The Joe Rogan Experience - #285 - Tim Ferriss

Episode Date: November 19, 2012

Joe sits down with Tim Ferriss.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Boom. Bitches, back with new knowledge and information. Tim Ferriss joins the podcast. My brother, thank you for coming back, man. Oh, it's great to be back. I've been looking forward to this one for months.

Dude, I've been looking forward to have you on, too. I'm glad we were able to work this out time-wise. You're a very busy character. You too, man. Do you're a very busy character you too man do you have a four-day marriage is that out yet you know people have asked for the four four-hour marriage and i'm like you know that would be easier to write given the rate of divorce it's like i can find i can do those interviews four-hour presidency four-hour ninja until i figure it out i'm not gonna write a book four-hour ceo yeah a lot it out, I'm not going to write a book for that. Four-hour CEO.

Yeah. A lot of those, too. There's a lot of those, too. Yeah. Your new book is, what is it called? The Four-Hour Commercial. The Four-Hour Commercial. That's me, man.

I'm the master of that shit. The Four-Hour Chef. Four-Hour Chef. A simple path to cooking like a pro, learning anything, and living the good life. It's a very narrow scope. That's not a narrow scope at all. How dare you? You're confusing me. I'm not as smart as you. Settle down.

This is probably the first time I've actually had some THC in my system since the last podcast. Well, that's ridiculous. What a coincidence. Do you attribute that to Tim Ferriss? Knowing that the government is listening and all. We always like to pretend like the government is... We're always trying to pretend like the government is don't know what you guys are talking about we're always trying to pretend

like the government is spying on us but meanwhile we broadcast this shit on an internet show that's how you know you're a stoner you're like dude what if the government's listening to this podcast right now

dude thousands of people are listening to this fucking thing right now oh yeah fuck the government why are they listening

why do they care um for our government is that possible maybe that we for our government we might be past that point yeah could have a four-hour countdown clock do you think that's happening well are you worried yeah i'm worried are you worried about uh what's going on in israel the gaza strip i'm worried not only about that but also honestly about just the financial integrity of this entire country yeah that seems fake well right i know exactly i mean the financial integrity of this entire country. Yeah. That seems fake. Right?

No, exactly. I mean, the financial integrity seems fake. Yeah, there's a really good book called The Biography of a Dollar, which talks about just the development of the currency of the U.S. dollar and where it is today. And the conclusion of all of those books is basically, like, buy shotguns, buy food, get something in a different currency. And what was kind of wild is is so when i was looking at the

doing research for the four-hour chef and got into this the wild stuff and we can talk about that like the foraging and hunting and all these things i'd never done and i went a little bit off the rails and started meeting all these survivalists and preppers and whatnot and so i ended up writing like 150 pages i had to cut because i just went ballistic in more ways than one just researching all this shit. And I had a number of close friends in San Francisco and New York who thought I was fucking nuts, and then Hurricane Sandy comes along. Whoa. So they thought that you were taking this way too far

and you had lost your mind and you were proposing improbable scenarios. Yeah, and then Hurricane Sandy. And now everybody has to think. It's amazing how fragile our life is here on this planet. We essentially live without a roof most of the time. The world is a convertible. And above us is all this shit that's flying around. There's like thousands of times every day

a piece of rock from outer space comes into the atmosphere and burns up. People need to wrap their heads around that, all right? This is crazy. This does not have to, just because this has been here as a city for 100 years doesn't mean it has to stay like this. Yeah, well, no, exactly.

And so Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, he's a really good example, which is, you know, the turkey thinks that things are going great all the way up until Thanksgiving. You know, like just the fact that he's had 364 days of living pretty doesn't mean 365 is going to be very pretty at all. I always use my analogy is the anthill analogy, that there could be an anthill that exists in a field and it's a big anthill. And these ants have been working in this anthill for God knows how long. And they only live for like a short amount of time. So it's been there long before they were ever born.

This anthill has existed in its many fucking complicated caverns. And then one day, this little kid comes along and stomps the fucking shit out of that anthill. And no one saw it coming. It never happened before. So they never even considered it. They just fucking go about their day. And this little kid comes along and stomps the shit out of that anthill and that's exactly what happened with hurricane katrina that's exactly what happened with sandy that's what could happen

with yellowstone oh yeah yeah or any sort of an earthquake i mean i i have a friend who has a house he has a vacation house on the beach in malibu. It is so badass. You sit there and you're on the ocean. And it's such a humbling experience to have. It's like something very, it just connects you in some weird way to nature when you're staring at that water. I think that's why beach communities are so chill. Beach communities are like, every day you're confronted with this reality that you ain't shit.

Okay? are like every day you're confronted with this reality that you ain't shit okay you stop and look out there dude as far as you can see is water and you die out there you can't make it and if for some reason it just swishes back and forth a little it's gonna wipe out everything for a hundred miles in like it's nothing okay so settle the fuck down and stop taking yourself so seriously like that's the feeling that you get when you're right next to water. I think that's important for people. It's important. It is.

I think it's also the sort of meditative aspect of the waves. Yes. It gives you a feeling. It gives you a peaceful feeling when you're sitting around and you're in Hawaii and you're looking at that water. You know you're on top of a volcano. You know this shit is temporary as fuck. you're like you know right now it's beautiful right now it's amazing you know the trippy part too you know i grew up on long island way out at the end and what part what is that like am against it montauk so i grew up as a townie

like a rat rat tail wearing townie and that's awesome and you you start thinking about, let's just say, climate change, and then you look at the wealth concentration in the first 10 to 20 miles of every coastline, and it's like 80% of the world's wealth would just be wiped out if there's a dramatic temperature change. And with Hurricane Sandy, what's not amusing, it's depressingly amusing to me, is when people are like, oh, that's like one in a hundred, one in a million. And if you look at, there was a piece in nature magazine this is just in the last i think few months where they said if climate change continues as predicted 100 year storms will happen every three years and i took a uh a training course in san francisco that was done by the police

department the fire department which was the the Northern California Emergency Response Training, NERT. And in the first class, this is the police. This isn't some wacko, paranoid, doomsday predictor. He said, all right, let's do an exercise. How many people are there in San Francisco? Something like, well, whatever, 800,000, right? Okay, if everyone's commuting in, like a couple million, whatever it might be. Okay, how many fire engines do you think there are in San Francisco? Something like, well, whatever, 800,000, right? Okay, if everyone's commuting in, like a couple million, whatever it might be.

Okay, how many fire engines do you think there are in San Francisco? And everyone's like, 100, 250, whatever it was.

It was something like 19. And he said, what that means is, if you look at like the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, it could be seven to 10 days before anybody gets to you.

Like, you cannot rely on the existing structure. And that kind of blew my mind. That, even it's amazing 10 days it's amazing to get it done that fast i after sandy i'm like well there's look they don't have a backup plan for something massive you know what they have coffins yeah right they have those plastic coffins they save up in case a fucking asteroid hits us they don't have like some crazy plan to feed everybody. They have a plan to go overseas and jack people and take their oil.

No plan to take care of the people in case there's some sort of an earthquake or something. Oh, yeah. No, there's no possible response that would cover it. And so what I figured out is I started doing the math and I was like, well, I spend, because I've broken myself like a thousand times, I was like, well, I spend, because I've broken myself like a thousand times, I spend $500, $600 a month on health insurance. And I don't even have 20 gallons of water and food and a shotgun and a few things, which would cost, what, $500 to $1,000 total one-time cost? I have a friend who has a solar-powered house. That's cool.

That's got to be the way to go, especially out here. Yeah. And just even a cheap generator. Like I had the power go out on my block in San Francisco for 24 hours, and I realized all my food is going bad. I had like 80 pounds of meat, no power supply. So I got a, I think it's a Honda EU 2000i generator that's popular at Burning Man and then a bunch of extra gasoline. I would not buy it just for that. Well, I burning man i would smell feet yeah i can go to burning man

with the rest of san francisco to see all my friends why do i smell that's like petroleum listen burning man people relax i'm just joking i don't want you getting angry at me fuck you dude why are you so aggro why i got a problem with burning me Burning Man? I don't really. I'm just completely joking. Can you just say shit just to say shit sometimes? Everybody's going to take everything so fucking seriously. Yeah, I think that generators are an awesome idea. That's a good idea to have around. It's hard, though, if you live in an apartment.

What the fuck do you do then? You could actually pull it off. And the only reason I figured this out... You've got to open the window or something? Yeah, you just have to have an exhaust pipe going out the window window so you get some coil up thing in that case how long does it stay on depends on the gasoline you have uh i mean i have maybe 10 gallons of gasoline and this this generator what's what's great about it is it's it looks like an old school like desktops server really yeah it's tiny it looks like one of those towers. It's not heavy at all.

It probably weighs 30 pounds. And how does the gas tank connect to it? What does it look like? Is it like a... You pour the gasoline right into the generator itself. Yeah, it's really well done. And it holds how many gallons? I don't know offhand.

Yeah, offhand I have... So how long does it stay with, like, one fill-up, and you turn it on? How long does it stay on? I honestly am not sure. I have everything ready to go, but I couldn't fit more than 10 gallons of gasoline in my apartment. Right.

Isn't it fucked up thinking about that? Like thinking about alternative ways to keep the power on? That's fucking terrifying. Everyone should at least get a Red Cross-endorsed hand wind-up-powered radio, which also doubles as a charger. You can get these for like 40 bucks on Amazon. But if the power's out, won't the radio be out too?

Well, you can actually use different frequencies. So, I mean, ham radio, as crazy as it seems, is actually a pretty good skill to pick up. That's what the fire department, police department, they're like, all those watches. That's how they catch pedos, right? It could be one of them or Dungeons and Dragons players again,

which I was not slamming. Kidding you for a elf. That's what I was. You were a gray elf. I was a gray elf. Wow. Yeah. Um,

you had 80 pounds of meat in your house. Oh, I have more now. I have about 120 pounds. Why do you have so much meat in your house? Yeah. Are you eating people? Are you eating homeless folks?

Shh. Cleaning up the streets. Gentrifying your neighborhood trying to improve your property value? So we have a mutual friend now, Steve Rinella. Yeah.

So just to give some context, so growing up on Long Island... Steve Rinella, for folks who don't know, is the host of Meat Eater. He's an author actually as well. He's got a host of Meat Eater. He's an author, actually, as well. He's got a book called Meat Eater, which is fantastic. Brilliant writer.

He's a very good writer, man. Very bright guy. So I met Steve when I was investigating how to reconnect with ingredients as part of this book. And I think above and beyond that, how to correct manual illiteracy. So one of the things that really started to bother me in the last few years is I looked at what my dad could do, my granddad could do. I can't fix half the things on my car. I can't do basic woodwork. I can't do any of that shit.

And I realized it was really causing me a lot of anxiety not to build things with my hands. So food and foraging and all this stuff became another way or one way to try to reclaim that. And then Steve I met through a bunch of different random circumstances. And what he countered was my image of a hunter. Because growing up on Long Island, I had a lot of injured deer come across my property from people who didn't know how to bow hunt. Like beer cans on the side of my on this on like my side of my driveway and i just developed this real like hatred it was that strong for hunters and just saw them as really responsible wasteful kind of jerk offs and then i met steve and so i'll give a little

you've probably heard this story but what blew me away about steve is he'll say look there are a lot of better hunters than me although he's a really good hunter they'll say there are a lot of better cooks than me but i'm a decent cook but there are very few of better hunters than me, although he's a really good hunter. And they'll say, there are a lot of better cooks than me, but I'm a decent cook. But there are very few people who can put them together. And so he took, for one of his books, I guess it was the Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, he took this 1906 Escoffier banquet. Escoffier is like the grandfather of French cuisine.

Three-day banquet, like 40 different dishes, with all this weird shit. Stingrays, and quails stuffed with sea urchin, or who the fuck knows. He served people raccoon that he found on the side of the road. Yeah, and what he did in this particular three day banquet is he killed and forged everything. He got every ingredient and then recreated

the entire three day thing himself. The guy's just dead. Yeah, he's an amazing dude. Oh, so for the meat, he took me on my first ever hunt, which was a white-tailed deer hunt. And then most recently we went to Alaska for about a week in the middle of nowhere to hunt caribou. So were you successful both times? I was. Yeah?

