Brian Rose - The Joe Rogan Experience #271

Full transcript: The Joe Rogan Experience #271 | London Real on London Real

0:00 Joe Rogan: I always wondered when I was a little kid why American Indian songs sounded like that, and then I realised they were high, because when you’re high it seems like it sounds kind of cool.

Brian Redban: It’s sounding really cool right now, Rogan.

Joe Rogan: The rattling sound that you hear, ladies and gentlemen, is an actual bottle of Alpha Brain. This is what I take before I do anything, because I’m an Alpha Brain junkie. I take it before I do stand-up, I’m not lying about this, before any podcast, any UFC. I’ve done UFCs without it and I panic. I’ve got to go with extra Red Bull, and me and Mike Goldberg have races to see who can get to the bathroom first.

[Sponsor read removed]

I’m not wrong about the dreams that you have. I would take it just for the dreams. If you take it and then go to bed, you have the most intense, graphic dreams. They’re very lucid, man. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not bad for you; it’s all just nutrients.

London Real: Can I tell you a story about one of the dreams? I gave some to my Russian housekeeper and she took it, and in the dream, the lucid dream, she went back to Latvia in 1965 and spoke to her grandfather. She came back the next day and she was like, “Brian, what on earth?”

Joe Rogan: Jesus Christ. Yeah, the lucid dreams are no joke. They don’t always happen, though. I’ve taken it before and had no dreams. I don’t understand the process behind it. Maybe your dream was so intense that inside your dream you found a way to delete it so you won’t remember it. That’s the mechanism behind dimethyltryptamine. The mechanism behind DMT is the same mechanism behind dreams, which is really weird. You can wake up and go, “What a dream I had, man. We were on roller skates running from Godzilla, and it was my cousin who I grew up with but haven’t seen since I was 13, and he’s like, ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ and I felt guilty, meanwhile Godzilla’s chasing us.” You can remember it, but if I came up to you half an hour later and said, “Tell me about that dream again,” you’d be like, “What dream was it again? What happened?” It’s like your brain erases it. Whatever it is, it’s based on something the brain is already really good at getting rid of.

London Real: And that’s the DMT?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, DMT, which is a crazy psychedelic drug that your brain makes, and it’s also available in plant form. The idea is that when you’re dreaming intense dreams, your brain is producing dimethyltryptamine, this hallucinogen, and nobody really understands what it’s about. There’s an old term, “sleep on it.” If something’s bothering you, sleep on it and maybe you come up with a good decision in the morning. A lot of the reason for that term is that you really do think about things that are troubling you while you’re sleeping. And if we’re all going through a DMT trip that’s erased by the time we wake up, which is a distinct possibility considering the weirdness of dreams… These are obviously hallucinations, really intense hallucinations, but in a much more controlled form than a DMT state.

London Real: It could just be a low-level DMT experience. There are certain Eastern religions which believe that the life we’re living now is actually just the dream that your higher self is having, which I find very interesting.

Joe Rogan: It’s just as likely. Being alive is pretty bizarre. Being able to measure things through your eyeballs and figure out where things are, all of that is weird, man. Being a human is weird. Dreams are weird. It’s weird that you shut off every night, that for eight hours we just accept that we’re going to disappear, and you look forward to it. Everybody’s scared to die; no one’s scared to take naps.

London Real: I used to be scared to go to sleep as a kid. I’d be like, “Here it comes.”

[Sponsor read removed]

Joe Rogan: The cordyceps mushroom is also the same mushroom that turns ants into zombies, a different strain of it, folks. There’s a branch of the cordyceps mushrooms that infects these ants. Fascinating stuff, man. It turns the ants into zombie ants, and the other ants have to get the body away from the ant hill when they die, because they explode out spores which infect all the other ants.

Brian Redban: Welcome to the cult of Rogan.

Joe Rogan: That’s what Brian Redban would say: they’re doing mind control in the form of mushrooms. It’s not that, folks.

[Sponsor read removed]

Go to onnit.com, use the code name “Rogan” and you’ll save yourself 10% off the supplements. And don’t use the code name “London” on this show; wait for their show.

London Real: If you use the code name “London Real”, do you get something off?

Joe Rogan: The other thing we’re sponsored by is deathsquad.tv, which is Brian’s site, where Brian makes these ridiculous cat T-shirts that I see at all my shows now. Those are all his designs, and the money goes to Brian to support his Death Squad podcast network. The Death Squad is just a nickname that was given to us a long, long time ago, and it’s now branched out into Brian’s podcasts. It’s a family; that’s what Death Squad really represents to all of us. If we put “Death Squad” under a post and it’s Joey Diaz and Ari and Brian and Duncan all on a show together, that’s what we call Death Squad. It’s family.

[Sponsor read removed]

London Real is here. Strap in. We’re fixing to get popping. Cue the music.

10:34 The Joe Rogan Experience. Gentlemen, welcome.

Brian Rose: Awesome to be here.

Joe Rogan: So good to have you guys here. I saw you guys on YouTube a while back. Gentlemen, Brian and Nick. Who’s Brian, who’s Nick?

Brian Rose: I’m Brian Rose.

Nic Gabriel: Nick.

Joe Rogan: From London Real. These guys are one of the coolest up-and-coming podcasts that I’ve had a chance to listen to, and it’s right up our alley, the stuff you guys talk about and the people that you have on. You had Jacque Fresco on, you had Graham Hancock on.

Brian Rose: Fresco is a 96-year-old, the Venus Project guy.

Joe Rogan: Sorry, Mr Fresco. But you’ve had Graham Hancock on; you guys have had some guests right up our alley. It’s beautiful to see that there’s more out there, that there are people doing this in London. There are people doing this in Toronto; I’ve run into a lot of people in Toronto that have podcasts now, and essentially it’s all the same thing. You get together and you go, “I would like to talk about some stuff that I don’t see talked about in the mainstream news.” There’s all this nonsense in the news about celebrities, or about parts of the world that really don’t have anything to do with our day-to-day lives, but there are all these other weird subjects that aren’t getting covered. There are so many fascinating things, like what’s going on with these psychedelics? What are they here for? Can this be a debate for intelligent people to sit down and talk about, or does it immediately get derided and reduced to some silliness: “Oh yeah, we’re going to take hallucinogens. Why don’t you get up in the morning and put a tie on like a gentleman?”

Brian Rose: I spoke to Hancock about that. As soon as I mention ayahuasca or anything, everyone’s eyes just glaze over and they’re like, “Oh, you’re one of those guys.”

Joe Rogan: Yeah, they think you’re a crazy person. If you want to talk about altered states of consciousness, you’re a crazy person in California too. Well, it’s a little better here. This is the most progressive spot in the country, I think. I have a feeling about humans in America. It’s not that there aren’t amazing people on the East Coast; there are amazing people all throughout the country. But I think there’s a prevailing attitude in each region. People always talk about liberals in California, and the reason why is that the East Coast is where all the people first landed. That’s where all the people from Europe were like, “We’re so done with Europe. There’s a new spot, they can’t mess with us, we’re going to make our own laws.” And then that got all crazy, and people just decided to keep going, and they eventually, on horses with wooden wheels, got all the way to the other side and went, “We can’t go any further. All right, let’s stop.”

London Real: People complain when the transatlantic flight is delayed by 30 minutes. They don’t remember what our ancestors went through.

Joe Rogan: They had to eat each other, man. That’s no joke. That was a scary time for human beings, and I think there were a lot of times when people would start out and not make it.

13:40 Brian Rose: It’s always a scary time for human beings, though, Joe. This is a scary game we’re all playing, right?

Joe Rogan: It’s the same scary game we were playing when I was in high school. When I was in high school it was all about the Soviets.

Brian Rose: You were talking about that recently. People forget. I used to go to sleep at night really worried about nuclear war.

Joe Rogan: How old are you?

Brian Rose: I’m 41. Remember that movie The Day After? It was on when I was about 10 or 12. It was a whole television movie about a nuclear war, and at the end of it I was up for days, scared.

Joe Rogan: I don’t remember that one in particular, but I bet I saw it. I’ve seen so many apocalyptic, Mad Max, I Am Legend type movies.

Brian Rose: Do you think America needs an enemy? Do we need someone to always be the bad guy?

Joe Rogan: Well, we’re not real. When you say “Does America need an enemy?”, America’s not even real. There’s just a bunch of humans, and they decide to call it America and act as a group, but it’s pretty obvious at this point that that’s not real. It’s us that’s real. It might as well be you guys; when you’re here, you’re Americans. What is America? It’s just a spot. And the idea that this spot acts as one unit and we should all go along with what the spot’s doing is completely ridiculous, because we don’t get a say. What they’re doing is completely contrary to what most of the people in this country would want done. So what we have is like a fake country, really a dictatorship that’s run by money, and it’s run with a loose grip. It’s not run with a dog collar around your neck so you constantly feel oppressed. It’s a loose grip of corruption and entanglement, where there’s no way to get into the system, where a guy like Gary Johnson, who’s the only one left running for president who makes any sense, the Libertarian candidate, can’t even get into the debates because they won’t treat him seriously. The media is really bought and sold. It’s a news programme where they pick and choose what angle of the news to give you, instead of giving you all the information, and anything that criticises America or shows America in a bad light has got to be reviewed before it’s put on air.

London Real: While you were giving that speech, I just really felt that you really want people to wake up.

Joe Rogan: They should wake up. They can’t operate like this. The news doesn’t have to operate like this, the government doesn’t have to operate like this, the corporations don’t have to operate like this. No one’s saying you can’t do business. What we’re saying is that business doesn’t mean you have to rob people. Business doesn’t mean you have to use lobbyists to influence policy so that you can pollute rivers. Business doesn’t mean you can store nuclear waste in the middle of the desert because you don’t know how to get rid of it. You’re not supposed to make it until you know how to get rid of it. We probably shouldn’t even be on nuclear power, because we’ve had several major incidents over the past 100 years, and 100 years is nothing when it comes to how long the Earth has been around and how long radioactive material lasts. They’ve put together these power plants where, if something goes wrong, that spot is poisoned for 100,000 years. You cannot live there any more. And even after 100,000 years, who’s going to be the first to move back there? No one’s going to do that. So that spot’s ruined for longer than humans have existed. That’s how long we’ve ruined Chernobyl, that’s how long we’ve ruined Fukushima. And there are hundreds of power plants all over the place. We’re assuming we’re going to be able to keep the power on indefinitely and cool these things off.

London Real: But it’s in human nature to only change your behaviour when something really bad happens.

Joe Rogan: It’s just an aspect of denial, and that’s how corporations work. The reason corporations are able to get away with what they do, bribe politicians and influence, literally, war and murder, is because they act as a group that’s just trying to get zeros and ones. They’re just trying to get money, so they don’t look at things in terms of their moral value. They look at things in terms of “Is this good for our stockholders? Can we make a profit here?” You get a guy like Dick Cheney, who’s the head of a company called Halliburton that fixes things up after they get blown up, and then this guy becomes the vice president and starts blowing things up and giving these contracts to the company he used to run. That is one of the craziest things that’s ever happened in front of human beings. It was essentially a hijacking, live on television, publicly and government sanctioned, where they jacked a whole country, and jacked the American people too, and made us give money to these corporations to fix what we blew up, and even build things that weren’t necessary. If you talk to people that are over there, they’ll tell you they have a certain amount of money they’re supposed to spend and a certain number of projects. They build a desalination plant and the people are like, “We don’t need this,” and it doesn’t matter, we’re building it because we got the contract. Billions and billions of dollars are going over there. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a speech where he said that we have the knowledge and the know-how to build a telescope that can literally look back at the beginnings of time, infinitely more powerful than anything that exists today, and it would cost about $10 billion. That sounds like an incredible amount of money until you find out how much they’re spending in Iraq. They spend that every few days.

London Real: Our species must have a really negative karma, because we have so much potential but we seem to channel it in the wrong direction.

Joe Rogan: Look, the business of running countries has not changed, although access to information has changed radically, so the understanding of what a country really is has changed radically. They’re doing the same thing they did during the Roman Empire; they’re just doing it through a loose series of guidelines. But it’s really clear that they’re robbing countries’ resources, controlling people’s militaries, attacking people mercilessly, spreading fear and terror. You want to talk about Orwellian? We have robots that we operate by remote control from the other side of the planet that shoot missiles from the sky and kill people. That is bananas. In 2012 we literally send Darth Vader spaceships that shoot rockets from the sky. That’s insane.

London Real: Do you ever get concerned that you might face repercussions from the US government for the views you promote on your show?

Joe Rogan: No, because everything I’m saying is obvious. It’s all right out there in the open. If you look at the Halliburton thing, it’s not like Rogan gave up the goods on Halliburton. Everybody knows that the relationship of Halliburton to the United States is completely corrupt, just by virtue of the fact that they got no-bid contracts, these enormous contracts. That’s not the taxpayers being looked after, that’s not the government being frugal with money. That’s a relationship with someone who had influence, either directly with money or indirectly by getting their former CEO to run the country.

Brian Rose: I think the idea of a corporation is a good thing. I just think you need to regulate them heavily. From a limited liability standpoint there’s a reason for them, because otherwise you couldn’t invest in Onnit without them coming and taking your car away if it were unlimited liability.

Joe Rogan: I believe in paying taxes. I pay my taxes, I never cheat on my taxes, I pay a lot of money in taxes. I believe in state taxes too. I pay state taxes in California; I know a lot of people that move to Nevada strictly because they don’t have to pay state taxes. I don’t mind paying for things, I don’t mind government. I think it can all be done correctly. It sounds corny, but it’s all got to be done with love. It can’t be done with fear, and it’s all being done with fear. The whole way the world is run is being done with fear: “I’m going to nuke you.” If they were people, they would be the most ridiculous people ever. If Iran and Israel were people, you’d be like, “You two just shut up, my God, you bickering next-door neighbours.” Netanyahu has a cartoon bomb he’s using in a UN speech to show when Iran’s nuclear capabilities get to a certain point, that’s when you’ve got to attack. Have you seen this? Pull this up, Brian. Netanyahu bomb cartoon. They’re insecure over there, and they’re like pawns in a little chess game that all the big powers are playing.

Brian Rose: I think we need a joint Israeli-Palestinian podcast. We just need them talking it out in a room together.

Joe Rogan: That’s the conflict to end all conflicts, the one that’s been going on forever. Look at that picture. Is that the most ridiculous thing ever? He’s like, “Well, this is it.” Ahmadinejad said it was childish, and I agree with Ahmadinejad. How about that? The dude who says there are no Iranian gays. But his taste in cartoons is excellent.

24:43 It seems like corporations and governments all have this diffusion of responsibility. Even though we’re in America, with all the things that go on that we don’t agree with, like drone attacks, it becomes a matter of how much of an impact it has on the rest of the population. If it only has a minor impact, a lot of times you can get away with it, and that’s the situation we’re in right now. We know that in order to change things it would require a major overhaul, and it would be really difficult for a lot of people. The government is comprised of a huge number of human beings, and a lot of them are essentially completely unnecessary if we had a real, just and true government.

Brian Rose: I don’t really believe in the conspiracies. I think it’s just people who have these positions where they have great jobs and they’re collecting money as a contractor, like Halliburton, so why change things?

Joe Rogan: There’s a lot of that, but there’s also conspiring. We know they conspired with Enron. Halliburton’s a clear conspiracy. But we also know a lot about government conspiracies from the past, not just ideas and thoughts but things that have actually been proven to have happened, like the Gulf of Tonkin, the idea that they got us into a war in Vietnam with a fake story. There was Operation Northwoods, where John Glenn was going to be the first American into orbit, and if anything happened to his rocket they were going to blame it on the Cubans. It was a reason to attack Cuba. “It’s a win-win. If John Glenn makes it, he’s the first guy in orbit; if he doesn’t, we blame it on the Cubans and go after them.” That was the plan, and this is not a conspiracy theory. These are written documents.

Brian Rose: Do you think the government needs some secrecy, otherwise there’s no diplomacy? Obama can’t announce the night before that he’s going to go in and assassinate Bin Laden.

Joe Rogan: First of all, I don’t believe they did assassinate Bin Laden. I think that dude had been dead for years. I’ve talked to guys who were in Special Forces type jobs, and they were like, “No, that guy’s been dead forever.” Dudes were laughing about it.

London Real: If I had to pick something, I’d probably say that, more than anything else, is fishy.

