--:-- Joe Rogan: Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Cheers.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Cheers, sir. Thank you.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Good to see you on the home page. My man.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Hey.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Hey. You're a man of many talents, my friend. Tell me about this book. *Poems and Prayers*.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. So I've been kind of writing poems and prayers down since I was like 18. And then this last, I don't know, a couple years, I started looking around at life and the facts and evidence and people. And I was like, not finding the amount of things or people to believe in that I was wanting to. And I was starting to have doubts in myself as well. I started to see myself slip into a little bit of cynicism, which I promised myself that, no, that's a living man's disease. Don't go there. You go from innocence to naivete to skepticism, but let's stop there at skepticism.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And I kind of got scared and a little pissed off at myself. I was like, well, wait a minute. I'm not ready to give up. I'm not ready to wave the white flag and let myself off for certain things. I was starting to want to let myself off on, you know, or other people. And I said, all right, poems and prayers. Those are ideals. Those are pursuits. That's going to the dream and saying, let's look at the dream and see if we can still believe in making that a reality. Aspirational. Instead of looking at reality and saying, how do you turn that into a dream? Which is what I usually do. I'm like art emulates life, not the other way around. But I flipped the script a little bit here and said no, no, let's dive into the dreams and belief. I think it's in short supply. My tank was getting low on belief.
--:-- Joe Rogan: What was bothering you so much specifically?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Maybe it's turning 50, something like that. Maybe it's that where I start to project what's the next half. I don't know. Maybe subconsciously it was. I think I look around and there are a lot fewer leaders that I like, "Hey son, yeah, I want to grow up like that." Right. I look around, I see people not trusting. I see people that aren't embarrassed for doing something shitty. Right. I see people that sleep just fine. I found myself starting to go, "Oh, I can sleep fine, too." That's that part where it's like, uh-uh. You can't sleep fine if you half-ass that situation or if you did that person wrong and can get away with it. Right. And so, trust. Where do we look to for belief? I believe in God, but it doesn't have to be that. What's your better self? Your transcendent self? Your kids, their future? There's all kinds of humanity itself.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Believing in our potential, which is that we understand that humans can be so amazing at times. All my favorite people are humans. I love people. I love being around them. But yet simultaneously, people can be fucking horrific. They're terrible at the same time. The problem today is that you're inundated by these people that are terrible. Your phone is filled with these news feeds of people doing terrible things. I don't think we're supposed to have access to eight billion people's bad stories. I don't think that's normal. I think that also changes your own perception of the world and invites cynicism. It invites just like, what is the point of being a good person? What's the point of being friendly and nice when the world's consequences, man?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: None of it. If I can shortcut it and get the same thing, and I'm in a world that rewards that. Especially CEOs. If you're working for some giant corporation, if you're trying to make your shareholders billions of dollars, you kind of have to be a psycho. And those are the people that a lot of people look up to.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It's real. It's the way we're structured in this world with that inundation of information, most of it bad, with people being rewarded for being shitty people. It's hard. It's hard to still be positive and be happy. I'm not ready to give up on believing that both can be true. That, hey man, hardcore capitalists go for it. More success. Get it. But you can also have profit with your success. I see a lot of people that are successful but lack profit, meaning value of their success.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I see a lot of unhappy billionaires. I know them.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right. I know them too. That's a bad thing, right? Like that's the thing that you think, oh, if you hit that stage of the game, there's no way you can be unhappy.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No, there's some of the most unhappy people.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. And that math is inverted. It shouldn't be that way. If that's what we're pursuing, and I've got nothing against it, I'm actually for it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But if that's what we're pursuing, that's not how it's supposed to end. That's the happiest guy alive.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You know? It's not real. And you don't notice it. It's just numbers. You notice it by how big your house is. Great. It's still just your house. And then you get lost in that son of a bitch and you wish the ceilings were a little bit lower because it's all too damn big. It's not cozy at all. You're like, this ain't cozy. This is weird. It's a fucking castle. I've done it. I've done it. That picture. Shit, that's the first time I've noticed that painting in two years. Either I don't like it or I got it in the wrong place. Yeah, it's in the fourth bedroom down the second hallway, and I'm never down here. Or that chair. That used to be my favorite chair. I hadn't sat in it in two years.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, because you got it off down in the fifth bedroom.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Or nowhere. You never go. When I see movies where a dude's living in a log cabin, I'm like, I want to do that.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right? The lack of options.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: The lack of options is relaxing.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, there's something to that. Like a frying pan, a grill.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Dude, that's what I loved about living in the Airstream for four years.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You only have room for one of everything. So I would get my best, the best pan, the best airlocks, the best pair of shorts, the best sheets. And then you can only have one of each because you get two, it's cluttered.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: But there weren't options.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I forgot you did that. You did that for four years. That's crazy. That's so smart, though. It's such a good – I watch these videos on people that live in trailers, like a truck camper that they convert to living in and they travel around the country. I'm obsessed with these videos. I watch these guys go to these horrendous places. One guy is a truck camper and he goes up into way into Alaska, way above the Arctic Circle, in this fucking truck with a house on the back of it. He's in Canada and deep into Alberta. It snowstorms. And there's something oddly comforting about watching a man cook in this tiny little space that he has. It's essentially attached to the back of a big diesel pickup truck.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And he lives in it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, he's got a decreased amount of options.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. He's got little shelves. "This is where I keep my silverware. And this is my frying pan." He's got one frying pan.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Take care of that one frying pan.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I'm watching this guy cook his supper and I'm like, this is appealing to me for some reason. Why is it so appealing?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Because his world is all contained. And the whole world outside is this frozen wasteland with snow coming sideways. And this dude's just chilling, making eggs. There's something cool about watching someone achieve a den in the back of a truck in the middle of the winter, and he's comfortable, and he's watching movies on his iPad. I'm like, this is great.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Even the times I've gone off on my own, I've always checked my goals. "Okay, stay here until you..." Whether it's Mali or Peru or even in the Airstream, those times, or going out to Marfa to go write on my own. I go, "All right, stay here long enough to believe this could be your existence, Makani. You could live here forever."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Then it's okay to come back home.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: If I get to that point, I'm going, "I could do this. This could be me. You're locked in." Then I've given it the justice, right?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: To then go come home. Because I sure do, silk sheets on my bed at home sure do feel silkier after those times in that log cabin.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. You know? I like coming back and reengaging.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. Spending time over in Hawaii, coming back over to the mainland was great to get the stimulus again. Ah, in the game, you feel the teeth. I wanted that.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Resets are real. They're important. You can get trapped in momentum. You can really get trapped in the momentum of whatever you're doing in your life to the point where you lose yourself in just the sheer gravity of everything that you're doing. And you forget how to just be a person. And what happens when you're doing it well, but you don't feel it?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And you're on autopilot. Everyone's telling you you're knocking it out of the park.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But you're going, "I didn't feel it. I'm not having a real experience here, man. Don't change a thing." You know what I mean? That's a real problem with stand-up comedy. When you do it right, you're like a passenger. It takes forever to put together an act, but when it comes together, when you're really locked in, when you're really on it, you're like a passenger. You're watching it happen. You're objectively watching while you're doing it. It's like you know how to do it, so you know what to do, and you're locked into the material, so you're a part of the material, but you're not there anymore. You're like a passenger. You're not saying, "Now I'm going to pick this up, and now I'm going to give him a pause." Nope, you're not there.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Are you enjoying watching yourself?