I was. So the white-tailed deer was your first experience? First hunt. And where did you go there? That was South Carolina. Because in California you have to fill out like a phone book's worth of paperwork to get anything done with hunting. In South Carolina, you just buy the hunting license online and you're done. Beautiful people of South Carolina.

God bless you. God bless you for fucking keeping the bureaucracy in check. So your idea about wanting to hunt was probably similar to what my idea was. It was like I eat meat and I have no connection to it. I'm just buying it in a store. I know this isn't healthy. I likened it to the idea of being born rich.

It's like I didn't really understand what it was like to earn it. I didn't in any way, shape, or form. And there's a lot of people that have a lot of misunderstandings about hunting too. And I shared those. When I was young,

I had a very ignorant opinion on hunting too. I just thought it was just people who like why would you kill an animal when you can just go to the store and get it for free or you know buy it without would have to deal with that like these people probably want to kill animals like well why don't you leave the animals alone then one day i was driving from a gig i was in boston or in new york rather and i was in in upper western Massachusetts, and I had to drive down, and I had to go like 30 fucking miles an hour, because these deer just kept jumping in front of my car. It was crazy.

I just kept seeing them over and over and over again. They were all over the road, so I had to drive really slow on the way home, and it was a really common thing on this one parkway where deer would get hit by cars. I mean, it was an infestation, Because if you're looking at that much on the actual road, off to the right and off to the left, there's fucking woods, man. So who knows how many goddamn deer are out there. And those deer, first of all, they're going to get hit by cars. They're going to starve because they're going to run out of food.

And if they don't have hunters managing that population, there's only one other option. And that option is predators. So you have two options. You have something that can kill a fucking deer with its face. And you're going to have a good population of those motherfuckers running around. And you're just going to trust that they're not going to get you and your dog and your kids. Or you're going to manage that population by shooting them and eating them. Yeah.

And it's a really fascinating sort of a situation when you really understand it for what it is. Like, it's wildlife management. They have to do this. Yeah. Because we are at the top of the food chain. So we have to take responsibility for that situation. We have game, and it's everywhere. And if you don't eat it, slowly but surely, that mountain lion population is going to start creeping up.

That's just how nature deals with shit. Or that, or the human population is going to start dropping because they become disease vectors for things like Lyme disease. My brothers had Lyme disease. My dad's had Lyme disease. Upstate New York, it's a real issue. That's how it's transmitted. I've heard quite a few people get it.

That's only one issue. There's a lot. And it's great meat. It's really good for you. It's better for you than cows that you buy in a store that have been fed corn and other unnatural things for cows. It's way healthier for you. My experience was that my whole life I had thought about it one way,

and then that one trip home I started reconsidering. I'm like, this is fucking crazy. And then I started looking at it, but there was no internet back then. So I'd have to read a book, I started reconsidering. I'm like, this is fucking crazy. Then I started looking, but there was no internet back then. So I'd have to read a book, which is really annoying. I'd sit down there. I don't mind reading a book now, but when I was 20 or whenever the fuck this was, why the

fuck are there so many deers? Then as I looked into all this shit, I realized there's arguments about managing them. There's the game, the fish and game and the hunters. Everyone has to come to an agreement of how many there are and i go well this is crazy you got these fucking they're like rats they're like giant rats giant rats that run in front of your car and commit suicide it's fucking bananas um and they they taste delicious and you can shoot them and it's free yeah you just have to pay for the license

yeah and then hit them in the right spot yes if they get distressed and it's free yeah you just have to pay for the license yeah and then hit them in the right spot yes if they get distressed then it's no good did oh is that true it can make it really uh distasteful if you get what's called a red cutter so for instance if you fuck it up and you injure it and then you chase it which you shouldn't do number one if you get a good shot and then you finally kill the thing um the the excessive adrenaline and whatnot can really can is that true because my deer i shot it and went down and it was uh it was gonna die but it was still alive and then i shot it again yeah i had to shoot it again yeah i think it depends a lot on the duration of that sort of that stress so what happens a lot for

instance with novice bow hunters i'm not a bow hunter like they'll go in the woods for hours well they'll hit it with a bow and then instead of waiting for it to die they'll chase it and it'll run around run around run around run around for like an hour right and then and then drop but so that's flooded with adrenaline yeah or i mean and again i'm i'm super novice but based on what steve told me also like depending on what gender deer you hit and if it's during mating season or not so if you hit like a ruddy buck that's just pumped full of horn naturally occurring hormones then i can end up being pretty what if it's like an aphrodisiac when the the deer is like super horny and you eat its meat but seems kind of homosexual i gotta be honest with you you know i don't think

there's anything wrong with that. Whatever works, works. Yeah, I mean, when you're eating tiger dicks or whatever the fuck it is that Chinese people eat, you're kind of... Not tasty.

It's very... I mean, it's interspecies. You're mixing species up, but it's also sort of homosexual. In a way, yeah. A little bit. It's okay. I had a bull penis in China.

Not tasty. I don't recommend it. We served that shit on Fear Factor. We served water buffalo dicks. I saw that. I saw that episode when you had all the different variations. That was just one time where I was like, this is the most ridiculous job on earth. The other time was when we served them donkey semen.

That's what canceled the show. They got so crazy. They served donkey semen. The producers lost their fucking minds, and so did NBC, because NBC said yes to it. That's the dirty secret about the last season of Fear Factor. They approved, NBC approved, sucking down a big gulp of donkey cum. They're like, yep, that seems like a good thing to put on TV.

Let it rip. That is disgusting. Dude, there's only been two times when i i disagreed with the producers i said you really shouldn't do this one time when we made them ride bulls i was like this is crazy this is you can't control this this is this is not good i didn't like it and then the other time when we made them drink cum i just never thought i'd have to say that i never thought i'd have to say i don't think you should serve those people donkey cum it's just it just doesn't seem,

it just seems like we're crossing a line. If you'd like this job and you want to keep it, and then TMZ got a hold of it. They put the pictures of it online. And then NBC said,

Polish out! Polish out! They pulled the episode. What response did they expect? I don't know what they were thinking, man. If I'm the guy who's telling you you're crossing the line.

Yeah, you're already there. You know, I'm a pothead cage fighting commentator. And I'm telling you you're going too far. Everything in my life is fucked up. Everything I do, whether it's stand-up comedy or this podcast, everything could be considered fucked up. And I'm like, you're going crazy. I'm like, you're getting too jiggy over here. gotta you gotta let that one go you can't they can't drink

cum no and piss by the way we serve them piss too nobody seemed to care as much about the piss i wouldn't care as much about the piss yeah the piss just they just drank it and nobody complained about the piss it was always the donkey cum and it always was like again it was like some sort of bestiality thing in people's minds. Because it's a body fluid and we know where it came from. Like milk. Yeah, but it's not like we're asking them to have sex. It's so funny how people

connect sex with the fluids that sex creates. It's like drinking... You're nowhere near that donkey when it comes. But drinking its cum somehow or another is sex with that donkey. I'm not sure I could rationalize myself into drinking donkey cum. As hard as I tried to make it into a thought exercise.

Well, what's fucked up is two people had a drink and they didn't win shit. That's what's fucked up because everybody drank it. One guy and two girls drank it. And they were nice people. That's what's even more fucked up. They were very nice. It's always the nice, quiet type. I felt terrible.

Drink the donkey semen. For all of them. I mean, it was like, occasionally you have a show where someone will try too hard or they'll be obnoxious. We didn't have any of that this last season of Fear Factor.

Everyone was like, really? They were nice folks. So I felt bad sitting down there drinking donkey cum. God, I would hate to see it digested like the next morning you're just sitting on the toilet blowing out quite honestly it's very similar to phlegm so it's like drinking almost like drinking a big glass of phlegm you know it's really very similar it's very

similar and it's textured and you know I don't know about taste because, you know, I never tried phlegm. Ha-ha! Get it? I wonder if you flush the toilet. Get it? I tried loads. You get the job? Where the fuck is this podcast?

I wonder if when you flush the toilet after digesting, if it's like super fast. Like it flushes really, really fast. Because it's slippery? Yeah. Because of all the phlegm? Right. Hmm. I don't know.

What kind of... Oh, what the fuck you're saying you need to go to a doctor for real need to go to a doctor and just tell him that you proposed that and he'll sit you down and go i think you're gonna die i think you have something wrong with your brain um so uh your first deer hunting experience was in north carolina was it south carolina south carolina was it South Carolina. Was it a gun, bow? It was a gun. It was a gun.

I didn't want to. My biggest fear going into all of that was fucking up the shot. I was really worried about just maiming the deer. Yeah. And then it takes a long time. It runs away. Like hitting it in the leg or something. I was really worried about that.

So I really got into the marksmanship super serious. It was actually just down here a couple weeks ago doing sniper training with some of the LA SWAT team members. Holy shit. Yeah, there's a great

company called ITTS that does trainings. They're fucking, they were great. But prior to that, so with the deer, I used a 7mm Remington mag.

I actually used Steve's gun, which is a left-handed customized gun. I use this gun too. It's a nice gun. It's a great gun. I actually use Steve's gun, which is a left-handed. I use his gun too. It's a nice gun. It's a great gun. I have since had a right-handed version of that made with a couple of changes. So it's like a his and hers

7mm Steve Rinella now. Nice. But I used his gun. And man, he's a great teacher. I mean, that's part of the reason I wanted to put him in the book. He is a fucking outstanding, outstanding teacher.

Well, he knows what he's doing in all, all aspects of the whole hunting thing. Cause it's his, his attachment to it. Isn't just hunting. It's also to, um, just the, the history of the United States and, and the people that lived in the land, the, the, uh, American Indian heritage and, uh, the stories. He had some amazing American Indian stories. Like really, I should say Native American stories. Really, really interesting stuff about that whole area where we went to Montana to the Missouri River. Yeah, the breaks.

Yeah, and he had just incredible stories, story after story. So he's a guy that like really embraces like the the history of a region too and the the history of the wildlife there as well how they uh migrate what the numbers used to be like and you know we occasionally would look for buffalo bones because they're like really common in the hills you know you see like the when the strata wears away you'll you'll find like these old ass fucking buffalo but that's cool yeah that's super cool it's pretty badass and steve i mean he grew up hunting with his brothers obviously his dad as well and i think his brothers they're both in the sciences but i believe they're both both ecologists

and it's just such it's a fascinating family and i mean steve i guess he's been writing for money for whatever it is, a decade maybe. But he started trapping for money in rural Michigan when he was like 10, 11. Yeah, yeah. He was talking about how his dad pulled him out of school for first day of trapping season, first day of hunting season. That's like how he grew up. I think that's fucking awesome. But it's fascinating because everybody immediately, if you think of a guy like that, you think of a dumb guy.

You think of an uneducated guy, an unworldly guy. He's the exact opposite of that. Total opposite. Brilliant guy. Brilliant guy. Very, very well read. Yeah. And really fun to talk to.

He's inquisitive. He's intelligent. He's on the ball. But he's the real fucking deal. Oh, yeah. And he expects that from other people as well. You're going to hunt with them. You're going on.

Oh, it's no joke. It's legit. Yeah, when we were in Alaska, we got dropped off. I think it was like five hours north of Fairbanks, flight time. And we got dropped off on the side of a lake by a bush plan. They're like, see you in a week. Peace. Don't get eaten by bears.

And then, lo and behold, never got dark because we were we were above the arctic circle and we had two huge grizzly bears repeatedly try to come into our camp because the people before us had left a fucking gut pile of caribou like i don't know 200 yards upwind so we had these two huge bears come in and uh and Steve was so funny because everyone's like oh fuck grizzly bear like 10 o'clock And it's like I don't know ETA three minutes And then Steve found that his found out his cell phone had been like in the bottom of his bag and was soaked with Deet and he's like fuck my fucking cell phone everyone's like Steve uh grizzly bear ETA three minutes He's like my fucking cell phone

He's like so unconcerned about this grizzly bear. And then he's just like, all right, fine, fuck it. And he picks up a shotgun and walks over with birdshot and starts firing it off and waving his arms and scaring it off from like – That's all you need to do? A hundred yards. But here's the thing. A hundred yards to a bear?