Joe Rogan: It didn’t sound right to anybody in any other country either.

London Real: Did you hear about that guy who wrote the national bestseller, who was one of the guys on the raid? His story differs. He said his beard was completely black when they came in, with no grey hairs.

Joe Rogan: Brendan Walsh dyes his beard. I think it looks sexy on Brendan. But the whole reason a guy like Osama Bin Laden, or any of these radical guys, ever exists is that there’s got to be some great empire to oppose. And it’s not a great empire of altruism that’s trying to help people all over the world and enhance their lives and make money by helping countries, instead of making money by robbing their resources and taking out their militaries.

London Real: It will collapse sooner or later.

Joe Rogan: That’s the problem. We don’t have to have an empire. All empires do collapse, because they’re run by bullies. You can’t run an empire and not be a bully. What we need is civilisation. We don’t need an empire any more. What we need to figure out is how natural resources can be distributed equally to all nations. That sounds crazy, but that’s reality, otherwise everyone’s just going to go where the resources are and fight over them.

Nic Gabriel: I’d like to believe that we could have a free society, a fair society. But Brian, I think you believe that with human nature it’s never going to happen, right?

Brian Rose: I have a lot of thoughts about human nature. I think humans are inherently lazy, and if we had a socialist system a lot of people wouldn’t do anything. So I think capitalism does motivate people to a certain extent. Of course, it can go too far; these corporations start acting in their own interest and become really big monsters. But it certainly is a great motivating factor. I believe you should be rewarded for your efforts.

Joe Rogan: I believe in many of the ideas that go behind capitalism. Where I think we mess up is with things like the stock market, things that can be manipulated, where you can gamble.

Brian Rose: I’ve got to talk to you about derivatives. I’ve got to drop some science. I actually spent four years at MIT in Boston, I think around the same time you were there.

Joe Rogan: That’s an awesome town, if it wasn’t so cold. Especially Cambridge. What a great place.

Brian Rose: We were right across from the Necco wafer factory. I got a mechanical engineering degree, but I went straight to Wall Street afterwards and worked in banking, and then for the last ten years I worked in London in the credit derivatives industry, the worst of all derivatives.

Joe Rogan: So you understand derivatives. What is it? It’s gambling.

Brian Rose: I was thinking about how I could talk about this, because I hear you talk about it all the time. Is it frustrating, like hearing nonsense? It’s like when I have friends who talk about Jiu-Jitsu: “Oh, just grab him, just reach over and grab his neck.”

30:24 Joe Rogan: It could be worse. You could have friends who talk about kung fu and tell you how effective it is.

Nic Gabriel: In fact, this is the worst shout-out I could ever give anyone, but a guy popped up in the chat and said, “Try to talk to Joe about kung fu, because I think he has some negative ideas.” And I was like, “Look, dude, I don’t really believe in kung fu myself, so it’s going to be tough for me to convince him.”

Joe Rogan: It’s not that kung fu doesn’t work. It’s just that it’s definitely not the best way to go. It’s that simple. A lot of stuff works. If you backfist someone in the face, it’s not going to feel good, but it’s not as good as an overhand right. It’s just not.

London Real: I think a better qualifier is that it’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s that it doesn’t work on the right people. You can probably knock out an 86-year-old grandmother with the white crane dancing tiger technique, but try it on an MMA fighter.

Joe Rogan: It’s also the way a lot of people practise it. I’m like, “Oh my God, you’re being silly.” You throw a punch, and then you pretend that what I would do is step right here and attack your organs with a claw motion. Come on. The guy’s going to punch you again and again, he’s going to kick you in the groin. There’s going to be a lot happening. You’re not going to have time to get off that claw to the liver.

Nic Gabriel: We just had Roger Gracie in the studio on Friday, and we were rubbishing kung fu and karate, so we’re going to get some hate. But he was talking about kata: you get good at the kata, you get your belt. But in Jiu-Jitsu you spar and you have to test it. You can put a choke on someone, but what if he doesn’t want you to put it on? He was breaking down some of the core differences.

Joe Rogan: There’s a big difference. I have a black belt in taekwondo as well, and in taekwondo there were guys who were black belts who just weren’t that good. They had been around a long time, they did their forms and they did OK in sparring, but the reality is they never reached that expert level. Someone could kick their ass. They really weren’t adept at fighting.

Nic Gabriel: You know what I find very interesting, Joe, and you might appreciate this? Look at some of those more ridiculous martial arts. If you see a Jiu-Jitsu guy who’s 45 or 50, he’s tough, he still rolls, he’s in shape. But without fail, every single 45-plus traditional martial artist is the guy with a slouch and a beer belly who hasn’t done a push-up for 15 years. And they always want to be called by some weird title as well.

Brian Rose: You pulled up some guy on Facebook the other day with a black belt, and you were like, “Look at his face. It’s not a Jiu-Jitsu black belt, because he doesn’t have the lines on his face.”

Nic Gabriel: Because he doesn’t test himself. He hides behind his belt or his certificate and says, “OK, that’s me, I’m this grandmaster,” and all the little students bow to him because they think he’s got mystical powers. But at the end of the day he’s not progressing in his art, and it just makes my blood boil, man.

Joe Rogan: For those who don’t know, Nick is a Jiu-Jitsu black belt. That’s what Jiu-Jitsu is all about: exposing reality. And there are a lot of martial arts that are about putting on a show, which is completely contrary to Jiu-Jitsu. Taekwondo had a big impact on me as a child, because doing something that was difficult was the first character-forming thing I did as a person. But there are a lot of cult aspects to it, the bowing, calling the instructor “sir”. None of that’s in Jiu-Jitsu. The respect is all real, legitimate, natural, friendly respect. I have a black belt under Jean Jacques Machado as well, and Jean Jacques isn’t just a great Jiu-Jitsu coach, he’s everyone’s friend. He’s a really nice guy, very informal, but no one ever disrespects him or takes advantage of that friendliness and thinks they’d be a better fighter than him. Karate guys, and I don’t want to say always, because a lot of it is done correctly and it is a discipline about maintaining the mindset of the Zen martial arts tradition, and there are a lot of people who are legit about it, but there are also a lot of people who just want to put up a dog-and-pony show so that you don’t challenge them and test them.

Nic Gabriel: I’ve got a great story for you. We’ll get back to derivatives. When I first started grappling in Cape Town, it was just after the first UFC, and people were just starting to understand functional martial arts. A few of the guys at the club where I trained just wanted to learn, so they were going to every martial arts club they could find and testing the instructor to see what they could learn from him. So they got to a ninjutsu school.

Joe Rogan: What is ninjutsu, by the way? When I was a kid looking at martial arts magazines, trying to pick out a martial art to learn, I thought it’d be pretty good to be a ninja. Ninjas are cool. But I needed something where you could get a black belt. That’s one of the reasons why I went with karate first.

Nic Gabriel: So they got to this ninjutsu school and said to the guy, “We’d like to spar with you, we’d like to see your system and what you can do.” He said, “You will wait until after the class.” So they watched them walk on their hands or whatever they were doing, and at the end of the class the instructor said, “Students, we have a challenger.” He took out a blindfold, walked to the centre of the mat, knelt down, put on the blindfold, crossed his arms and said to my buddy, “Attack me.”

Joe Rogan: Get out of here.

Nic Gabriel: I couldn’t make this up. My buddy looked around the room for a camera; he thought this had to be some kind of joke. Then he just ran around to the back of him and put on a rear naked choke, and the guy squealed and didn’t know what was going on, and eventually my buddy let him go. That was the end of ninjutsu for our training.

Joe Rogan: Well, he was really nice about it, because he could have just punted him in the face, a Pride kick to the face, Shogun style, 2004. Instead he decided to choke him. That’s a very nice guy. There are a lot of dudes who got mad at me online, these guys who do kung fu in New York, because there’s a whole culture there. Most of it’s fake kung fu. When I say fake kung fu, I mean they’re making things up. “What if you did this?” “Oh man, you can’t do that, look how exposed you are. I’m attacking your knee here, son. Your whole side of your neck is wide open.” I laugh my ass off at them. These guys want to believe they’re real martial artists, and they’re really mad at me. One guy was like, “Come on, son, you tell me if I hit you in the face with a monkey paw that wouldn’t hurt.” If I let you hit me in the face with a monkey paw, it would probably hurt, but that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is you’re practising some nonsense, kid.

38:16 Brian Rose: But we all have aspects of our lives in which we’re deluding ourselves. We probably just can’t identify them. For them it’s martial arts; for us it might be our relationships or whatever.

Joe Rogan: People love to delude themselves. It’s way easier than facing the insignificance of your reality in this crazy picture of the whole universe.

London Real: A protection mechanism for the brain.

Joe Rogan: The ego is there to give you a reason to stay alive until you can get enlightened enough that you no longer need the ego to appreciate this existence. The ego is there to keep you alive. When you’re ten years old and you think you’re super special, your ego makes so much sense. It’s an engine to push you forward. And from there it’s all about getting enlightened to the point where you no longer need the ego to enjoy existence.

London Real: But that doesn’t happen in the West.

Joe Rogan: It does happen. You can do it. I did it. I’m not perfect, but I’m certainly way more evolved than I was when I was a younger person.

London Real: Was that through training or psychedelics or what?

Joe Rogan: All of the above. Jiu-Jitsu for sure helped. I’ve been doing Jiu-Jitsu since ’96, and just getting constantly strangled and going at it until your heart’s going to explode in your chest, and you’re trying not to tap but you realise you’ve got to tap, and then you’ve got to go again because there are still four minutes left in the round. You develop these intense relationships with people because you understand their character. You see dudes that break, you see dudes that will never break, guys that are so tough to tap, and guys that are a monster out of the gate but then run out of gas.

Nic Gabriel: It’s so different even one level up. I’m a Jiu-Jitsu instructor, and I don’t know if all Jiu-Jitsu instructors have it, I’d love to hear from some of the others, but when all your students are watching and there’s that young, tough 20-year-old purple belt, and you’re tired and carrying an injury or something, you’ve got to put it on the line or they aren’t going to respect you any more.

Joe Rogan: It’s true. And the reality is there are a lot of instructors out there who, if Marcelo Garcia came to their school, would get tapped. So they have to figure out what to do: “Do I just let everybody know that Marcelo can tap me? Watch me get treated like a baby.” A lot of people have a real issue with that. And there are a lot of dudes who say, “OK, now I’m an instructor, I have to make sure I’m lifting weights, I have to be bigger and stronger.” Eddie Bravo talks about that. He fights for his life in those classes, because Eddie’s at such a high level right now, especially his guard. His guard is so nasty. I’ve rolled with a lot of dudes, but he’s one of the few guys who consistently catch me from the guard. It’s hard to catch someone from the guard.

Nic Gabriel: I’ve got to roll with you.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, seriously. Maybe Thursday. Come to 10th Planet, we’d love to have you guys. I think when you do that on a regular basis, you tap people, you get tapped, you strain, you blow through all the energy you have in an endeavour, especially one that’s so primal. Jiu-Jitsu is so life and death, even though you can do it and no one gets hurt. It’s the craziest thing, man.

Nic Gabriel: I have this theory that you would know more about someone after a ten-minute Jiu-Jitsu match than after a ten-minute conversation.

Joe Rogan: A ten-hour conversation, maybe. Ten years. There are certain dudes where you tap them once and then they’re done. You own them; you can just run right through them. Even if they’re not tired, they just start giving stuff up, and you’re like, “Come on, man, pull your arm back, tuck yourself, protect yourself.” You don’t want them to break. You want them to offer legitimate resistance, and that’s what sparring is supposed to be about.

London Real: That happened to me in Brazil. I went down as a white belt and I was training at Gracie Barra, and all week I was getting my ass tapped as a white belt. Then Friday was no-gi day, and I obviously showed up with no belt, and I started rolling with this one dude and tapped him like six times. I think he just didn’t know who I was, and after that first tap it was over.

Joe Rogan: It can happen. And then there are dudes like this guy I remember who had just started Jiu-Jitsu, this crazy Armenian dude. He was just learning techniques, and he would spar with anybody, and this guy would not tap. He would fight to the death. Watching him roll with people, you would think he was done and he would just struggle and flail. He wasn’t strong and he wasn’t big; he was just proud and bound and determined not to tap.

London Real: Not necessarily the best way to go about it.

Joe Rogan: No, he had to get over that. But I remember watching him because it was one of his first classes. It’s fascinating to me, watching people start Jiu-Jitsu.

Nic Gabriel: You know what, Joe? Jiu-Jitsu guys are the modern-day Jedi Knights. Rickson would be the Yoda equivalent. It’s kind of cool when you think about it that way. We’re people who take ourselves to the limit, and that’s why there’s such camaraderie between Jiu-Jitsu guys. You know so much about a Jiu-Jitsu guy when you shake his hand.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. I always talk about how Jiu-Jitsu guys have control of their ego. It’s very rare that you run into a Jiu-Jitsu guy who’s completely out of control.

Brian Rose: So many of our early guests on London Real were actually Jiu-Jitsu guys, because that was who we knew. We must have had eight of them, and they were all these cool, grounded, pretty humble dudes, still smart, still excelling in their field.

Joe Rogan: They get checked on a regular basis. That’s what it is, man. Getting checked on a regular basis is huge. It’s what I said about the ego. Your ego leads you to victory, it leads you to want the glory and the accolades, but ultimately it hurts you if you fight with your ego. Everybody knows that. You’ll lose your composure, you’ll get crazy, especially if you start getting tagged. Instead of fighting smart you’ll just flail back, which is oftentimes totally the wrong approach. If you’re going to do the right thing technically, you have to be in complete control of your ego. You can’t even let it factor into the process.

London Real: Look at it as a game.

Nic Gabriel: You can sense that with Roger. We interviewed him on our show the other day, and one of the things I brought up was that I’ve known him for almost ten years, and Joe, I swear to God, I’ve never seen him lose his cool. He’s the most Zen person I know, and it goes hand in hand with good Jiu-Jitsu. I’ve noticed that the calmer I get as a human being, maybe it’s to do with ageing or meditation, the better my Jiu-Jitsu is, the more I’m in touch with reality when I’m sparring with someone.

Joe Rogan: I do as well. I think Jiu-Jitsu is an excellent part of daily life, for a man especially. And I think it’s just one aspect. Others are nutrition, philosophy, thought, conversation with others. I know people talk about how much this podcast has helped them. It’s helped me too, because it’s helped me review a lot of the ideas I have in my head and my take on things, in projecting them out to other people.

46:00 You’re also forced to take a real account of all your thoughts. It’s like teaching Jiu-Jitsu makes your game better.

Nic Gabriel: You learn by teaching.

Joe Rogan: If you teach Jiu-Jitsu, your game improves. My friend Brent is a perfect example. He was always a decent purple belt, but he wasn’t the best guy, and then he started teaching. He’s a black belt now, but within a year of teaching his game went up so many notches. All of a sudden he was dangerous. Every time you rolled with him he was snatching kimuras. His technique became so sharp from teaching.

Nic Gabriel: You know why that is? I actually found out the other day, because I noticed that as well when I started teaching full time; I got quite a lot better. I don’t know if I’m using the correct term, but there’s a specific kind of neuron in our brain that fires when we see someone doing something. I think it’s called an empathy neuron. So when you’re a teacher, you watch your students. For me, I watch what they do, and in my mind I overlay what it should look like, like a mental video overlay. Then eventually I show them what to do and they do it correctly, and it’s kind of like me doing the technique again. Does that make sense?

Joe Rogan: Yes.

Nic Gabriel: So I guess that’s what’s happening when you watch someone else doing something, or if you’re just involved in the process. That’s why you can get better watching fight videos.

Joe Rogan: Absolutely, especially when you already have the knowledge of what to do in your head, the patterns. The other day I was rolling and I had this guy in side control, and he tried to get up to one knee, and as he tried I took his back. It was all in one second. You couldn’t think it through, even if you were an athletic person; you wouldn’t be able to do it like that, because what’s happening is your mind is being bypassed.

Nic Gabriel: My first coach always used to say to me, “Your body knows what to do, but your mind gets in the way.”

Joe Rogan: Yes. And when that happens for me, it’s the most beautiful moment. It really is like magic. All of a sudden you’ve got this dude’s back. And especially if you freak a guy out, he’s like, “Holy cow, how did he get my back like that?” Marcelo is my favourite example. When you watch Marcelo’s arm drag to the back, there’s a moment where these guys can’t even believe he got to their back so quickly.