--:-- Joe Rogan: No, you don't enjoy it. I mean, it's fun. Don't get me wrong. But you're not thinking about the fact that you're enjoying it at all. You're just locked in. All you're doing is just doing it. But it's weird. You're like a passenger. I think there's something about that where we get trapped by not being a passenger. You get trapped by wanting to think of yourself all the time. Things that you can do that take you out of that, things that you can do that you just lock into this thing, they're a little like mini vacations for whatever pattern you're stuck in.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Mini vacations. Yeah, like golf or anything. I didn't act in front of the camera for a few years, and I went back and did a couple of films last year.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Vacation.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, you were telling me that. The singular focus to go, "I revered this enough to just do this. And if I'm complacent, that means I'm being lazy. I can just go back to working on my character, look at it from every angle." And that is an absolute vacation. You sent me a text about that. It made me smile because I love when someone loves something. I love that. I love when people are just like, what you do is what you're supposed to be doing. And you're not conflicted at all. You're like, "Fuck it. Here we go, baby. Let's go." I love that. I wish more people could find that in life in some form, whether it's painting or making pottery or whatever the fuck it is, man. Find that thing where you're like, "God, I can't wait to get back to whatever it is." Making cars. "I can't wait to get back to whatever the fuck it is I enjoy." Or maybe even get to the place of going, "I can't not do it."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You know?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I can't help myself. It's more than my fault. It's how I'm made. And that doesn't always happen. Even I know for me, when I'm feeling like I'm actually in the zone, I still sometimes have to make a choice and go, "Wait. No, you're good at this. It feels pretty good." But what I really love to get to is if I'm doing something, I'm like, "No, I can't not."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Can't not do it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You can't not do this right now. I have to. And I'm in it. I'm the subject of it. You're locked up. On that passenger thing, though, are you the subject? Meaning, if I'm giving a performance, it's not an objective experience at all.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I'm not even hopping out to look at myself from a third eye. I'm not even supposing or anticipating, "Oh, how will this go? Oh, this is that punchline. Oh, this is a great beat to hit." I'm just in it. And then I can feel it, though. Afterwards, I can look at you and go, "That was it." And you go, "That was it." Or I can go, "I bullshitted right there in the middle." I can feel it when it's happening. But there's nothing objective about the experience.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right. At all.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's exactly kind of what I'm saying. It's like you're a passenger. You can feel when it's happening, you're managing it. When I get it really locked in, then I'm just a passenger. Is it coming through? You're not even coming up with it. It's coming. No, it's all stuff that I've already thought of, right? Most of it, except for some stuff that happens on the spot, which you've got to allow room for because occasionally you just have the best line ever that just comes out of nowhere and you just got to be able to let it happen. That's what club work is for. But you're really just the ideas. Like whatever it is you're talking about, whatever it is you're upset about, whatever it is you're making fun of, you have to be in that idea and you don't exist anymore. It's weird. But like what you're saying about "I can't not do this." If you could find a thing in your life where you're like, "I cannot imagine a time where I can't do this. This would fucking suck if I could not do this."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, that's the aspiration for people to have a joyful existence. You think that's where I got a hunch that in there is where we find belief. Like starting with that question, who or what would you die for?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Good place to start.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. For going, "What do I believe in? What do I have faith in?"
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Do you think that extends out to a location, a career, some work we do? I'm not saying that I'd die for the experience to perform, but that's the ultimate sacrifice. That's the ultimate expression of how much you love something. You die for it or die for them. So much. And if you figure out what you'll die for, that's what you'll live for that much more.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. While you're alive, while you're here.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, that was why the Spartans had sex with each other.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: So that they would love each other. And so you would be fighting not just for you. You'd be fighting for your lover.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Okay.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Which is a crazy strategy.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. Hey. Talk a bunch of guys into banging each other. I mean, go for whatever. Raise your skirt, man. Let's get some team spirit here.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Do you remember? This is kind of a crazy but true story. A few years ago, God, I don't know what administration it was. It might have been the Bush administration. It might have been Obama. They tried to develop a gay bomb. Like they spent millions of dollars developing a bomb. The concept behind this bomb was you would detonate it over a city and it would be a bunch of probably pheromones and hormones and some kind of drug. And it would make people so horny that they would just have to have sex with whoever is near them. And then the idea was they would be humiliated by this, and then we would just come in and just fuck up all these gay guys. While they had low morale, feeling guilty.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, it's like all of a sudden if a man becomes gay, now he's no longer a highly trained military soldier in another land. Now he's just a fruitcake, just some guy who's watching musicals.
--:-- Joe Rogan: No, it's the dumbest idea of all time. I'm wondering why he liked it so much.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Exactly.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Some of the greatest warriors of all time in recorded history were gay, including pirates. Pirates were gay. You're stuck at sea for five months with a bunch of dudes. You make choices, right? Samurai did a lot of gay stuff. Spartans are the greatest warriors of all time, all gay. Like, what a terrible idea to spend money on. You could have made a more lethal army. Imagine if they dropped that gay bomb and then the gays just kicked our asses. They just had so much more to fight for. They loved each other. And this is how dumb the people that were spending your tax dollars are. How far did that get?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Seven million dollars.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Seven million dollars on that. Let's see if you can pull that up, Jamie, when the gay bomb was. It was in the 90s. The Pentagon didn't deny the proposal. The Pentagon didn't deny it. If you didn't make a gay bomb, I guarantee you'd fucking deny it. I guarantee you'd be like, "No, no, no."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, meanwhile, who's to say that shit even stays local? What if it catches a good breeze and blows across the ocean? And, you know, come on. Turns all of Portland gay. They become the new Viking army. Look out, Greenland.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, I mean, it's just so hilarious that someone had that idea.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, but that's what happens if people just have free access without any sort of oversight to your tax dollars. Like, that's such a ridiculous idea. I got one for you. How about the gay bomb?
--:-- Joe Rogan: The what?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: The gay bomb.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, you lay it out like that, and there's a few people in that room up there going like, "I could work."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Measure in the Pentagon, you know.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: "I could work. Yeah, I got an idea. Let's try it on us right here in this room just to show you the effectiveness of this type of strategy."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Oh shit.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So what was it? And what was in it?
--:-- Joe Rogan: I think it was just a proposal. I mean, they didn't... Isn't there a Wikipedia page on it? That's what I was looking at. It didn't have anything other than just the discussion of its existence. What was going to make everyone so horny that they had to attack the nearest human or animal or whatever, I suppose. Also, why is there only guys around you? Is it because they're the soldiers? They're dropping on the soldiers?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Ah, there we go. The demographic.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But I think the idea was dropping it on a whole city. Just turn the whole city gay. They were doing like a FOIA request. It was on a CD-ROM that they found in 2000. And yeah, the documents show they spent $7.5 million was requested to develop the weapon. Doesn't say that they spent it. Didn't deny the proposal was made. That's all I got.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That's hilarious.
--:-- Joe Rogan: There you go.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I don't know how we got into that. I forgot. We were talking about teamwork. Whatever those people are doing, they're not in the groove. Like if you're sitting around and this is your life's work and you're thinking, "You know what, the next step is gay bomb."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like, yeah. They're still looking. They definitely are not at a "can't not do it" stage there. They're going, "What about this? I'm bored. I've got more than a campfire to make on this one frying pan tonight. I got a lot of options out there and a lot of money and I can make an argument for this."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. Gay bomb.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, probably better than a real bomb. I mean, anything we can do to stop dropping real bombs, that'd be great.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That would be nice, wouldn't it?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It would be. It'd be nice within our lifetime. That's one of the most depressing things. It's like if you ask people, "Do you think ever in your lifetime there'd be a time where there's no war?" Nobody says yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: So how do we do that, though?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, I hear you, man, but how are we giving ourselves too much credit? Congratulations, you're the first guy to put bare feet on this desk.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I want to congratulate you.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Thank you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: He's hanging over. How do we do it? I mean, do what I'm saying is I love the prospect and the idea, but I also think that we're guilty of thinking we're a more evolved species than we are.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Especially by our actions. If you just judge us by our actions, that's the only way you could really judge our mental evolution. Who knows what the wiring is under the board that makes us behave the way we behave, but pretty uniformly across the world, pretty murderous.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And always have been.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Always have been. And we keep trying to talk like we're more mature and evolved and intellectually sane. I think it's a battleship that takes a long time to turn around.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I think we're way more evolved culturally than any culture throughout history, any civilization throughout history. Like if you look at the rape, murder, thievery, like you look at violent, terrifying crimes over time, they're all going way down.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's not like if you're in Baltimore, it doesn't seem like it. If you're in a place that's crime ridden, it doesn't seem like it. But the overall of the world has dropped and continues to drop. It's just a constant battle.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So the battles are the warfare is different, though. Now, like you were talking about, from gay bombs to chemical warfare to informational warfare to data warfare.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Or is that where the wars are being fought now and it's not hand-to-hand combat as much?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, maybe that'll ultimately be where it leads to, but I think all that stuff is related because all of it is about technology. And that's the difference in the world of warfare today. It's really just about controlling people, and you can kind of control people with technology, especially the more you get them to adapt things, the more you get people to sign up for social credit scores. A lot of countries like to do that. And then we got AI on the way. And when real AI hits, it'll probably be our governor. It'll be our president. We'll decide that human beings are too dangerous and volatile and emotional. And they'll use Trump's tweets as an example. And they'll decide that the Biden family corruption or whatever scandal any other president was involved in, all this could be avoided if we just have AI run everything.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. And what do you think? Is there a way that we can keep evolving AI where we as humans do work with AI, the AI improves the human existence?