That's not a slow animal, right? So Steve's got some big balls. Yeah, he scared it off. The thing went running. Came back like two hours later. That's what we're going to say about him after he gets fucking eaten. Yeah, exactly. He had big balls until the bear ultimately ate.

That's what they said about grizzly man until the very end. He really knows those bears. He knows how to stay safe. Yeah, I think Steve is fine to be within 100 yards of a bear as long as he has a good firearm. Yeah, you've got to really have a strong rifle. When you stop respecting the fucking grizzly, that's when the grizzly takes care of you. To shoot a grizzly, you can't shoot it with a little pistol.

No, you need to hit it with a slug. Yeah, because you're not going to stop them. It's going to take years for them to die. If you shoot a big grizzly with a fucking 9mm, you try to go gangster rapper style on them, that's not going to kill a bear. No, no. It's going to keep running at you,

and you're going to be so scared when it eats your head. Yeah. People underestimate how hard it is to kill an animal like that, depending on the circumstances. I was talking to a friend of mine who is a Navy SEAL, and he's still enlisted. I mean, he does deployments and everything. But he was at one point in Africa,

and these villagers in sort of the downtime knew these guys were with the military and they said, hey, could you help us call this herd of water buffalo because they're destroying all our property and blah, blah, blah. We can make food out of the buffalo that you kill. He's like, sure.

So they had these long range sniping rifles and he said that, and he's a damn good shot. I've done some training with him and he said that he shot a water buffalo right in the corner of the eye and the thing like shook its head and then looked straight back at him and just kept on eating like what yeah the fucking skulls like that thick and it had like gone halfway in the skull and just lodged with a high power rifle and the thing just kept on eating. And so, like, that is what would happen if you didn't place your shot with a bear, and forget it.

Like, if the grizzly charged at you. A high-powered rifle, and it couldn't get through his fucking head? Yeah, they had to aim. They ended up having to aim at the base of the skull from the side of the back. Oh, my God. That's so crazy. Don't shoot him in the head became the rule. That's a big fucking animal.

Yeah. Well, when I was in Africa doing research for this book, too, I went to India, Japan, all over the place. And when we were in South Africa, water buffalo kill everybody. I mean, people are afraid of the lions,

but if you meet, let's say, the Maasai Mara, these warriors who jump up and down, the famous for the red robes, they're not afraid of lions at all. They'll walk off into the darkness with their big walking stick going from one village to the next they're like yeah like big house cats will scare them off water buffalo hippo and elephants those ones are all

afraid of because they'll just charge you and kill you yeah yeah water buffaloes are big fucking tourists get out of their cars on safari they're like oh let's take a picture with the cows and then the cows are like cow lamborg bulls, and then they get – I've talked about this a bunch lately, so I can't really go into it again. But have you seen Relentless Enemies? No. This is what I'm talking about. I've talked about it so many times in the podcast.

You have to watch it. It's a documentary. I'll just give you the brief. It's a documentary about a part of Africa where the rivers change courses, and it's isolated these lions with water buffalo. That's their only prey. So the lions have grown enormous. The female lions are the size of male lions. It's an amazing documentary. There's a couple different prides on this island, but one of them is fucking huge. They're like Hulk lions. That's awesome. They're just jacking water buffaloes, man. That's how they have to do it now. And you see how big a fucking water buffalo is when you see five lions have to do it now and you see how big a fucking water buffalo

is when you see five lions struggling to take this thing down yeah they're no joke fuck that man if you see one of those things in the wild you're not fuck with it yeah apparently back in the day like that was a big deal with buffalo too like if you if you got near a buffalo and the buffalo charged you i saw a video of a guy getting charged by a buffalo on YouTube. You don't think for whatever reason that you're going to die by buffalo. But that moment where that thing is going... And you realize how fucking big it is. And you go, what am I doing? I'm in front of this crazy fucking Star Wars looking animal.

Yeah, you're going to get hit by something that weighs more than a Volkswagen Golf with skull plates on the front of its head. Not going to end well at all. It must have been amazing back in the day when the Native Americans would run into these herds that were as far as the eye could see of these things. Because they really didn't have many natural predators. No, not at all. I mean, wolves, but it takes a a lot freaking wolves to take down a buffalo yeah they probably were fine yeah there must have been so many wolves though the wolves must have ate great yeah

because there was so many buffalo what other being after the saber-toothed tiger which was what the pleistocene what was that like 14 000 years ago was that what it was when the the woolly mammoths and saboteuse tigers also existed what other animal would eat them it would only be wolves and mountain lions right can a mountain lion even take out i don't think so because i think mountain lion more as a stalk and pounce type of animal as opposed to the endurance running like the i don't know if you seen Planet Earth, the series where they have an aerial shot of wolves hunting. I think it was a caribou. It may have been an elk. And how they basically, the wolves would run.

It's the trippiest thing when you see it from the air. They're almost like a peloton in the Tour de France. So they have the wolf in the front who's tiring out the caribou, and then the replacement runner will come from the back and fill in, and that guy will drop back and say they just run this relay race where they they they tag in and tag out on running this animal until it drops and then then they take it out holy shit yeah like persistence hunting sort of exactly yeah yeah exactly which uh they still do in certain parts of africa they they'll chase up a gazelle or whatever the fuck it is down until it just runs out of gas.

Yeah, pretty wild. And then they stab it. Fuck, how long does that take? I guess that can only be done in a place like Africa. You'd need the high heat. And you'd also need the higher heat. Oh, right, right, right. For the animal to overheat.

Right, right, right. That makes sense. Because that was the weirdest thing about deer, when you open them up, how hot they are on the inside. It's like, it's really kind of like, whoa. It's a real eye-opener. Yeah. What was really trippy, so the field dressing, right? So I was much more interested in what happens after pulling the trigger than before.

Did you stalk this deer? How'd you do it? No, this deer, the first deer, this was done from blind. So it was really, didn't have to work as hard on the hunt, certainly, compared to caribou. With the caribou, we did have to stalk. So you did both with Rinella? I did both with Rinella. And the first one, how long was it?

The first one had to be a year and a half ago, or maybe even slightly less. Was that when he had the other show, The Wild Within? No. No, I don't think so. It was the new show, Mediator? So the deer hunt was not filmed for Mediator. The caribou hunt was filmed for Mediator. So the deer hunt was just you guys?

The deer hunt was just because I met Steve and I said, you're my guy. If I'm ever going to hunt, you're the guy who's the best option for guiding this. And got along and both have pretty fucking strange senses of humor and went to south carolina and you think he has a strange sense of humor i think he has uh he can depends on how much wine we've had uh when we were camping what was great is we had these fucking bags of wine because they were from the boxes but they've been taken out and they look just like an iv bag so i've been like fantasizing about getting these like rolling carts from the hospital like supply store and just getting fucking iv bags of wine that people can drink through like a camelback

at dinner just to creep the shit out of everybody those camelbacks are fun yeah those things you you um uh you were in a warm weather area was it a warm weather time south uh in south carolina it was so we had to be really careful about keeping all the meat cool. That's part of the reasons that you need to... One of the reasons you need to remove the internal organs so quickly so that the meat doesn't spoil.

What was super trippy for me because I've just never experienced anything quite like it was when I was doing the field dressing maybe a minute or two into the process. Like I just felt like I had done it before. And I had this like hardwiring moment where, uh,

I was just really good at it. And it's just, that doesn't happen with many things. And I was starting to, it made me think about like how to orphan cats, know how to hunt, how to orphan to anything, fill in the blank.

That's even more specific than knowing how to hunt you know what i mean it's really incredible just like to take it apart and it felt so natural going through it well had you this been with obviously this you're a very smart guy so this had been something you had considered for quite a while before you actually went hunting but i never read about the field dressing because i wanted to have an intellectually honest first experience for my readers and to be able to convey that to them. So I did not study butchering, field dressing, anything. The only thing I studied was the marksmanship because I didn't want to fuck it up.

One of the things I liked about his show as opposed to a lot of other hunting shows was the fact that he did do a lot of the field dressing on the air. Yeah. He did show you what was going on. So I had a better sense of it. I had seen a lot of hunting shows before. Like I'd watch Ted Nug i'd seen a lot of hunting shows before like i'd watch ted nugit show a lot yeah but um he doesn't clean them as much and he doesn't like do he'll do it occasionally but steve did it quite a bit yeah and it's very you know you get to see like that's that's realistic shit man like that's you really see what an animal's like when you get

a steak where you know okay this is let's back it up. Here's the animal. Now it's dropped. Now you open it, and then you turn it into steak. Like, whoa, that's a completely different experience. Oh, yeah. And it was fascinating to go through it for the first time but also document the whole thing in terms of photos and videos and everything else all the way until that night when we had some backstraps, which are kind of like the spinal erectors.

Dude, you're talking like a hunter. Yeah. Talking about backstraps, which are kind of like the spinal erectors. Dude, you're talking like a hunter. Yeah. Talking about the backstraps. I'm using Steve Rinella's vocab. Well, the backstraps, what was trippy about that, because I think about anatomy just in terms of training and weightlifting, deadlifts, and blah, blah, blah. And so I was thinking, oh, backstraps.

And so then I went back to where we were staying with a guy named Dave Amick who builds custom rifles. And they had this little Labradoodle that came around. I was playing with a Labradoodle and I started like feeling its back and its anatomy. It was so weird. And I was like, is it weird that I'm like looking for back straps on this Labradoodle? No, no, no, no. And Steve's like, don't worry.

Like when I give my wife a back massage, I think the same thing. Oh, wow. That's so weird. When I give my wife a back massage, I think the same thing. Oh, wow. That's so weird. It's like when you're actually taking an animal apart and thinking about the anatomy, you start seeing those cuts in that anatomy, like everything that moves. It's really fucking weird.

Well, when you see an animal for a purveyor of meat, you see it as a meat container. Yeah. It's a new experience. Yeah. It's weird. I went to Chrysler's birthday party last night and they had one of those things

that was like a box where you put a pig inside and then you put like coals on top of the box and then you flip it. It's like they bury it underground or something? Yeah,

but I guess it cooks faster than burying it underground. It only takes like three to four hours or something like that. But it was amazing watching them take the pig out and then like Bert was just digging in there,

taking out parts of the pig, and then cutting out the meat. Oh, this is Bert's birthday, right? Bert's birthday party. I wish I got to that. It made me feel like such a pussy watching all these men just taking this pig apart. They all knew exactly what to do.

I would be disgusted by it. I'd be like, ugh. Really? So you look at like the whole pig you were like this is too much seeing the whole pig it it was really creepy it was creepy i thought it was creepy to watch because it's an actual body yeah i think the box makes it creepier though because it's like a coffin for a pig instead of just being in the ground yeah i think yeah i i think um that that never really bothered, but maybe I look at things differently.

I don't know. Maybe if I wasn't, it snuck up on me. I've been thinking about it for so long. By the time I went hunting, I'd been thinking about it for at least 10 years. I wanted to do it for at least 10 years. I'd always wanted to feel more conscious and aware, just responsible for the food that I eat, including the meat. And I didn't know that someone like Steve existed. You know what I mean?

Right. Until I met him. And I'm like... Yeah. Well, I don't think there's many like him. Yeah. Maybe his brothers. Yeah.

Look at that, Jack. There's the pig laying in that. That is kind of... Whoa, that's wild, man. That's kind of creepy looking. Yeah, that pig looks like someone dropped a refrigerator on him. That looks like a PETA advertisement. Yeah, right? And then... dropped a refrigerator on him. That looks like a PETA advertisement. Yeah, right?

