucking technology away and like connecting with somebody

and like seeing them because I think on a deep level we all just want to be seen and understood yes you know and that's why social media is such a platform because everybody's fucking looking at me. Yeah. This is my opinion. Yeah. Right? And it fucking matters.

Yeah. Right? Yeah, I get it. I see it. For sure. But let's just realize we're all the same. The thing about the social media interactions, though, is that it happens in isolation.

Like you're alone and you're putting something out there and then the other people alone when they're receiving it and that's why they can be so cruel and shitty is because they're not looking at you and seeing you like most of the things that people say on social media they would never say to someone's face even if they were bigger and stronger than that person they wouldn't say because it feels terrible to say shitty things to people it's. It's an interesting thing that happens when you recognize that a lot of the way we react with each other is based on insecurity. We put up these armored walls between us and the rest of the world

and you have this thought that, you know, fuck everybody and everybody's fucking me over and fuck them and then you do something like DMT or mushrooms or ayahuasca and you recognize oh that's that's nonsense like that not only is that nonsense that's bad for me that's bad for everyone it's bad for everyone I come in contact with it's unnecessary and then you realize the source of it all it's just fear it's just fear and insecurity. And that was so profound to me, like this recognition of what the problems that the ego presents and that these problems, this ego, first of all, was not designed to live in a society like this. Our bodies were not designed to live in these neighborhoods of millions and millions of people. This is not normal.

And we don't know how to deal with that. And so we come up with more walls and more insecurity and more defensiveness. And this is bad for everyone. And the solution to that is to expose people to these things and allow them to recognize the flaws and the patterns of behavior that they've been following their whole life. But the more people that get exposed to that, the more that's going to be a normal narrative and that people are going to understand that you're just a person. You're not a bad person. You might've made bad choices, but you're just

a person. We're all human beings. Even people in jail for violent crimes, they're just a person. You're not a bad person. You might have made bad choices, but you're just a person. We're all human beings. Even people in jail for violent crimes, they're just people. They're people that got on terrible paths and they don't realize that we're all connected. Yeah. I wish that there was a way

where more people could be exposed to it because I really think it would change perspective 100% and good. It's changed radically in my lifetime. It's changed radically. Because you've been talking about this for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. It changed radically over the last couple of decades that I've been exposed to it.

I think the first time I did DMT was early 2000s. And I remember, well, the first time I did mushrooms was early 2000s as well. But the first, the first mushrooms were did mushrooms was early 2000s as well. But the first, mushrooms were amazing and it was beautiful. But DMT, I always describe as mushrooms times a million plus aliens. It was the encounter of entities that was so mind blowing that this thing that like there might be some sort of disembodied consciousness that exists in some realm that you can access within 15 seconds. Just the thought that that's a real thing. Ayahuasca as opposed to DMT, Ayahuasca is, for people who don't know what we're talking about, is a oral version of DMT. DMT is broken down in the gut by something called monoamine oxidase. And

what ayahuasca is, is one plant that contains dimethyltryptamine and another plant that contains an MAO inhibitor, harming. And you combine the two of those together and it produces this orally active version of DMT that's a much longer experience, but typically it's not as intense as the smoked DMT. When you smoke it, it's like right into your bloodstream. And it's short though, right? Yeah. Shorter. But you just do it again afterwards. I mean, you come out of it in like 15 or 20 minutes and you want to go right back in. It's so profound and it want to go right back in it's um So profound and it changes everything it changes everything it changes Changes how you think of reality it changes your your way the way you interface with other people

It changes how you think about yourself You know all your stupid ideas of who you are and all your ego and nonsense it all just gets blown at blown to bits And I feel like that purpose of it matters less right? of who you are and all your ego and nonsense, it all just gets blown to bits. And I feel like that's the purpose of it. That just matters less, right? Yeah. All those insecurities and fears. It doesn't mean you give less fucks about life.

I think it actually just changes what you give a fuck about. Yes. Connecting and loving people and spreading positivity and kindness. There's churches that use ayahuasca. I had Dr. Rick Strassman on the podcast recently, and he talked about these churches that have an exemption by the Supreme Court in order to use it for religious purposes. And there's one of them that is like, there's two different ones. Do you remember the names of them, Jamie? There's two different churches. One of them seems a lot more fun. They sing songs and they,

and they, they have these ecstatic dances. And so they do their, their DMT, but they're both Christian based churches. Really? Yeah. And they,

uh, one of them is from Brazil, I believe they might be both from Brazil, which obviously has a long history of use of, uh, psychedelic medicines, but that these people have these incredible communities that they've based around the entire flock participating in these psychedelic rituals. Like that's really

what a church probably started out as. If you read the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which is John Marco Allegro's book. I was just hoping you were going to bring that up. I was just talking to a buddy actually last night about this book. It's an amazing book that I believe, I'm not sure if this is true, but let's find out. I believe it was bought out by the Catholic Church. I have two copies of the original printing of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and it's a fucking phenomenal book because it's written by this guy, John Marco Allegro, who is a biblical scholar and a linguist, and he was also an ordained minister but through studying religion he became agnostic and

he was like I think these are all these they share these stories like where what's the root of these stories so he was hired to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls and for 14 years they painstakingly deciphered this which I believe was the first version of the Bible that they encountered that was in Aramaic. And this was, they found these scrolls in Qumran, which is in Israel, where they found these caves. And inside these caves, they found these ceramic pots that had these scrolls in them. on these ceramic pots that had these scrolls in them. And it was so painstaking that they had to do DNA samples on the scrolls because these scrolls are made in animal skins. That's how old they are.

And they took these scrolls and they had to match up the DNA with a specific cow that was on each. So they knew that these strands were from this one cow. So let's put all these together and figure out how they piece together. how they piece together. So they do all this and then they analyze the language and then they decipher it. His interpretation after 14 years of study was that the entire Christian religion was a giant misunderstanding and that the original version of it was all about fertility cults and psychedelic mushrooms. And particularly in his eye, it was a lot of it was all about fertility cults and psychedelic mushrooms. And particularly in his eye, it was a lot of it was about the Amanita muscaria, which is a very misunderstood and very confusing

mushroom because I've done that before too. It didn't really do much. But they think that it might've been seasonal. They think it might've varied genetically and geographically and that it had different compounds in it in different places but this is the mushroom that's connected to santa claus yeah this is the mushroom that looks like santa claus it's a red mushroom with white dots on it and the original santa claus which is a great myth yeah yeah it's wild because the original santa claus the the myth was that santa claus was a shaman yeah and he would come down through the chimney. The reindeer piss. Yeah. Yeah.

So all of it is connected because the reindeer eat amanita muscaria mushrooms and then they would actually knock people over trying to get to their piss because they would smell the amanita muscaria in their piss. And these people that did this ritual, they would eat the amanita muscaria and then they would drink their own piss

because the psychedelic compounds were in the piss which is how'd they figure that out but this book was um is that true that it was i think the catholic church bought it out and then it was uh republished i believe about a decade ago it was definitely republished i can't find anything that says it was bought out. They banned it. And it was banned by the publisher. And that guy was fired from his job. But I can't see anything about them buying it. He also wrote a second book that was widely available because of that.