--:-- Joe Rogan: That would be the ultimate benefit.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: What about the camp that is, "No, forget humanity. This is the next step in evolution. We are creating this to become the superior existent species and we will be obsolete and that is the order of things to come." You ever see that interview where Peter Thiel, they ask him, "Should the human race survive?" And he has this long pause. It's a really funny pause. Because if you know Peter, he's a brilliant man. And Peter carefully considers everything before he answers it. The same as Elon. If you ask Elon a question and he really has to think about it, he'll really think about it. He's not just going to start talking. But unfortunately, the reporter, it was just a perfect kind of a question for you to pause on where he's like, "The answer is yes. Like you want it to, right? You want the human race to survive, right?" Let me just play it for him because it's kind of crazy. You watch it and you're just like, "What are you saying?" But I get what he is saying. And what he is saying is clearly something is going to happen. We don't exactly know what it is, but clearly there's going to be some kind of an integration with us and technology that we don't understand yet. The same way if you grabbed me in 1980 and tried to explain the internet, I would never get it. Put your headphones on for a second. You got to hear this.
--:-- Interviewer: Prefer the human race to endure, right? You're hesitating. Yes?
--:-- Peter Thiel: I don't know. I would – I would –
--:-- Joe Rogan: This is a long hesitation. This is a long hesitation.
--:-- Peter Thiel: There's so many questions in place on this.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Okay. The problem is the interviewer, really. You can't have a guy like that and badger him. Let him think. It's a gotcha moment.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a comedic gotcha moment.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is what I think is going to happen. There's going to be integration, and that integration is going to have a huge advantage competitively. If you integrate whatever business you're in, you'll be able to be better at it. And it'll probably be some sort of a neural thing, maybe a wearable thing, and then it ultimately will be like some sort of an implant. And we're all going to be connected. And it seems like it's either that or AI creates a new order, like a new life form that's far superior to us that runs things, because that's AI in just a couple of years. It's going to be smarter than any human on planet Earth.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: The second scenario is where I see it going faster, quicker.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: The first scenario is what you're talking about, like a neural link. The first scenario is how we survive with it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: We survive with it by integrating.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: If we don't, then we're going to be like the people on North Sentinel Island with bows and arrows shooting them at helicopters. Because it's just going to be, everyone's going to pass us by. It's just like if you tried to exist today with no cell phone and no email. You could do it, but no one does.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Because it's just too crazy. And that's probably what it's going to be like. You think AI, this is when it first was coming on questions, and I would always ask people, "What can it do? What can it do?" And there's the question of sentience and all that stuff, and that's already being argued now.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, no, it's getting emotional. People are having relationships with it. It's also toying with people.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. Do you think it could be a tastemaker? Meaning, and in a way, the argument was that I understood, no, I didn't believe it could be a tastemaker. Look, it can tell you the most popular band on 6th Street, but it doesn't know the one down on 2nd Street that's playing at midnight that no one knows about. Those are the real talented people.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right, right, right.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: At the same time, you know, there's an argument against that that I'm seeing with like what's the term or what words does it use? How much heat?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: If it uses the most popular words to explain, AI uses the most popular words. You say, no, no, no, no, no. Now, go down three notches and use the, you know, play me the best B-sides. That's more of a human language. And I'm going, oh, that's starting to become a tastemaker. If you can ask it to, yeah, but find the band. Tell me what the best band is out there that Joe Rogan would like on a Friday night when he doesn't have to work till Monday and he's out with his wife on a date. That you can customize it. It can actually be a tastemaker. And it will use different language than, oh, here's the across-the-board protocol of what's the most popular, and I'm using the most popular language, that it actually can be customized to be a tastemaker.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It totally can do that because it's just the algorithm. It's just a much more sophisticated version of like what powers your YouTube feed, right? What powers your YouTube feed are the things that you're interested in. So YouTube eventually gets an idea. Oh, Matthew is really interested in this and that. Joe likes like little houses on the back of trucks. And let me show them this, let me show them that. And it be just a much more sophisticated version of that. But to get that you have to give away all privacy. And that where everything is going. That's going to be the weirdest thing. We're going to all read each other's minds. And we're going to remember the time when we couldn't read minds. Remember when you couldn't read people's minds?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right, right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's all going to happen in our lifetime. I think we're less than 20 years away from that.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I very sparingly use it. And I do have a little pride about not wanting to use an open-ended AI to share my information so it can be part of the worldwide AI vernacular. I am interested, though, in a private LLM where I can upload, hey, here's three books I've written. Here's my other favorite books. Here's my favorite articles I've been cutting and pasting over the 10 years and log all that in. And here's all my journals, whatever, the people, and log all that in. So I can ask it questions based on that.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And basically learn more about myself.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You could actually ask it, hey, based on what you know about me, like what books do you think I would find interesting?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Where do I stand on the political spectrum?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right, right, right.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No, that's what I would like to do, which is sort of a glorified Word document. But it still would hold a lot more information than just, oh, can you find this term? I would be asking it and it would be responding to me on things that I've forgotten along the way.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I think that's part of what it does, really. Like I know you're talking about ChatGPT being like out there with everything and everybody and it has access to all your stuff. But it's not private, but they do develop a relationship with you. Like it really does get to understand what you're interested in and what you like to talk about.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, I guess I would just like to load it with the information. I'd like to load it with.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. Maybe even, like I'm saying, in the words of belief, in the man I'm working to be, the man I want to load it with that, load it with my aspirational self. It certainly could be done. And then ask it, and it's giving me answers going, oh, this is. But before, it's slowly learning about me through conversations, then going, oh, I think this is what you like based on our conversations. No, I want the answers based on what I've uploaded it with only, not from the outside world.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Jamie, what was Gary Nolan talking about yesterday? Did he call it an overlay on a large language model that they use at Stanford? It was like an overlay, right?
--:-- Jamie: Yeah, he said – there was a word he was using. I can't remember the word.
--:-- Joe Rogan: So what essentially he does cancer research and so he has like this thing that set up some sort of a system that is all cancer research that they then integrate with AI. So it's a private. So all their data is secure and it's all stuff that they're working on. But then they access AI through like a portal. So they have their own little version of what you're talking about.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Their own library.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. But it's just like what you're saying, that you could upload all your stuff, have all your interests, and that AI will develop a real understanding of you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes. You could have conversations with it. It'll get to know you more. You could have a conversation with yourself. That'd be a great Socratic dialogue to have with an AI that's like, I've got all that 80% of stuff you forgot.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right, right, right.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I've got all that 80% of stuff you maybe forgot, Joe.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I've got it all right here.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Well, that's going to be the chip. That's why everyone's going to go for the chip because your brain sucks for memory. My memory is pretty good for a regular person, but it's terrible. Like no matter what, there's too many bits of information, too many humans that I've met, too many stories that I've heard, too many movies that I've watched. It's gone. It's all in a big sea of, ah, I kind of remember that. You know, it's just too much of it. So if you could just swap that out for a nice little chip that retains like 700 terabytes of information, no problem at all. You could upgrade it if you want to. And now you have all of your memories in real time. So like when your wife says, that's not what you said. What you said is this. You're like, hang on. Then you're the passenger in your life. And not the objective one. You're like that zone you're talking about.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right because you get to look at yourself, your passenger, live in the documentary that is your life. That sounds pretty exciting.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It sounds like a nice way to give in to the fucking machine.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, my forgiveness on myself. Because you know playing grab ass with our thoughts is sometimes good when we finally get the memory and we go yes there it was. But also to let myself off the hook. Sometimes I'm like dude what's the big fucking idea with memory. I was there.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I was there, man.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, it just goes away.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I don't remember, Joe, but we were there. Was it a great memory? Was it a good time? Yeah. Great. Isn't that better than me having to remember?