Then there's a pig head, putting it through Bert's body, like a photo of Bert. Oh, that's weird. The head is certainly weird. Yeah. That's cool, though. The pig cooking a pig on a spit, essentially, or a whole pig. And they did it at his place. Yeah, it was pretty sweet.

In his man cave. I completely understand, by the way, where everyone's coming from who's a vegan. Everyone who's coming from is a complete animal lover and doesn't want to have anything to do with eating meat. I fucking hear, and I think it's a very noble way of thinking. If you really look at what they're doing they're essentially trying to be a part of the next stage of evolution when it's done through the right or or the most moral for the most most moral reasons they're trying to exist with very

minimal karma with no death no no damage to the planet but But the reality of this environment that we live in now, this world, this existence, this dimension that we live in now, is that these animals, these are all temporary. And some of them, they're dumb as fuck. There's this whole system going on here. You've got to recognize this system. We're attaching morals to something that's just this natural, everyday process of animals consuming animals and in order for you to you must recognize you are an animal

and in order for this animal body to work at its best really it should eat animals yeah you know that's the i mean you can live and exist as a vegan there's a lot of top vegan athletes like mac danzig he's a high level vegan athlete But maybe he'd be better if he ate meat. It's possible. If you listen to guys like Dave Asprey, they tell you the science behind eating actual animal matter and what that does to your nerves, the way your body performs, the way your body can move. I don't know if he's right. I'm too stupid.

I'm too stupid to really know who's right. But it sounds to me like the people that are trying to be vegans, I like what that stands for. I like what that stands for. That stands for people that recognize that, like, man, I'm doing something. I'm affecting something. I don't want to be a part of it. The reality is we've sort of distanced ourselves from what we're doing by not having most people involved with the actual taking of the animal's life. So even though you're a part of the chain of command or the chain of evidence or the chain of matter from a living animal to steak, you've got nothing connected to it. So there's a lot of people that are wearing it so there's a lot of people that are wearing

leather there's a lot of people that are eating cheeseburgers and they're like i can never go hunting yeah and you're like well that's kind of crazy yeah that seems like that seems like it's kind of crazy no i i yeah i totally agree number one and i would also say you know what a lot of people don't realize is the industrially farmed meat, and I use the term farmed very loosely, but is extremely damaging to the ecosystem and ecological sustainability in the U.S. But what they miss is monocrops like wheat, soy, corn are arguably equally or more damaging. And I think that what, so one of the things that made me want to actually explore food more is that in the next 10 years or so,

I met with a lot of really interesting people like Sam Cass, who's the private chef for the Obamas at the White House, also does a lot of food policy stuff. Damn, you know the chef at the White House? Yeah, I've met him before. What does Obama like to eat? Well, the meals he told me about were fish.

So he would go out and catch the fish and then bring them in and cook them. Obama would catch the fish? No. That's not what I was guessing. No, Sam Cass. Who used to work at a bank. What were you guessing, Brian? Chicken and watermelon?

You son of a bitch. No. You son of a bitch. But something like 50% or more of the current small farm owners in the U.S. are set to retire in the next five to ten years. And what that means is you have these last, the Mohican, like small family-run farms in many cases. They're going to be up for grabs, whether that turns into strip malls

or is handed over to Monsanto or some big industrial food court. Or third, which is really the only sustainable option that I see, is moving from a few really big producers to many smaller producers. Otherwise, there's just too much politics involved with subsidies for corn and things of that type. Explain that for people who don't understand that, because there's a weird thing going on with corn. When you have a handful of very large industrial food producers, I don't understand that because there's a weird thing going on with corn. you end up in a really fucked up situation where there are certain crops that do a lot of damage that are forced into the food supply

in everything you can imagine like corn which will be in everything from certain like toothpastes to every condiment you use to bread that you eat because the growth of corn and distribution of corn is subsidized by the US government

which makes it possible for farmers to make money by producing excesses of corn. And if you look at, let's say, the topsoil in many of the most agriculturally productive states, they've been reduced from 10, 15 feet, in some cases, to less than a foot by constantly producing the same one or two crops. So in any case, I think that there's a, when you were saying vote with your dollars, I think it's really important to realize that people are voting for the future of this country in many, many ways, financial and otherwise, certainly from an ecological standpoint, every time they eat a meal.

You're voting three times a day for what you want in the next 10, 15 years. And it's not going to be reversible. Once that farmland goes away, we're kind of fucked in a lot of ways. So anyway. How did it get to that point? How did people that produce corn, how did they influence the government to get them to give them subsidies? What is the benefit of them getting subsidies? I don't know all the historical context, to be perfectly honest.

What is the benefit? Like, what is, how do they sell it? Like, giving... Well, you could, they export a lot of corn as well. No, I mean, like, how does a bill like that get passed? How does laws like that get put in the place where they're subsidizing people for growing excess corn? So hard to say.

I mean, there's so many lobbying groups. There's so much backdoor dealing. If you look at, let's just say the labeling or non-labeling of GMO food as an example, like that was a big issue in California recently, but didn't it lose? I think it lost in the state of California.

Yeah. It's, which is crazy, Which is crazy. Which is crazy. Sometimes they can word things where it's confusing as fuck to people. I mean, ultimately, I think the most direct path of making a statement

is using your dollars on the right things. Yeah. So this is a free market. People respond to money. So it's like if you can buy food whenever possible from smaller producers as opposed to bigger producers, closer producers as opposed to those really far away,

the healthier you will be, the better your performance will be, and ultimately the less you'll be shackled to some company that can do whatever it wants. It's so hard for people to do that, though, and it costs a lot of money. Even if you want to eat organic, that shit's so expensive. If you want to eat really healthy foods, if you want to go to the supermarket and go to Whole Foods or something and get all grass-fed this, it's amazing how much more expensive it is

than going to a market and you get some weird-looking semi-gray steak. Take that bitch home. It can be expensive. There are ways out there for people to make tactical choices, for health at least, about which produce to spend more money on. Like their annual lists, for instance, the Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen.

And what all that means is there are – the Dirty Dozen are the 12 most contaminated produce items, vegetables and fruits that exist on the market in the U.S. And they're studied every year and chemical analysis is done. And those are the fruits and veggies that you'll want to get organically if you can afford it. The Clean 15, on the other hand, are foods that even when produced conventionally with pesticides, antibiotics, et cetera, have the lowest levels of contamination. So those you can actually feel pretty safe buying at lower prices conventionally. And a good way for people to tell if you're getting screwed by your local grocer or not or tricked is on most fruits and vegetables,

you'll find a label or sticker, right? If it starts with nine, it's probably organic. If it isn't, if that number doesn't start with a nine, then you might be getting bait and switched if they say it's organic. Really? What is the standard for organic? What is exactly organic?

Does it mean no pesticides? What does it mean? This is a label that's been very abused. I found out my loads are organic. They're 100%. Donkey semen. They don't taste organic, John. What are you doing?

Are you broadcasting over there on your channel as well, you freak? Yeah, I'm doing it for camera. Organic means a lot of things to a lot of people. In general, it's supposed to mean without, or as it's intended by a lot of people, without additional pesticides, antibiotics, etc., as it would have been grown 100, 200 years ago. But it's a battle for dollars.

So a lot of these labels, if they're not regulated, get misused. And what is the feasibility of, like, say if you had a community of people, say if you got together with 10, 20 people, whatever, and you all wanted to get in on some farmland and figure out how to grow your own vegetables. Have you ever thought about how much land it takes, how many animals you need? Yeah, I've looked at it super closely. Is that in the book? I talk about a lot of the survivalist and self-reliance stuff.

I don't talk about homesteading or animal husbandry as much. Isn't that a weird way to put it? Homesteading and animal husbandry as much. I pretty much talked about it. Isn't that a weird way to put it? Homesteading and animal husbandry. That's my next book. Those are two strange terms that you very rarely hear people use. No, so I looked at this really closely. My girlfriend actually, she's from Vancouver, Victoria, and her family has created in the last year a farm

that produces almost all of their food. So they have a handful of sheep. They have a garden that's probably 150 by 150 feet. And that thing produces so much vegetation that they have to give it away. And that's a family of four plus two dogs. 150 by 150 feet. It's not big. Maybe 200 by 200.

But it is a very manageable amount of acreage, and it produces an astonishing amount of food. Now, you have to know what you're doing from a gardening standpoint. I think raising animals in a lot of ways is 100 times simpler than keeping track of like 20 species and keeping them alive. Of plants? Of plants. Is that what they had, 20 different things?

Oh, they had more. Did they use greenhouses? They did have a greenhouse for certain plants, like tomatoes, for instance. But outside, just like these huge stalks of kale, like four or five feet tall. Amazing. I mean, it was trippy for me in the same way that going on my hunt was trippy, where you're like, wow, huh. So that's what a ribeye, that's the part of the body that a ribeye is from

right uh in the same way just seeing you know kale for the first time growing out of the ground or like asparagus or whatever it was really wild how much effort would it take to do that for like a family like to run like and to grow enough food and to have it like it's it's it's an interesting thing to think about how much land do you you need? How much water do you need? You know, how much acreage do you need for four people, five people? I don't think you need much. I mean, my uncle had a farm. I have two uncles who had one very small farm,

another with a much larger farm. And, I mean, if you have, you want chickens for protein. And not for the meat, for the eggs. The eggs. Because they give out eggs every day they just kick those eggs out you know i didn't even know that till i was in my 30s i'm so fucking stupid i thought that uh every time a chicken gave an egg that egg could have

been a baby chicky it could have grown to be a baby chicky but you ate it before it could that's what i really thought i thought like when you had fried eggs that you were having baby chickies that just you caught them in time and you killed them before they became little. But that's not what an egg is, folks. Chickens lay eggs every day. The ones that we make at least. I don't know if it's normal in the wild for them to run. They still produce a lot of eggs.

I mean they're not like franken chickens where their breast meat is so big they can't stand up. Right, like the freak ones that you see in those weird documentaries that scare the shit out of you. Yeah, there was a great TV show or series in the UK. I think it was BBC produced called, I think it was Escape to River Cottage. And it was about a chef from London who decided to go to the country and basically try to do all this stuff from ground zero.

So raising animals raising all of his food on this property do you remember the guy's name uh i should know this he wrote the river cottage cookbook and as well as a book river cottage meat book which is one of that's the same guy that bourdain had on his show got longish hair glasses maybe uh do you know that show's over now he's got a new one on cnn now oh yeah they moved it over to cnn that's what uh the uh one of the guys mo who's the director of meat eater is also one of the guys who works for bourdain he works for both oh that's right that's right 0.0 yeah so i remember it's hugh fairnley whittings hall some very british sounding

aristocratic name that's very british fairly aristocratic. Hugh Fairley Whitting's Hall something like that but the show is awesome and it goes through a lot of this stuff. Shows him fucking it up and getting it right which is really cool.

Yeah I would imagine it would take some effort and planning for sure. Yeah. But I mean Brian Cowan and I who also went on The Hunt with me

with Steve Rinella we've talked many times about getting a plot of land for our family like figuring out how to do something like that. It would require a lot of work though. It would.

But it's probably a good idea. Part of what I thought about when I was doing all this research over the last fuck, two years since we last saw each other, whatever, is creating a small group of like modern hunter-gatherers.

So you have five friends, and instead of trying to do it all yourself, you're like, all right, you're in charge of caribou. Go get us some caribou. You're in charge of fucking tomatoes. You're the tomato guy. Make sure you get the tomatoes. You're in charge of, who the fuck knows, kombucha.

You make that. That would be a great thing to make. Isn't it crazy, though, that that might be a reality someday? It's impossible for people to imagine anything bigger than Sandy or Katrina. Katrina was bigger than Sandy. But something along those lines. A massive disaster, massive loss of property and life. But that's nothing compared to what used to be here.

Just the ice that used to be over North America. Some guy, we were in Canada, and he was talking about how they found beaver... The guy just brought it up. Someone was talking about global warming. And he was saying how they found beaver dens under hundreds of feet of ice in Greenland. And that at one point in time, that ice wasn't there. This is real simple.