And that is called Psychedelic Mushrooms and the Christian Myth. I think it was something about the Christian myth. What is the other John Marco Allegro book? He had two books. Something in the Christian myth. Dead Sea Scrolls in the Christian myth, yeah. And that was his interpretation. Now this is a convoluted, complicated argument

because you really have to understand ancient languages. You have to be able to decipher them and read them and know the etymology of the words. But he traced back the word Christ to an ancient Sumerian word that was a mushroom covered in God's semen. And so the idea was that when it rained, things would grow out of the ground. So this was God. I mean, you have to realize that we're talking about people that lived thousands and thousands of years ago. These people, they, fertility was very important. Having children was very important. There was never this concept of like there's too many people.

There was like everyone's dying. It was very easy to lose a child. Like child mortality was very high. Infant mortality was very high. It was hard everyone's dying. It was very easy to lose a child. Like child mortality was very high. Infant mortality was very high. It was hard to stay alive. There was very little medicine. No one understood anything. So these people had this idea that when it rained, it was God giving life to the world.

And that rain was God's semen. And if you've ever been in a place that has mushrooms, when it rains, you wake up in the morning and there's mushrooms everywhere. Mushrooms that weren't there before. They grow so quickly. A mushroom as big as this coffee cup could appear overnight, which is really crazy.

So these people, it would rain, and then in the morning they would find these mushrooms and they would eat them and they would fucking trip balls Right. Could you imagine being one of the first people that discovered psychedelic mushrooms and you're you're eating them And then they wanted to hide these stories from the conquering Romans from all these other empires that were invading them and so they hid them in allegories and in myths and This was his take on the Bible is that all these stories were translated over

and over again from Aramaic and ancient Hebrew to Latin and Greek and English. And then so much was lost in the translation. That doesn't really fly very well in the Christian church of today, I don't think. Well, it does. If you go to that one that's from Brazil it takes psychedelics they're probably like yeah yeah that's exactly what it is I was talking to a teammate of mine last night about that and he's never heard of it and it's like hardcore Christians kind of crazy to me I'm like yeah yeah it does but well the very least you have to understand that if the Bible is the Word of God it has been interpreted by people right and people are biased and people They have reasons to withhold information or to empower

Control sure I mean Martin Luther was almost killed because he translated the Bible into a phonetic language that people could read and Understand and he wanted people to interpret the Bible themselves. They wanted to kill him. It was only because of his political connections that he stayed alive. Knowledge is power. Yeah. Well, especially back then. I mean, Jesus Christ. I mean, if you were a priest back then, you were a rock star.

I mean, that was originally— And most people couldn't read. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so they had to rely on these other people to tell them what the God wanted. God forbid you make it easier for people to understand. God forbid. Yeah. Perfect choice of words. Yeah. When did you first have, what was your first psychedelic experience? I had mushrooms, um, years ago, uh, out in nature on the beach and had this magical experience where I felt

like I merged with the ocean and I'd never done psychedelics before that always been interested actually watching your podcast years ago and hearing you talk about it got me like aware of. I mean, growing up in a very strict religious culture, anything outside of the straight and narrow was a major sin and a no-no. But for me, being a little rebellious, I was like, that sounds kind of fun though. Some of these things people are doing,

hippies seem like they had a pretty good time doing a bunch of LSD and stuff. That sounds pretty cool, right? And you know how many people died from mushrooms? Thousands? Zero. Yeah, I know. I mean, someone probably did mushrooms and thought they could fly. That was another Bill Hicks bit.

Yeah. It was like tragedy. Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped off a roof. How many people have OD'd on marijuana? Zero. Really? Crazy. Isn't that crazy?

But again, I'm sure people have lost their minds. I actually had Alex Berenson on the podcast yesterday who wrote a book called Tell Your Children. He was on to talk about COVID, and he actually got reinstated by Twitter because he won in court. Yes. Everything he said turned out to be true. Yeah. All the things that he was saying, the things they banned him for. Are those other guys back on?

Well, what other people got banned? Wasn't Peter McCullough, wasn't he banned? I do not know if he was banned. Was he banned? I do not know. I believe Robert Malone is still on. He's still on? Maybe he's banned.

They might have banned them. They might have banned them all. Look, they were banning people for contributing to vaccine hesitancy. I mean, they were taking this hard line stance because they thought they were right. They didn't know, man. And this is a big part of it. It's not like this is a vast conspiracy by these people. A lot of these people were ideologically captured.

They really thought that they were doing the right thing, that this was the good thing to do. They just were incorrect. They had these assertions, they had these facts, they had this data that they were getting from the government. They had this data they were getting from Fauci and the NIH and the CDC, and they thought they were doing the right thing. That's why they did these things.

I think I stole a line from either yourself or somebody out on that I said at one point. But science that can't be questioned isn't science anymore. It's propaganda. Right. And that was my problem with the whole thing is science is propagated by peer review. Yes. And you have an idea and then give it to your colleagues or a study group or an institution and then having them review it yeah and figure out it

did you should make any sense or there's some holes in it yeah right but there wasn't any questioning of the information that was put out what was it was it wasn't allowed there was questioning but it wasn't allowed yeah you're automatically put into anti-vaxxer flat flat earth, crazy, right wing conspiracy theorist. That's what I said when I made that video to Neil Young when Neil Young was getting all his music removed from Spotify because I was promoting misinformation. I said, what you say is misinformation today is not going to be misinformation in the future. You have to understand that. And I was saying how they were saying there was misinformation. Well, the things that you were getting kicked off of social media platforms initially, you were saying that masks don't work or saying that the vaccine

won't stop transmission or by saying that the virus came from a lab. All those things would get you kicked off of social media initially. Those have all been proven to be true. Not only, well, not the virus coming from a lab. That's just most people believe it to be true. Assumed, yeah. It's like a large swath of the scientific community is behind that now. And including Newsweek. It was on the cover of Newsweek, this lab leak theory,

which is not, I mean, it's the most plausible scenario. There's not an animal host. They haven't shown that there's an animal host that could give it to people. That's not propaganda. That's not fake. That's not pseudoscience. This is just what they know. All those things would get you kicked off social media. Now they're widely understand to be true. So this is one of the things that I said when I made that video, that these people that you're talking about, one of them, Dr. Robert Malone, he holds nine patents for the creation of mRNA vaccine technology. He was a part of the creation of mRNA vaccines. He took the mRNA vaccine and had a horrible reaction and almost died.

And then you have Peter McCullough. Peter McCullough is the most published physician in history in his field. This is a guy with rock solid credentials who initially was telling people to take the vaccine. And then he was experiencing all of these patients that were coming in with these diseases and these illnesses that they'd acquired, he believed, from the vaccine. And there was no ability to discuss this and no ability to ascertain if that was the fact. You had to follow a very specific narrative. But that's not science. No. No.

That's propaganda. One of the things that we learned from John Abramson when he came in here and he was talking to us about the, you know, he was a doctor who had worked to litigate against pharmaceutical companies when they had produced that. He was part of the Vioxx thing and some other medications. He said that when a pharmaceutical company creates a product and they do studies, when someone peer reviews the data, they don't peer review the raw data. They peer review the studies that the pharmaceutical companies has given them, which is fucking crazy. That is so crazy. That's like saying, like you say, if you're guilty of something and you say, well, let me give

you the evidence that I have, you know, my evidence that I've reviewed myself and this is why I feel like I'm innocent and I'm going to show you my evidence. Like, and the cops be like, fuck you. Let me see your phone. Did you text the drug dealer? Let me see. Did you plot a murder? Let me see your fucking D-mail.