Nic Gabriel: My friend Alexis is a high-level black belt now. He’s a little bit skinny, reasonably athletic but not an Olympian, quite a fragile guy, about 150 to 160 pounds, and he is so technical. He’s like a surgeon wielding a scalpel. He told me he went to train with Marcelo, and he said, “Nick, I swear to God, it felt like that man was reading my mind. Every move I did, he knew. If I went to put my hand down to get my balance because he’d off-balanced me, he’d grab my hand, and he’d know I’d reach to counter with the other hand, and he’d already have something queued up.”

Joe Rogan: Have you rolled with him?

Nic Gabriel: No, I’ve never rolled with him. But just think, for a high-level black belt to say that about Marcelo. Isn’t that exciting? We could all one day get perhaps close to that level.

Joe Rogan: The best guys I roll with: I roll with Jean Jacques Machado pretty regularly, I’ve rolled with Eddie Bravo a bunch of times of course, and Denny Prokopos is one of Eddie’s black belts. He’s got a nasty guard. He’s a small dude, only about 160 pounds, and he can still tap me from the guard regularly. He’s wicked. Eddie’s got a lot of guys that just have stupid guards. Shigeki is another one, and he’s 135 pounds.

Nic Gabriel: What about you, Joe? Are you a guard player or a passer? What’s your style?

Joe Rogan: I’ve changed a lot over the years and tried to be much more guard oriented, half-guard oriented, and earn top position, because most of my submissions used to be from the top, and I realised that’s unrealistic.

Nic Gabriel: Roger’s dad, Mauricio, is a seventh degree, a red and black belt, so this guy’s legit. When I was quite a bit younger I said to him, “Man, I don’t want to play on my back, because if I’m on my back I’m just trying to get to the top anyway, so why don’t I just go straight to the top?” And he said, “You know, Nick, when you get older you’ll see. You’ll need your guard, because there’s much more energy conservation when you’re on your back.” I didn’t think about it at the time, but the older I get, the more I see what he was talking about.

Joe Rogan: I like to earn it. That’s what Eddie always says: if you’re going to attack someone from the top, you should earn that position. So I always start off from guard.

51:24 I’ve been injured for five months. I hurt my back, and what I tried to do was just lightly roll, like an idiot, even though I knew it was injured. I was like, “I’ll just roll with light guys and not go hard,” and I made it way worse. The one day where I tried to roll light set me back three months. Then I came back and only trained for a couple of days and popped it out again, but it was much more mild this time. It was just a bad muscle tear in my back, in between my shoulder blades. It was a Jiu-Jitsu thing.

London Real: Are you going to be rolling till you’re 65, do you think, or later, like Helio Gracie?

Joe Rogan: I’m rolling till the wheels fall off. I’ve got to say it was nice during the five months I was off that I wasn’t always tweaked. It was always my elbow, where I should have tapped and I muscled out of it, or my neck got tweaked. It’s always something.

Nic Gabriel: I don’t know about you, but for me, and I’m sure for a few other Jiu-Jitsu guys, when you get to the end of a hard week of training and everything hurts and you’ve got that bone tiredness, I used to fight against it, but now I kind of get off on that. I feel like, in my body, I’m alive. Do you know what I’m saying?

Joe Rogan: You also feel like you’ve earned relaxation. You’ve actually done something incredibly difficult. I had a great roll last night. This is my third time back from the injury, and I’m finally pretty sure that if it’s not 100%, it’s definitely 90%. I’m feeling great, and I was exhausted, and I just flopped on the couch and watched TV, and I didn’t feel guilty at all, because I put forth some serious effort. I don’t feel like I can enjoy goofing off, like watching TV or something, unless I’ve done something hard. I feel like you should reward yourself with that, but it’s all a matter of managing it. I like to watch TV or a movie after I’ve written for a few hours: “OK, I did my work, I can shut off now.”

Nic Gabriel: I can’t do it, Joe. I was just telling Brian the other day, I sold my PlayStation and my TV. I realised I don’t want it in my house any more. It sounds a bit strange, but I always feel kind of empty after watching TV or playing video games. I don’t feel like I’ve grown as a person; I feel like a vegetable. I’m happy to have it out of the house.

Joe Rogan: There’s a very different feeling I get from playing video games than I get from doing other things that are difficult, like pool. I play pool, which a lot of people would also say is a waste of time. They always say that if someone is good at pool, it’s the glorious result of a misspent youth. But I feel that pool in a lot of ways is a lot like Jiu-Jitsu, because it’s a lot about managing your nerves, control of your body and concentration. It’s not as fast paced, but it’s pretty intense when you play high-level pool. There’s a lot of exercise of control and composure. In striking the ball and judging how hard to hit it, you’re literally judging how much energy you release. You’re controlling the effort, and it’s very important, because you can’t hit everything full blast. It’s not like boxing, where you try to knock somebody out in the first round with power punches. You have to have a really good sense of how lightly or how hard you need to hit that ball, and you need to be able to control the ball with a level stick, drive through it level as you’re coming down. There’s a lot of thinking and weirdness going on if you look at it from a big-picture perspective.

Nic Gabriel: There’s a philosopher called Alan Watts, I think he was around in the ’60s or ’70s, and he talks about how you’ll get these wealthy people who buy a huge boat and then wonder why it doesn’t make them happy. It’s because pleasure comes from the process of acquiring a skill; it doesn’t come from a material object. That made a lot of sense to me. Now I find Jiu-Jitsu is the most fun now that I’m a black belt, because I’ve acquired that skill and I can just enjoy it. I’m not trying too hard to get better. I’m just enjoying my skill and getting pleasure from it.

Joe Rogan: Absolutely. When you have a good roll, say you get in there with a good purple belt, someone who’s really scrappy, and you’re countering each other and attacking, and then you finally catch a dude with something, you earned that. There’s something beautiful about pulling off a technique on an unwilling participant, where you’ve figured out a way to bypass his defences. It’s a fascinating game of intellect, and that’s what people don’t understand. It’s not just a physical thing. There are certainly physical aspects to it, and I feel them now because I’m just getting back into Jiu-Jitsu shape. Even if you work out, it’s not the same. The only thing that comes close is kettlebells. There’s a kettlebell workout called the Extreme Kettlebell Cardio Workout; a company called Dragon Door sells it, and it puts you through hell. And it’s a light kettlebell. He does it with a 35-pound kettlebell, and I would never have believed someone could give me a good workout with a little 35-pound kettlebell. It’s 45 minutes, with maybe a minute’s break here and there between sets, and it’s ruthless. Your legs want to die. You feel like you’re going to step and your muscle is just going to fall off your leg. If you get through that 45 minutes with that kettlebell, congratulations, you’re a beast.

Nic Gabriel: When we’ve got a big show coming up, or before an ayahuasca trip, Brian’s like, “I’ve got to do my kettlebell workout in the morning,” because it puts you in a good mood, right?

Brian Rose: Yeah, to try to get in the right zone.

Joe Rogan: It gets those endorphins going, man. It fires up your system and gets your testosterone production up. They always say the best exercises for putting on mass are full-body exercises like deadlifts and squats, where your whole body has to move as a unit. They’re far more effective for putting on real size and functional strength than just bench press or curls.

Nic Gabriel: If you look at someone whose main supplemental training outside Jiu-Jitsu is bodybuilding, you can see they just don’t move right. That’s not the way the human body was designed to move through space. They’re all locked through the chest and shoulders, and there’s no horizontal movement in their hips, only linear movement. If you’re pushing 400 pounds on a leg press, your muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones get used to working in a very specific direction. There’s no balance and flexibility in it.

57:51 London Real: Joe, I’ve got a question. When Aubrey was on here talking about all his crazy stuff like ibogaine, I remember you and Brian listening to him and you were like, “I don’t ever want to do stuff like that.” Or when he talks about ayahuasca, is that stuff you guys never want to touch?

Joe Rogan: Oh, I’d do ayahuasca in a heartbeat. I’m not worried about ayahuasca. Ibogaine, I think, would be great for someone who had real serious personality issues or substance abuse issues. I don’t have those.

Brian Rose: Graham Hancock was talking about ibogaine, and he was like, “I don’t want to do it again.”

London Real: The closest I have to a substance abuse issue is coffee. I love coffee.

Wasn’t there somebody who died the other day from ayahuasca, supposedly?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, but they don’t know if the ayahuasca killed him. The shaman could have killed him, because the shaman buried him. So who knows if he died during a ceremony. Somebody might have killed him.

London Real: I guess that was a legit shaman, an old-school one. He’d been in some movie before that.

Joe Rogan: And then apparently this kid’s dead, so “I’m writing that drug off.” One guy dies, meanwhile he smokes cigarettes. Isn’t that hilarious? Cigarettes kill 500,000 people a year in this country alone, and he’s like, “Well, this ayahuasca killed one guy in Peru.”

London Real: Wasn’t ayahuasca the drug he said makes you feel like you’re dying the whole time?

Joe Rogan: No, that’s ibogaine.

London Real: Yeah, forget that drug. I think we both said forget that drug.

Joe Rogan: I think it’s very beneficial for certain people. My friend Ed Clay, who runs a centre down in Mexico, one of Lloyd Irvin’s black belts, great guy, his whole life changed because of ibogaine. He went down and took it. He had an issue with pain pills. He’d got an injury, and like a lot of guys, they get injured and the doctor prescribes them something, especially if you hurt your back.

London Real: It happened to someone I know very, very well, a construction worker. No joke. It’s strong, the opiates.

Joe Rogan: It’s very terrifying that it’s so readily available, that doctors will prescribe it so easily, and that they’re trusting you to have control. They give you all these pills at once. It’s not like you go to the doctor and every day he dispenses you a new one: “If you want to get on OxyContin, I’ll give it to you, but you’ve got to come to me.” No, he gives you a whole bottle of 90 pills, and if you want to take four at a time, no one’s going to stop you.

London Real: It’s weird. We don’t have readily accessible opiate prescriptions like that in London.

Joe Rogan: We have an incredibly hypocritical society, especially in Florida. Vanguard did a show called The OxyContin Express, dedicated just to OxyContin, showing that Florida has these ridiculous laws. I think they’re trying to change that now, probably because of that show. They have these things called pain management centres. Say you come in and say, “I hurt my back, it’s really painful, I can’t even sleep,” and they go, “OK, I’m going to write you a prescription for pain pills.” Then you shut that door and open the next door in the same building, and that’s the pharmacy, and they have your pain pills. How does that continue to exist? Because there’s corruption. And by the way, Florida is also the state that recently came under fire for hiring police officers to pretend to be high-school students to get kids to sell them pot. They hired a 25-year-old woman who was attractive to make friends with a 17-year-old boy who was an honour roll student. This kid tested negative, by the way. He didn’t do drugs, didn’t have a record; he was just a kid. She made friends with him and got him to sell her weed, and then they had him arrested. She coerced him. She’s 25 years old, a woman, and she’s dealing with a boy, and she’s attractive. First of all, that’s completely unfair. Attractive women have a massive amount of power over a 17-year-old boy.

London Real: You know what’s funny, Nick? I don’t know about you, but when I was younger my fantasy was an older woman, and the older you get, it kind of switches around.

Joe Rogan: There’s a whole MILF market in porn. Some dudes are into those really dirty-looking 40-year-olds, savage monsters with mascara and sweat. A lot of dudes are into that, women who just know what they want. That’s a whole market.

London Real: You know what’s a pretty freaky market as well? I watched a movie called Samsara recently, the sequel to Baraka. It’s a bunch of long shots with no dialogue, and they showed the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen, a sex doll factory, and then they juxtaposed that shot with one of those strip club brothels in Thailand to make a point. It showed you just how similar the whole sex industry is. Selling sex dolls and selling human beings is pretty much the same thing in that case.

Joe Rogan: That’s fascinating.

1:03:35 London Real: You always talk about what you want to do with the Squad and with the podcast, and I think you said recently you feel a responsibility to take this to another level. I always wondered what you meant by that.

Joe Rogan: The only thing we’re doing differently is that I have a new studio I’m opening up that’s closer to where I live, and it’s a completely independent thing. It’s not connected to a comedy club, and it’s got a lot of space, so we can have it set up the way I’d like, with nice cameras and monitors on the wall.

London Real: But you’re not getting rid of Redban, right?

Joe Rogan: No, I’ve had this guy with me for ten years. I’m not going anywhere without him. Brian’s one of my best friends. He’s a weird guy, but you don’t get some weird dude who’s into Hitler cats easily. That’s hard to find. He’s an important element. Brian’s going to be with me this weekend, by the way. We’re going to be in Phoenix at Stand Up Live, and it’s going to be crazy, folks. Joey Diaz is there Friday and Saturday, Ari Shaffir is going to be there on Friday, Brendan Walsh on Saturday, and Brian’s going to be there the whole weekend. We haven’t been to Phoenix in a couple of years. That’s one of my favourite places.

Brian Redban: Did you hear they bought the other club? They bought the Tempe Improv too.

Joe Rogan: Good for them.

London Real: Do you still get nervous when you go on stage?

Joe Rogan: No, I get excited. I’m looking forward to it. It’s important, so I get excited. I wouldn’t say nervous, because that implies fear, and it’s not a fear thing. It’s an excitement. You have to be heightened; you can’t go up nonchalant. People want to be entertained, they want to feel the intensity of the performance and the focus, so you have to be up for it. But if I didn’t do my job, if I haven’t been writing and I don’t know what to say, I would feel nervous. And there’s a weird fear that comes with trying new things and messing around with new bits, especially if you’re not convinced. Sometimes I’ll have a bit and I’m like, “This might suck. This might have been one of those stoned ramblings.” Then I’ll do it on stage and find a path, and all of a sudden it becomes a monster. On stage it becomes alive, and you have to take that chance. There are two aspects to writing. One is the physical act of sitting in front of a keyboard, writing in silence by myself, and that’s a very important aspect of it. The other is telling the bit in front of people, because then it comes alive. I was going to say it a certain way, but in the moment I go, “No, I don’t need that part, I need to edit that out and get right to this part.” It’s a matter of editing on stage. It’s one of the few art forms where you must have an audience to create. I can start the process on my own, but stand-up can’t reach its full form without the crowd. It’s impossible. I use their energy.

London Real: It’s part of the equation.

Joe Rogan: The reaction is part of it, the feel I get from them, the intangibles, where I know the timing lies. It would be impossible to describe. It’s such a specialised skill, a weird skill. It’s not what everybody thinks it is. It’s not just that you’re saying things and people are considering them and laughing. There’s a little bit of that, but there’s also some weird connection, some hypnosis thing going on between the audience and you. As an audience member I feel it as well. When I watch someone who I think is really hilarious, like when I saw Stanhope recently or Joey Diaz the other day, when someone is really killing and you’re locked into their bit, there’s this weird connection, and as a performer you feel that. When you’re coming up with new material, you feel where it goes, and you also feel when you’re faking it, when it’s forced. You know what the audience feels. It’s like you’re conducting. It’s a really pure art form, a weird art form, and it’s really hard.

Brian Rose: I took a comedy course and did five minutes in London, and it was trippy. I know a lot of people hate on comedy courses. I know Maron hates on comedy courses.

Joe Rogan: He shouldn’t. No one should, because it gets people in the door. If you’re not a stand-up comedian, why not take a course to force yourself on stage? The real problem with courses is that a lot of them are run by losers. That’s the problem.

London Real: But do you need a funny guy to teach you, or do you just need the guy to get you on stage so you can learn yourself?

Joe Rogan: You’re not going to get real comedy advice from somebody who sucks. There were a bunch of people who wrote books on comedy, and I remember as a young professional, when I’d just started getting paid to do gigs, people would laugh at these books and at how horrible the comic who wrote the book was. But what a book does do, even though I agree with that in certain ways, is get you interested in the conversation. You might go to the bookstore and say, “I need to find a book on how to be a comic,” and that book might be step one, taking a class might be step two, and ten years from now you might be Marc Maron, a real professional comedian. It’s just a matter of taking those steps. The good thing a comedy class does is that it allows you to mess around, get on stage and see if this is something you’re actually interested in, and think about the process. And by the way, when you’re in a bad comedy class listening to idiots tell you how to do it, you might go, “This guy’s an idiot,” and that might help your comedy. It might help you understand that there are a lot of people out there who do it terribly. Don’t do what this guy’s doing, don’t hack it up, don’t make it so obvious, don’t insult me as the person watching. That might actually benefit you in an educational sort of way.