It's real recent. Some shit happened. And we cling to the idea of staying in a spot. We cling to the idea, this is my land. I've staked a claim. I have a property line. I even have a fence up. But that's ridiculous.

Because this earth is a constantly shifting organism. It's a thing. And it moves around. And things change. The atmosphere changes. There used to be dinosaurs here, stupid. This shit is volatile. And we don't want to believe that.

We want to believe that, oh, I shut my little cardboard door and locked my little brass lock and I'm in. I'm completely shut off from the environment. You know, just having, fuck. I mean, people like spend three hours on a Saturday, spend a few hundred bucks, go to Costco

because they have all this disaster preparedness stuff and get two weeks of food. Get like a week or two of water. Just have it. What's the downside? It's definitely not a bad thing to have. It's definitely not a bad thing to be prepared. If you can do solar power,

I definitely want to try to do that. And a lot of people go with, they have both. They have like a generator, they'll have like solar power, they have propane. You can have like propane generators that will kick on automatically when your power goes out. Oh, nice.

I had that in Colorado. Because when I was living in the mountains, apparently the power goes out up there all the time. It sometimes takes a long time for them to turn it back on. So as soon as the power would go on, you would hear like a second and then you'd hear the generator kick on. It was a big ass generator that was set up for this property. But windmills, that's another option. My friend in Oregon has windmills, and he actually sells power back to the grid. How the fuck that works.

How does that work? Buy your power? No idea. Well, yeah. The meter goes the opposite way. That's crazy. They don't get my credit. That's what some, actually many schools in California and elsewhere are doing to generate extra revenue,

is they're actually having solar power companies that are partnered with, whether it's different power companies or the local government, will install solar panels on the top of all the gymnasiums and all the school buildings and everything like that. And then they will receive either an upfront payment or some type of monthly stipend or they get a percentage of the energy that is then sold back to the grid, basically. Yeah, there was a school in Boulder that had a whole farm set up there. It was pretty badass. The kids were growing their own food. That's cool.

I was like, yeah, that would be a really smart thing to teach kids how to do you know instead you teach them some shit they're almost likely to never use yeah you know teach someone how to actually grow some food that would be a great thing to teach like as a standard class in high school farming just like simple farming this is how you grow vegetables that's just why isn't that like a requirement? Math is a requirement. English is a requirement. We're like, listen, we've got the natural world locked down. We don't have to think about that anymore. But that lost connection, you really do feel this connection when you grow something,

when you actually grow something and then eat it. It's like it awakens something inside you, this weird primal satisfaction. then eat it it's like it awakens something inside you this weird primal satisfaction and also just the the therapeutic aspect of having to care for something besides yourself i think is really i certainly underestimated it i mean i kill plants like it's my job i just i have a brown thumb or i don't pay attention i don't care whatever it is but i i ended up experimenting again with growing plants and I just got rosemary. It's a really tough plant, pretty hard to kill, and you can use it for just about any type of food. So I started with just a little rosemary plant, like cut to kind of look like a fucking Christmas tree that I got at Whole Foods or something. And that thing will produce enough herbs,

enough herbs for tea, enough herbs for food for like weeks and weeks on end and it's hard to kill so i thought i found that to be a really low stakes way to have an early success with growing a plant that would hopefully then encourage you to do more of it because it sucks when you try to get into something like that and then immediately fail because everything dies and you're like ah yeah you don't want to jump right into the deep end of the pool learn how to grow a plant. Right. Before you think about starting a farm.

Yeah, exactly. You know? If you have like your everyday life and then on the side you want to run a farm, like, bitch, you ain't got time for that. Yeah, yeah. The full timers have enough trouble with that. Yeah, I mean, you would have to – if you were going to feed yourself completely with the animals and the food, that would require a tremendous amount of work. The people that sell vegetables and actually run a farm or a dairy farm or something along those lines,

that's an incredible amount of work. People who actually know folks that actually have a family farm, that's an incredible amount of work. That's even more. But just to feed yourself and your family it's going to require several hours every day many hours every day taking care of the animals feeding them cleaning up yeah animals definitely yeah dealing with time you know setting up whatever the fuck you have around your vegetables whether it's fences or this or that or keeping your irrigation going keeping your watering going dealing with fucking pests little fucking things that start eating your food.

You can actually purchase a pretty cool, I think they're hydroponic, I might be using the wrong word, hanging gardens. So they have these plastic containers that hold the various plants, and it actually hangs down the side of a door, almost like a shoe holder. And then there's an automated water system that you can time, so you can leave and go away for a day or two. And it just grows these plants effectively vertically, which is super, super cool. And then they get to a certain size and you have to plant them?

Get to a certain size and you can eat them. Really? Yeah, you don't even need to plant them. Wow! That's super cool. Uh, do they run on power? Like what kind of power is it?

Yeah. You would, you would plug in, uh, for the, if you have the timed and automated watering system, then you'd plug it in. See,

that seems to me like it's at least slightly defeating the whole purpose of the whole thing. If you need the fucking electricity to be on. Right. Yeah. I think this is more for the aesthetic of having plants on your door. Yeah. Well, it's pretty dope if they can keep the power on.

But if you don't keep the power on, then all that means is you have to water the plants, which means you better have some goddamn water if your water system, if your municipal water goes out. Yeah, no shit, man. You have to have like a well system. Or just go by, I mean, for instance, in the basement of my apartment right now, I have, I don't know, like 40 gallons of water. Don't tell people, dude. They'll come looking. I have five guns.

I'll try to get it. You'll shoot them for your water. Wow. Tim Ferriss, murder's thirsty guy. I have like seven of those arrowhead water things. If people, if after three days of no water, people will start looking for water. Oh, yeah. It's not like I'm saying I expect that, but here's the thing.

I like target practice. I have ranges near my house. It's fun to do. Having a firearm as worst case scenario insurance in a location where a seven point or higher Richter scale earthquake is 80 plus percent probable in the next 15 years. Is that real? 80%? So 70% plus a few years ago. And I think that has since gone up because on the Ring of Fire we had Japan, New Zealand. And I think the odds just improved. What's the deal with those dudes who find wells with a divining rod? Oh, the dowsing. A stick?

I think dowsing. Dowsing? Is that what it's called? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's a divining rod then? What the hell is that? Divining rod, I believe, is where you hold onto the fork of a stick that looks almost like a slingshot.

So you hold onto the top of either end of the Y, and then you're supposed to get steered by the end of it. Oh, so dowsing is the use of a divining rod. That's what it is. I believe so, yeah. And there's another method where they have two sticks that are shaped like L's, and they hold them in either hand upside down

and then when they cross that's supposed to indicate how the fuck could that be real I don't know it's like that game where you play like your

three card money no where you have the spirits where you're oh Ouija like Ouija boards so I will say this much I do think there are

things like that that are not unexplainable but are yet to have been explained. And I say that partially because I've seen some pretty weird shit, even at, a lot of people don't realize this, at Princeton University before, I think this ended 2000, 2001. But one of the reasons I went there as an undergrad is because they had something called the Scientific Anomalies Laboratory. because they had something called the Scientific Anomalies Laboratory. And this is where, among other organizations,

several branches of the military funded research into things like remote viewing, which is basically scientifically controlled clairvoyance, where you have a transmitter and a receiver, and they use double-blind protocols to see if it is possible to report images back from one location, from one person to another. to see if it is possible to report images back from one location, from one person to another. And they had some, and then to validate whatever, or to design the studies and then analyze the data, they had some of the world's top mathematicians and statisticians supervising the stuff. And Professor John, J-A-H-N, who ran, I believe that was his name, who ran this laboratory, and I went down, I was a test subject, I didn't have any X-Men-like powers, sadly,

who supervised this, did this closing presentation when the lab was being wound down due to lack of funding. And he presented some of his findings. And he basically said, if you look at the statistics, like all of this stuff has been validated, but it will never be accepted because of A, B, and C. And what was really trippy about the remote viewing, right? So in the remote viewing protocol, one of them, they would have, let's say, three or four envelopes. The transmitter would choose one. They would leave, get into a car with the supervisors,

the experimenters, and then open the envelope, find GPS coordinates, and go to that location. And that's where they would transmit from. And what they found was, for one of the locations, the drawings that came back, and there were better, some people were better at receiving than others, the drawings all looked very, very similar, but they didn't resemble the gas station where people were going. And then they did research on the location and they found out they were drawing barracks that had been there like 120 years earlier.

Whoa. Trippy. Really, really, really trippy shit. So I don't know about the dowsing rats. Is that like, say if you wanted to set up an experiment today with remote viewing, are there experts that you would go to that are the bad motherfuckers of remote viewing that you really think could replicate something scientifically,

like for a television show or something like that, if they were under the gun? That's a good question. I don't know. I honestly think that these types of abilities are at some point going to be as analyzable as shooting three-pointers or looking at the top UFC fighters. Okay, we're going to look at the fiber composition of a GSP and Anderson Silver. I think at some point it's going to be like, oh, Johnny's really good at remote viewing because he has the blah blah blah and his like substantial yeah he's got like some fucking the th374 gene is turned on oh of course and so there are some people who appear to be better than this than others but just to touch on like the ouija board

and uh fucking tarot cards and all that shit i think that there i don't place any power in the tools themselves i think there are people who have abilities who then use those tools to explain their abilities. It is an outlet for their abilities. I've just seen way too much weird shit, man. What have you seen that's verifiable? What have you seen that you could... Yeah, nothing.

See, that's the problem. No, no, I know, I know. But like... I want this to all be real. The verifiable stuff, I would say, is look at research that's been done by, I think it's Sarnoff International. They're a bunch of defense contractors who have funded this kind of stuff. And also, look at the, try to find stuff on the Scientific Anomalies Laboratory. Should I watch The Men Who Stare at Goats?

You know, I've wanted to see that. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it either. It sounds great. I heard it was very funny. Isn't it Coen Brothers? Is it Coen Brothers? I've heard it's very funny.

It's Clooney, right? Yeah. I've heard it's very funny, actually. I can't believe I haven't seen it now, now that I think about it. So there's nothing that you can, no studies that you can point to that definitively have proven it,

but do you maintain that it's possible, or are you a believer? No, like, no studies that you can point to that definitively have proven it, but you, do you maintain that it's possible or are you a believer? No, no, no. I'm not operating on faith. I think that if you look at... No, that's not what I meant. I mean, you've seen enough that you believe in it.

I've seen enough that I, what I'm comfortable saying is not that like telekinesis exists or this exists, but there are odd phenomena that I have seen that that's how, I mean, I don't think science has a limit. Science is a method of thinking and a method of testing hypotheses.

And a method of measuring. And a method of measuring. The problem with unique events is you can't really measure them if they don't happen again. If they're unique, right, exactly. So they have to be, good science is replicable, right? And I do believe that there are enough demonstrations of like measurements of metrics that should correlate to like chi, right? Like energy that's emitted from palms by people in China and shit. There have been a lot of studies like this stuff.

What do they say? Well, they have, I don't know what they measure, photons? It's probably not photons. Heat from a distance? I don't know what they measure, photons? It's probably not photons. Heat from a distance? I don't know what it is. But I've seen enough stuff that I think many of these anomalies that are seen as superpowers, they're not superpowers. They're manifestations of some type of biological variable that will be explainable at some point in time.

And I'm not saying all of them exist, but I've seen, and again, this is going to sound like it's straight out of Qu'm not saying all of them exist, but I've seen, and again, this is going to sound like it's straight out of Quackville, but it's stuff that I've fucking seen, is I lived in China for six months. I was an exchange student there and saw this Qigong master from, and I think a lot of that's pure bullshit and just cultish behavior,

but this particular guy, old guy, and he was sitting there in a park and he was doing his exercise and shit, and he had dry leaves in between his hands and he was sitting there in a park and he was doing his exercise and shit and he had dry leaves in between his hands and he was just like kind of shuffling them back and forth between his hands the weirdest like one of the weirdest things i've ever seen was it was it a con i don't know you mean they were like flying through the air but they're like sliding across this tabletop in the park between his hands. His hands are like 18 inches apart. And I mean, I don't have any explanation for it,

but I know what I saw. So it's not like I'm a proponent. I'm not on the, you know, the, uh, psychic power, uh,

lobby or anything. It's just, can you find that guy and get a video of that? It seems like simple. Like, Hey dude. Yeah. I mean,

you can get that leaf thing. There are videos of all sorts of weird shit, and most of it's BS. But anyway. You saw a guy really do it. You believe a guy can really do that. Well, I know what I saw. And to me, I mean. How far away were you?