Is it as crazy as like the FDA getting 51% of their budget from the pharmaceutical company fees? That's pretty crazy. You can fact check me on that, but I believe that's... Is that true? Yeah, I wouldn't be shocked. I mean, the... They're basically paying to get their product approved. Well, and

how about the CDC stopping the distribution of COVID vaccine booster data from people 18 to 49 because they said it would contribute to vaccine hesitancy? How about Pfizer asking to wait 75 years to release their data and then 55 years? That's wild. Like, let's wait until after we're dead just for the compliance. Yeah. Yeah.

And my thing is, like, at a bare minimum, right? At a bare minimum, it should just make you pause. Yes. And go, even if you say, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm not any of these things, a rational, to me, and this is an opinion, a rational thinking human would just be like, hmm, hold on a second. This is kind of fucking weird. When it comes to pharmaceutical companies, it's like that old story

of the scorpion and the frog. You know, the scorpion hitches a ride with the frog and the frog's like, hey man, don't sting me because if you sting me, we're going to drown. And the scorpion stings him. And the frog's like, what the fuck? And the scorpion says man don't sting me cuz you sting me We're gonna drown and the scorpion stings them and the frogs like what the fuck and scorpion says hey. It's my nature Yeah, yeah, that's their fucking nature. I mean this is what they've always done for you expect them to make some moral right-angle turn towards being

Just completely selfless and not concerned at all about profits and only looking for the greater good of humanity, well, you're looking at the wrong people. That's not what they do. What they do is they have a responsibility to their shareholders, they have a responsibility to the corporate management, and that responsibility is to make the most amount of money possible. And they're going to do that. And they're going to do it by hook or by crook. They're going to weasel.

They're going to hide data. They're going to do it by hook or by crook. They're going to weasel. They're going to hide data. They're going to manipulate data. And they've been accused of that, rightly so, all through this whole thing. But they have billions of spending. They spend billions on... Brought to you by Pfizer. Anderson Cooper. Brought to you by Pfizer.

Yeah, it's so obvious and so wild. And if you discuss it amongst many people that have a shallow understanding of this topic, they will immediately roll their eyes and say, oh, look at Aaron. This crazy fucking hippie asshole football player thinks he's going to fucking educate me. Well, I watch MSNBC and I have the data. Keith Oberman says you're an asshole. I'm like, It's fucking amazing. It's amazing. You know, I've had some people that also were very pro-vaccine, very anti all these different

things and then got really badly sick and were very conflicted and didn't know what to do. They got really bad. I know people that got really badly sick from COVID post vaccinated. And I know some people that got really badly sick from the vaccine itself and they were very conflicted and some of them just kept their mouth shut and stopped talking. And, and, and some of them even publicly said, I would still take it again. I think overall the good is good. I mean, my heart's fucked now, but you know, it's bad for better for everybody. And that's one of those things if you say publicly you're going to get a certain amount of love.

It's like a virtue signal that I was willing to sacrifice. There's so much of that. I mean, put one mask on, two masks on. Sure. You know, I'm doing my part. Yeah. Look, it's still kind of a free country, so you can do whatever the hell you want. Kind of.

Yeah. A lot freer here. A lot freer here a lot freer in texas yeah the difference between texas and california was so stark that when you know i came out here with my kids in may of 2020 they're like let's move here like immediately like just seeing people like going out to restaurants and seeing people on the lake like in california the beaches were fucking illegal to go to yeah and here we're on a lake and people are drinking and fucking playing Garth Brooks music and jumping in the water.

And my kids were so confused. They're like, what is happening here? Like, why is this so different? And this is Austin, which is very progressive and very liberal. You go to the rest of Texas, they pretend that COVID just fucking didn't exist at all. South in general. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and you know, that's not good either because it is a real fucking disease. And if you're not healthy and you're not covered, you could get fucked up by it. I agree 100%. But what I was saying or trying to say was, why is nothing else being talked about as far as ways of combating this disease, like eating better, like exercising, like vitamin D deficiency. Well, even monoclonal antibodies. I mean, they suppress monoclonal antibodies, which is wild.

They held on to, what, 500 million of them or something crazy? Something crazy like that. All of it was bad. All of it was bad. And all of it is a lesson for people in the future that if something else happens again, to be more skeptical and to understand the influences that are behind these decisions that politicians and even, you know, quote unquote health experts make. They're being influenced by things other than just data. And that's very important for people to understand,

that there's an enormous amount of money that's being spread around here, and people have gotten obscenely wealthy because of this pandemic. And they've done so because they promoted a very specific narrative that they knew was going to be profitable for them, even if it was detrimental for people, even if it removed people's ability to choose what to do and not to do, even if there was people that would not be adversely affected by that virus statistically because of their health, their age, they didn't give a fuck. You want to play football? Take this fucking thing.

And I want you to do it publicly so that I can get more money out of those other people that are thinking about it and they're on the fence. Yeah. And then we're going to virtue signal to say, look how righteous our league is. We have 95% compliance with the vaccine. Compliance. And if you don't, we're going to send a stooge to your team to show you graphs of your vaccination percentage of your team compared to the rest of the league, which actually happened. Really? Yeah. What was the stooge like? Oh, I mopped the floor with them. Did you? Yeah. See, again, that's why people are like, no one knew your vaccination status. You lied to your teammates. No, no, no. Day three of training camp, they sent this stooge in and he showed these slides about what your vaccination

percentage was in your team. Where you compare the rest of the league? And I started asking them questions about liability. Oh, I'm not a lawyer. Okay, cool. But you're in here talking about all these different things and you don't talk about anybody's personal health issues. There's zero exemptions. You took out religious exemptions. You took out PEG exemptions. You took out anybody's ability to have an opinion. I don't want to do this. Well, it's not only going to affect your day-to-day status on the team, but your ability to get a job, your ability to keep a job, your ability to get a tryout if you get cut from this team, because you want to put a percentage above 90% of your team where you guys can have some sort of special virtue. Like, look how amazing we are.

We're above the 90% threshold here. And then they scared teams and said, if you had an outbreak caused by a non-vaccinated player, you'd not only forfeit that game if you had enough players out, but you wouldn't get paid for that week. And here I am showing up to training camp, Joe, the first day, and we got five people who work for the organization out with COVID all fully vaxxed.

And I got COVID from a fully vaxxed individual who only got vaxxed to keep his potential of being a part of the NFL. How many people do you know that had vaccine injuries? A few. How bad? Heart issues. And then, like, bizarre episodes that took him to the hospital. As little as, like, eye issues that uh skin rashes

um no covid toe but a bunch of other stuff what was covid toe didn't they try to accuse you of having covid you hurt your foot i i i i joked on the my weekly show on the Pat McAfee show, that I'd gotten – not joked, but I'd gotten hurt. I hurt myself when I had COVID working out around my house because I had to be literally locked away for 10 days. And they joked about how I was, you know, an injury, a COVID toe injury. And they joked about how it was an injury, a COVID toe injury. And in the Wall Street Journal in their journalistic integrity wrote this article about how I had lesions on my feet. And that's what my injury was. And it was caused by COVID. And then I showed my toe in an interview when I came back to work.