Brian Rose: We just got up and sucked every week in front of these people, and we all bonded at the end, these 12 strangers. If you can’t make 12 random people in London laugh, then most likely you’re not going to make a comedy audience laugh. And we just got up there and sucked.

Joe Rogan: By the way, tomorrow night we have a show here at the Ice House. Joey Diaz and I were on the phone today and he’s like, “What are we doing tomorrow, dog?” I go, “What do you want to do?” He goes, “We’ve got to do a show. We can’t come in cold to Phoenix. We’ve got to give them at the Ice House a show.” So I said, “All right, settle down, we’re going to do a show.”

London Real: Is it like breathing for you guys? You’ve got to be on stage weekly?

Joe Rogan: Joey, no matter what, is always doing three or four sets a week. He’s always hopping around doing it. He loves it, and it’s one of the reasons why he’s so good, so comfortable and natural up there. He’s a real stand-up. He’s a black belt in stand-up comedy. And he knows we’re going to have these huge crowds. The club in Phoenix is about 600 seats and it’s almost sold out, two shows Friday, two shows Saturday and one show on Sunday, so Joey’s ramping up right now. He’s shadow boxing in his house.

London Real: We invited him on London Real, but he told us he doesn’t have a passport, so he can’t go to London.

Joe Rogan: That’s too bad, because that would be awesome. You guys could experience the love.

Nic Gabriel: You’re like a black belt in stand-up comedy as well. When you meet a new colleague or peer, can you tell if they’re a natural, or if they’re someone with average talent who really polished it to a high degree?

Joe Rogan: You can tell if they’re a douchebag, and if they’re a douchebag they’re probably not going to be that good. There’s something fake about it; they’re going to be clunky. And then there are some people you meet who are just so open, and you’re like, “Whoa, I’ve got to see what this guy does on stage.” Some people you meet are just really there, centred, engaging you, and you’re like, “This is a sharp guy.” And then there are other guys who are really quiet, and then they get on stage and they’re a maniac. You never know. People’s personalities are strange. Some people are completely different on stage than they are off stage. Some people are really funny on stage and then off stage they’re quiet and reserved. They get it all out in their on-stage antics. There are a lot of different types of comedy. The most taxing and exhausting is the always-on one-liner guy who’s always trying to say the next funny thing.

London Real: But you guys do crack jokes when you’re hanging out.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, but only the ones that work. It’s the same thing we’re talking about with being a black belt. You’ve got to know what’s actually funny and what’s just annoying to listen to, what is just you jerking off into the wind and what is actually relevant, something you’re actually contributing to the conversation. One of the things Brian is really good at, and I want to give him his props, is he’ll say something that I would never have thought of and never have said, and he’ll interject it in weird spots. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but it takes the conversation to a place you probably would never have gone on your own, and that’s what’s fun in having a conversation. What’s fun in watching a stand-up comedian is someone who can take things to places you might not have gone, but they’re relevant places. You allow them to think for you for a brief moment. And when they’re awkward and clunky, you’re like, “You can’t think for me, stupid. What are you doing? You’re bullshitting me.” So you tune them out immediately. When someone’s exhausting because they’re always yukking it up, they don’t understand how they’re being perceived. There’s a disconnect between what they’re projecting and how they’re being received. That’s just like the karate guy who still thinks he’s a master and he’s got a gut now, but he wants everybody to be terrified of him, and really believes somewhere in the back of his head that he could handle multiple attackers. He’s bullshitting.

London Real: That’s the scariest thing in life, when you’re confronted with your delusions. You think you’re the man and then you just get destroyed.

Joe Rogan: That’s why I told you not to eat that cookie he was trying to give you. No cookies. You don’t want to mess with these edibles, man. Edibles will put you in a bad place unless you’re ready. It’s very confronting. It confronts you with all the weird stuff you’ve been pushing to the back of your head.

London Real: Sounds like ayahuasca.

Joe Rogan: Have you ever seen the information on the difference between eating and smoking marijuana? Cannabinoids change on the first pass through the liver. They become 11-hydroxy metabolite, which is an intense psychedelic drug, about five times more psychoactive than THC. So the amount of marijuana that’s in a pot brownie, if you smoked it, would get you high, but if you eat it, it’s almost uncomfortable. It’s so self-examining, so intensely probing into all aspects of your fears and unconscious thoughts.

London Real: That’s why you do it on a plane.

Joe Rogan: I do it all the time.

Nic Gabriel: I was in LA about five years ago and someone gave me a brownie. I’d never had one before. He picked me up in the morning and said, “This is for you.” We were on our way to Universal Studios, which I’d never been to before, so I ate this thing on an empty stomach, and I got really paranoid and I chickened out on the Shrek ride, man. I literally lost it. I said, “I’ve got to get out of here.” There were all these mirrors on the walls.

Joe Rogan: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt scared of the Shrek ride. That’s a new meme on the Rogan board: “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt scared of Shrek ride.” Weed’s a tough thing, man. A lot of people say it makes you paranoid, and I believe a certain amount of paranoia is very important. I really think it’s not paranoia, I think it’s just… Is that me? How dare you. That ringtone. I don’t change ringtones. I don’t want to hear your music either, if you’re one of those dudes with the latest Green Day song.

London Real: I have a badass ringtone.

Joe Rogan: I bet you do. What was I saying? What were we talking about? I had a point, though. Well, if I forgot it, it certainly wasn’t worth talking about. I was talking too much, obviously.

1:16:52 Brian Rose: So am I dropping some science here?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, sure. Derivative science.

Brian Rose: I’ve got to drop a little bit. I know you’re always talking about crazy derivatives, how there are too many of them out there and it’s betting on fake stuff.

Joe Rogan: Well, what I talk about is that I really am an idiot and I don’t really understand it, so if I’m saying it, I’m just repeating something I heard online.

Brian Rose: Fair enough. So I’ll break it down. The oldest form of derivative is what the Egyptians used to do. They’d grow some cotton and know that they could sell it for a future price, and if they got a certain price they would plant the crops, and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t. That was the oldest form, and then it got crazy with the credit derivatives and so on. The way I look at it, it’s more like technology. An iPad, you could say, is bad if you load porn on it and give it to an eight-year-old, but in theory it’s not bad stuff. The problem is when it gets a little unregulated and crazy.

Joe Rogan: I see your point, and I think what you’re saying is probably correct. But I think if you want to have a fair society, a society that makes sense, I don’t think you can have things, when it comes to money and finances, that can be manipulated in any way, shape or form, or that are based at all on confidence or perceptions of how something is doing. When I look at the stock: “Apple’s down. The iPhone has not been perceived as the hit we thought it was, so Apple stock is down.” What are you even saying? What kind of crazy world do we live in, where regular people are gambling for and against a company falling apart, and that’s a part of our society and a part of our economy? That’s crazy.

Brian Rose: But every time you buy, you’re kind of gambling. When you buy your house wherever you live, you’re thinking it’ll probably be a good investment, as opposed to if you bought a house in Tijuana, where maybe it wouldn’t. So every decision you make with your money is kind of a bet.

Joe Rogan: Sure. If I were saying you should never gamble, that would make sense, but that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is you can’t gamble on things you’re not even a part of, and that can’t be a giant part of the economy. “The Dow is down seven points today.” What are you even talking about? You’ve got a ridiculous system if the Dow fluctuates up and down based on some stupid bill that gets passed, or because Iran’s been rattling its sabres. That’s a nonsense system.

Brian Rose: But humans are all about confidence, right?

Joe Rogan: Sure, but our economy shouldn’t be based on such a weird, ethereal sort of feeling, the idea of whether or not people believe Apple’s on the rise. What about BlackBerry? Where’s BlackBerry now? They were on top of the world at one point in time. It all just seems like nonsense. One piece of gold should equal one donkey. Back to old school, until we figure out… What was the guy’s name? Jacque Fresco. He talks about resource-based economies. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Economies based on numbers and derivatives and finances and stocks and bonds, what are you even saying?

1:20:20 Brian Rose: I just don’t know how we’re going to get there without a complete bloodbath. How are we going to get to a better version of government without a complete bloodbath?

London Real: You say the internet, and that’s the only option we have right now, right?

Joe Rogan: I think the internet is eventually going to lead to the governing of the world through the people. I think it’s inevitable, as long as people continue to have more and more access to information and more and more power to distribute that information, like we do right now. That’s one of the scariest things about these bills tightening things up, these cyber-terrorism bills and sweeping legislation that allows a government to come in and shut down websites and deem them enemies of the state. WikiLeaks is an enemy of the state now. Julian Assange has just been deemed an enemy of the state; they’ve decided he’s as bad as al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, all he’s done is tell the truth. All he’s done is distribute information the government didn’t want distributed, so they decided this guy’s a terrorist. That’s scary. I think it’s nonsense. As I get older, I think more and more that it’s a silly system. If Gary Johnson can’t debate, what you’ve got is a rigged system, a giant, crazy, rigged, fake system, and if I pretend I’m a part of it, of this stupid Electoral College, and hop on board, it’s nonsense.

London Real: The Electoral College is still crazy, right?

Joe Rogan: Every aspect of it is nuts. Lobbyists are nuts. A corporation’s ability to donate limitless amounts of money, that’s nuts, the latest super PACs and all that.

Brian Rose: It’s weird watching it from London. It’s really weird. It seems like a big joke with Romney. My sister liked Mitt Romney on Facebook last night, Joe.

Joe Rogan: Good for her. He seems like a nice guy. I like him too; that doesn’t mean I’d vote for him. And I think it’s been pretty obvious with Obama that it’s not that easy. Everybody thought Obama was going to be this great saviour of this country. I remember this woman who was all happy when he won: “Now I know that my mortgage is going to be paid.” I was listening to her say this and thinking, “Whoa, you want to talk about high expectations for someone who’s going to come in and fix this incredibly entangled, corrupt system?” Not only did he not fix it, he let some things get past that I never would have expected, like the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the military to be used on US civilians and allows people to be held without representation, without any recourse. You can’t have a trial; they can just hold you indefinitely.

London Real: That’s terrifying.

Joe Rogan: It’s terrifying that they would ask for that, and here’s why. It’s not like things have gone horribly bad in this country. It’s not like there are riots in the streets every day and people are assassinating government leaders and bombs are blowing up buildings everywhere, and we’ve resorted to some sort of arcane law we have to put in place until we can calm things down. No. Go walk down the street in Pasadena; it’s beautiful out here, man. Get on the highway; there are a few too many cars, but people are civil. You’ve got hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the worst thing is somebody might blow the horn or stick a finger out. No one’s cutting people’s heads off with swords. It’s not necessary to pass these crazy Orwellian laws. What it makes me think is that they can see the writing on the wall, and they know that this form of running governments is no longer valid. It doesn’t work. We understand your influence, we understand why you’re making these decisions, we see where the money comes from. It’s all readily available now. It’s not like we’re living in 1930 and I have to read the Hearst newspapers to find out about the upcoming election. You can find out anything about anybody. It’s really different now. That’s not saying we don’t need a government; we certainly need a government. It’s not saying we shouldn’t have corporations; of course we should. There are a lot of corporations I think are great. I think Apple’s great, I think Porsche is great, I like their products. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that we can’t allow money to supersede humanity, and that’s what they’ve done. They’ve allowed the idea of doing their stockholders justice and making as much money as possible to supersede humanity. And when you have businesses whose entire function supersedes humanity, and you can measure that, that needs to be stopped. They’ve got to stop it for themselves, because they’re all getting horrible karma from it.

1:25:04 London Real: Have you thought about having politicians on the show?

Joe Rogan: We’ve had a few. We’ve had young David Seaman; he’s coming back again. But why would politicians want to come on my show? Maybe Gary Johnson would, but he’s legit. I had a chance to speak to Ron Paul on The Tonight Show. I never asked him to come on the podcast, because I thought it would be ridiculous. Seaman’s coming on again. What, you have a problem with that?

Brian Rose: But you’ve created this. This is our one-year anniversary, pretty much, since we started our show, and it was pretty much after watching your show. The split screen was pretty much an ode to you, from when you used to shoot it, I think, at your house, right?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Well, we started doing it because of Anthony Cumia, really. He was the big push. We went on the Opie and Anthony show, and Anthony has a show called Live from the Compound. He has a sick setup, a green screen and a broadcast desk and really high-end microphones, and him and his buddies would get drunk and do a show, and me and Brian were like, “That looks fun.” So we started doing it. It’ll be three years for us in December. We started doing it on Ustream on a laptop.

London Real: And you guys were on sofas in the beginning, right?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, in my house, just chilling in my house. We were bored.

Brian Rose: You infected us over in London.

Joe Rogan: Well, like I said, we were infected first by somebody.

Brian Rose: We’ve come up with this idea called Global Real, and we want to facilitate setting up similar things to London Real in every major city in the world, for anybody who wants to just do a podcast. We talked to a guy in Victoria, British Columbia, Eric, on Skype recently, and he’s like, “I want to do a podcast.” I’m like, “Just do it. If you want some help, let’s do it.” And he’s like, “I want to call it Victoria Real, with your permission.” I was like, “Dude, awesome.” As long as it’s not another London Real, you’re good.

Joe Rogan: There can’t be enough podcasts, right? There are a lot of people who feel like the other people doing podcasts are somehow the competition. I don’t feel that at all. I never have. I feel like there are 300 million human beings just in this country, and hundreds of millions worldwide who listen to anything in English. I think there’s a huge audience for everybody, and I don’t think it has to be us against them. I’m inspired by other comedians, just like I’m inspired by other podcasts. I’m a big believer that the way to be successful and the way to feel good is to help other people.

London Real: Abundance mentality. That’s one of the first signs of an enlightened human being: he knows there’s enough for everyone. He doesn’t have to claw and scrape and say, “This is mine.” And once you start sending that energy out into the universe, your experience becomes very, very different, right?

Joe Rogan: I think my stand-up comedy, all of it, has benefited from that. My life has benefited from it. I think you have to be a generous person. I’ll regularly go to a coffee shop and leave a $100 tip. I think you’ve got to do that. I leave little happiness bombs. My friend Duncan and I ate at this barbecue place, and I tipped the waiter 100 bucks and he didn’t even know it, and we laughed, said thanks, bye, and got out of there. I love the fact that the dude’s going to open it up and see somebody just gave him 100 bucks, and we’re gone. It’s a little happiness bomb. And I’ve also put that mentality into stand-up. All of us do that. Ari does that, Duncan does that, Brian does that, Joey Diaz does that. We’re the first guys to tell you about someone we think is great, someone we love, something you should check out, and it’s aided all of us.

London Real: What you give, you get back ten times, right?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I think so, man. There are a lot of comics who bring guys on the road with them who are terrible, so they don’t get shown up. I’ve always been of the mindset that I should bring the funniest human beings available, so that the show’s better. It makes me laugh, and it’s not going to make me less funny. That idea is crazy to me. A lot of people actually want the person who’s on in front of them not to be funny, because it makes them look better. That’s the worst way of thinking ever. Your sense of what’s funny about you is so delicate that no one else can also be funny? Sometimes you’re funny, but you’re only funny if someone before you sucks? That doesn’t even make sense. It’s the wrong mentality. It’s a lack of that abundance mentality, and a lack of the real idea that human beings are inexorably connected, that we’re connected by energy and by intent, by the thoughts we put out there and the thoughts we receive from other people. It’s not a woo-woo thing. It’s a real exchange of energy.

Brian Rose: I’ve been impressed by the power of a conversation. We get on the air once a week and have an hour’s conversation with someone we think is important, and that’s why we put them in the centre of the screen. We want to feature these people to the world, whether it’s Simon Powell with The Psilocybin Solution, or an MMA fighter or somebody, and it’s like, “Check this dude out.” But it’s had a big effect on me. I’ve grown so much as a person this last year. It’s probably been the best year of my life, and that’s after ten years in financial markets making money. This last year I’ve changed the most. I drank ayahuasca. Two years ago I would have been the dude whose eyes glaze over when you talk about psychedelics: “Oh, you’re one of those people.” And now I’m doing it.

Joe Rogan: What made you have an altering of that idea?