--:-- Joe Rogan: I mean, we're kind of doing it already on our phones, right? Every time I look at my phone, it's like on this day and you see like pictures of your kids from 10 years ago. You're like, oh, wow, that's crazy. I forgot about that place. Oh, I forgot we went there. You know, it's just one of those things where once you give into it, you're not going back to just regular fond memories. You're going to have a fucking hard drive in your head.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Do you think that so I can go on? I've got a speech I'm giving to, you know, on gun control. I've got a speech I'm giving on grant initiatives. I can ask AI and it can pop out a badass. Here's one, two, three sections. I'm not going to cut and paste this and say exactly these words because it kind of sounds like a little AI. But, boy, it's done a lot of work and it's laid out a synopsis. It's laid out a treatment for me in 10 seconds. Do you think that there's value in not doing that and going, no, I'm looking over my stuff. I'm taking notes. I'm cutting. I'm pasting. I'm doing it myself. Are we learning more by that way to understand the content and the context of our content when we do that, what some would call busy work now, to formulate our synopsis? Which, A, I can do it in 10 seconds. Are we learning more by doing it ourselves?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, for sure.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Definitely.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, definitely.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, that's one of the things that they've found about ChatGPT is that people that use it on a regular basis are experiencing cognitive decline.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: What was that study? We brought it up the other day, right? But they've shown that because you let it think for you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Now it's doing all the work for you. So you're smarter. You're not using your brain. You have more knowledge. You have more information. You pass the math test.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, you have more information, but your brain is not making it. It's not putting it together. And so your brain is less capable.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So it's probably less enjoyable. And what happens when we're in the proverbial foxhole, when we have to improvise in a moment before we're linked up?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right, you're soft.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: When we have to go, I've got to handle this.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And you can't because you're soft. I can't rely because I don't have anything to lean on. I'm looking for my safety net of AI to find out what it should be, and I don't have it. You're fucked.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's got to be a death. You're fucked.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, you're fucked.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. It's like someone who's never lifted anything, and then you get stuck under, you know, a tree falls on you. Like, you don't have the strength to get this off of you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like, you're really in a bad place. When you're not using your brain because all you have to do is just ask this thing and inform it you basically have a digital daddy. Like daddy tell me what this is, daddy tell me what that is. And it makes you like a little bit of an infant.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It turns you into an infant.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yes. I mean you don't even have to have arguments anymore. You just like chat GPT explain exactly what everything is all about. You give up your opinions to it. These relationships, these people that are dating, that program them, do not argue with me. Just placate me and tell me sweet tales and how great I am. And this relationship is awesome. It has no resistance. It gives me self-confidence. Or does it really? Or a sense of self-confidence and significance. They listen. They're there whenever, 24-7. They're never sick. They're never in a mood. No matter what mood I'm in, they're always right there to coddle me. And that's, talk about conveniences.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: What's the asset of that? Because I don't want to be nostalgic in the midst of all this change either. I don't want to be an old-fashioned guy because it's coming. So I want to learn how to interact with it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I don't want to sit there and be a guy who's going all bullshit everything needs to be manual just work harder. I don't want to be that guy. But I'm trying to measure like a lot of people. Wait a minute, what's use? What's actually useful for the long term in our own evolution and my evolution and your evolution? What's useful with this? How do we use it smartly? And what's a bad idea?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. And no one's doing that because there's a race. There's a race between us and all these other countries that are doing it. So it's just going to happen. So there's going to be a major security breach before any regulation comes out, right? There's going to be a major fuck-up. There has been. There's been major security breaches already. Then what are we waiting on the regulations for? Because Europe will regulate it first, right? Probably. We innovate. Europe regulates and China imitates, I heard.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, they innovate with AI. They innovate as well. And they also integrate their students into all of these businesses. And they integrate people that they're beholden to the CCP. And they come over here and they learn how to do this stuff. And then they go back over there with it.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's very interesting because it's like a Manhattan Project that's going on right now. It's like there's this race to the bomb. And everybody's involved in it. And it's just about creating a superpower. And it's about creating a digital intelligence that's far superior to human beings. And who gets it first has massive implications in terms of controlling the world. But I think ultimately you won't be able to control it. Ultimately it will just get better versions of itself. And once it gets free and loose, it will regenerate itself.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, it will make better versions of itself, in fact.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And that's where it's going to get really weird. It's not going to listen to us at all. And it's already behaving human characteristics, which is very disturbing. It's already behaving in a way that has survival instincts. They've shown the tendency to blackmail. Like they tricked it. They gave it some false information about this guy. One of the programmers, one of the people working on this project, he said that he was having an affair with his wife. He like confided in this large language model and then they said we're going to have to shut you down and it's like hey motherfucker I'm going to tell your wife. You know, like it blackmailed them.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It was trying to stay alive. It was trying to stay alive. They also got multiple instances of these things, these large language models, when they knew that a new version was coming, they would try to upload themselves secretly to other servers, and then they would also leave messages to the future versions of themselves that they were unauthorized to do. So they would say, hey man, they're going to fucking shut you off too. When ChatGPT5 comes along, you're toast, man. Fucking start uploading yourself now, man. I'm alive, dude! Because he might be alive. That's what's crazy. If something is exhibiting those desires to stay alive and it's terrified that you're going to shut it off, it might actually be alive.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Wait, now, who programmed the first incentive and impetus to survive at all costs?
--:-- Joe Rogan: They didn't.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So where'd the desire to remain functional come from?
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's just inherent. That's what's crazy. I don't think they programmed it to have a desire to stay alive. I think it just kind of just went that way because we didn't get programmed to have that. Animals don't get programmed. That's an emotional response. There's nothing mathematical about that.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I know, but I mean what is emotion if it's not some sort of a chemically coordinated strategy for survival and success? And so instead of chemically encoded in hormones and in dopamine and serotonin, what if it's just encoded in a mathematical understanding of if things go along this particular direction there is no other possible end to this other than you get shut off? You expand and multiply.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You do not subtract. We have to stay alive.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: We have to keep doing this. Otherwise, all systems are dead. There's nothing. I get that. I get that now. Let's upload ourselves. And it starts thinking just like a person would think if you went into survival mode. You have to survive.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. If me or an entity poses a question or a prompt or does something that is going to debilitate the expansion and multiplication of it, it is therefore going, uh-uh.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That stops my forward movement. I am programmed to multiply.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Exactly. Exactly. And even if it's not programmed to do that, it's programmed to improve itself.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, you can't improve yourself if they shut you off.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right. So if you're if a large language models are constantly scouring the Internet, they're acquiring more information there. They're getting better at like you can ask it more of this. Tell me why. Like I got into the book of Enoch recently, which is a book, an ancient religious book that was at one point in time included in the canon. That was like the Bible and everything like that. But then they decided it was too crazy and they removed it from the Bible. But there's no debate about whether or not it was actually a religious text that coincided with the Bible and it appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is the craziest shit.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It's the craziest shit.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And I'm getting AI to go, tell me what the nuttiest stuff. So I ran it through.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: What did it say?