And it started this whole thing. What was the extent of the injury? I broke my toe in an interview when I came back to work and it started this whole thing. What was the extent of the injury? I broke my toe. That was the extent. Just a normal injury? Yeah, a fracture. And the Washington Post, did they contact you at all? Wall Street Journal. Oh, excuse me, Wall Street Journal. Did they contact you? No, I mean, no, of course not.

I asked for the guy's information and I had a phone conversation with him. Really? Yeah. How'd that go? It was very cordial. Did you ask him why did you publish this? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I had my own assumptions that he was obviously trying to slam me because that was the flavor of the week and I was an easy target. But I said, have you ever watched me on the Pat McAfee show? and I was an easy target. But I said, have you ever watched me on the Pat McAfee show? I said, do you understand my relationship with Pat and AJ, who's my best friend on the show and the jokes that we have and the lightheartedness? I said, did you watch the episode at all?

Because if you did, you would know that they were making a joke about how I hurt my toe when I had COVID. I said, and also, sidebar, every, probably an assumption, but I'm assuming this is probably true. Just about every beat writer that works for the, that covers the Packers, right? And national media that watched that show each week, because they write stories about it. Not one writer wrote anything about COVID toe. No one fucking, you know, it was like, Oh, let me look into what COVID toe is. And maybe I can, you know, scoop this first and write an article about it. I said,

no one wrote about it. I said, do you think you were like writing some, you know, uh, groundbreaking, you know, breaking news story by saying COVID toe? No, you're trying to slam me. I said, I just want you to admit that you didn't watch the show. I said, and you were doing it. No, no, no, no. I watched the whole episode. I said, have you seen any other episodes? I said, do you understand the rapport I have with these guys? Do you understand what humor is?

Sarcasm? But I think overall it was a cordial. I mean, he took my call. Probably thought he was going to get another story out of it. What was his reason for publishing this false information? He thought he was doing a justice to all the, you know, thousands of people affected by COVID till but what is the, no one had ever heard of COVID till until that article came out. I can promise you that. Yeah. What is Covito?

Is that a real thing? Supposedly. It involves some sort of lesions on your feet. But you never said you had lesions on your feet. So why did he publish that? Because it was the flavor of the week. But did you ask him? Why did you publish that?

Yeah. And what did he say? He thought he was reporting on a legitimate medical affliction. Sure he did. Yeah. Did he publish any stories about people with vaccine injuries? No. Those are legitimate medical afflictions.

You should probably look into that. There's not enough information on VAERS, I don't think. Well, it's not just that, right? It's like there's no liability. That's the real problem. Like, it doesn't matter. That goes back to the 80s. Yeah.

Well, with this stuff, it was specific. With this particular medication, this particular vaccine, it was very specific that they were going to exempt them from any liability because of this emergency use authorization. Which is only granted, I mean, you know these things. Yeah. If there's no other therapeutic option. Exactly. Exactly.

Which is why they were so vehement in their opposition to anything else. Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. I mean, I feel like that's not, you know, like you saying that, me saying that last year. Like, that's conspiracy, right? Oh, you saying that, me saying that last year, like that's conspiracy, right? Oh yeah. Yeah.

There's a lot of things that- I mean, I think there's a greater, at least percentage of the population that can go, okay, that's reality now. Yeah. Right? Most people. Most people are saying that's reality now. And there's a lot of people that feel duped and they might be quiet about it, but they

feel duped. There's a lot of people that feel duped and they might be quiet about it, but they feel duped. Is it true that the, because remember they championed that they had got a vaccine that was FDA approved, right? But that actual vaccine didn't come out. Is that true? Well, when Jen Psaki said these vaccines are approved by the FDA, which is the gold standard, that was a lie. They weren't approved. This was not true. They had an

emergency use authorization. They weren't approved. But she was a propagandist. I mean, when she's working for the White House, she's this person that answers questions. And most of it, the hard questions were all by Peter Doocy on Fox News. He was like the only guy that was like pushing back against her. And she just fucking flat out lied on not just one occasion, multiple occasions. I mean, maybe they had a narrative that they told her. Maybe these are talking points. Maybe that's her job. But it's a weird job in the beginning, right? To begin with, because it's a job where you're not even asking the president you're asking this white house press secretary yeah so there's a person you know and the only

one that was good at the girl um mckinney what's her name kaylee mckinney the one who worked for trump that lady was a fucking assassin that lady had like binders with like footnotes and anyone say some shield that's interesting because actually actually CNN said this and then she would like quote it back to them and stuff it in their face That lady's the best ever at that job. She's the fucking Michael Jordan of White House press secretaries. She's a fucking wizard She was great at it. Unfortunately, she was working for Trump. So she didn't get any of the credit She deserved for you know being so good at that. Now they just read it out of the binder. They don't even have no words. Now they just fucking lie.

Did you see the one lady that was on with Don Lemon? Don Lemon, who's chief propagandist for the fucking CNN. She's on with him and he's saying, do you think that Joe Biden was too old to run in 2024? She's like, why are we even asking this? I can't even keep up with him. That's what she said. I can't keep up with him. Which I said, like, well, you should go to a doctor

because you've been fucking poisoned. If you can't keep up with that guy, that's a real problem. He's dying in front of our eyes. I mean, if he dropped dead tonight, no one would be shocked. They can't, I mean, they can't put him back up, can they? Yes. Yeah, they can. It depends back up, can they? Yes. Yeah,

they can. It depends on what kind of medications they get him between now and then. Whatever the fuck they gave him during that second debate, that's a good mixture. I don't know if he can maintain that mixture, because I have a feeling that every cell in his body is like like re-entering orbit in the space shuttle, like fucking

keep it together. So let's live in that world for just a second. What would... Let's think about about it because i've thought about this before because i've thought about like man he was pretty like you know on the ball what could they possibly have given him adderall for sure yeah if i was going to do it what i would give him it was adderall i would give him testosterone i would i would i would have him on testosterone period anyway because he's that old i mean i would have him on you know peptides human growth hormones from orleans whose body produces more growth hormone i would have him on all sorts of nootropics i would have him on alpha brain i would have him on every fucking

thing that's available neuro gum i would give everything that you can to enhance his memory acetylcholine all these different things that we know through peer-reviewed data that actually do help your memory. And then I would give him some sort of stimulant. I would give him something that's maintainable, something where he's not out of his skin going crazy, and he'd probably practice. He'd probably practice with low doses, and I know they had practice debates. And so he had his talking points dialed in and I would even give him an earpiece. I'd give him something where we could give him data and tell him this and tell him that

and don't say this. And there's, I respond to that. But I don't even know if that would be good because sometimes when people have things in their ear, it confuses them. It's hard to get used to like having people talk. Have you ever had someone talk in your ear while you're talking? Yeah, it's difficult. It's hard to get used to like having people talk if you're at someone talking your ear when you're talking. Yeah, it's difficult very hard I've had bad producers on shows and in the middle of a conversation you're there talking in your 30 seconds to go out here Yeah, that's not that bad because that's like easy to ignore but let me talk about this. Yes. That's where it's hard Like what you know they start giving you day. I had one time. I was interviewing someone for the UFC I took it out of my ear

I'm like shut the fuck up. You're talking while I'm talking, you idiot. Don't do that. You're ruining everything. But they don't understand that role. They just want you to be a little robot for them and just do what you need to do. But when you're talking to someone, you're taking into account what they're saying. You're formulating your next question.