Brian Rose: I walked away from that job. I think a lot of times, as young males, we’re sold this capitalist promise where you go to school, you make the money, you get the girl, you have the car, and you’re happy. And a lot of our viewers, I think, are the same way. They’re guys in their mid-twenties who think they’re playing the game, and they’re like, “OK, so where are all my rewards? I’m not happy with this any more.” I think I got there. I was doing this day-in, day-out job, and it was, quote unquote, successful, and I had all the trappings, and I just wasn’t happy. So I walked away from it, scared as hell, with nothing to do.

Joe Rogan: Beautiful. That’s a beautiful story.

Brian Rose: For six months I was literally not doing much, and Nick and I would meet in the West End and walk around London for about three hours. I was listening to your podcast, and we’d walk and talk about philosophy and women and finance and perspectives, and at the end I’d be like, “Nick, that would have made a good podcast if we’d just recorded it.” And Nick was like, “Let’s do it.”

Nic Gabriel: And then I arrived at Brian’s house. I thought it was just going to be us talking into GarageBand, and Brian had set up this huge studio, with a microphone in my face.

Joe Rogan: That’s awesome.

Brian Rose: And we got the cameras. I thought the video was super important, because I’ve listened to audio podcasts before, but you need to see guys’ faces. I always say people need to see at least the first five minutes of our guests, because they need to see if they’re a jerk or a douche or not. I think after five minutes of looking at someone you can say, “OK, I like this guy’s vibe,” and then you can listen if you want.

Joe Rogan: You can tell from listening too. I was listening to the Opie and Anthony show, and there was a guy on, and they were being nice to the guy, but I was like, “This guy sounds like a douchebag.” So I asked a friend who knew him, and he goes, “Oh, he’s a piece of garbage.” I go, “Thank you,” because there was something about this guy that was so disingenuous. Just by listening. But I agree with you about the video. The reality, though, is that the majority of our listeners are audio only.

Brian Rose: More than 70%, I think.

Joe Rogan: I think more like 90%.

London Real: I’d say more like 60%.

Joe Rogan: Well, between Stitcher, which is a cool service, one great way we’re distributed through smartphones, and now the podcast app on the new iPhones, and we have our own podcast app, The Joe Rogan Experience app, which is free… The audio version is what people listen to on the train or in their car or at the gym. I think that’s much more prevalent. Very few people are sitting in front of their computer watching.

1:33:35 London Real: I usually watch the first few minutes just to take a look at the guest, and then I switch to audio. We’ve got gifts, by the way.

Brian Rose: Might as well drop these on you guys.

Joe Rogan: You have gifts for us? How dare you.

London Real: That’s for you, and that’s for you, Redban.

Joe Rogan: Did you wrap it in some crazy London Real wrapping paper?

London Real: It’s actually some posters. I didn’t have any wrapping paper.

Joe Rogan: Death Squad wrapping paper for Christmas, come on, dude. I’m telling you, whoever you were that came with the Higher Primate tattoo, this guy had the dopest one, one of Brian’s T-shirt designs, the Shiva one, on his shoulder, done by this wicked tattoo artist. Whoever you were, that was a badass tattoo, dude. You’ve got Pride gloves for me, dude? Were they used?

London Real: No. I went to Pride, I think it was ’05, in Japan, and they’ve never been used. And Redban’s got the classic English ones.

Joe Rogan: I think Pride gloves are actually better than the gloves the UFC uses in one way: the padding goes more over the ends of the fingers, and it kind of keeps your hand curled. I feel like there were fewer eye pokes in Pride.

London Real: I don’t remember a single one in Pride.

Joe Rogan: Pride was awesome, man. It was such a crazy time. Those fights were nuts. There’s no other organisation that would have put on Minotauro versus Bob Sapp. That was craziness.

London Real: They were almost superheroes.

Joe Rogan: If you don’t know what we’re talking about, Minotauro is the original Jiu-Jitsu heavyweight, really the first guy to come along and start submitting high-end guys from his back. Nobody did that before Minotauro. And he fought this guy named Bob Sapp, who was literally 370 pounds of muscle. He was ridiculous. It was a crazy fight where Bob Sapp pile-drove Minotauro at one point. Minotauro was more than 100 pounds lighter than him, probably 150 pounds lighter, and at the end he caught him in an armbar. Spoiler alert, sorry. Bob Sapp probably couldn’t extend his arm more than that. Bob Sapp was so big he didn’t look real. He made millions in Japan endorsing products. But then the market fell apart there, from what I understand.

We’re going to get [name unclear] on the podcast the next time he’s in America.

London Real: He’s great. He went into Fukushima and delivered aid. That’s one intense dude.

Joe Rogan: That guy is the real deal. He was there during the height of Pride, and he was also there when it dropped off, so he’d probably be the one who could tell you what really happened. Maybe we’ll get it from him when he comes on the podcast.

London Real: And James Thompson was involved in Pride too.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, “The Colossus”. He’s on my message board now, and he writes a lot of blogs. He’s actually a very good writer, a really interesting cat. He’s this big, scary-looking guy, but he’s actually really well thought out and well spoken, and a real fan.

London Real: He sent me a message on Facebook, and I was like, “This can’t be the same James Thompson.”

Joe Rogan: He’s a great guy, man. Sorry, James, I’m going to get back to you. Like I said, he’s on my message board all the time. A lot of MMA guys are cool dudes, and I think it’s along the same lines as what we talked about with Jiu-Jitsu. Thank you very much for the gloves, by the way. That’s awesome. The only difference with MMA, of course, is that you have to consider the potential for long-term damage to your mind. These guys always have that hanging over their heads, and I think that’s one of the reasons why you can’t enjoy it like you can enjoy Jiu-Jitsu. In Jiu-Jitsu, even when you tap somebody, you don’t feel bad, because you get tapped too. Everybody taps; it’s part of the game. He needs to learn that he can’t put his arm there when a guy’s got his back. He needs to learn what he did wrong in that position. It’s a lesson for everybody, so you don’t even feel bad about delivering it. If you’re trying to get good at Jiu-Jitsu, you should ultimately welcome getting tapped, because it exposes your true weaknesses. Otherwise you’re really not going to know, and the only way to get better is to see those weaknesses, shore up those holes and move forward. So someone who taps you is actually helping you, and that aspect doesn’t exist in kickboxing. In kickboxing you only have a certain number of shots you can take. When you deliver on a sparring partner, there’s part of you that knows you just did some damage. When you uncork a right hand on someone and see their eyes roll back and their knees buckle, you know you just messed that guy’s consciousness up.

1:38:38 London Real: Are guys training smarter these days? I know Mac Danzig was here talking about that. Do you think a lot of fighters have that new philosophy of training smarter, not harder?

Joe Rogan: I think some of them certainly have, but some of them don’t have as much access to the most technical trainers. There are trainers like Matt Hume; if you watch his fighters, they’re so obviously well trained, very obviously technical. Mike Winkeljohn’s fighters are also very similar; they’re super obviously technically well trained. You watch Cowboy Cerrone move, you watch what Jon Jones is learning; these guys are learning very good technique. And the only way to truly do that is to be taught by someone at the front of the game, someone who really knows what’s up, who has a super-technical stand-up game and knows how to move a fighter through progressions, challenge them and test them, but not have them get mauled and beaten up, and balance all that out. Because it takes one bad punch and you’ll never be the same fighter again. I’ve seen guys, especially with kicks, who got kicked in the head and were never the same, and that is 100% real. Especially certain kicks like wheel kicks, where an insane amount of power lands on your head. Edson Barboza knocked out Terry Etim with a wheel kick in Brazil. It was nasty. The heel connected right to the jaw, the consciousness was gone instantly, and he fell down like he was dead. How many of those knockouts have you got in your life? Do you have five, and after that you’ll never be the same person? Is it one, two, three? We really don’t know, because it varies from person to person.

London Real: Do you see these guys fade sometimes? You’re in there week in, week out, commentating at UFCs. Do you ever see a guy like that and think, “Wait a second, he’s not moving the same way he used to”?

Joe Rogan: No question about it. You can see it in their speech patterns. Look, The Underground is a mixed martial arts forum that I frequent, mixedmartialarts.com, the best mixed martial arts website in the world, in my opinion.

London Real: Have you ever been to Sherdog?

Joe Rogan: Sherdog’s good too. It’s a great website too. There are just a few too many trolls on the board. Underground is a little better at squashing them, although I hear I shouldn’t say that, because I hear Sherdog’s gotten a lot better about it. Anyway, my point is that they’re ruthless, because they’re hiding behind anonymous screen names, but sometimes they’re accurate. Every now and then they’ll put up a video and say, “Does so-and-so seem to have brain damage?” And you listen to him and you’re like, “Wow, that guy is struggling.” There was a video recently of Paul Williams, the boxer who got knocked out by Sergio Martinez with a vicious one-punch knockout and was then in a motorcycle accident that left him paralysed. They interviewed him, and I was listening to his laboured speech and thinking, “That doesn’t sound good.”

London Real: That’s horrible, man.

Joe Rogan: I didn’t meet him, but I was right behind Terry Norris once when he was talking to a fan. I was a huge Terry Norris fan when I was a kid; he was one of my favourite boxers. Terry Norris was standing there talking to this dude, and I couldn’t believe it was real. I thought he was hammered drunk or something. I thought, “This cannot be how this guy talks now.” So I inched over closer and listened to their conversation, and oh my God, it was so sad. It was the saddest thing to me, being a big fan of this guy and watching his fights so many times. He was this really wild dude who got knocked out a few times, one of those guys where it was either kill or be killed. He got knocked out by some badass dudes, like Julian Jackson, scary knockouts. To see him, when he was younger than I am now, slurring his words like that scared the hell out of me, man. Have you seen Meldrick Taylor lately? It’s horrific. Meldrick Taylor was one of the best boxers ever to come out of the Olympics. In his early professional days he was a wizard, he was so fast, and he had one really brutal fight with Julio Cesar Chavez and was never the same again. Then Terry Norris knocked him out, a few guys knocked him out, but he kept fighting. HBO had an interview with him recently where they showed him talking when he was younger and then showed him today, and it’s horrendous. That is a real reality of combat sports.

London Real: Do you think the UFC is safe enough now, or in ten years are we going to start seeing blowback? Is there any way around that? Humans want to see combat sports, right?

Joe Rogan: Well, look, here’s what’s safe: you’ve got to get out before you have irreparable damage. Guys have done it. There are guys who have retired and they’re fine and healthy. Marvin Hagler is apparently in great health. He was a great boxer, but he never got knocked down, he never got messed up, and Hagler knew after the Sugar Ray Leonard fight: “All right, I’m done, this is it,” and he never came back. Rocky Marciano did the same thing; he got out before he got really messed up and was fine in his later years, before he died in a plane crash. You can figure out when, but you have to be really smart, and that’s hard to do. Fighting excites these guys. It’s not like you can fight and then all of a sudden you can’t fight any more. You fight just a little less well than you used to, and if it messes with your head, you’re like, “You know what, I just need to change my training up, I need to incorporate some swimming or something.” You try to do that, and then you get knocked out again, and you’re like, “Well, I was winning that first round till I got caught.” Jens Pulver is still going at it. He’s still good enough to stay in the game, but only just. Those knockouts all become holes in your ticket, your ticket getting punched over and over again. How many have you got? Who knows? Alistair Overeem has been stopped a bunch of times, but he’s better than ever now. Peter Aerts has been stopped a gang of times and still beat Semmy Schilt two years ago in the K-1 Grand Prix. Some guys can get stopped a bunch of times and still be OK, and other guys can’t.

London Real: It’s the luck of the draw, right?

Joe Rogan: At the end of the day no one can tell you. Some guys, like Mark Hunt, can take a ferocious shot, and there are other guys who just can’t take that much punishment. They’re built differently. Who knows what it is? One person has a glass jaw, the other guy’s got an iron jaw. How much of it is psychological and how much is physical? It’s hard to tell. It’s a combination of both, I’m sure. But it’s not a safe sport. It’s as safe as we can make it, but the fighters all realise there’s a certain amount of risk involved. You’re going to get injured, you’re going to get broken bones, torn ligaments, concussions. You’re going to have that in mixed martial arts; there’s no way around it. So in that sense it’s as safe as we can make it, but it’s a dangerous sport, and they have to train with that in mind and understand when it’s time to stop.

Nic Gabriel: What really bugs me is when someone says, “Oh, the ref shouldn’t have stopped the fight.” Man, always err on the side of caution when someone’s brain is in jeopardy.

Joe Rogan: I think with some guys you’ve got to let them try to get back, like Frankie Edgar. He’s a perfect example. How do you stop that guy’s fights early, when you’ve seen that first-round comeback against Gray Maynard, two fights in a row? You’ve got to look at the individual and his ability to bounce back from punishment, and give him the opportunity to win. Frankie’s proven time and again that he can do that. So the referee has to be an expert in fighters’ particular styles and their ability to endure punishment. It’s not the best way to compete, but with a guy like Frankie Edgar it’s also one of his weapons. He’s in incredible shape, he recovers quickly, and he can wear a guy out because of that. He can drag a guy into some crazy firefight where he’s got a thousand bullets and the other guy might only have 400. The other guy might think, “I’ve got 400 bullets, this guy’s dead,” meanwhile Frankie can keep going. In the fourth round with Gray Maynard, when he knocked him out, I was like, “God damn, he’s still going at the same clip he was going in the first round,” and Gray couldn’t manage that at that point in his career.

1:47:12 London Real: What’s it like behind the scenes at the UFC? What would we be surprised at, something you notice all the time when you’re calling those fights?

Joe Rogan: I don’t know, man. It’s a weird job, even for me. It’s hard to believe that it is my job. Whenever I do it, I put on the headphones and they talk to me in the booth: “What’s up, you ready to do this?” “Let’s do this.” Goldie and I touch knuckles, “The first fight’s going to start in five, four…”, the music plays and the lights go on, and you’re like, “Wow, I guess this is my job.” It’s hard to imagine they’re paying you to do that. It doesn’t seem real that I’m the one who represents the techniques, the one who explains to people what to look for and what’s going on. It’s very strange. Even while I’m doing it, and I’m doing it to the best of my abilities and knowledge, it’s still bizarre. I have a hard time believing it’s really happening while I’m doing it.

Brian Rose: I always tell people we’re like you and Goldberg. I’m the Goldberg, because I’ve got a bunch of questions I’ve got to ask Hancock, for example, and Nick’s kind of like the colour man with the flow. If he’s feeling something, he just asks that question. And I’m like, “OK, I’ve got to get to these things. The fighter does this, the fighter does that, next week on Fox you can watch this show.”

Joe Rogan: Yeah, that’s Goldberg’s move. And it’s a difficult job. He doesn’t get nearly as much credit as he deserves. He’s really good at it, really smooth. People just get upset that he’s not a martial artist. But the bottom line is you really have to be an actual martial artist to do martial arts commentary. There’s no way around it. You can’t fake it. You can’t not know how to take someone’s back and explain how he’s got to take his back. I’ll see someone occasionally and I’m like, “You can’t let go of that underhook. If this guy lets go of that underhook, he’s going to take his back.” Especially with a super-high-level guy like Hioki. In one of his recent fights, he got side control on a guy, and as soon as he reached back I’m like, “Oh, he’s going for the north-south choke,” and I called it several steps ahead. With a guy like him you can see it. You know what he’s going to do. You can’t let him wrap his arm around your neck. If you let him reach back with that left arm, you might as well just go to sleep, because he’s going to choke you. That’s step one of a three-step process you’re not going to be able to stop, because once he’s got step one, his base is set and you’re done. There’s no way you can know that without doing it.

London Real: Listen to the commentary on the early UFCs. It’s hysterical, because those guys were like boxing commentators. They had no idea.

Joe Rogan: Right. The hardest part to me is the ground game. There are a lot of variables in stand-up, for sure; it’s not that stand-up is easy. But there are infinite variables on the ground, and you have to understand the various styles of attacking different positions. Some guys go side control on a guy and face towards the feet, and they’ll try to get a guy in a twister or try to get someone’s back. Then there are other guys who go Judo style, and they’re going to look for the mounted crucifix, or ground and pound, or a scarf hold. Mark Coleman did that to Dan Severn; it was one of the first submissions in the UFC heavyweight division when he won the title. You have to understand all those. You have to have been strangled, you have to have got somebody with it, you have to have fought it off. If you haven’t, you’re not going to be able to explain to people what this guy’s doing wrong or what he needs to do. And that’s what makes it more exciting. Jimmy Smith is really good at it, from Bellator. If a guy’s got someone’s back, Jimmy Smith will say, “He’s got to defend with his right arm while he’s attacking with his left.” He’ll explain it to people, and if you’re an amateur or someone who has nothing to do with martial arts, you can watch and follow along: “Oh, I see, his right arm’s going to choke that guy. Oh yeah, the other guy’s got to get his leg free, otherwise he’s going to get…” It adds to the excitement. You can’t be just a sports guy and do that. You have to be a martial artist.