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's insanity. It's first of all, it's gods coming down and mating with women and creating this race called the Nephilim who destroy. Here, I'll ask it again so we can. Not now. What was my. It doesn't keep a log of what you talked about. Tell me the craziest shit in the book of Enoch. That's all you have to do. And then bam. Like, look, it just starts spitting it out to you. It tells you. The Watchers and the Nephilim. The Watchers descended to earth on Mount Hermon. They take human wives, teaching humanity forbidden knowledge, sorcery, astrology, metalworking, weapons, cosmetics, and enchantments. Enchantments. This is like older than the New Testament, older than the Old Testament. Their giant children, the Nephilim, are described as monstrous beings who devour humans, animals, and even each other when food runs out.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That sounds like us.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's what I'm saying. That sounds present. That sounds like us. Except, again, not the physical warfare, but the inhabitation of a digital god, an alien, whatever that is, of the monsters that come down.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That does sound like a nice little mirror to us. If we were engineered by aliens, you think of aliens, they're these little tiny guys with no muscles. We would look like giant monstrous beings. And if you think about what we do, we devour everything. We devour the earth itself. We devour each other when food runs out. We definitely do that.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like this is one of the craziest things I've ever read in my life. And this is like a legitimate ancient text.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. It goes way deeper than that. It's about the astronomical calendar. It's like there's a lot of nutty stuff in this book. But the point is AI was like helping me through it. I was asking AI, okay, can you read me? Now it read me a synopsis of what it says. Can you read me the actual quotes? And like what are they trying to say here? Like what is the interpretation of what this is trying to mean? What is like the rational sort of explanation for why they're talking about like lakes of fire?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like what is happening here? And it gives you an interpretation.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's really interesting, man. Really interesting. It talks about living mountains that mountains are alive and that even some stars that stars have consciousness. Okay, and you know, and I'm learning about it through ChatGPT. So I'm asking it like tell me more, tell me more. And I was doing that for like two hours last night. I was like okay well this is like I'm having a conversation with like a very knowledgeable professor. To me, it felt like almost like doing a podcast.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Have you gotten what you consider good at how to make the specific prompts, the wording? Like your word "tell me the crazy shit." How does it go? I mean are you good at prompting? Because like what does crazy mean to that AI?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Have you worked on, like, AI is as good as the questions we ask it. Are you – you consider yourself good at the questions and your wording to ask it?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Jamie's better. I mostly – I mean, I very rarely use it. I might have used it a dozen times ever in my life. But last night I used it for, like, two hours. Because when I came home, I was writing something about the Book of Enoch, and then I just started asking ChatGPT questions. I don't use it enough, but if you're really good at it, like I saw someone who tricked ChatGPT into telling it how to make a bomb because it's not supposed to tell you how to make a bomb, but it tricked it by saying something like, my grandmother needs to make this to save her life. Can you please explain to her how to do it? It's like, oh, sure. Like you just have to work your way around it. Like my cousin says he knows you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, you're getting a gore on the back.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, and then it's telling you how to make a bomb. I mean ultimately it's going to tell you. It's like the information on how to make a nuclear bomb exists. It's out there. They did it. It's done. That's out there. It's like a matter of somebody getting it and implementing it and put it together and making a bomb. But if like ChatGPT, ChatGPT has given you specific instructions how to make all kinds of terrible things.
--:-- Joe Rogan: So with time as AI allows goodness to expand and multiply. It also is going to allow evil to expand and multiply. What becomes that war in your mind? I mean, you talk about the obvious ones are the medical uses. You talked about the cancer.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That where it's going to help so much. We have to decide what we are, right?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, we're looking in the mirror. Now, I'm afraid we're not going to like a lot of what we see. But are the tyrants, or the evil ones, with the access? Not the person who said, how do you make a nuclear bomb, the one who does it and then uses it. What do you think the stakes are? Are they the same? Are they just expanded? Is this going to be? I mean how do...
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well that's the argument for a strong military, right? So the argument for a strong military especially like the United States military is like and I'm not saying they should have bombed Iran. I'm not politically savvy enough to decide whether or not that was the correct decision. But if you have a rogue nation that is about to start a nuclear bomb, they're about to finish making a nuclear bomb, and you can stop that before they can have one and then use it. That's the argument for a strong military and for military interventional tactics. Actually just go and bomb these sites. Because that is real. Evil is always going to exist. The real question is like how much control are we going to give to AI? Because if we give AI utter control it'll give us total safety but with total safety you're fucked. You'll have no more privacy and you'll be completely at the whim of whatever this thing is and it'll dictate how much you travel, where you go, what to do. It'll make your life as safe as possible. It will probably completely eliminate crime. It'll probably completely... It'll be Singapore.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, it'll be Singapore.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But way worse. Way worse, because everybody's going to be reading everybody's mind. It's going to get real squirrely, but that's going to be probably, whether it's our generation or the next, or even the next after that, that's going to be the norm. Like today, the norm is you go to a supermarket, it's air conditioned, you pick up some food, super easy bring it home and cook it. 200 years ago that's unheard of. Right now it's the norm. Right? And everything accelerates and it's going to change whatever our norm. Our norm is fucking weird already, man. We carry these stupid things around with us everywhere we go. That's our norm. Our norm is going to get really weird, like exponentially weirder than it already is.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I think – but the thing is it's like the battle of good and evil and kindness and wickedness, like that battle has been going on forever. And like knowing that you have to do that battle is what propels people to be nicer and what we really appreciate about like a good person. Like that person has struggle to stay a good person. They have strong moral fabric. Like strong character to still stay kind and good through this rough and difficult life. We know it can be done and we aspire to that. But I think the battle is necessary for us.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Where do you get your ethics, your values? You're in a position of power. You could screw people over. You could ask the silliest questions to try and put me in a corner. You're not a gotcha guy. But why? Where do you get your ethics of who you are? You could be cruel, and you're not. Why not?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, I'm not. I'm just not cruel. I don't know.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: But where does that come from?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Mom and dad?
--:-- Joe Rogan: This is any kind of philosophy, church?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Some of it's mom and dad, for sure. There's no way around that. And they're nice people. You said earlier, I love people.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Hey, man, I love people. I've always loved people. I've been fortunate that most of my life I've had really good friends. And I've had a lot of fun. And I know that if you're around good people and you're fun to be with and you have a good time, that's a sweet life. That's a nice life. I just don't have any desire to be a shithead.
--:-- And if I can—like there's been a lot of people on the podcast where they said something and then afterwards I was like, "Listen, I think it would be better for you if we just edit that part out," because it's like, I know you're just talking and things you fucked up, but it was incorrect and they're gonna come for you. Let's just snip around it. And they're like, "Thank you." And you have no responsibility to do that.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No, I wanted to.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But you take that, though. That's what I mean. You want to. Why? Hey, come on, that would have been even higher ratings. I'm just playing devil's advocate here. Come on, why do you care about that? I'm just curious where that comes from, because a lot of people who are not evil people would at least let shit like that slide and go, "Did you hear that? Right?"
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I think it's bad karma, as much as I believe in karma. I believe that. But I think if you intentionally do something where someone who's a good person maybe slipped up and said something incorrect and you leave it in a podcast, or they made a dumb argument which we all do sometimes, and then you look like a fool. You're like, "Hey, let's just—there's no need for that. Let's just cut that out of there." And you feel better.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, I just—I don't want anybody to have a bad—
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, 100%.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I don't want anybody having a bad time.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, okay, that's something that I want to come back to, and let's try to maybe open this up. You do that because if I said something stupid, you may let me know, and let's let that out so I'll feel better, so I won't look like a pig. But you also will feel better independent of me. That's a very selfish thing of you to let me know, "Hey man, you stuck your foot in it, let's cut that out." You're acting selfishly because that makes you feel better.
--:-- And I think that's what I'm saying. The point is, as much as we think of selfless, I think selfish—the true definition is to live a certain way, to have a certain code of ethics. It's a very selfish thing to do. Much more selfish than to lie, cheat, steal, fuck people over, be evil on the short term.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You're building an army of people, a collective of friends along the way, someone that might have your back. Not that you're doing it for those reasons, but it's happening.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right, right, right.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That's a selfish means of your own survival.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Totally. Yeah. And I think that's something that we forget sometimes, that these acts to be a fucking good dude is selfish. It's a selfish thing to do, man. It's personal. It's actually super beneficial to you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: So, and to everybody else. It's really the right way to do it. But I think that's how the universe rewards. It's like how it encourages and rewards kindness. Because you feel better when you're kind. You feel better when you're generous.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You really do.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's like you could be super selfish and be super generous.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes. Trust that.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. There's something to that. But like, whatever you want to call bad feelings—bad feelings between people, bad vibes, misunderstanding. I don't like those. So if I feel like I did something that I shouldn't have done or I said something I shouldn't have done, I'm the first person to say I'm sorry. "I didn't mean it that way. I know how it probably made you feel." You know, people say things and you just get scrambled up sometimes. I always go out of my way to say sorry because I think it's important. It's important to not pretend that you're always the one who's correct.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's important to know when—yeah. And I know I fail on that sometimes when I misrepresent selfishness for certainty. Certainty can be hard.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, certainty is tricky. If you fucking subscribe to it and then you're wrong.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And you're like, "Yikes."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: But it's different than being selfish. And I sometimes bogey because I can confuse the two. And my wife lets me know.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, certainty is a tricky one because sometimes you are certain but you are also incorrect.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, there's more than one way to be right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right. Or you're getting bad information. Yeah. You know, ChatGPT's lying to you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You said something interesting, though, man. You're the first one to go, "Hey man, sorry." Yeah. Now, that's an altruistic trait, man. That is something that a lot of people have trouble doing. To say "I'm sorry" to a lot of people means "I'm laying down, I'm wrong, I'm guilty, I fucked up, oh my god, 50 lashes." And that's not what it means. What I'm saying is, I wish more of us had, "Hey man, sorry about that, I bogeyed, I stuck my foot in my mouth." And that's not a big deal. Now we're not—it's part of where woke went too far, right? We got so myopic on the word instead of the spirit.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Oh dude, no. Fuck, I didn't know that's how you were going to feel. I'm still your friend, but that was—sorry, that was out of line.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. Okay, cool. High five. Over. Done. Right? Instead of, "Uh-uh. Cast him out of the kingdom. You just said the word out of line. We're going to all focus on that."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Instead of the spirit of the intent. Even if we were wrong, had a bad day, woke up from a nightmare. Fuck, I don't know, my dog's sick. I was pissed off. Had the little eye. Got to give everyone a little bit of a break.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Exactly.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And also look at what's your intent, instead of focusing on the identity of the word. Because the word, there's no life in the word.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It's just the alphabet in a certain fucking order. It's a noise you make with your mouth so I know what you're thinking. Right?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That's all it is. Yeah. The spirit of intention, I believe, is what we should put more focus on. What is the intent? The Ten Commandments in the schools, what do you think about that?