You're listening. You're trying to interact with this person. You can't. You want to talk and listen to what their response is and also listen to what you're trying to tell me? Well, you need to get better at your job. No, you need to shut the fuck up. That's what you need to do.

Let me do it. I know what I'm doing. UFC, how about that Usman Edwards fight? Crazy. God. Crazy. Crazy. That's the greatest come from behind head kick knockout ever.

It was over. It was over. Usman was dominating the last two to four. I watched it again today. I watched it in come from behind head kick knockout ever. It was over. Usman was dominating the last two to four. I watched it again today. I watched it in the gym today working out. It's like, fuck, it's crazy. And we always knew Leon Edwards was really technical and really good, but I just assumed that the battle was lost. First round he looked great.

He took him down for the first time. Well, Colby Covington should have gotten credit for a takedown in the second fight. He did take Usman down. Usman's knees went to the ground, and Daniel Cormier was angry that it wasn't registered as a takedown. He goes, that's two. And you're talking to Daniel Cormier who's an Olympic wrestler. That's the expert. That's who you should be going to when you decide whether or not something's a takedown.

So I think they erroneously credited that with the first time that Kamaru Usman's ever been taken down in the UFC. It was the second time, but it was the most significant because not only did he take him down, he took him down, he mounted him, and then he took his back, and he was threatening with a rear naked choke. It was big. But then Kamaru, who's the champion he is, took over, and he won most of the remaining rounds,

and it looked like it was three rounds to one. It almost looked like Edwards had kind of resigned to the fact that he was going to lose on a decision. Yeah, that's what a lot of people were saying. I mean, Dean Thomas, actually, who's the guy we go into in between rounds, who's an expert coach, he said he's broken. You could see how he wasn't looking his coaches in the eye, and he looked dejected. He goes, this is what it looks like when you're mentally broken. And then he went out there and landed the greatest head kick in the history of the sport. It was so perfect, too.

It's so textbook. But that's the thing about Leon. He's so technical. The way he does things is so smooth and so efficient. And so it wasn't shocking that he could do that. It was just shocking in the context of his performance up until that moment. But the way he fainted with the right hand,

extended the left, that forced Usman's head to move off the center line and threw the kick at the same time. It was fucking magic. You can teach someone the reason why that technique works so well. You couldn't teach him any better than that visual. Because Usman's moving away from the punch and wham, the head kick comes.

What is this? They were drilling this right before the fight. Really? Oh my goodness. They noticed something on video, I guess. Oh my goodness. Jab away hook kick. Yes.

So they noticed that as he was moving, he would move off to the right-hand side. Wow. That's incredible. He'll circle and then go with the high kick. Wow. That's incredible. I mean, it's perfect. Greatest head kick knockout ever and I don't think there's a close second

in terms of you could say Holly Holm versus Ronda Rousey but Holly Holm was winning that fight it's a totally different experience Holly Holm was avoiding Ronda she avoided the clinch she avoided the takedowns she was dominating her on the feet Ronda was already beaten up by the time that Holly landed a head kick Rhonda was getting fucked

Up that was a rough night for Rhonda Rousey fan very rough right very very rough night But a great night for Holly Holm fans. I was this is different This was a fight where it was a come from behind he was down three rounds to one he won the first round he lost The next three and to land that head kick in a fight like that was fucking wild. Especially when you consider like Leon hadn't fought in so long he had gotten, there'd been so many problems. You know, he was scheduled to fight Tyron Woodley in England. That fight got canceled because of the pandemic and there was all these setbacks, but we had always known that he was one of the very best in the division. And he's this like dark horse,

this guy that people maybe in the general public weren't really aware of you know Everybody's aware of the big stars And he was just like super talented guy that had only lost one time in the UFC and that was to use my money early in His career and that was when he didn't know how to wrestle so the bit one of the big victors was him taking loose Mondown the first round and showing them hey motherfucker, I'm a real martial artist. I'm not just a striker anymore. I'm a fully well-rounded martial artist. Pretty impressive. I love you and Daniel's reactions.

Oh, my God. Some of the best. It was crazy. It's so crazy. I mean, how do you not react that way? Like when that happened. I mean, everyone behind us had the same reaction. There's a video of Tony Hinchcliffe who was right behind me and uh when the head kick lands he stands up

and puts his arms in the air he goes oh my god that's everybody's reaction was like oh my god because when you think that's one of the beautiful things about mma that is different than any other sport in that like or boxing too is that you could come from behind with one move, one thing, and it changes everything and shuts it all off. It's so final. But you just haven't seen that in boxing or UFC, I would say, in a while, right? Very rarely.

Where somebody's been getting beat up. You know, that's what I love about the Tyson Fury, Deontay Wilder fights, is because you just knew at any point, it didn't matter who was ahead, one punch from either of these guys and it'd be fucking over. Right. But in the UFC, you just don't see that a whole lot where a guy's getting his ass whooped and then comes back and. Well, it's a credit to Leon that he was able to do that, but also credit to Leon that he really didn't absorb a lot of punishment in that fight. He wasn't busted up.

He wasn't, he didn't have his eyes swollen. He hadn't been concussed and rocked. He was losing, but he wasn't getting beat up. He wasn't getting, like, tortured. He was still very fresh in the fifth round, which is also a credit to his conditioning, you know, that he was able to fight that kind of a grueling fight and still be fast enough.

In Utah as well because some of the other fights, multiple fighters were really, I mean, poor Luke wasn't conditioning-wise, but there were other in the prelims where people were really tiring out in the second and third rounds of three-round fights. Sure. And both these dudes, Usman as well, they look really fresh in the fifth round. Well, Usman lives and, well, trains at least in Colorado. So he's training at altitude, which is great

But there's two there's arguments about that too There's one of the arguments is that the best method to do is actually to sleep at altitude but to train at sea level Yeah, yeah because they it's about how much output you can put out and That if you're training at sea level, you are able to put in more work. So you have more output. So you're able to condition your body better and then you recover at altitude. So in your sleep time, your rest time, then your body acclimates and produces more red blood cells, which enhances your endurance, but you're still getting in more work. Interesting.

Yeah, that's the general consensus now, is they think that it's better to sleep at altitude. So people have these altitude tents. Hyperbaric stuff? No, it's an altitude tent. It's a tent that you sleep in. And so what it is is like you are in this diminished oxygen environment while you're sleeping. That's like a mile or 10,000 feet or something? Yeah, something like 10,000 feet. And I know BJ Penn used those when he was fighting and some other folks have used those,

but Leon used that throughout his camp. So even when Leon was training in England, before he came over to America to prepare for the final leg of his training, he was sleeping in an altitude tent. Worked out. It worked out. Yeah. Wild. And they're going to have a rematch.