There's magicians everywhere going. I was like four. Oh, that's just that one. No, I know. And here's the thing, right? Like, there's some really brilliant ways to cons. It's like, that could have been a con. God knows that China is full of cons.

Really? Oh, sure. If you're in Beijing, you'll have art students come up to you every 10 minutes to sell you their unique pieces of artwork and their porn. They could really blah, blah, blah. Porn? No, no, no. Artwork. Oh, they're poor.

I thought you said they're porn. I'm like, they're selling you their porn in Beijing? No, no, no. That's good. They're poor. I mean, there are tons of scams in China, so who knows? But what I would say is in the research for, let's say, The 4-Hour mean, there are tons of scams in China, so who knows? But what I would say is, you know, in the research for, let's say, The 4-Hour Chef, because it's kind of a book on

learning. It's a book on accelerated learning, not just on food. But I met people who could memorize a shuffled deck of cards in like 43 seconds, right? Or somebody who can learn a language like Icelandic well enough in seven days to go on TV and be interviewed. So to me, if that is within their own possibility, or memorizing, training yourself to memorize 10,000 numbers, moving something like moving the leaves between your hands is not beyond belief for me.

It's just, it's not, I don't see any reason why it should be impossible. I don't know. So you'd be able to push some energy from your hand that would make light things move back and forth. Yeah, sure. And again, there's no physiological evidence

to demonstrate that is possible up to this point, but there are lots of things that seem impossible that have been certainly observed, whether it's through looking at theoretical physics or looking at applied physics for that matter. I mean, there are plenty of things that were thought impossible that are just not. You think that it's, or rather, you believe that there's been studies that have shown that people can generate certain amounts of energy with their hands?

What studies? No, no, no. I'm not saying any of this stuff. You said it's measurable? Is it measurable? There have been studies done in China and elsewhere looking at qi, so the potential measurement of qi specifically.

How do they do that? How do they memorize it? I don't know the exact tools they're using for measurement. And again, I'm not saying I am standing for... No, I know what you're saying. You're saying the world is weird. The weirdest world and the problem is... The weirdest world. Hey, what was that? The wisdom I said? Yeah. Nice. I wonder what you're saying. You're saying the world is weird. The weirdest world. The weirdest world.

Is that what I said? Yeah. Nice. I wonder what's in my... Whoopsies. I need some... I blame the weed. I need some ProVigil.

The... What did I say? The weirdest world. Yeah, the weirdest world. The weirdest world. The world is weird. That's what I'm saying. You're not saying necessarily that you believe.

You're saying that there's so much weird shit that is real that you leave open the possibility that a guy could have some strange telekinetic control over matter. Yeah, and for instance, you need for something to be scientifically verified with, let's say, statistical validity, whether it's through this number of subjects, the number of N, or you just have such a number of subjects, the number of N,

or you just have such a magnitude of change that like the, the P value, I mean, the probability of it being random event is less than 5%. To do that, you need tools for measurement. And it's naive to think that we have created all the tools for measuring all things. We haven't, right? That's why, that's why, for instance, people try to isolate nutrients, get themselves into trouble because they'll say, okay, beta carotene is good for you. This is true like 15 years ago. And then people eat a ton of beta carotene, they get sick. Why? Because they're not consuming it with naturally occurring cofactors that they couldn't isolate. And so you have to be science among other things is a game of measurement. So I think that as the tools get better,

for instance, right now I'm actually involved with and partially funding studies at UCSF, University of California at San Francisco, in their neuroimaging lab, where for the first time, they're able to do a couple of very interesting things, like take a functional MRI machine and use it in the same room at the same time as an EEG, which is actually a really tough problem, because these fucking magnets will like, you know, pull shrapnel out of your skull. I mean, they're really strong magnets. You have to be careful. And they're, they're able now using like even retail products like the connect and whatnot to look at how you can reverse symptoms of dementia potentially. Like how do you train someone's brain to go from resembling that of a 60-year-old to that of a 20-year-old?

And the better the tools for measurement, the more precise you can be, the more precise you can be, the more specific the protocol is that you can use. And it's fucking amazing. Like there's stuff going on right now that is going to just turn things upside down when it comes to like training

mental performance and reversing the symptoms of age from a cognitive standpoint. So for me, it's just like, God, like as we follow Moore's law and technology gets smaller and faster exponentially, and there's certain heat issues when you get to a certain size, but like the tools we're going to have measurement five years are gonna be like ray kurzweil land so we're we're gonna be able to isolate all co-factors involving in nutrition cellular development the the evolution of the genetics we're gonna have all that mapped out a lot of it i mean i think the rate of progress is going to increase how could it not really dramatically so we won't have it all figured out but do you think we'll get to the point where we create an artificial person

i think we'll absolutely get to the point uh where we get where we're able to create an artificial person that tricks most people i think that's going to happen sooner than people expect that's going to be so fucking weird yeah i mean it's like the turing test right so i and somebody could call me on this if i'm fucking it up, but I believe the Turing test was having effectively a chat communication between a real human and a computer and having that computer trick the human

into believing that it is another human. And I think the more interesting Turing test is when you get an artificial human sitting across from you who tricks you, fools you into believing that it's another human. And I don't think, I mean, maybe I'm in my own sort of echo chamber living in Silicon Valley, but just seeing how quickly things are moving and how quickly things are getting quicker, I'd be surprised if we don't hit that point in five

to 10 years. I'd be super surprised. It's amazing when you really stop and think about what lies ahead. We are so far away from the reality that existed when I was just in high school, which is 20 years ago. To look at the future and look at what lies 20 years ahead from now, it's almost unrecognizable. Things are going to get so strange. Well, if you think about the movie Minority Report, right?

So Minority Report was made, what, like 10 years ago? And like all of that technology, and I think that was supposed to take place like 20 years from now or whatever it is, like that stuff's going to exist. All of those screens that you can move with your hands and everything. I mean, that's going to be widespread in the next two years probably. And, you know. Yeah, that's not even, that's like that Microsoft Surface thing. It's very similar to that. We're running years probably uh and you know yeah that's not even that's like that microsoft surface thing it's very similar to that we're running ahead of schedule you know

like we're things are things are running ahead of schedule and people give us a ray kurzweil is i'm not sure if you know who that is but he oh yeah all right so people because of some of his beliefs and i think that a few of the his conclusions are clouded by the fact that he fears mortality and wants to bring his dad back to life and things like this but he's a brilliant guy with an excellent track record of prediction so when he says like we're going to have nanobots that you swallow and are able to diagnose all your issues and fix all these problems

I don't think he's that far off with most of it I really don't think he's that far off are we going to be able to make people immortal in the next 20 years and have it very conveniently coincide with his sort of expect projected median death sentence uh probably not but uh but he's sort of opening people's ideas or uh minds up rather to the possibility that there's there's like there's sort of an extrapolation that he has made

that maybe other people would just not be qualified or have the vision to see. And when he lays it out, it really sort of changes the entire game. Because when it becomes a mainstream idea, like Transcendent Man, his documentary, all of a sudden, amazing. Fascinating insight into him as a human being, too. But all of a sudden that

becomes like a a live meme yeah you know and that idea sort of grows you know because of the fact that he's talking about it on this oh he'll he'll accelerate it yeah unquestionably unquestionably and i actually saw the um it was the debut of transcendent man uh or transcend, one of the two, at Tribeca Film Festival, and Ray was literally right here. He was sitting in front of me watching it, which was pretty cool to sort of watch him watching this movie. Wow. Was it weird?

Wasn't that weird? I'm a, so I'm, well, I guess starting a few years ago and for a number of years was a visiting faculty member for the finance and entrepreneurship track of Singularity University, which Ray started along with Pierre Diamandis, chairman of the XPRIZE, based at Ames NASA location in Mountain View, California. So I've had a chance to interact with a lot of Ray's cohorts and colleagues, as well as Ray himself and Peter Diamandis, who's a really impressive guy in his own right. And Ray's a smart guy. I mean, he's, I like that he doesn't back down.

So I think when a lot of people who are very, very smart have extremely bold ideas, they sort of get browbeaten into curtailing their belief. Really? I think so. In what way? Well, I think that Ray has stood up to critics so many times and gone on TV so many times despite the fact that he's given – people tend to completely dismiss a lot of his stuff out of hand. And I just like that he has so much intestinal fortitude to stick to his guns. Like his

level of conviction based on everything that he has seen I think is warranted, number one. I just find it very admirable that he doesn't hedge or try to like concede or in any way negotiate. See, I'm so out of the loop and I hang out with such a bunch of weirdos that no one that I hang out with even remotely thinks that it's crazy.

I hang out with people that believe in chemtrails and shit and fucking government conspiracies left and right. So this coming singularity is like, oh yeah, that's happening. Obviously, yeah. I mean, and I'm also living, I live in San Francisco and it's, you know, people who want to colonize Mars and shit. So it's like, it's not that out of reach for people that I spend time with.

In any case. Some people don't see it. They see it differently than him. And they're also brilliant men like Hugo de Garas, who was in that documentary as well, In any case. Some people don't see it. They see it differently than him, and they're also brilliant men, like Hugo de Garis, who was in that documentary as well, who believes that,

he calls them artilex, the artificial intellect, and he doesn't think it's a rosy scenario for the human race at all. He doesn't believe. He's got the iRobot. Yeah, he's got that scenario going on. He thinks that some shit is going to get completely away from us.

I think it's extremely likely. Humans are constantly creating things that can destroy everything. Well, our best accomplishments are all destructive. People would say that's really an ignorant thing to say, but I would say that the most impressive things that people have figured out how to do is to create nuclear bombs and to make the Large Hadron Collider, which is not necessarily a destructive thing. The Large

Hadron Collider is not a destructive thing, but it does make microscopic black holes. You really have to realize that you're creating some incredible amount of energy. You're releasing some amazing amount of energy to make these atoms collide at the speed of light or just slightly under the speed of light it's not destructive don't get me wrong but it's bordering on it it's like what are you doing you know you're you're figuring out a way to fuck with matt what's going to happen from that i mean it's well it's eventually going to get to something that you can use to like make a country turn into a hole. You'll just have a hole where this one country used to be. A void. Yeah, you'll have no matter.

The nothing in The NeverEnding Story. Could you imagine? I want to be the first person to try to fuck a black hole. You probably already have. If you can conceive of the idea of someone dropping an atomic bomb on a city full of

people that had nothing to do with the conflict and really had no choice whatsoever in where they were born, which is exactly what we did in the 1940s in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. If you can conceive of that, the next step is literally you show up where this town used to be and there's a

giant black hole just sitting there and you can't get too close to it and there's a giant black hole it's just sitting there and you can't get too close to it and it's just no matter and you can't see through it and it just sits there and that's where the town used to be and someone just decided to erase it that's not outside the realm of possibility a nuclear bomb itself is fucking bananas that idea is crazy you could figure out a way to harness the very power of the sun itself and drop it on a city and instantly make half a million people just disappear. You could do that. You could come up with the next level.

The next level shit is going to be even nuttier. And that's the forefront of our capabilities. Of course, it's like distribution of information and beautiful things that have come from medical innovation and the scientific understanding of the world, the universe we live in is beautiful and it helps the growth of the human being. But at the end of the day, what we really like doing is figuring out a way to fuck things up

with extreme efficiency. Yet a lot of that is the potential of an accidental black swan. Like, oops, we thought we were going to do this, but now we have a black hole over Toledo. Oh, yeah. And then there's all of the stuff behind the scenes that people don't see, where there are very competent people who are very deliberately trying to destroy things. You think?