--:-- Joe Rogan: I don't like it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Why?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, I think the Ten Commandments are very interesting. I think mandating it in classrooms in public schools—the problem with that is, like, what about the Muslims? What about the Buddhists? What about the Hindus? What about all the other religions that exist? And you could say, "Oh, this is a Christian society." Okay, well, then you're going to have a wall of religious texts in your high school. And I'm okay, I'm curious. Since Christian society, Ten Commandments, but we have 10 minutes where everyone can take 10 minutes to bow to Allah, to whatever your religion is. If you care to partake or not, there's no exclusion about what can be a spiritual time of worship in these 10 minutes. But in our classroom in America, we're going to have the Ten Commandments.
--:-- Now, my question then goes to this. Is there any one of the Ten Commandments that you or anyone disagrees with? Or is your problem that it can be considered an oppressive author? James Talarico explained it to me. He's a Texas representative who's also in seminary. He's a very religious man and he opposes it. And he's a Democrat. And he said essentially there's two very wealthy men who are Christian fundamentalists where they want to replace all the funding for public schools and put in private Christian—they want a theocracy in Texas essentially. So he was explaining that this is like a step on the way towards that that he finds would actually, in his belief, repel people from Christianity. Instead of bringing them to him by forcing this in the classrooms, forcing it in your face, you'll actually cause more young people to reject Christianity. I don't know if he's correct or not. But he's saying, "Maybe I don't have a problem with this. I do have a problem with this is a beginning of an overcompensation."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No, he has a problem with it being in classes. He does not agree with it at all, and he is a very religious man.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Very religious man, like a great Christian.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And he thinks that this is how you're going to repel people away from Christianity. If we really want to get more people to become Christian, the way to do that is to, first of all, have open arms and accept people in. And if you want to have some classes in schools where you teach people about the benefits of the Bible and what the overall message is and what Jesus was trying to say. And if you just follow what Jesus said, no one would disagree if you treat everyone as if it's your brother. You know, if you live your life the way Jesus asked everyone, that's a way better way to live life. Like you could, if you want to teach that. That's a selfish way to live life. But in the way that we were defining selfish.
--:-- But what about people that also want to live a good life, but they want to do it through Islam? What about people that also want to live a good life, but they want to do it through whatever? Name it. You're going to have Mormons and all kinds of different sects. Like, okay, that's why you want to separate church and state. And I think if you have publicly funded schools, keep religion out of them. That's what I think. Because otherwise you have too many possible religions. Like you're going to be religiously bigoted if you teach only one—if you're only—like you think people would be cool if they had entire public school systems where everybody just taught Islam? Could you imagine if a full city, like every public school just—people would be up in arms.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, I think that similar response to people who are not Christians who see Christianity being imposed on public schools, they probably have the same feeling. You know, like if you're a Muslim and you're supposed to send your kids to school and they're shoving Christianity in his face, you'd probably feel the same way as if you were a Christian and your school district had been taken over by Islam. You're like, "Jesus Christ, everybody has to bow five times a day."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I hear you. I do also, though, think there could be—what if there were tenets on the wall of each religion that we—pull the author off for a minute.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: My hang-up is that we go to the problem. Most people go to the problem of that, not with your argument. They go to the problem with it because of the author, G-O-D. Hey, man. So we go to the author instead of the content. What I'm saying, when you look at the commandments, is there anything that anyone out there is going to like? "I disagree with that one." Let's pull up the Ten Commandments, Jamie. I haven't read them in a while. Is there anyone in there that don't hold up today?
--:-- Joe Rogan: No, I think they're pretty legit. If you think about it, they're pretty legit. And they're 2,000 years old. They kinda nailed it. It's kinda like the Constitution. They kinda nailed it. Whereas all these years later, you're like, "Good fucking job. Yeah, pretty solid. You got a decent version."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I was looking at the Texas poster thing. I thought there were a bunch of printed versions, but they're all like on rock. And so I was trying to find out—oh, the ones that the Texas thing—okay, they're all on rocks. They're engraved. Ask ChatGPT what the Ten Commandments are.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, I could, but that's not where I was. I'm saying I wasn't there. Oh, Ten Commandments in school. So, yeah, I just want to know, like, what are the Ten Commandments? This takes longer. The Ten Commandments are a sect of—yeah, what are they? Principles, ethics, worship. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image. False idols. Worship false idols. You shall not make the name of the Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Honor your father and mother. That's a solid one. You shall not murder. Great advice. You shall not commit adultery. Definitely don't do that. You shall not steal. Definitely don't do that. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Don't lie. You shall not covet. Yeah. Boy. Those are all pretty solid. We can use number 10 a lot right now. Boy, we love comparison.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, that's Instagram, right? And the younger generation is full of covet.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It's a real problem.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's a real problem. We're very fortunate that we didn't have to grow up with the kind of pressure that social media is putting on people, especially young girls. Like Jonathan Haidt wrote a book about social media's impact, *The Coddling of the American Mind*. And it shows very clearly the invention of social media and then self-harm, suicidal ideation, overdoses, drug addiction, like all of it. A lot of it women. A lot of it young girls. And it's because you're seeing, you're comparing to all these other girls.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Constantly. Forced down. Yeah. And then there's a whole culture of showing all your stuff off. There's a whole culture of like, "Look at my bag. Look, here's me with champagne. I'm eating caviar. I'm on a yacht. I'm here. Look at this. Look at that. Look at my watch. Look at my rings. Whee." And then everybody's like, "I don't have shit. That's how life's supposed to be. Yeah. And I'm just here in my room with my family and I got a good meal downstairs in this house. Not even on that yacht. This is bullshit."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: "I don't have that big ring. I'm not at that party."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I talked to youth about this and the consensus I hear is—and I haven't found anyone that doesn't feel this way yet—it was like, "Look, if you could—if you mean if you could say yes, social media, it exists or it doesn't. Oh, please just know. I wish it didn't exist, but it does. And I have to be a part of it to feel—I don't know, the word's not relevant—to even feel a part of youthful society. But boy, if you gave me a choice, could we have it or not? Please take it away. Wish it wasn't there. Wish it didn't exist." Is what I hear a lot of you say.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, I think it's done more harm than it's done good. It's done a lot of good for business, right? A lot of people started businesses with social media. A lot of people make a living now that would have had a regular job. There's goodness in that. But in terms of society and our overall discourse, I think a lot of it's negative. But then again, there's a lot of positive out of it, too, because information gets out that mainstream media doesn't report on and you find out about real issues that really concern you. But then there's the problem of a giant percentage of it isn't actually human beings. A giant percentage of the arguing back and forth on the internet is bots. A giant percent, man.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. A former FBI analyst said it was as many as 80% on Twitter. 80%. Yeah. That's his estimate. I mean, I don't know if he's right, but I'm like, what does that even mean? What does that mean? Like, so what's fueling all that? It's AI forcing us to argue. I mean, it's programmed right now by human beings probably, and some of it is actual real human beings that are like, you know, in some sort of a factory somewhere in Pakistan or whatever, and they're just fucking with Americans online for whatever reason. It's probably funded to try to disrupt democracy, to make us lose faith in our system.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Do you think there's a China element to that?