If they do have a rematch, it'll be in England. So Covington won't get Edwards? I don't know because a head kick like that takes a long time to recover from, and that's something that really needs to be discussed because his ability to absorb punishment may be, you know, because of that kind of a knockout when you get knocked unconscious, like Freddie Roach wouldn't let Manny Pacquiao do anything for like a year.

He wouldn't let him fight. He wouldn't let him train. He wouldn't let him spar. He was like, you need to take a long time off after Juan Manuel Marquez knocked him out with that one punch. That kind of KO when you're flatlined, when you're flatlined by a massive blow like a fucking head kick, which is the most powerful blow that you could throw in MMA, that can affect you. And it affects different people in different ways. There's all sorts of different variables that have to be taken into consideration.

You know, was it just a flash knockout? Is he going to be fine in a couple of months? Or is it something that he, you know, we don't know what kind of repercussions health-wise that's going to have on him. Some guys, they lose their chin, like, overnight. One knockout like that and they're never the same again. Hopefully not for Kamaru. He's a lot of fun to watch. No, he's awesome.

He's awesome. I mean, in my opinion, before that fight, he was the greatest welterweight of all time. If you look at the quality of his competition and the way he dominated them, he didn't just have, like, close fights with people. He was smashing them. And he did that all the way up to his title run, you know he did that while he held the title and one fucking kick changed

everything there's some fun fights coming up oh yeah man yeah there's some good ones adesanya's fighting that's a good one pahera's a dangerous man yeah it's just coming back to the ring he's fighting hamza which is crazy i know that is... Yeah, that guy's intense. Yeah. Yeah, there's some great fights. But Diaz is one of those ones, and I'm a fight fan, but it's a no-brainer. You know, there's just a few guys,

doesn't matter what you're doing, you always make sure you tune in. Yeah. It's like with Conor. It was like that with Floyd Mayweather, even though it wasn't... That's why I really shifted from loving boxing to loving MMA and the UFC,

just because it's so much more definitive in the MMA world. But Conor and the Diaz brothers and Adesanya up until maybe the last couple fights where they haven't been as exciting, I would say. I would say there's a reason for that, is that Adesanya's smart. Like the guy he fought in his last fight Jared Cannoneer everybody's like well he didn't do enough he just coasted and won like no he was fighting one of the most fucking dangerous guys alive at 185 pounds Jared Cannoneer is a fucking monster he's so dangerous he's so powerful and he's so big he fought at heavyweight

and then he fought at light heavyweight and he makes 185 by the skin of his teeth. And then weighs, what, 205 on fight night? Easily. He's massive. Well, do you know that Pajero, Alex, the guy who is going to fight Stylebender next, he weighed 229 when he fought last. What? Yes.

So he weighed in at 185. And then he was 229 on fight day how is that even possible science that's a wild cut I don't know there's a I love style but he's back to back oh he's so technical he's the most technical guy in the sport in history in terms of striking no one's even close to him he's so good but look that's the difference so what did he say so he cut 47 pounds so that's him fight day on the right and that's him weigh in so 99 kilograms what is that what's 99 kilograms 220 just under 220 so 47 47 fucking pounds. That is bonkers. To go from 85 to whatever that is.

Yeah, 100 kilos is 220, so that's... That's incredible. It's fucking incredible. But that's what they're doing. And that's the most avoidable aspect of MMA, I think, is the weight cutting. And I think it's a real problem. So what do you do to change it? They need to do hydration tests.

They need to have more weight classes. Because right now there's only eight weight classes. So there's some big jumps. And one of the big jumps is 85 to 225 or 265. 205 rather and then 205 to 265. Those are the big jumps. So 85 to 205, that's 20 fucking pounds. That's so much weight. There's nothing like that in boxing. In boxing, you have guys that are

fighting at 147 and then you have guys that are fighting at 154 and then you have guys that are fighting at 160. That's so reasonable. Six pound weight class differences are very reasonable. And then it goes to 68. That's reasonable. Then it, and then it goes 68 to 75. Also reasonable. These make sense. Seven-pound gaps, six-pound gaps. The 20-pound gaps that they have in MMA are nuts. And then how about the fucking 60-pound gap from 205 to heavyweight? That's crazy.

It's too big. It's too much. And the way these guys are depleting their body and destroying their body to make weight, you can only do that so many times. Guys start getting kidney damage. They start getting kidney stones and develop all sorts of issues with their organs. It's just not good. And it's avoidable.

It's totally avoidable. If you just structured the weight classes and ran hydration tests to make sure that guys are competing in a weight class that is actually their frame. That actually fits them. That can be done. Make it happen. Nobody wants to listen to me now. I brought it up with the powers that be.

There's a lot of things that I bring up that they go, yeah, we can't. But they could. And unfortunately, I think it's going to take a tragedy. And we've had people die overseas. I've seen people on death's door. I remember when Travis Luter fought Anderson Silva, he missed weight, but I was there while he was trying to make weight. So he missed weight and then they gave him a certain allotted amount of time to try to make weight again afterwards to see if the fight can still go on. I watched him shuffle, because he couldn't walk. So he was shuffling to the scale.

His lips were cracked, and you could see blood in his lips because he was so dehydrated. There was no water. There was no water. He had dried himself out to death's door. Like if he had to fight that right then at that moment, he would not have been able to go one round. He was so exhausted. And then the next day he lost and he looked exhausted when he lost. He wound up losing

by submission. He got caught in a triangle and got hit with elbows and tapped out. But it was more the weight class or the weight cut than it was anything else. You know, you could say that's on him because he didn't do it correctly. Look, you know, Usman is big for the weight class too. So is Leon Edwards. They both made the weight fine and then they rehydrated. It can be done. But it's avoidable. It's an avoidable part of MMA that I think should really be addressed. And I think it's also cheating. I think it's sanctioned cheating. You're not 180. You're not. You're pretending. You're pretending you're fighting at 185 pounds. You're fighting at 220. That's what you are. You're 220. You just dry yourself out to 185 for the briefest amount of time possible. You hop on a scale early, and then they scientifically

rehydrate you up to a healthy level. To dehydrate yourself to the point of literally on death's door 24 hours before a fucking cage fight is crazy. You wouldn't go out and party 24 hours before a cage fight. You wouldn't do any of the things that could deplete your body the same way dehydration does, but yet we allow it. And not only do we allow it, we expect it. It's dumb. It's dumb and it's avoidable.

And it's one of the biggest dangers in the sport. It's dumb and it's avoidable and it's one of the biggest dangers in the sport There's a company called one FC that apparently have some sort of hydration Policy and they they they change like people that were competing at lower weight classes are now competing at higher weight classes They move stuff around but they've addressed it and they've addressed it in a way that seems to work for their organization And I'm sure there's some fuckery involved and some shenanigans involved, but way less than we have in the UFC. We'd like to see him be preemptive instead of reactive. Proactive instead of reactive.