Oh, I don't think. deployments to different places and they're like oh yeah we just got a bio uh like biotech terrorist with a phd from like brand name university in the u.s in yemen who's trying to build a dirty bomb to like explode over the great lakes using a blah blah blah and we're just like whoa fuck like the number of times so do you think do you subscribe to the idea that that's what's going on with the united states government that's why it's trying to clamp down on on on personal liberties and freedoms. It really is to protect people because there's so much shit going on that we don't know about. I would love if that was true. There's so much shit going on that we don't know about.

It's not like they want to read your email and find out who you're sending dick pictures to. What they want to do is make sure that no one's making a fucking dirty bomb. And there's only one way to really do that is to monitor everybody's email and look for certain words but then you're gonna arrest brian because he'll call a girl i'm like i'm gonna leave a dirty bomb in your mouth and then boom next thing you know you're in jail i i think there's a fine line between the two i mean i think that once you sort of set the juggernaut in motion for like constant surveillance and warrant free wiretapping and whatnot that yeah it's a fun i mean i think it's very hard to to not have the to go lockstep uh hand in hand the other issue is human beings whenever they have power over other human beings

they abuse it you can go back to the Sanford prison studies that they did where they were trying to, Stanford was, they got students to pretend to be jailhouse guards and prisoners. And they had to stop the experiments really quickly because people immediately started abusing each other. And that's- It was supposed to go on for something like a week or two because they canceled it, I think, after 48 hours.

And the problem, one of the big problems with the idea of warrantless surveillance is that you're allowing people that are just regular folks to decide whether or not they should spy on people and whether or not they should take their information or whether or not they should fuck with their

lives. You're regular folks. You have no evidence whatsoever that they are enlightened. No evidence whatsoever that they are enlightened no evidence whatsoever that they're operating on a higher frequency all with the good of mankind there's no evidence whatsoever that government people are any different than regular people and regular people are fucking crazy and regular people are on antidepressants taking sleeping pills and drinking every weekend and they're doing drugs and they're all fucked up in the head and who knows on what SSRIs they're on. That's everybody.

That's a huge percentage of our population, including people in government. And we've seen with this general Petraeus thing, okay, that the people at the highest level of government, a guy who is the head of the fucking CNA still can't keep his bitches in check. He's still got regular people problems. The guy's still got affairs. He's still got this hot woman who's married and this is going on. And these people, that's the CIA. Ironically enough, what I think is fascinating about this is this must allow the people at the highest levels of government to understand how dangerous this is. Because the whole thing came about, like his exposure came about, because the FBI was investigating the CIA.

The FBI and the CIA don't like each other. I didn't know that. Did you know that? Did you ever think that the FBI and the CIA didn't like each other? No. I have a friend who explained to me that the Navy SEALs and the Marines do not like each other. There's a lot of infighting. That shit is ridiculous.

Yeah, a ton of infighting. And you know what? Mildly don't like each other or, like, want to kick each other's asses? Well, they play football against each other, don't they? Well, yeah, maybe that's an unfair question to ask because you're generalizing and lumping everybody into one group. But, I mean, if you look at, let's say, the FISA bill, which Obama passed a couple of years ago, which effectively allows warrantless wiretapping, the response that people have, which I understand, which was a response I had for a long time, is I don't have anything to hide. If it keeps everyone safer, go for it. Right.

The problem with that is when you have people in power like to stay in power. Obvious enough. When you have that type of warrantless wiretapping, who do you think are going to be the first people to get wiretapped? Every member of Congress.

Sure. All your opposition. How many people? So what percentage of congressmen or congresswomen have dirty laundry 100 everybody has fucking dirty laundry i mean yeah it's it's easy enough to you know especially the old school people that have been around a long time they were they were rocking it like pre-internet you know if you want you know like teddy kennedy like you want to go to like his past like that you know those guys like that the fucking newt

gingriches of the world that they rocked it that way long before the distribution of information so now that all this stuff is out and everybody's tapping everything like whoa you see with the portray a scandal clearly mapped out the problem with this whole situation because there is fucking no reason this should be news there's no reason this should be investigated by anybody that's in any organization that's trying to stop crime because there's no crime being committed other than i guess morals violations by the guy who's supposed to be you know exemplary of the military's highest honors yeah i guess you can look at it that way but the reality is there's no no one's in danger like why are you wasting resources on this fucking national

inquirer shit yeah and how did you go about doing it well it's all so obvious like you can't allow people to just check shit out because the woman she was just like some crazy bitch that's like this socialite who flirts with guys and then there's this other one who's the author who's emailing that girl saying get away from my man and she calls the fbi says this bitch is threatening me she turned the fbi on her and then they're like why is this what's going on here and then the guy who's investigating it sends shirtless pictures of himself to the chick so then they stop the investigation. They go, what the fuck are you doing? You can't send dirt.

So they investigate him and find out that he's doing creepy shit while he's investigating Petraeus and this girl. Oh my God. It's so clear. Just that as a map should be, stop!

Stop looking at each other's fucking emails. Jesus Christ, you women. The FBI shouldn't be a bunch of fucking women. The FBI should be one of the most distinguished group of people in the position of power in this fucking country. You're not supposed to be investigating who's blowing who. That's ridiculous. There's shit to be done.

We're in two wars, you fucks. You can't send shirtless pictures of yourself. Just chilling at the barbecue thinking about our case, flexing your six-pack. You fucking asshole. We're sick. We're a goddamn sick nation. What we need is legalized prostitution and no more snooping. Those are two things we need to calm everybody the fuck down.

Those gentlemen in this position of power clearly need some sort of an extracurricular release. I'm not saying everybody needs it. I'm not saying I'm happy. I'm good. But what I'm saying is you need to figure out a way to calm these motherfuckers down. And that's the only way that makes sense. Stop reading their emails

and let them get blowjobs. We're trying to fucking keep the country safe. I think that's a pretty good concession. You can't just emails and let them get blowjobs. We're trying to fucking keep the country safe! I think that's a pretty good concession. You can't just go digging into people's shit like that. These guys are... Petraeus is 60 fucking years old. That means for 40 whatever

it was years, he operated with no internet. He lived his life without a fucking whisper of the internet. And he lived his life without a fucking whisper of the internet. And he lived his life as a fucking guy who's a professional killer. Okay? And to all of a sudden introduce

the internet into this guy's life, and to start snooping on his email, I think that's rude. I think it's not fair. Those fucking guys, they better stop. They better stop this NSA thing that they're trying to do, where they're trying to make a database of every phone call you've ever made, every email you ever take, every text message you ever make. They're building some

crazy facility in Utah where they can just record everything that gets done. Well, just in case, they need to investigate Tim Ferriss. He's making terrorist threats against the president. Let's see what he's been doing online. The scary thing is he's not making terrorist threats, but Tim Ferriss. He's making terrorist threats against the president. Let's see what he's been doing online. The scary thing is he's not making terrorist threats, but Tim Ferriss is propagating a message that the powers that be disagree with. Yes. I mean, you get to a West Berlin point pretty fucking quickly. Exactly.

And people think that's impossible because America doesn't stand. You're not dealing with America. You're dealing with people. Yeah, exactly. America is just an idea. i love america i love the idea but i just don't trust people to be in a position of power and neither did the people that fucking founded this country that was the whole point yeah the whole point and we have slipped away from that to the point where now we operate under the semi-democratic situation where you kind of have a say but not really yeah that's not cool we're all adults that's not cool you don't

have to do it that way there's a really good uh movie i'm gonna i'm gonna fuck up the name i think it's other people or other people's lives about west berlin and their surveillance done in west berlin it's a fucking great movie. It's fascinating. But if people, I mean, look back to, not to dwell on this point, but it's like people should keep that potential in mind. It's not that long ago that we had McCarthyism.

Right. And if you want to put McCarthyism on steroids, like have every phone call, every email that anyone has ever sent. Oh my Lord. I used to think that we learn. But I think we learn and then we forget and then we have to learn again. I think we have these cycles.

It's like the coming and going of the tides. Because when I was a kid, I remember the Vietnam War ended when I was, I think I was like seven or eight or something like that. And I remember it because I remember very clearly thing. I was really terrified of the idea of war because, uh, my, my stepfather had avoided the draft. He got lucky. Um, he didn't get drafted, but we knew people that did. And it was really scary that these people would go and they would have to go someplace where they might get shot and nobody wanted to do it. And everybody seemed to not believe in it, but yet it was still going on. So when that war was over, I had this real tangible sense of, okay, we've figured out that that sucks.

We're not doing that anymore. Like that is, we figured out that war is a terrible thing. It's unnecessary. And now that the war is over, we can relax. And that was the case all through my life, through high school and into my early, I guess I was maybe 21 when the first Gulf War happened. And I was living with my friend Jimmy Dottilio. We were living in Waltham, Massachusetts. And we were sitting in the middle of the living room watching the shit on TV.

Because it was the first time they would show you these night vision shots of these rockets flying through the air in this eerie green hue. And you're seeing all these explosions. And he just looks at me and goes, well, buddy, looks like we're at war. That Boston accent. I was like, holy shit. We're back to this? That one went nice and quick. And then post-September 11th, it's like the entire lessons of generations that had to go through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, those lessons were – whatever the society learned from that, at least it was temporarily lost.

Temporarily, we lost our fucking minds. And now people are starting to come around to it again and I'm hoping that the evolution that we make from this version of it will be more lasting because of the freedom of information, rather the free ability to distribute information with the internet, that we can get it out a little bit easier this time. Then we can say, listen, ladies and gentlemen,

we're not saying we don't need government. We certainly do. We're not saying people shouldn't have laws that they abide by. They certainly should. We should have a nice, peaceful, not saying you shouldn't make profit. You certainly should. What we're saying is you can't get crazy. You can't go nutty and not look at humans and not look at the human race as the most important thing. Instead, concentrating on money, concentrating on the extraction of resources from strange parts of the land that people aren't

really paying attention to because it's not close by. So it's okay to kill people with robots that fly in the air. All of that is bananas. And it doesn't mean we can't keep a nice order in the world. We can. But we can't get too fucking crazy. I'm hoping that, I don't know if you agree with this, but that there's a sort of a wrestling match going on between the idea of an apocalyptic scenario that's human created and the idea of technology and understanding meeting somewhere in the middle and working it out. it out yeah no i i think that you have technology that's i would like to think you know human sort of self-interested rationality but i don't know you have the technology to solve problems which is developing really quickly and then you also have problems that are compounding right just like

money at a bank account you have these problems compounding, whether it's climate change, explosive population growth in certain areas. And so it is a bit of a, it's a race in a sense. And I don't know which side is going to come out in front. I mean, I'm very, very curious about population growth and how that population density and global travel and how that compounds the impact of something like avian flu or SARS or whatever. And it's like, at what point do we reach a population density where it is like the deer jumping in front of your car where you just have such a high density of people that the inevitability of disease and rapid spread globally through air travel, effectively, just wipes out. And isn't that sort of the natural cycle of things? Is that when there's an overpopulation...

There's a correction. There's a correction. God, it's fucking terrifying to think of the plague as a correction. Yeah. Pretty wild. And in any case, I mean, so I'm actually probably going to be getting a little bit of land in Utah. Don't tell people. Tell Ferris to come into your house.

Brian and I have been talking about Columbus. His mom's got a compound. We're going to move in with Mrs. Redband. with Mrs. Redband. I actually ended up visiting a couple of, from the last book for our body, had a number of hedge fund managers

who basically want to be the guy from Limitless. Oh, dude, we got to talk about this. I got to take a piss. Yeah. Talk to Brian. He's really all about Limitless.

I will talk to Brian about Limitless and then I will piss because I've also had like a gallon of water. We can all piss together, boys. We could do that. Why is your,

we were talking about this earlier, your book is banned from bookstores. Yeah. What's going on with that? Yeah, so The 4-Hour Chef is the first major book out of Amazon Publishing. Amazon about a year and a half ago announced the launch of Amazon publishing in New York City, which would be competing

against all of the major publishers to recruit authors. And that's really making everyone in the book industry extremely uncomfortable because Amazon's super ambitious and hyper, hyper confident and competent also. So the book is being banned as a result. The first time I'm aware of that book has been banned by all of Barnes and Noble, tons of, tons of Indies. But do they even matter anymore? Because to me, I barely even see bookstores anymore.