Nic Gabriel: Joe, what’s your favourite submission?

Joe Rogan: Chokes, always chokes.

Nic Gabriel: With the collar?

Joe Rogan: No, no, no, I hate that. I have a black belt under Jean Jacques, but I don’t use the gi. I use overhooks and underhooks. I believe that if your game is gi oriented, the good thing about the gi is defence. With the gi you must be technical in your defence and technical in your attacks, because when a guy gets hold of your collar or your sleeve, there’s a lot he can do to you. If you’re slippery, with no-gi you can just muscle out of it, but with a gi you have to use technique and do it the right way. So in that way the gi is good.

London Real: So you’re like Eddie Bravo, darces and rear nakeds and guillotines.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, OK. But I think the beautiful thing about a gi is if you’re fighting a guy who’s got a coat on, some guy’s got a leather jacket on and he’s talking trash, all you have to do is grab his collar and he’s dead. He won’t even know what’s happening. He’ll be trying to punch you, and you just reach into his collar.

Nic Gabriel: You know what I find interesting? I don’t know if you remember, there was that scientist, and there was a group of islands with different monkey tribes on them. When one monkey on one island learned how to pick a certain banana or open a certain fruit, all the other monkeys learned it. It’s a similar thing with Jiu-Jitsu. Suddenly you’ll see this new choke in the game that you’ve never seen before, and in three months everyone knows it. It’s such an interesting thing.

Joe Rogan: Darces came along that way. Think of that Anderson Silva front kick; after he started doing it, everybody did. That was so dramatic that everybody saw it. But what you’re saying is that it just spreads through schools, because people figure it out at the same time, because they watch YouTube videos, like a meme. Sometimes there’ll be a new technique. One of the things that opened up the darce was that a lot of people were attacking from the half guard with the double underhooks attack, and when they did, a lot of guys were sneaking their arms in, and all of a sudden it became anaconda chokes and darce chokes. It became a whole new subset of the art, basically, to deal with underhooks. If you’re on the side of a guy, maybe in half guard, and he has a really strong underhook, you know that if you get your arm under his underhook and past his neck and connect your arms together, now he’s in a bit of trouble. He’s trying to be very offensive, but in allowing me to whizzer his underhook and pass by his neck, he’s allowed me to control his neck, and now I’ve got a position on him. Especially if you go for the Japanese necktie, which is one of the new moves a lot of guys are doing now.

Nic Gabriel: I’ve never even heard of that.

Joe Rogan: Oh, I’ve got to show it to you. It’s way more high percentage than a darce. You control the guy’s head.

Brian Rose: I want to ask you a question about London and what you think of London.

Joe Rogan: Well, I think he was going to say something.

Brian Rose: Yeah, I’m sorry, go ahead. I always cut him off on the show.

Joe Rogan: It’s hard not to, right? It’s rude to cut people off, but you’re not meaning to. You have a thought, and if you don’t say it, sometimes it escapes and gets away from you.

1:54:24 Derivatives.

Nic Gabriel: Well, I have two. Dude, I’m sorry, I’ve got two, I’ll never forgive myself. The first one is: do you think if you got in a time machine, travelled 100 years into the future and walked into a Jiu-Jitsu academy, you’d still be able to hang?

Joe Rogan: I’d get killed.

Nic Gabriel: You think so?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Unless they were terrible. I’d mess up some white belts, I guess. But the really good black belts… I’m a weak black belt, objectively. I’m strong, don’t get me wrong, I’m a strong Jiu-Jitsu player, but as far as high-end black belt guys go, I’d just get tapped. That’s just reality. I’m not a world champion. I don’t have enough time to put into it. I have much more potential. If I really had the time to train five days a week and do strength and conditioning, I think I could jump my game up big. My mind is way ahead of my body. I just don’t have the time to put in the numbers, between having a family, doing stand-up, doing a podcast and travelling for the UFC. I train as much as I can, and when I train, I give 100%.

London Real: Are you still writing a book? Do you feel like you need to get a book out of you?

Joe Rogan: No. I would like to do it. I have a lot already written, and I will eventually put it out, but right now I’m concentrating on my new studio and my stand-up special, which is going to be out at the end of the month, the end of October.

London Real: Is that already in the can?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it’s already in the can. It’s just a matter of the website getting built, which takes a lot longer than you think, and getting the infrastructure in place to distribute it. I found out somewhere along the line that when I do too many things at the same time, I don’t have any fun and everything suffers.

London Real: The family and everything.

Joe Rogan: Well, I won’t let that suffer, so the things that suffer are other aspects of my career. So I limit the amount of things I do. Once this stand-up special is out and I can stop thinking about that, boom, I’m diving fully into writing the book. I have to balance it with writing stand-up, which right now is more important, because my special is about to drop and I have a whole new hour that I’ve basically put together between the time I did the special and now.

London Real: What do you want from your stand-up five years from now? Bigger audiences? Do you have goals like that?

Joe Rogan: No. I’m super happy. If nothing changed at all from the way it is right now, if it just maintained, I’d be the happiest person on Earth. I have the greatest audiences in the history of the art form. It’s the craziest thing ever. I wish you guys could come and see some of these crowds, because they’re crazy, and it’s mostly podcast fans. It’s mostly people who don’t just resonate with the idea of comedy, but resonate with the idea that there’s someone out there who’s also confused by all this, someone who’s being honest about all of it. I’ve found a huge number of those people because of this podcast, and I don’t desire anything more than that. I have all these people coming up to me after shows, people who tell me they’ve lost weight, people who tell me they’ve got their act together, that they’re living their life like they’re the hero in their own story.

London Real: I love that analogy. That’s a great way to think of it.

Joe Rogan: It should be like the blockbuster moment of the movie every day. You should be saving the girl. You could literally do what the hero would do. It doesn’t mean rescuing babies out of burning buildings. It means don’t be a jerk. Figure out a way to get your act together. Don’t be someone who’s just slacking off while behind you is a mountain of work to do. Get your stuff done. Be someone you would admire. That’s something I had to learn on my own, slowly, over a long period of time, but in reiterating it on the podcast, just like in teaching Jiu-Jitsu, it’s become very concrete in my head.

1:58:30 Nic Gabriel: I have another very deep and meaningful question I want your input on. In fact, me and my Jiu-Jitsu buddies debate this all the time, and some of them want your input. What do you think would win in a fight, a silverback gorilla or a Bengal tiger?

Joe Rogan: Tiger. A tiger would kill that gorilla. Come on, man.

Nic Gabriel: See, I say gorilla. A gorilla can rip a car door in half with its bare hands.

Joe Rogan: Good luck with that when the tiger’s got your back and is choking your neck off.

Nic Gabriel: I don’t think the tiger would mess with the gorilla, because it’s not going to be easy. That’s why gorillas nest on the ground. Gorillas don’t care.

Joe Rogan: They’re 500 pounds and they’re 5ft 4in. They’re so strong we can’t even wrap our heads around how strong they are, because chimps are incredibly strong, and gorillas would destroy a chimp with one hand. You know gorillas have tiny penises? That’s because they’re so dominant they don’t have any pressure from other males, and the female gorillas are so in line with how everything’s supposed to be that they don’t sleep around. Female chimps will mate with anybody who comes around, and male chimps know this, so male chimps have giant testicles. They’ve always got to be ready. That’s part of the chimp world, and all animals that live in promiscuous societies have large testicles, including human beings. There’s a direct correlation between the size of a man’s testicles and the promiscuity of the women in his environment.

Nic Gabriel: When are you going to Africa on safari? I know you always say you’re scared of Africa.

Joe Rogan: There’s no real safari, dude. You go to these wildlife containment areas.

Nic Gabriel: In South Africa you can go properly.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, you can also get eaten by a lion. There was a whole story recently about two female lions that broke into a house and pulled a guy out of the shower. He was naked, showering, and he got killed by two females.

London Real: The females do all the hunting.

Joe Rogan: Could you wrap your head around that? You hear something, you open the curtain, there are two lions in the bathroom with you, and they rip you to shreds and drag you out. Basically, what I’m trying to say is I’m not going to where all the scary animals live.

London Real: So Joe, if you had to choose a way to die, would you rather be in the water with a great white, or on land with a lion?

Joe Rogan: Neither. Give me a heart attack. I’m scared of all of them, man. I’m scared of tigers, I’m scared of sharks. I’m scared of everything, dude.

2:01:23 London Real: Joe, by the way, that Ancient Aliens documentary thing you tweeted, did you watch the whole thing?

Joe Rogan: I watched all three hours, yeah. I should give that guy props. There’s a video I tweeted yesterday. Today is 2 October, so if you go to the 1 October feed, I tweeted this video where this guy went and debunked every single point that Ancient Aliens has ever put forth about how humans could never have built this, how this is impossible. He stomped a mud hole in every show they’ve ever done. It’s over three hours long, it’s on YouTube, and there’s no question about it. It’s so good. Just go to “Ancient Aliens Debunked”. You want the full movie with fixed audio; that’s the version. The other one had a little glitch in the audio, but you can still watch it, it’s still excellent. The guy’s YouTube name is VerseByVerseBT, all one word. It’s a brilliant job. Whoever this guy is, thank you very much, because you cleared up so much confusion. For me there was a lot of stuff I really didn’t understand. There’s still some stuff that hasn’t been explained, like some of the things about Puma Punku and the way they moved the stones and fitted them in. But this guy was able to find so many pieces of evidence that point to how they did certain things. He explains how they built obelisks and giant stones, and shows ones that were in the process of being made when they were abandoned, so you can clearly see how they did it. Fascinating. He also had some brilliant insight on the construction of the pyramids that I had never heard before, the theory of the internal ramp. The question has always been how they placed the stones and moved them into place, and they actually did some sort of scan of the pyramid, and you can see the internal ramp. They didn’t understand what it was when they first made this reading of the structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza, until the internal ramp theory came into play. This guy examines the internal ramp theory and shows all the evidence for it, including areas of the pyramid where, at certain points, there’s a hole in the side and you can go in and see all this space in there. Most likely that’s how it was built.

London Real: What does Graham Hancock say? That’s what I want to know.

Joe Rogan: Well, either way, listen. This Ancient Aliens debunking explains how all these things were done. What it doesn’t explain is how they figured this out, what kind of intense mathematics were involved in the equations of 2,300,000 stones, each of them cut so perfectly that they meet exactly at a point at the top.

London Real: Trippy.

Joe Rogan: It’s amazing. It doesn’t explain why they did these things, and it doesn’t explain where they got the knowledge from. It explains how they did it, and how they did it certainly took a long time, was incredibly difficult, and required master craftsmen and builders and skilful labour. But the knowledge to construct it is what’s really fascinating, because that’s what Graham Hancock points to. It’s not that he believes aliens came down and gave people information, like the Ancient Aliens guys do. What he believes is backed by real evidence, and that evidence is that there was a very sophisticated culture that existed all over the world somewhere around 10,000 BC, and that something probably happened to those people and we had to start a lot of things over again. Coincidentally, the time period Graham Hancock points to, about 10,000 BC and earlier, is the exact same time period as the most recent discoveries of impact glass from meteor showers, found in the same layer of dirt all over the world. So scientists are convinced, and this is fairly recent, that there were incredibly destructive meteor showers around 12,000 years ago. They found this glass in France, they found it in the Middle East, and when they do soil samples it’s all in the same strata, I believe that’s how they describe it, the same layer, when they do the calculations of how old it is. They believe that somewhere around 12,000 years ago is when the Ice Age ended, when all this mass extinction happened, the woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, all around the same time, and they could all coincide. So what we have in ancient Egypt is not simply an amazing culture that built the pyramids in 2500 BC. It might very well be that in 10,000 BC they built the Sphinx, and that in 10,000 BC they had massive stone structures already in place, back when we thought people were just hunter-gatherers. That’s the basis of Graham Hancock’s thoughts on it, and every day he’s being proven correct. The more people discover about ancient civilisations, the more Graham Hancock is correct.

Brian Rose: He’s a powerful man. We were in awe of that amazing guy. Just a lovely human being too, a great guy. He just exudes it.

Joe Rogan: He’s the perfect representative, in my opinion, of what can be accomplished through psychedelics and thinking, and his take on his own work and on the difficulty of trying to express these very controversial ideas. It’s amazing.

Brian Rose: I don’t know if you watched the show with us, but he talked about the 24 years he was smoking cannabis and how the ayahuasca told him to stop, and he just dropped that right on us in the episode. I have a lot of respect for someone who can be that honest about themselves.

Joe Rogan: That’s the kind of guy you want running your country.

Brian Rose: He’s no longer just a writer or an archaeologist. He’s a great mind.

Joe Rogan: He’s a great man, and he changed the way I looked at history. That book, Fingerprints of the Gods, changed the way I look at history, and I’m pretty convinced now, especially due to the most recent geological evidence and the discovery of things like Gobekli Tepe, which is a 14,000-year-old massive compound of huge stone columns. Is it nine-foot or 19-foot? I think it might be 19-foot-tall stone columns. It’s still amazing, because 14,000 years ago people were supposed to be hunter-gatherers. There wasn’t supposed to be any sort of civilisation like this; we were supposed to be living in tepees. And they’ve only uncovered less than 4% of it, I believe, because it’s a painstaking process. They’ve got to do it with toothbrushes, sift through the sand and find bone fragments and pottery fragments. But what they do know about Gobekli Tepe is that it was covered up purposely, 14,000 years ago. They literally buried a whole city intentionally. They know they did because of the type of landfill they used. I don’t know how they can figure that out, but they’re pretty much in agreement.

2:09:38 London Real: Do you want to go to those sites? Do you want to go to the pyramids and check them out?

Joe Rogan: I’ve been to Chichen Itza. That’s the only place I’ve been to.

London Real: That’s Mexico.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it’s near Cancun. It’s amazing, it’s incredible.

London Real: It feels different when you’re there. You can feel there’s something about it, right?

Joe Rogan: Freaky. Beyond freaky. Just to think that you’re walking in this area. I remember standing there, looking around and thinking that at one point in time this was like a football field, where they played that crazy game where they kick a ball through a hole, which they believe might have devolved into playing it with human heads at one point. And there’s the area with the sacrificial altar where they would kill someone and cut their heart out and throw the heart down the stairs. You can go there, you can touch that altar, you can walk up the stone staircase.

London Real: They feel really negative when you’re there.

Joe Rogan: It feels weird. These guys went dark.

Brian Rose: Hancock’s new book is his new fictional piece about that whole period. He’s talked about it on the show. He talks about 80,000 people being slaughtered in four days for ceremonial purposes, and I was like, “Oh God.” Just listening to the story, the rivers of blood and the human sacrifice. I guess they would fatten people up in pens for days and weeks on end to sacrifice them for a brand-new monument. Just the concept of you being there, fattened up with your family, knowing you’re going to have your heart pulled out of your body and shown…

Joe Rogan: Human beings are capable of some messed-up stuff, dude. And the crazy thing is, how did they go from being people so incredibly sophisticated that they built these structures aligned to the cosmos? A lot of them directly correlate with constellations. They understood the alignment of certain stars, they understood the prediction of lunar eclipses a thousand years in the future. They had this incredible knowledge of astronomy and recorded a lot of really incredible things, and yet they were killing 80,000 people in a couple of days.

London Real: Light and dark always go together, right? Is that what it is?

Joe Rogan: I’ve been talking about this lately on stage too, about the real problem with the nuclear bomb. The guy who presses the button didn’t build it, doesn’t understand it, didn’t create it. He didn’t invent nuclear explosions, didn’t figure out how to split the atom, didn’t construct the whole piece. All he had to do was come along and press the button.

London Real: Oppenheimer, who worked on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, had big moral dilemmas about creating the atom bomb. I think he later died of throat cancer, from being exposed when he was working on it, but he was really troubled his whole life.