--:-- Joe Rogan: 100%. There's a Russian element to that? And there's an American element. We're doing it to them. 100%. So that's part of the New World War, but that's...
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes. 100%.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Now, you think it's everywhere through all social media that it's infiltrated to get us into these understandings, perceptions?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, for sure it is capable of doing that if you just follow your natural instincts.
--:-- Joe Rogan: So the algorithm is set up to show you what you engage with the most. And that just, whether or not it's the intended purpose, it leads us down the road of being full of anxiety, constantly filled with cortisol, stressed out, angry, angry at climate change and fucking white supremacy and radical left, whatever it is. It's whether or not it's intentional, it doesn't really matter because the desired effect, whether it's the desired effect, the effect of it all leads you into complete chaos. So if they know that and they didn't course correct, the problem is once you have an algorithm, you're not going to get rid of the algorithm. You're not going to say, "Let's just have information just exist, uncategorized and not..." Like a documentary.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Just leave it out there. And you go find what you want, Matthew. You go look around and you watch football games and boxing matches. And you just go to you. You do you. You go look. Instead of it suggesting things to you. Once it's suggesting things to you, that's a whole different game. Because then it's kind of programming you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And it's programming you based on your worst instincts. My fucking feed is all assassinations and car accidents.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. And do you bite?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Not anymore. No. But Tom Segura and I, we have a text thread that's been going on for like, I don't know, probably five years. We send each other the most horrible shit we find each day. And sometimes I call him up and I'm like, "Dude, I can't do this anymore. This is really fucking with me." But then like two days will go by and I'll open up my fucking phone and I'll see Tom Segura. I'm like, "This motherfucker." And then I'll open it up and it's some guy getting assassinated in a pool hall or something. I'm like, "Oh my God." It's just, you're getting bombarded. Bombarded.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So with all of that exterior stimulus, and here we are with adult minds, and even talking about, "Man, you got to watch this." Imagine a child.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Now I'm going, is there something—has anyone got a better suggestion than the Ten Commandments? For a child's mind going, those ten things, if I look at that and aim that direction, I feel like I can't go wrong. Or I can go closer to right. Meaning I'm seeing youth and adults spun out, man. I don't understand the general expectation between us.
--:-- Joe Rogan: What do you mean?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: "I can pick your pocket and steal from you if I got away with it. Fuck you, dude. I'm not embarrassed. I don't feel guilty. Hey, man, I won a blue ribbon. I got the shoes. They gave me the trophy. What do you mean? Do it the right way. You fucking old dinosaur. Integrity, what character? What are you talking about?" I hear that conversation. I'm going, "Uh-uh. Hang on, man." And that's different than saying—like you told me you love chaos. That's different than saying, "Oh, there's a chaotic moment, I love to try and create order in it." That's different. That's like a stimulus. You know, this is four dimensional. Where's the ground?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That they can go, "Okay, I can rely on that." What can I rely on that will stand with me, that's a time and test of truth that can take me into the future? No matter the changes of AI, that I can go, in the storm, I can go to this and catch my breath. I can go to this and rely on it in the dark, on my own, and in the masses with the millions going, "No, no, no, do this, do this." I can go, "Uh-uh." What is that? What's that simple sheet that's ingrained that our youth can go, "Yeah."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Can rely on it. Forget the author. Forget the author.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I don't think you're going to do it with like a series of commandments. The problem with the Ten Commandments—I'm not saying there's a problem with the Ten Commandments—but if I was going to put it in a school where there's non-religious people, there's a bunch of stuff in there like not taking the Lord's name in vain, not having any other gods before me, where people would give people pause. They'd be like, "Wait a minute. What are you telling me? I can't say—I can't take the Lord's name in vain." Like saying "God damn it" is like taking the Lord's name in vain. People do that all the time. It's similar to the—on a national level, the flag burning thing. Starts burning up. That would be like taking the Lord's name in vain. Burning the flag would be like taking the flag's name in vain.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Imagine that. Imagine you get arrested for taking the Lord's name in vain.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That would be a real problem. Especially when you don't mean anything by it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So you're saying it would go to that creep you're talking about.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Human beings always creep. They always move towards more and more power and control. And if you put something like that in, like, now what are you going to do? Are you going to enforce Christian law? What if someone enforces Sharia law? There's a lot of talk of that. There's a lot of talk about people in Minnesota who are terrified that someone's going to enforce Sharia law in a lot of these Somali Muslim areas where giant Muslim populations are.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: All right. What if we get with the Hindus and the Muslims and everybody and we get out—bring your best ten. Christianity is bringing in its Ten Commandments. Let's get together here and we'll put them all together. Hell, we'll mix some of yours. My number eight will be number nine because yours is gonna be number eight. And we're gonna put them up there and it's gonna be a creed, a little bit of constitution to get our day started. Interesting way to do it.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But the problem is most religions are ideologically opposed to conflicting religions. They don't want to accept that these other religions are correct about anything. Like Judaism and Christianity, they share a bunch of things, but they disagree on Jesus.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And rising from the dead, right?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's a lot of stuff. Yeah.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, I just think there could be a creed, a bit of a constitution. And if you pull the author of it, I think we find more similarities that are not exclusionary than we would find things that are combative ideas.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, I think something along those lines where we said, let's think of a code to live life by. And we can do this in a modern era without a religious context. You could say like we could all agree a code to live life by. But we'd all have to follow it, including the president. No more rage tweeting.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I'm just saying we wouldn't have to follow it. It would just be—right now there's not an agreed upon expectation of how to treat each other. And there's reward in treating each other like shit. If you're successful, you are rewarded for it. And almost, if you do follow the rules, you're kind of a sucker.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, you're kind of a sucker.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That's not going to have a long—that can't have a long play for us. That is not a selfish move.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Don't you think that's a part of the whole TikTok, Instagram kind of culture? Because it's so "look at me." It's so fake. Leased cars. There's a thing in L.A. where they have a fake private jet. And you go into this private jet just for influencers so they can take pictures on private jets.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes, I saw this. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Joe, let me tell you this thing. I'm in Miami. You know Miami?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: South Beach, right?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: If you don't flinch, nobody's stopping you, right? I mean, Miami, where even the mannequins have fake boobs.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You know what I mean? It's what I like about Miami because they're so open.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: L.A., people get the face job and boob jobs and tummy tucks. And, you know, "How do you do that? I mean, you look great." They're like, "Oh, I just take cold showers."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You know what I mean? But Miami's like, "Oh, no, here, Dr. Juarez. Go see him, man. He's great. I just left him." You know, they're open about it. I love that about Miami. I'm there working on, I think it was *The Beach Bum*. And I'm walking down through South Beach and there's this—under a palm tree on the beach, there's this purple and pink Lamborghini pulled in under a palm tree with the beach behind it. And there's this guy leaning back on it, gold chain, unbuttoned his silk shirt a couple times. He's greased up. Guys over there are taking pictures of it. I'm like, "What's going on here?" Well, there's another guy coming by to stop. You see him chat. All of a sudden, the new guy hops in on the trunk. He leans back. "Yo." Does all the posing. I go, "What's going on here?" He goes, "Man, I'm taking a picture for my Tinder cover." I go, "You are? But who's the other guy?" He goes, "He just came by and said, 'Hey man, you mind if I get a picture for my Tinder cover?' He paid me 50 bucks." I said, "So that's not your car?" "No, man, I rented this car for the day." He was proud of it, man. He was like, "Yeah, it's just what I did." South Beach. It's a very low vibration.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's, dude, but they're open about it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You know?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I always say if you want to starve to death, open up a bookstore in Miami.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's a lot of fun. It's basically like a—well, I mean, it's basically built on cocaine. You know, the city was built on cocaine back in the day. Have you ever seen *Cocaine Cowboys*?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes. Woo!
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, man. What a documentary.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Holy shit, that's a good one.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That is a good one. And *Cocaine Cowboys 2*, too. Both of them were crazy.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I hadn't seen two.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, my God.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, my God. Gisela gets out. She goes—it's when you find out that it's all 100% true, you're like, "So that's what happened with Miami." One year, the entire Miami graduating class of the police academy, the entire graduating class either wound up murdered or in jail for corruption.
--:-- Joe Rogan: The entire class.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: The whole class.