It happened in our league. You know, forever, my rookie year, you know, day one through day 14 is double days. You know, two practices a day. Yeah. And how did that change somebody died and then it was two and one and two and one and two and one and then there were some college kids that died and then they went oh you can't ever do double days in a row anymore and no

they're dying from heat stroke are they dying from exhaustion both yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there was, you know, there was some maybe genetic issues going on, but at the root, there was not the right nutrition and hydration policies or education involved to allow these guys to recover. And what was going on only got changed when there was a tragedy do you think that's because they are trying to instill mental toughness and just condition them to just some extreme level by doing this and that this was like this old school thought yeah it was you know it was and some coaches have still said today you know how do you build callus if you don't you know put them through hell you know and it's like

work smarter not longer yeah efficiency over time well i have a thought on that too is that i mean i think you can make people mentally tougher but i think at the elite levels of competition everyone's mentally tough yeah and that's not the issue. And I've seen people fight overtrained. You know, I saw Tim Kennedy went through two camps in a row because one fight got canceled and they went right into another camp. And then he went out fighting Kelvin Gastelum and he was gassed out like almost immediately. Which that fucking guy has a gas tank as big as the ocean. He's never out of gas.

It's like one of his biggest strengths is his fucking relentless pace. He's never out of gas. It's like one of his biggest strengths is his fucking relentless pace. But his body was just failing him because it had never gotten the adequate rest and recovery. Well, I mean, I think for a lot of the older mindset, older coaches, that's not part of it. Rest, recovery, hydration, proper eating habits, how that affects performance. It never came into effect. It's like, no, we're going to grind you and see what your limit is. Yeah.

Yeah. And the ones that can make it through, they're going to make the team. The ones that can't, you're fucking out of here. Yeah. But that's just, thankfully, that's not the way we do it anymore. But I don't think it ever has to be. They've had to change a lot of things in the NFL, right? I mean, concussions.

Now people realize what an issue that is. I mean, when you first started playing football, how much talk was there about CTE and concussion? None. Yeah. You know, you get dinged in the head, you see stars and get back out there. Yeah. Yeah. Now there's much better policies in place and awareness around it.

And, you know, probably as much attention as could possibly be to any type of head injury that happens. We have independent people, you know, spotters who can pull people out of games who might've got dinged up. We have multiple independent medical personnel whose main job is to watch for head injuries now, which is great. And the recovery process to actually get back on the field is way more difficult. You got to pass a number of different tests. It's all slotted on a day-to-day basis. It really sets up that you're not going to be able to come back the next week. What protocols do they have for recovery? Like, so if someone gets dinged, they get concussed,

what do they do to try to help them recover? Well, I don't think that part is maybe where it needs to be yet. It's more go home and rest. Really? Yeah. So they don't have any modalities? They don't have any therapies? They don't have anything that they do?

Hyperbaric chambers? Nothing? in green bay really and i would say not in probably most places there's no there's i think in any business i'm not just going to single out the nfl but there is an aversion to a new way of doing things always and i think until they see other people doing it and having success maybe uh it's always going to be met with no this is how we do things we've always done in a certain way that's how we're going to do things now there's education that comes up and conversations and we further it but but it's not like, hey, you got a concussion? Okay, you're going to hyperbaric for days one through three and do light therapy in this day and take this on this, whatever it might be.

There's not. And what tests do they do on people to make sure that they have recovered? There's cognitive testing. There's balance testing. There's multiple cognitive tests and then a balance test. And it's all compared to your baseline that you do at the beginning of every season. When you hear about guys like Jim McMahon that are suffering really badly now,

does this give you pause? Yeah, for sure. And I know Jim Jim and I'm definitely friendly with Jim. I, you know, enjoy being around him. He plays in the same golf tournament I do in Tahoe. He's played every year it's ever been on. And, um, and I've talked to him about, uh, about his, uh, his issues and, and heard him talk about it as well. And it definitely gives me pause. Um, that's why I'm always, you know, doing research on my own about stuff that people have done. Joe Namath has talked a lot about, you know, his use of hyperbaric chambers actually and

healing some of the gray matter that has been associated with traumatic brain injuries. But, you know, CTE has been linked to a number of suicides that we've had from former players. of suicides that we've had from former players. And it's a real thing. I really do think it's an issue. The NFL, I think, is doing a lot to combat it now, thankfully, with the standardization of the helmets that we use is way different than it used to be. I mean, there is a very high standard and testing process that goes into that. They've tried to police the helmet-to-helmet hits that we've had. There's way more protection for players that carry the ball. There's protection of all sorts for any type of helmet-to-helmet contact. You can't erase any of it, and some of it, honestly, is the draw to the sport, is the violent nature of it.

But I think all of us realize the risks that were taken. I mean, you should. You play in a contact sport. And there's things to look into and to think about when you're playing and when you're done playing to make sure your cognitive function is still there and you're lesser at risk to some of the effects of CTE. Well, you're a very proactive guy, so I'm sure you have kept abreast of all of your own impacts. How many times do you think you've been concussed?

Let's see. I've had three concussions, I believe. One, two, three. Yeah, I've had three concussions, I believe, one, two, three. Yeah, I've had three concussions where I've come out of games in my playing time and obviously taken a number of other hits to the head that, you know, didn't classify as concussions. But the last one I had was in 2018, and I got kind of clotheslined. And I went over and sat on the bench, and I was like, oh, man, I kind of dinged up a little bit, but felt like I wasn't – I was okay. And then it just came on, and my vision just went like, whew, you know, and took myself out of the game. you know, and took myself out of the game. And that one kind of scared me, to be honest, because it didn't feel like I was concussed.

It didn't feel like I was, it felt like kind of a normal shot almost. And then it just came on and I, you know, basically was losing my vision. And that's when it gets scary. So that's when I really started looking into, um, some of the things that, uh, that people were writing about and researching on, on, um, traumatic brain injuries and, and ended up getting a hyperbaric chamber and, and, um, and, and felt like, uh, those dives have really,ives have really helped me. And then, you know, taking Alpha Brain is awesome too. Yeah.

I saw this article recently about Brett Favre where he's talking about how he's had somewhere around 1,000 concussions. That might be exaggeration. Might be. Well, he played in 350 games, so that's like three a game. I think he was talking about his whole life. Oh, his whole life? Yeah. Yeah, I mean.

What does it say here? It said more than 1,000. It's what we know now is concussions happen all the time. So he believes he's only suffered three concussions in his career. He's now upped that estimate to more than 1,000. Well, I do know that for sure, you know, when he started playing, I believe, in 91, the protocol was you got dinged, just take a little break, shake it off, and get back out there. Right.

Well, that's how it always was in sparring. Yeah. I've seen guys get knocked out in the gym, and then they're sparring 10 minutes later. And that's when multiple concussions can happen Yeah because because once you get ding the first time the next hit doesn't have to be on the same anywhere on the same level to To have a you know a brain a brain issue So he says what we know now is concussions happen all the time far

I've said you get tackled your head hits the turf you see flashes of light or ringing in your ears But you're able to play based on that Thousands so it had to be because every time my head hit the turf there was ringing or stars going flash bulbs but i was still able to play yeah yeah i mean if if every time you get tackled that could be a concussion like play then probably a lot for all of us. Yeah. Have you found anything that's like deteriorating or would that be the end for you? That would be the end for sure. Yeah. I mean, my life after football is going to last a lot longer, I hope, than my life in the game. This is my 18th season and I'd like to- That's a lot of seasons.