Joe Rogan: Do you remember what he said when they tested the very first nuclear bomb? He quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” That’s what he said at the first explosion, because he knew what he had done. He was like, “Oh no.”

London Real: He could have just slacked off for a few nights of work and not created it.

Joe Rogan: Well, the thing is, the people who can create it are not the people who use it. The people who can create it are people who go, “If you understand how atoms work, if you got in there and split this, you could have incredible destructive power. You shouldn’t do it, but if you wanted to, that’s what you would do.” The warrior, the general, the military man who would drop an atomic bomb on a city is way too stupid to ever figure out how to make that thing. The mentality to figure out how to make an atomic bomb is completely different from the mentality that would just drop one out of a plane.

London Real: If Ahmadinejad had a nuclear bomb, would he launch it on Israel? Or do you think even Ahmadinejad knows, “I don’t want to be the guy who does this destructive thing”?

Joe Rogan: What I think is that when you have nuclear power, or any sort of mass destructive power, it’s a lot like the military equivalent of winning the lottery. You didn’t really earn it, you just have it, and you’re going to spend it with no regard for, and no knowledge of, the consequences. You’re a child with a grown-up toy. You haven’t developed this thing; you’ve just got access to it, the same way some idiot who doesn’t really understand cars can walk into a Chevy dealership, buy a Corvette ZR1 with 648 horsepower, stomp on it and slam it right into a tree. That guy should never have had access to that kind of power, that ability to move so quickly with his own decision-making. He can decide whether or not to run the red lights, whether or not to drive his car into a mall parking lot and smash into cars. There’s something weird about the power we have in contrast to what we understand or what we’ve earned. If you’re a tribesman out in the woods and you build a bow and arrow, you craft it and develop your aim and then you use it to hunt and kill an animal, that’s a fair trade. You’ve really earned all those steps. But if you drop a nuclear bomb in a lake and start pulling out fish, “We’ve got all the fish we need,” you’re just some idiot with a nuclear bomb. You couldn’t build one of those on your own.

2:15:25 London Real: On a similar note, I’ve been told the best war leaders, the best generals, are the ones who’ve come up through the ranks, because they’ve seen combat. They know what it means to send people onto a battlefield, whereas for a guy who just went to West Point and never fired a shot in his life, it’s easy to say, “Send in the troops,” because he doesn’t know the direct consequences.

Joe Rogan: I think that’s one of the reasons they like people who get into office who aren’t like Wesley Clark or John McCain. Essentially, they’re chickenhawks, guys like George Bush and Dick Cheney. The biggest warmongers are the ones who never experienced it personally. I think a guy like John McCain would be far more reluctant to use a military strategy, knowing there are boys out there who could have been just like him. A guy like Wesley Clark would certainly be far more reluctant to take the lives of these young soldiers for granted, because at one point in time that was him.

Brian Rose: Colin Powell was really good about that in the first Iraq invasion, because he had spent so long in Vietnam and had seen the mission creep there, how it lasted forever and ever, and he was really adamant: let’s go in and get the hell out.

Joe Rogan: What’s mission creep, Brian?

Brian Rose: It’s when you don’t have a defined outcome for a mission. You don’t say, “We’re going to go in and do X, Y and Z.” You say, “We’re going to go in and wait until there’s peace,” or “We’re going to defeat terrorism,” and there’s no specific end to that mission. It happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Iraq.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. And that’s the idea that we’re slowly empowering our bases out there and building up, and that’s what we’re doing right now with Iran. We’re slowly moving battleships into that area, and it’s getting pretty scary.

Brian Rose: Iran’s a crazy, unique case. There’s a website I want you to check out sometime called stratfor.com. They’re really big on this thing called geopolitics, which is basically that every nation is built on its geography as well, and they talk about how Iran is built up in a very mountainous way and it’s in no one’s interest to go in there, because it’s such a mess. I hope we don’t anyway, because we don’t really have any business doing that.

Joe Rogan: It’s crazy. We don’t have any business doing it. It’s nuts. They certainly shouldn’t develop nuclear arms, but who knows if they even are trying. I assume they probably are, but it could be propaganda. It could be just one of those things where we need that area, that path, to bring our oil through. That’s supposedly what this whole thing is about.

Brian Rose: It’s a great trump card. North Korea has used the threat of a nuclear device to keep itself alive for about 20 years. They keep bargaining, “We’re going to bargain this month,” and then they don’t, but it’s kept them relevant, just having this one weapon. I think that’s why countries want it.

Joe Rogan: The whole world’s a mess, man.

London Real: It’s a bit frustrating sometimes. Need more podcasts.

Joe Rogan: Well, believe it or not… That sounds stupid, right? How grandiose are we, thinking we’re going to change the world? But the only way you can change the world is to influence young people, so that the young people who go through the ranks don’t imitate all the crusty old guys who have been running things in these archaic ways, because that’s just the way things were always done.

London Real: Communication is super important, communication and access to information.

Joe Rogan: This is a different world. This is not a world where you can bully people quite as easily.

London Real: If your ideas were going to the Iranian public and they listened to your podcast, and similarly, if there was a crazy Iranian podcast and we could listen to their leaders, I just think communicating would at least get us going in the right direction.

Joe Rogan: Well, I bet my podcast does reach a lot of Iranians, and I bet there are a lot of Iranians who have their own podcasts, just like London Real. I’ve got to assume it’s not going to stop here. What’s going on with podcasts, and especially with the free ability to distribute information and to communicate, not even distribute information but just to talk on the internet, to discuss and review things, has never existed like this before. There’s never been a time in human history when a guy could be doing something like my podcast in LA and you guys in London could be listening to it while you’re jogging. Where has that been?

London Real: We get emails from people in Denmark, in Taiwan.

Joe Rogan: And it’s cheap. It’s not hard to do. It’s not like we had to spend billions of dollars and put satellites in orbit to figure out how to get our message to people, or send it over on horseback and hire a local guy who speaks the language to decipher it. No, it’s easy, man. It’s really easy, and this is not going to change.

2:20:06 London Real: You know the crazy thing? The internet was originally a Department of Defense project, and now it’s going to bite them in the ass, right?

Joe Rogan: But it’s not… We need them still. We just don’t need them as a daddy. No man needs another man as a daddy. What we need is camaraderie and community. We need the government to rethink what they really are. They are one of us; we’re all in this together. It’s not like the Stanford prison study, where they took college kids and had some of them become guards and some become prisoners, and you immediately saw corruption and abuse. It doesn’t have to be prisoners and guards, and it shouldn’t be. But that’s what it is. We have a government that’s set up so that it’s not part of our community, it’s not one of us. Instead we have people trying to tell us what to do, who will lock you up, and they suck at what they do. They’re incompetent and they’re bad at their job, so they like to hide. They like to hide information and make it really hard for you to get hold of anything that shows they suck at their job, and when you bust them and distribute that information, you become an enemy of the state, like WikiLeaks. Stop and think about what WikiLeaks has done. In releasing that Collateral Murder video, WikiLeaks let people know how callous war can make regular, good Americans, how it can turn soldiers into people who don’t care that innocent people got gunned down in the street, and who make jokes and talk lightly about machine-gunning vans filled with people, including children. This is fact. You watch that video and it makes you feel bad for the guys who are shooting, it makes you feel bad for the people on the ground. The whole thing makes you feel bad because it’s just off. It’s wrong and crazy, and not what we want when we think about the United States of America in a proud way. We think of ourselves as a noble country, filled with rugged individuals who figured out a way to escape from the monarchy of England and come over here and do it on our own, and this time we were going to have freedom, the Constitution and rules in place so that corruption couldn’t happen. And then you see massive amounts of corruption.

Brian Rose: And we were there 40 or 50 years ago. We had a guest on two weeks ago and we talked about Islam. He’s a Muslim guy who lives in Britain, from Pakistan, and he was like, “Brian, when I grew up in the late ’70s and early ’80s, we had all these wonderful ideas about what the US was. It was something good.” Maybe they were also anti-Soviet at the time, I don’t know.

Joe Rogan: We also didn’t have the internet. That’s a big part of it. People didn’t know what we were doing. Operation Northwoods, man, that was in the 1960s. In the 1960s they were going to blow up airplanes and attack Guantanamo Bay and blame it on the Cubans, so we could go to war with Cuba. That’s a fact. The Freedom of Information Act has released all the documents. It wasn’t a pipe dream; it was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

London Real: Do we have a less favourable view of America globally now than, say, 30 years ago?

Joe Rogan: Yes, because of the internet, and because of the Iraq War and Afghanistan and the subsequent damage, and then of course the drone attacks in other countries. And look, I don’t know how much of a threat al-Qaeda is. I’m not privy to that information. We don’t get access to it. I don’t know how many different attacks on America there have been; they haven’t had a second successful attack since 9/11, which is crazy to think about. But it’s also crazy that anybody wants to attack us in the first place. Why are they mad? And with George Bush, the only nonsense we ever got was “They hate our freedom,” and you’re like, “That’s it? They hate our freedom?”

Brian Rose: I always wonder, if America as a sovereign entity was actually attacked, which it never really has been on its own soil except for 9/11…

London Real: Hawaii.

Brian Rose: All right, guys, you’re killing me. But would everyone bond together, or is it, like you said earlier, a nation that’s fragmented? If Louisiana got attacked, would LA people be like, “Forget you guys”? Or would you get drafted and sign your kids up to go and die to defend those borders?

Joe Rogan: Good question. Well, after 9/11, what happened here was everywhere you went you would see American flags. Within the first couple of months after 9/11, everyone’s car had a flag on it.

London Real: Manhattan too. I was there.

Joe Rogan: It was nuts, man, especially in New York, where everyone’s a jerk. It’s the one place where people just are, but they were friendly all of a sudden.

London Real: It was weird in a creepy way.

Joe Rogan: It was real weird. I remember going to New York maybe a year after September 11th, and it was still reverberating, the ripples and aftershocks of 9/11. People were way nicer than they’d ever been before, way more friendly, way more humble, way more respectful to law enforcement and firefighters.

2:25:06 London Real: Maybe we need that on a global scale for us to pull together as a species. Maybe an asteroid does need to hit the earth.

Joe Rogan: And a quarter of the population has to die, so we all go, “Hell, we need each other. We’ve got to stop being horrible to each other.” It’s unfortunate that in this model of civilisation it doesn’t seem like there’s any other way for us to learn other than falling apart. It’s not like we can just look at things and say, “Hey, obviously we’re doing this wrong and we’re going to have to figure out how to do it right.” And in the process of figuring out how to do things right, there’s a lot that’s going to go away, and one of those things is people having billions of dollars. You’re not going to have billions of dollars any more, because it’s not your money. Your money is basically a bunch of numbers in a bank somewhere. Instead, what we’ve got to seek is a real resource-based economy. Then we’ve got to figure out who owns these resources and how they should really be distributed. Should somebody be able to camp in front of a diamond hole in the earth and say, “This is my hole, these are my diamonds”?

London Real: It’s like Jacque Fresco’s talk.

Joe Rogan: Do you really own those diamonds? Do you really own that gold, that oil? Who’s to say these resources are yours? Shouldn’t it be that the resources are what power our economy, and our government, and that no one really owns them, and that they’re distributed to all the people who claim the Earth as their home? That sounds like crazy hippie socialist nonsense, but the reality is you shouldn’t be able to build a giant machine, park it ten miles off Louisiana in the middle of the ocean, suck billions of dollars out of the earth, not give any of it back and say, “This is all ours.” You’re draining the Earth like a giant mosquito vampire thing.

London Real: No accountability, when you put it that way.

Joe Rogan: Not only no accountability, but you’re making billions of dollars off the Earth, in international waters or national waters or in a bay. Why is that yours? It’s yours because you got a contract to build this giant sucking machine. And where’s that money going? You can control a lot with that money. When you’re making billions and billions of dollars of oil money, you know what kind of power you have to buy lobbyists and influence legislation? You have a lot of power.

London Real: Imagine if you could zero out all the bank accounts in the world.

Joe Rogan: Like that scene at the end of Fight Club.

Brian Rose: It is. When we had the financial crisis in London in 2008, apparently RBS, the Royal Bank of Scotland, was one day away from shutting off the ATMs. They were saying, if you’ve ever thought of a food riot, think of people not being able to touch their money.

Joe Rogan: Oh my God. That would be some mayhem. And it’s happened in small doses in America. There was the savings and loan collapse that George Bush’s son was involved in, a huge scandal that cost people millions and millions of dollars. A lot of people’s personal fortunes, their entire life savings, were completely erased. Vinny Paz, the boxer, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just gone, disappeared: “Sorry, we don’t have it any more.” That’s what part of the most recent financial bailout in this country was, trying to avoid something like that with all these big banks failing. But at the end of the day, if you’re going to have a society that is well designed, you can’t use an infrastructure that is not well designed and maintain it. The structure we have now is so messed up and corrupt and crazy.

London Real: The cracks are starting to show as well, big time.

Joe Rogan: It’s like having a giant building made out of cardboard, and instead of acknowledging it, you’re just throwing duct tape up everywhere. It starts to separate. We’ve got to figure out a way for it to be a society that makes sense, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you restructure finance. You’ve got to restructure what money really is, and how much people get paid to do certain jobs, because most people are slaves. They’re just slaves with a loose collar on.

London Real: And by the way, that’s your choice. You can choose not to do that.

Joe Rogan: You can. I agree with all that. You can choose not to be burdened by a home and a mortgage and finances and car payments and all that stuff. But you know what would really be better? If you do actually work all day, you should get paid enough that you can save money and don’t have to worry, that you don’t have to worry about being constantly in debt. The idea of owning a house shouldn’t be out of someone’s reach. It should be fairly acquirable. That would make a lot more sense. We just live in this really corrupt system of loans and interest and nonsense number-shuffling.

2:30:23 Brian Rose: I just don’t know how we’re going to get there without blood everywhere.

Joe Rogan: You’re right. I don’t know either. Or massive enlightenment. And look, something happened for sure during the ’60s, and a lot of people attribute it to psychedelic drugs. The music changed, the culture changed, the society changed.

Brian Rose: I listened to The Doors recently. That’s a big leap from Buddy Holly, man. Something happened, and that was the media form back then. I was telling Nick the other day, how do you spread a message without the internet? You do it through music. You listen to Morrison’s lyrics and you’re like, “Oh, that changed kids.”

London Real: The closest thing to Joe back in the ’60s and ’70s. You know that Black Sabbath song, War Pigs? Redban, can you pull that up? Just a message through the music. But you’re always talking about getting the kids to change first. Is that your only hope?

Joe Rogan: Everybody, man. Everybody I talk to who comes up to me and says, “Dude, this podcast has changed my life, you changed the way I look at things, changed the way I approach my life.” They realise this is not a permanent experience. This is supposed to be a ride, an enjoyable time, a finite time that they can manage, and if they just stick to a certain series of principles: go towards what you love, actually do what you want to do, be nice to people, have a close-knit circle of friends and love them as you love yourself. To really move in that direction is possible for all of us, and that’s the way you change the world. The way you change the world is to change the way people look at things, so that nobody wants to be the big jerk in charge, because the big jerk in charge leads a miserable life. Look, we live in a world where, when kids get crazy and make a lot of noise and are hard to deal with, people give these kids antidepressants, they give them Ritalin, all kinds of crazy things. Then when they get to be adults, they’re even more messed up and sad and disconnected from their lives, so we give them antidepressants, more things to help them get over this little mental hump, and then their penis stops working. What do they do? We’ve got Cialis and Viagra and Levitra and all sorts of pills that fix that. “This stuff isn’t helping me any more.” “Oh, we’ve got some other stuff that you add on to your antidepressant. Take this as well as that, and this is really going to put you over the top and make you happy.” We constantly keep looking for a chemical fix for depression and for the lack of good feelings in this life. I think there are certainly people who have mental imbalances and are helped by pharmaceutical drugs, by antidepressants. But that notwithstanding, there are also people who are getting a very bad signal from their life, because they’re living a life that is non-harmonious. It’s not fun, it’s not filled with love and joy, they’re not pursuing their true interests, and everybody’s interests are different. Our natural state is to be joyful and calm and happy, and if you look at all those stories of people encountering most indigenous cultures, everyone’s cool.

London Real: Do you know what I mean?