I mean, no, I'll tell you what I think the play is. So what they want to do is kill Amazon Publishing so that they aren't able to recruit good authors. And so they want to make an example out of me as this guy who's had two number one New York Times bestsellers, very fortunately. They want to basically cripple me so I don't hit the New York Times bestsellers, very fortunately, they want to basically cripple me so I don't hit the New York Times list

and then point to that and in effect say, if that guy can't do it with Amazon Publishing, don't sign with Amazon Publishing. Oh, you're talking about you're being banned? I wanted to bring that up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's the most banned, boycotted, whichever one it is.

1,100 bookstores? More than that now. So yeah. Even the airport bookstores? Or is that? Nothing. No, the airport bookstores are interesting. Those are basically, not always, but effectively pay for play.

So that's like buying advertising almost. You pay for placement. What a lot of people fail to realize is, let's say at a Barnes & Noble, it's just like a Walmart. Like if Coca-Cola owns the first 20 feet of Walmart, they legitimately pay for that space. Similarly, if you walk into Barnes & Noble and you see the whatever rack or the new noteworthy or whatever, the store owners have some decision over that, but a lot of it is paid co-op advertising. That's why it's so hard if you're self-published to get books into Barnes & Noble

because they're like, you know, what are you going to pay us for an end cap? That's not free. Well, they also have to stay open, man. Barnes & Noble's closed

left and right. It's hard to get people to buy books these days. I always said that if you want to really starve to death, open a bookstore in Miami. You know? Yeah.

It's hard. It's hard. It's tough. It's a tough business. And, you know, I think that what, I'm curious to see what happens, man.

So they've banned you. Yeah, I'm out. Zero. And actually, what's their discussion? No. Well, what's really funny about the whole situation,

there are a lot of things that are amusing to me about it, but they, at first they said, well, we're not going to carry Amazon published books because you're not on the nook. Like, you won't let us put like books because you're not on the nook.

You won't let us put The 4-Hour Chef on the nook. Is the nook bad? I have a nook. No, nook's not bad. No, what I'm saying is they were saying, hey, Amazon, you're not letting us put these books on the nook, so we're not going to carry you in the stores. Okay.

Then Amazon came back and they're like, okay, fine, put it on the nook. Barnes & Noble's like, we still don't like you. And so they, yeah, they're not carrying it. In fact, some. And Barnes & Noble's like, no, we still don't like you. And so they, yeah, they're not carrying it. And in fact, some of the Barnes & Noble store owners wanted to carry this book

and they got severe slap down from corporate because corporate got word that they were ordering copies of the book and they just gave them the iron fist. Have you thought about organizing an email campaign or something against Barnes & Noble's unfair practicing? Is it unfair? I think it's unfair. Yeah, it's... Do against Barnes & Noble's unfair practicing? Is it unfair?

I think it's unfair. Yeah, it's... Do you feel like it's unfair? I feel like... You know who it's unfair to? And this is... The children. The children.

Those poor refugees. No, it's unfair to their customers. And ultimately, this is where I think they're missing the mark. Number one is, even if Amazon Publishing fails, that will not stop the move from print to digital. It will not stop that trend. It will not even register. Secondly is, the only competition is for loyal customers. And bookstores certainly more than ever need loyal customers. If someone comes into, let's say, Barnes & Noble, browses around and then goes home to buy the book on Amazon for price,

that person was never a customer to begin with. If, on the other hand, somebody walks into a Barnes & Noble and says, I really want to buy a copy. I want to buy three copies of The 4-Hour Chef as Christmas presents and for myself, and then they can't get it, all that accomplishes is they're driving

that loyal customer to Amazon to become a customer of theirs. So I don't quite understand the logic. But again, humans are emotional, right? That's why it's so concerning, among other reasons, about all the stuff we were talking about. So I'm not sure if it's a completely rational decision. Amazon's a big scary company to a lot of booksellers, but I think that, for instance, the only way to keep print relevant for the foreseeable, let's say, 10, 15 years is to create a tactile experience, like works of art through publishers like Phaidon, P-H-A-I-D-O-N. They make beautiful books that is next to impossible to replicate on digital or to have a very unique experience

and a relationship with your customers like Omnivore Books in San Francisco, which is all cookbooks. It's all they sell. So you want to know anything about cookbooks,

buy something out of print, get a recommendation, meet one of the top chefs in the world, that's where you go. Really? That's a specialized sort of fucking store, huh?

It's cool, yeah. There's one called, I think it's Slotnik, S-L-O-T-N-I-C-K, Cookbooks in New York City, same story. It's like the Mecca of cookbooks. So you want to know something about that, that's where you go. And those businesses will continue to thrive, but it's like if you're competing against digital for price and convenience,

it's going to be a pretty tough road. But there are ways to counter it. So, I mean, the only reason, if I wanted to just make more off of the book I would have stayed with other publishers quite frankly, but Amazon was interesting because I want to try new things and I want to be allowed to try new things

like I'm doing a content partnership with BitTorrent I'm putting out tons and tons probably well over a gig of free material and videos and all this shit on bittorrent because they have 160 million users and that's the kind of thing that amazon will let me do whereas others may not be so keen to let me the other thing that people are talking about the distribution the distribution and they're like oh well what's amazon going to do the first thing

no publisher out there i don't think any publisher except for Amazon in my case, would let me do a 672 full-color book with thousands of photos. That is a fucking expensive book to make. I don't think anyone else would have let me do it. Why is that? I don't understand. Because the margins suck. It's a really, really tremendously expensive book. Because of the photographs, the print that it has to be on? Yeah, exactly.

Because of the way, the photographs, the print that it has to be on? Yeah, exactly. Like to create a really physical book, a really beautiful physical book, like a tactile experience, there just aren't many publishers who will do that anymore. And so distribution aside, what's really, because I've been asked this, what makes Amazon interesting from the standpoint of a content creator is that if you look at almost any other publisher, Simon and Schuster, whoever, it doesn't matter. They do not have any direct connection to their readers. They sell to the head buyer in a category of Barnes and Noble. They sell to the head buyer category at Books A Million in the middle of the country. But whereas Amazon, I mean, I use Amazon Prime. Amazon probably knows me better than I know myself

in a lot of ways. They have such direct access to tens of millions of customers. It just makes it really attractive as an experiment. Whether it'll turn out, who the fuck knows? We'll know at the end of next week. But I don't know. It's a really interesting scenario.

Amazon has a couple good things going for it besides the fact that people already know it as a great place to buy things with one click and buy books they have this new thing that they're doing with audible which is uh one of the um sponsors of this show oh they're doing whisper sync yeah this is the fucking coolest it's amazing and what what WhisperSync, I was going to save it for the commercial, the next Audible commercial, which is this week, but what WhisperSync is essentially is you read a book

and say if you fall asleep, wherever that page is, you can have it on your smartphone where you get in your car, you plug it in, you have an app that plays through your audio jack and it picks up where you left off and car, you plug it in, you have an app that plays through your audio jack, and it picks up where you left off and starts reading the book to you while you're in traffic.

Yeah, exactly. It'll go from text to voice. It's fucking beautiful. It's really amazing. Is it going from text to an actor's voice? Right, so it'll sync. Like, if you're reading a book in bed, and then you get in your car to go to work,

and you have the audiobook version, then it'll pick up where you left off reading it so do you have to sync it from your um your your kindle i think it does it as long as you're connected to wi-fi or 3g it syncs automatically and it syncs to your phone it's wild and your phone knows what's what's up in the car whatever yeah that's ridiculous the government's gonna know you're gonna know what Fifty Shades of Grey you've paused and masturbated on. Who is, is it,

so it's actors that read or is it computer that reads it? Do you know that? My understanding is that it syncs with the point in the book

that a voice actor is reading. companion audio audiobook. Yeah, if you buy an audiobook on Audible and then, because it's owned by Amazon, and then you're reading on your Kindle, let's say, the next chapter, you get in your car to listen to it, and it will continue where you left off in the book reading.

That's incredible. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah, here's the answer. It's only on the Kindle Fire HD and the Kindle Fire, there's two of them, the 8.9-inch and the 7-inch. The second-generation ones, it's a professionally narrated audio book. Amazing. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, that might actually get people to start reading books more and learning some shit.

That's the future. But it sucks that Barnes & Noble is trying to keep you out. Yeah, I mean, they really need me to fail. So if I succeed next week, they're going to have a big world of trouble. They're so silly. Just sell the fucking book. Yeah. Stop being bullies.

Yeah, I mean, they're really being bullies. And the thing is, I mean, I've had the prior two books. Very successful. They're picking the wrong guy to make an example of. Your books are New York Times bestsellers. Number one New York Times bestsellers. Suck it, Amazon. Or Barnes & Noble.

Suck it, Amazon, too. Suck it. I'll suck Amazon for you. Suck Barnes & Noble. Come on. Barnes & Noble, get it together. That's ridiculous.

Yeah, it's silly. It's silly. So, yeah, it's going to be a dogfight, though. So we got some, I could actually give you a scoop on some stuff

that's happening next week. So, for instance, nobody knows this yet. Uh know yeah i know this do you have a breaking news sound i do yeah so do you really yeah you have a breaking news sound yeah ready go uh i have to find it oh well come on semi-breaking this was one of those fucking morning zoos that's not breaking news oh that was good that was pretty good damn good that was worth the wait so you know

what do you do when you get banned by bookstores well you you open your own bookstores is what you do so I am actually going to be

taking an outlet I'm partnering with Panera Bread oh wow which a lot of people don't realize Panera has like what 2,000 locations in the US and I'm partnering with Panera Bread, which a lot of people don't realize. Panera has, like, what, 2,000 locations in the U.S.? And I'm doing a pilot starting, what's tomorrow?

Monday, tomorrow, in New York City. People will be able to buy The 4-Hour Chef at retail at all of the four main Panera locations in New York City. Interesting. So, like, how Starbucks sells CDs now? Exactly. And that's a new thing, man. I think that's the way to go.

That's a perfect place. Starbucks and Panera Bread. And they're also going to be at the same time piloting. So Panera, right? Bread. Pan. They're going to be piloting a slow-carb diet hidden menu, which is from the 4-Hour Body stuff.

So if you want to actually effectively eat paleo or eat slow-carb and loose fat, now you can go to this place that's known for bread and actually get a slow-carb meal, which is pretty cool. So you can do both of those simultaneously. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah. How do you feel about seeing now, there's so much awareness for the content of food now.

I mean, you see grass-fed meat everywhere now. It's part of the vernacular now. This didn't exist just five, six years ago. You never heard that. No, I think it's a great thing, as long as the labels are policed to some extent so that assholes don't come along and start mislabeling things purposefully,

which happens all the time. But I think it's a great thing. And I mean, one of the goals that I have is to create a super trend of about 20 million people who simply think about, let's say, purchasing food for breakfast differently or dinner differently. change a certain buying habit, then I think that this country can really turn towards more of this smaller producer, many suppliers versus, you know, monolithic industrial producers. And once you do that, I mean, once the money is there, the supply will generate itself. I mean, you'll have, it'll be commercially viable for people to do more of this grass-fed stuff, which we already see coming. It's just,

I want to stick kind of a Archimedes lever in the whole thing and fucking blow it up, which is part of what I hope to do in the next, I don't know, 12 months or so.

How much different would communities be if every neighborhood had a little mini farm? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like a shared garden or a co-op garden.

And we all just sort of chipped in and everybody had responsibility like neighborhood watch type thing yeah and it's not that far-fetched I mean it's not that far-fetched at all well the problem with cars is that now we don't have communities anymore like I don't live near any of my friends I've been trying to get everybody to move near me that's not working we're gonna have to buy land somewhere but I thought like how great would it be if I lived in the same