I'd like to think I got more than 18 years left in my life. That's kind of amazing that you've done that. mean uh you think the average nfl player what is the average time playing about three years wow is there a sport like that i don't know i mean i don't think there's another sport like that no i mean the turnover it's just it's a young man's game you know although uh tom has kind of rewritten some of that in playing what 24 years he's going back in again yeah uh but they don't kind of make them like that at all i feel fortunate to be still playing at 18 years but um but you learn how to take care of your body and and avoid i mean tom has avoided, I think, big shots most of his career. He had one knee injury and other than that, he's been fairly healthy most of his career

and not really had any concussive issues. And I've been able to stay relatively healthy as well in my career. But, yeah, it's a young man's game, and that's the fun part is the battle against time and the battle against age and the battle against the young guys trying to take your spot. You said you've had some knee injuries before, right? Yeah. What was the extent of those? I've had multiple cartilage issues, two clean outs, had an ACL reconstruction in college.

in college and then just a lot of you know issues around that nerve issues arthritic issues bursa inflammation and then in 2015 after that season i got cleaned up and i said it's time to get serious about my diet and i cut out a lot of shit from my diet uh Hurtful to many Wisconsinites, but I really cut out dairy. You probably shouldn't say that out loud. I've said it before. Did they get upset? They did, yeah. Really?

They said I was anti-Midwesterner. But when I did that, and I really limited gluten as well, I haven't had knee issues since January 2016. Really? So you think much of it? And that was since 1999, 17 years of knee issues, cleanup, and a change in diet, and nothing the last six years. As far as inflammation goes, I had a fracture on my knee in 2018, but nothing inflammation related. That's incredible. That's really amazing that diet had that much of an impact,

especially when you consider the amount of abuse that your knees would take playing football. Yeah. It's been a total game changer for me, but diet has a big effect on more than just inflammation in your knees. Yeah, it really does. Personality. Yeah. Yeah, it has a big effect on your immune system, a big effect on just overall pain and the way you feel. Yep.

It's kind of amazing how bad most food is for you. Most of it's not real. It's not real. It's not good for you Fill with preservatives And you know Genetically modified To stay on the shelf longer

You talking about that Fake meat Oh that stuff That stuff's hilarious Especially the vegetable fake meat They keep trying to sell that shit Nobody wants it The stock has crumbled

Because everybody was like Beyond meat This is our way out of this Like uh uh That's their way to more health problems That shit's terrible has crumbled because everybody was like, beyond meat, this is our way out of this. Like, uh-uh. That's their way to more health problems. That shit's terrible. You ever see like the rat profiles when they serve rats?

They develop all these fucking liver problems when they serve them that fake shit. How'd that information get out? I don't know. See, find out what that study was. There was some study about rats and um the uh ingredients in these fake meats it's not it's it's processed seed oils you want if you want to eat vegetarian eat vegetables yeah don't be eating some fucking fake nonsense that that's designed to make it look like a fucking cheeseburger you're not eating a cheeseburger bro but don't eat a bunch of shit sprayed with glyphosate yeah yeah that's the crazy one the recent discovery that some the percentages are insane yeah it was like 96 of corn or some shit and like 100 of soybeans or some shit yeah has

glyphosate residue yeah and people are saying oh it's a tiny amount of parts per million no big deal like what are you talking about where about? Where's the fucking long-term data on tiny parts per million of a fucking toxic chemical being ingested by people not being problematic? Show me that before you're – because there's so many people that are co-opted by these companies. And then they'll immediately be the expert that comes on to calm people down after this. Oh, you need to look at the actual data we're talking about the most minuscule amounts yeah well everything is going to kill you yeah why worry about that what's the big deal yeah glyphosate scares the shit out of me because it's so it's everywhere it's like there's so many fucking things that are sprayed with it

and you know if you want to that's the thing about monocrop monocrop agriculture you want to be able to have 10 000 acres of corn boy that's a lot of fucking plants you have to kill you got to kill a lot of other stuff that wants to grow there and that stuff that they spray on the plants to kill the other stuff that shit's in your body now and they did uh blood tests on people and they they found that it was some ungodly percentage. I forget what the number was. Was that microplastics? Yeah.

That's another one. Not good. Yeah. Yeah, you need a credit card-sized, at worst-case scenario, credit card-sized piece of plastic every week. That can't be good. No. Yeah. I don't think so.

Well, it's just the worst of it is what's happening to people in development. Like people, when a woman's pregnant, her body's exposed to a large amount of phthalates. These phthalates, they reduce the size of a man's testicles and penis. They damage the reproductive organs of a woman. Women are way more likely to get miscarriages. They damage the reproductive organs of a woman. Women are way more likely to get miscarriages. If you look at the advent of petrochemicals,

there's a book called Countdown by Dr. Shanna Swan, who was also on the podcast. I think she's from Harvard. But she wrote this breakdown of the introduction of phthalates. And phthalates are these chemicals that exist in plastics. And they use mammal studies to show what happens in mammals, and one of the things it shows is that their taints shrink because the taints of male mammals are between 50% and 100% larger than female mammals. But with the introduction while they're in the womb to phthalates in the female's bloodstream,

the male taints shrink. And they've shown a radical decrease in the size of taints, the radical decrease, and this is in humans, decrease in the size of penises and testicles, and then a big uptick in miscarriages for females. And they believe that all of these are about these chemicals that are now in our diets. It's destroying the reproductive systems of people. It's lowering sperm counts in a radical way. It's very, very scary stuff.

And it's almost unavoidable at this point because I don't believe that these studies were released. I think they figured this out somewhere in the 2010s. And so we have like 10 years of this data and maybe even less where they're they're just sort of working out like what are the implications and what's actually happening to people yeah we're fucked we're fucked or not i mean maybe they'll figure it out someone i have hope i have hope. The Roundup shit scares me almost more than anything because there's so much of that. What do we got here?

Plant-based impossible burger. Tests conducted by moms across America found the impossible burger tested positive for residues of glyphosate. The levels of glyphosate detected in the impossible burger by Health Research Institute laboratories were 11 times higher than the non-GMO project verified beyond Burger. But wasn't there something about rats? Can't find it? Yeah.

It said it was like a rat. That's the title of the same page. It said like a rat feeding study. Oh, damn it. Was it a rat feeding study? That was the headline of this same page. It's like a rat feeding study. Oh, damn it. What does it say? Rat feeding study? That was the headline of this page. Okay. Rat feeding study suggests that Impossible Burger may not be safe to eat.

Great. Now you tell me. Yeah. Wow. There's a lot to consider, but I hope people, at least because of this information will make better choices that's the hope and you know organic foods definitely a better choice and you know also limit your amount of fucking bullshit in your diet drink more water drink more water what a radical idea yeah how about that yeah probably good for you start with that take

some vitamins and electrolytes. Get out in the sun. Get out there. Exercise. Get out in nature. Get off your phone. Don't eat cheeseburgers as much. Yeah. Get off your phone. Live your life. Thanks, buddy. Hey, my pleasure, brother. Thanks for being here. It was a lot of fun.

It was great to hang out. We'll do this again sometime. All right. Bye, everybody.