Joe Rogan: There are also people who love to be depressed. There are people who revel in depression, take pride in depression. Unfortunately, people have criticised me for talking about depression, even on my own message board. Some dummies wrote some stupid stuff. It was so poorly thought out: “Does anybody get furious when they hear Joe talk about depression?” You don’t think I’ve been depressed before, stupid? Everybody’s been depressed.

London Real: People don’t know that you have, though, because you’re always so positive.

Joe Rogan: Well, it took a long time to get positive. I’ve had really awkward social moments, really dark moments of terrible feelings that lasted months and months. We all have.

London Real: Anything in particular that got you through it?

Joe Rogan: Weed helps, certainly, but that can be a source of even more depression if you get hold of a bad one.

London Real: What do you tell people? People are always asking you for answers. I know you don’t want to be the guy.

Joe Rogan: I’m not the guy trying to tell you what I’ve learned. You can never tell people what to do, but you can tell people what helped you, what aided you, where you were going wrong and how you saw it and corrected it. A big part of life has got to be the way you interact with human beings, the happiness you derive from friendships, from doing things together, and also from creating things, whether it’s carpentry or art or anything. We are some weird animal that constantly seeks to use the imagination to make physical things manifest themselves, whether it’s something you can read online or something you can watch, like a video podcast. Whatever it is, we get a massive amount of satisfaction out of making things, because we’re some weird bee thing. We’re some weird insect that’s making a hive, this super-complicated hive connected by billions and billions of other weird little pink monkeys, and brown monkeys and black monkeys and yellow monkeys, and we’re all putting it together and we don’t know what it is. We’re all responsible for our own little piece of this crazy machine called culture and civilisation. We don’t know what we’re doing, but clearly we’re all working together in some weird form. And you can accept that. You can choose to be depressed, you can choose to live an ineffective, inefficient, non-harmonious life because it’s going to make your mother-in-law happy and keep your marriage together, or you can seek silence and calmness and truly examine your situation, and then slowly try to turn that boat around, slowly try to turn that battleship towards where it needs to go.

London Real: I think Ari Shaffir said one time, start with the people in your daily life. Be nice to the waiter, be nice to this person. It can start really simple.

Joe Rogan: That’s my thing. Drop happiness bombs.

London Real: Yeah, I’m going to start doing those.

Joe Rogan: You can do it. It helps life. It puts forth more positive energy, and that sounds like hippie-dippy nonsense, but it puts forth better feelings. You feel better about the day, and when you feel better about the day you think better about the future, you respond better to other people, and you set this ball in motion. When you make someone feel better, they make someone else feel better. If Ari sees me tip people or be nice and says, “Yeah, I’m going to do that too,” and then you hear about it and say, “I’m going to do that too,” and someone hearing this says, “That’s how I’m going to do it,” it’s ripples and ripples of positive reactions. Positivity can raise collective consciousness, ultimately, as much as, if not more than, anything that’s ever existed in human history. The biggest bursts of change that have ever come forth in human history are nothing compared to the reactions people are going to have to the free access to information and content that the internet gives. The impact of the ’60s ain’t nothing compared to the impact of the 2000s and the 2010s and the ’20s. It’s going to be logarithmically expanding. The world is changing so quickly we can’t even wrap our heads around where it’s going, and that’s why the government is panicking. That’s why they’re building this giant NSA spy centre in Utah, one of the biggest, most expensive projects the government has ever undertaken. There’s no money for Neil deGrasse Tyson’s gigantic telescope to see the beginning of time, but they’ve got plenty of money to build some huge building to store every email you’ve ever written, to turn on everybody’s laptop camera and store it in some database somewhere. You think that’s a joke, but it’s not. Your cell phone is basically a giant GPS tracking device. That’s all it is.

London Real: It’s scary.

2:38:26 Brian Rose: Before I forget, I just want to offer up London Real Studios to you guys if you’re ever in town, to use as your studio if you want.

Joe Rogan: That would be dope. If we’re ever in England for the UFC, that’s when I usually come over.

Brian Rose: Obviously we’d love to have you on our show, but if you ever want to just use the studios, I reckon you might be able to get the Queen on your show. You guys have got enough juice. Maybe you could get some crazy people who are in England or in Europe.

Joe Rogan: Or Prince Harry, or one of those dudes. Is Prince Harry a real prince, or is he one of the Hogwarts guys? I never know. London’s a trippy place, man. Harry Potter. I never know if it’s from Harry Potter or if it’s real.

London Real: He’s real.

Brian Rose: Redban’s got a shirt on that says “Keep Calm and Carry On” on the front, and that pretty much says a lot about Britain. Nick and I are actually foreigners, which is crazy, and we started a show called London Real. I’m American, he’s South African.

Joe Rogan: So what brought you guys to England?

Brian Rose: I went for business, ten years ago, for finance.

Nic Gabriel: I wanted to train Jiu-Jitsu under someone high level, so I went to train with Roger.

Joe Rogan: Nice. So you moved to England for Roger Gracie. Is it “Hoger” or “Roger”?

Nic Gabriel: He said on the show that either is fine. The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu guys all say “Hoger”.

Joe Rogan: He’s a scary guy, my friend. He’s got the perfect Jiu-Jitsu body too, those long limbs. He’s a big, tall dude.

Nic Gabriel: I was surprised when he came over. I’d forgotten how tall he was.

Joe Rogan: Were you shocked when he got knocked out by King Mo?

Nic Gabriel: I asked him about it on the show. I was surprised, but then again, like you said, on any given day… And King Mo’s got some power.

Joe Rogan: That’s what’s scary about wrestlers too. If a wrestler develops knockout power, the odds of you getting him down are kind of small. It’s going to be hard to get a wrestler down. Jiu-Jitsu guys versus wrestlers is always a weird sort of combination, because if the Jiu-Jitsu guy can’t get the wrestler down, and the wrestler is a Chuck Liddell type of guy, it’s bad for the Jiu-Jitsu guy. But if the Jiu-Jitsu guy can get the wrestler down, a lot of times wrestlers have some bad habits off their back. That King Mo fight shows you that a wrestler with some serious power, like King Mo, is a dangerous guy to fight if you’re trying to take the fight to the ground.

Nic Gabriel: It was weird. I asked Roger why London, because he’s a Brazilian guy. You’d think it’s the last place he’d want to go, the land of rain and bad food.

Joe Rogan: London has some good food, man. You’ve just got to know where to go. That was an old Bill Hicks joke, a whole bit about London’s food being bad. I’m like, “You’re crazy.” The Indian food there is sensational. We’ve had some great Chinese food there.

London Real: What do you guys think when you go to London? What does it feel like? Is it weird?

Joe Rogan: I love it. I love London, I love the people. I think there’s so much competitive craziness in America, and so much arrogance in the American attitude, which is one of the things that built it and made it as nutty as it is, but it also makes it exhausting.

London Real: I feel it a bit just landing here from London. It was like we were on Mars. I’m staying in Venice Beach, and the aggression levels are a little high.

Joe Rogan: Well, it’s not like that everywhere. We were in North Carolina this past weekend. We did Raleigh on Friday and Asheville on Saturday, and Asheville is a goddamn gem of a town. It’s a small town and everybody’s walking in the streets. We didn’t even think about it: “Where’s this restaurant?” “Oh, three blocks up and to the right,” and we’re all just walking, and everybody else is walking. People walk everywhere, and I’m like, that’s missing in LA. It’s completely missing. Nobody walks anywhere.

London Real: You need to have face-to-face contact. On the Tube in London, the Underground, you see people face to face, and you’re constantly interacting with them, seeing women wearing burkas or some lady from Somalia, smelling them and seeing them.

And it’s almost super polite. As a matter of fact, you say sorry first.

Brian Rose: I’ve lived there ten years now, and the first thing you say is “sorry”. It’s really annoying.

Joe Rogan: No, it’s not. It’s beautiful. It’s setting forth good intentions.

London Real: I have a theory. America is such a huge land mass that it’s not ever that densely populated, if you compare it to Tokyo or London, where we’re on this tiny little island. In places that are so densely populated, people are forced to learn to live on top of each other and be nicer to each other, because there’s nowhere to run.

Joe Rogan: I would agree with you, except for New York. New York’s filled with jerks, and they’re stacked on top of each other like chimpanzees. I lived there for a few years, and now it’s too much for me. I hear what you’re saying, but I think it has to do with why people came here in the first place, the first ripples of intention of the people that landed. They were crazy. They were people who were so bold they got on a boat and sailed for months across the ocean to some place they hadn’t even seen in a video, because video wasn’t invented.

Brian Redban: Ten-minute warning.

Brian Rose: One thing I find about London is that it’s years behind the technology curve. In LA so many people have podcasts, and maybe New York lags a couple of years, but in London we tell people about London Real and say it’s a podcast, and they’re like, “It’s a what?” There just aren’t a lot of people there doing it yet.

Joe Rogan: That’s interesting. But I think that’ll change. It’s not like you don’t have access to computers and an internet connection and microphones. You could always buy them. You guys will lead the way. You’ll be the ones who start it out.

Brian Rose: At first you show people, “OK, we have a show for an hour,” and then they try to watch it like Game of Thrones for an hour, and it’s not like that.

Joe Rogan: Well, we have a lot of people who do live shows here, in front of audiences, and I don’t like those. When Maron does it in front of an audience, I just turn it off, because it always feels different. They’re trying to cater to the audience, and then they’re not talking to me. They ham it up a little bit, because you’re aware that there are however many people in the audience. Guys have done them with thousands of people. I know Carolla does thousand-seat shows. I just don’t think it’s the right sort of vibe for podcasts. It’s a different thing. Some people are good at it. Norton’s great at it. He turns it up.

Brian Rose: Do you think we should go live? We don’t have a live format, but it’s effectively live, because we don’t edit; we do it as one hour. I was curious.

Joe Rogan: Live is good. Do whatever you want, man. It doesn’t matter. Try it out and see if you like it.

London Real: I thought I would love it, but I hated it.

Joe Rogan: No, he’s not saying in front of an audience, he’s saying live.

London Real: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Joe Rogan: It’s pretty authentic. Everything we’ve said in this has been live for who knows how many people. How many people are listening to this, Brian?

Brian Redban: I don’t know.

London Real: How many people watch your show altogether?

Joe Rogan: We don’t know. Millions. It’s definitely millions.

Brian Redban: We’re on Sirius radio right now. We have 2,300 watching live. Just our Ustream page has 11,454,000 views. There are only about 2,000 people watching at a time; the most earlier was probably close to 3,000. The most we’ve ever had was maybe nine or ten thousand at once.

Joe Rogan: But the real numbers are in audio downloads, MP3 downloads. That’s where it gets crazy.

Brian Rose: Can we drop our info so people can come and check us out? The website is londonreal.tv. We’re on Twitter at LondonRealTV, and you can always check our YouTube channel, which is LondonRealTV, or just type “London Real” into Google and you’ll find us.

Nic Gabriel: And guys, I have a Jiu-Jitsu site called Jiu-Jitsu Brotherhood, all one word. It’s about my style of Jiu-Jitsu, and everything’s free on there. You can go and check it out as well if you have a chance.

Joe Rogan: Beautiful.

Brian Rose: And if anybody wants to start a podcast in any city around the world and you’ve got questions, you can email us, message us, call us. We’d be happy to help. I’d love to see more of these things. You don’t have to call it “Real”, you can call it whatever you want. And maybe one year from today you can be on Joe’s show.

Joe Rogan: I’ll have anybody on, man. I think that’s what it’s all about: encouraging other people to carry this on. You guys are doing it the perfect way. It’s beautiful to watch. I enjoyed watching your show and listening to your conversations with Graham Hancock and Simon and a bunch of other ones I’ve seen too. It’s awesome, and I hope you guys spawn a million others and it just continues on.

London Real: Pay it forward, right?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. It sounds so corny and grandiose, but I think that really is the way to change the world. The way to change the world is to let people know how you’ve changed, and then it branches out, it ripples, it has this massive snowball effect and it just grows. If there’s any way we can improve our world, it’s improving the way the people around us see it and approach it. This thing might be ridiculous. It might be just one frame in an infinite movie that goes on forever, and a lot of people get really sad about that and say, “Well, that’s so pointless.” But it’s happening right now, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it. If this is really one step in an infinite number of steps, and it’s just a life cycle that’ll repeat itself, and you’re going to be a baby again in 50 years, guess what? I’m having a great time. And if I can figure out a way to transfer this energy into my next life, I’ll have a great time in that life too. I didn’t always have a great time in this life. I don’t know if reincarnation is real. I don’t know if this is a one-time shot and everything else is just your ego trying to protect itself from the inevitable doom of the spirit, which dies just like the body does. I don’t know.

London Real: We’re all going to know one day, though, right?

Joe Rogan: Maybe. I’m not sure about that either. We’re all going to die; I don’t even know if that’s real. I’m not convinced. This whole thing might be a dream within a dream within a dream. It might be a PlayStation 7 wrapped up in chocolate sauce and pumped into your veins through a pot cookie that Brian Redban handed you on your way out the door. No cookies, Nick. But I think what’s made it fun for me is having these kinds of conversations. It’s really made life more enjoyable, and I know that you guys are positively influencing a lot of people, and I know this show is, and all of our friends are, and I think that’s what’s up. It’s something we’ve all locked into, most of us unexpectedly. We sort of stumbled into it, but I think that’s the right way it’s supposed to go down. The universe has a plan for all this, and we’re little, strange monkeys following the plan. If you’re resonating at the right frequency, if you have the right intent, I think that plan turns out the way this one’s turned out. I think it’s good. It’s helping everybody. It’s awesome. London Real. That’s what’s up.

Brian Rose: Joe, thanks so much.

Joe Rogan: So they can find you guys on Twitter at LondonRealTV. Do you have individual Twitter accounts?

London Real: No, we just roll as a team.

Joe Rogan: Like husband and wife.

London Real: We bicker like it.

Joe Rogan: Wait until one of you actually gets married and starts having kids. Then you’ll have some problems, when the wife comes in: “Are you really going to podcast with him again today? You guys did one a couple of days ago.”

Brian Redban: Hey, can I promote the Death Squad show? November 10th, me, Brendan Walsh and Tony Hinchcliffe are coming to Columbus, Ohio, at [venue unclear] Tavern. It’s on brownpapertickets.com; search for Death Squad. We’re going to have a couple more dates, and there’s a special surprise guest that I’m not allowed to say, who’s joining us. You can also get that information at deathsquad.tv.

Joe Rogan: People keep asking me when we’re going to put together a website with all the information for everybody who’s, quote unquote, involved in the Death Squad. We’re going to do that; it’s just a matter of time. Like I said, I have too much going on right now, and Brian has too much going on right now. There is somebody else doing it for us: Vicky Pezza has got Death Squad News, which has all of our tour dates.

Brian Redban: She hasn’t updated it lately.

Joe Rogan: Well, it’s free. We’re going to do this when the studio gets constructed and we move in. Brian and I had some conversations about it today. And there will be regular weekly shows at the Ice House. I talked to Bob Fisher, the owner of the Ice House, today; he brought me in for a little meeting, and one of the things he wants to do is have a weekly show here. So I’ll be at the Ice House every week that I’m in town, most Wednesdays. Consider it done. This Wednesday, so far, it’s Joey Diaz, Duncan Trussell, probably Brian, I think Ian Edwards is coming too, and Ari Shaffir. Ari Shaffir just texted me: “I’m in. Boom.” That’s how we roll. That’s the kind of psychic energy I’m putting forth, ladies and gentlemen. And if you want one of those super-sweet Death Squad T-shirts, the ones I saw everywhere in North Carolina this weekend, they’re available at deathsquad.tv, and again, those go directly to support Brian’s podcast network. So if you like the Ice House Chronicles and all those other cool podcasts, and Kevin Pereira, who will be starting on Thursday… This week, tomorrow, we have Duncan Trussell joining the podcast, and then on Thursday we have Amber Lyon, the CNN reporter. They censored her, man, and it’s going to be really fascinating stuff. This is going to blow your mind. I’ve been listening to several interviews with her that are already available online, and this is one courageous woman. It’s going to be a really fascinating look into the world of big-time journalism.

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That’s the schedule for this week. The new podcast studio is under construction right now. We go live with the internet there this Friday, so within a week we’ll start doing some shows from there. But we will never abandon the Ice House, ladies and gentlemen. This is our home. We love you, you love us. We are one, all of us together in this crazy soup of humanity that might just be a dream. See you tomorrow, freaks. Peace.