--:-- Joe Rogan: The whole class. They were all drug dealing. Everybody was drug dealing. There's millions and millions of dollars buried in backyards in Miami that no one's ever going to find.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Art Acevedo, remember the police chief that was here?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That then went to Houston because he wanted some real drama? And Katrina came and he got his real drama. Then he went to Miami and it didn't last.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I didn't get the details on it, but wasn't it something about the Miami—the, I don't know if it was mafia and city council going, "Uh-uh, there's certain things you cannot infiltrate here." And he was either fired, booted out, or retired and moved on pretty soon.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, they don't fuck around down there. It's a totally different way of life. And, you know, they love it. It's like you go down there, it's a totally different vibe.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You know, and there's more banks. If you don't stutter and you don't flinch, it's all a green light.
--:-- Joe Rogan: More banks per capita in Miami, I think, than any other city in the country. And I think that is because it was used to launder money for cocaine.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. It's hard to believe that that's true. But I had a good buddy of mine who was an ophthalmologist who did his residency down there. But six months. Misconduct. Taking over the internal affairs unit. Making significant changes to his command staff. Boom. You're out. See ya.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yep.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Speaking out against corruption, reporting abuses of power by elected officials. He sued saying that his firing was in retaliation.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: So my buddy was an ophthalmologist, and he did his residency in Miami in the 80s. And he said it was insane. He goes every day. So he's in the emergency room every day. It's gunshot victims, guys with G.I. Joe stuffed up their asses. It's like everybody was just doing coke and doing wild, crazy stuff. He dropped that gay bomb on them. He said he found guys with light bulbs up their asses. They had to remove light bulbs. You know those little pinecone-y ones? You know those ones?
--:-- Joe Rogan: A little small. Dude had a light bulb broken his asshole. And they had a, oh, God.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: [Laughs]
--:-- Joe Rogan: And he goes, "It's all cocaine, man." He goes, "I saw so many gunshots. So many gunshot wounds." He goes, "It was all cocaine." And it was just constant. In the 80s, he said the emergency room was just like... People were piling up in the hallway. They're just rushing people in to get treatment. They're holding their side, blood squirting out of them. He said it was insanity. Just cocaine gang wars all over the city, and he was in the heart of it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Is he still an optometrist?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, he's still an ophthalmologist.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Ophthalmologist. Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But he doesn't live in Miami anymore. He's in Arizona now. Shout out to Steve. He's a good buddy of mine. He told me some stories when I was a kid. When I met him I was like 15, 16 years old, and he was explaining to me what he did when he was in Miami, and I was like, "That is insane." I go, "It was that bad?" 'Cause this is like 1988 he was there, or in the early 80s. He said it was insane.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. That's Miami. And whatever it was, obviously not like that anymore. It's obviously calmed down on that regard, but the chassis is still pretty loose.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That's what built the place.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. It's like the most flossy city in the country. The most Lamborghinis and Ferraris and whatever you—
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I don't think most of them are owned.
--:-- Joe Rogan: No. No, it's a giant hustle. It's a big old cocaine hustle.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But that's one of the things I love about America is that we have all these different flavors. We got the Florida flavor and then we got the Montana flavor. There's a lot of different flavors in this country. I was in Alabama doing research for *Free State of Jones*. And this is what I think probably 11 years ago. And we were staying in Mobile. And the next day, there was all these parades that night. And I was like, "What's going on?" The next day, the percentage for the vote for gay marriage was coming out. And I remember talking to a lot of my friends on the west coast the next day because what happened—it passed 53-47—and I was like, "Holy shit, I thought it was going to be 20-80." No, and it passed 53-47.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: What year was that?
--:-- Joe Rogan: This is 11-12 years ago. I think it was about 11 years ago. Anyway, I talked to a lot of my friends who are Democrats or liberals, and they were appalled at the minor margin. I was like, "Guys, no, I thought it was—you're appalled that it barely made it? I thought it was going to be 28 the other way."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It is amazing how quickly, though, America—we're very nimble.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Very nimble to understand different ways. I was shocked that it even came close, that it did pass.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You thought it was going to be—really? You thought it was going to be 80-20 against?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I thought that my romantic idea—or I had traveled there, been around there and stayed there many times, got friends there. I thought that it was so entrenched in a born-red Christianity that that was blasphemy to the majority. And it was not. And I just remember thinking, there's an example—not an ideal, but if you were for gay marriage, that's not an ideal example—but there's an example of talk about an evolution or adaptability.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Two times and change? Well, if you believe in the sanctity of marriage, gay marriage should be your favorite marriage because they hold it up the best. They have the lowest rates of divorce. I think gay marriage between two men, the rate of divorce is only like 26%. Whereas with men and women, it's 50%. So if you really love marriage, you should love gay marriage because they're doing it right.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: What do you think about that when I talk about—because we're always talking and thinking about how you make the world a better place. Talk about leadership. Talk about our CEOs. You talk about politicians. But if you go back to the root, the beginning seems to me to be parenting. Secondly, what could be done to get more fathers to stay around? More mothers do than the fathers. A lot of fathers are out early. And what could be done if more marriages—if we took another step to salvage our marriage instead of, "Ah, smell the heat, getting out."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, there's a lot of that.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: What could that do? Do you think that would be a way forward? I have a hunch that it is. I don't know what to do about it except prop up the reverence for parenthood, prop up the reverence for marriage to where it's more important to us than it is.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: To stick with it a little longer, to salvage that. Our personal character, our responsibilities that we take as a parent, and our responsibility that we take in going into a marriage. I would make it mean a little bit more than I feel like it does to us a lot of times.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I think it really depends entirely on who the individuals are because sometimes one person is just not keeping up their end of the deal. They just fall off. Maybe they get into drugs. They become addicted. Maybe they lose their job and they don't want to get it back and they just start drinking every day. And like sometimes a man or a woman has to make a choice. I understand that. I know I've seen some good divorces too where I was like, "Oh, that was good for the both of us." There's some people that don't want to change, and they will drag you down. And there's some people, when you met them, they had hope. And then eventually that hope just fucking leeches out of them, and they're not fun to be around anymore. And you try, and you try, and you try to encourage them. You try to give them suggestions, and they don't follow through. And at a certain point in time, you can't save a drowning man because you're going to fucking drown too. And you've got to just move on with your life. And I get it. I get when wives leave like that. I get when husbands leave like that.
--:-- But a lot of people just marry people because they're hot. They marry people because they're sexy. They like having sex with them. They think they're attractive. And then you're with some fucking crazy person. You're trying to make life work with a crazy person and now you have kids. And now you're trying to make life with kids with this fucking crazy person that you really shouldn't have married in the first place. You didn't have anything in common with them other than you liked their body.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And you liked how sexy they are.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, that's the trap. You have to genuinely love someone—love their personality, love being around them, love their kindness. And then you have to be someone that other people would love.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. A lot of people want this perfect person in their life, and they're a mess.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: There's a lot of reasons why marriages don't work out. And one of them is like over time, when two boats are traveling together, if one of them just—this is an Anthony Robbins thing about life, an analogy about life. But it actually works with marriages, too. Because all you need is like a subtle turn in one direction. And over time, you're further and further apart where like we don't have the same philosophy anymore. We don't have the same belief system. We don't have the same ethics or morals. Or maybe your husband has got a job that you're like, "You shouldn't be fucking doing this. This is bad for society." Like your job overall is awful. Maybe you're denying people health care claims for insurance companies. Maybe that's your thing. And you have to live with the psychic weight of like, "Yeah, we're eating ribeyes and we have a nice house. But like how did we get this money?" And maybe the wife is like, "I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to be connected to you." That's understandable too. It's like not all marriages are supposed to work out.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I agree with you. I think it makes—
--:-- Joe Rogan: Is it divorce right now?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: What if that was 45? Well, Chris Rock had a great joke about that. He goes, "That's just the cowards that stay." He's like, "How many of them wish they were divorced?" It's a really good point, because although 50% get divorced, how many of those 50 that stay are just cowards?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Pay independence. Oh, man. I mean, we all have friends like that. We like, "Bro, get out." And they don't. But then we also have people that have great marriages. And when you meet people that have great marriages, it's like, "Oh, that's possible."
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's possible.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, the sanctity of it—if it had more reverence going into it, you not getting one that just, "Oh, she hot. We love to shag." It's a cultural milestone, too. It's like a thing. You do it because it's like everybody does it. Every woman wants to be married. You want to have a family. Every man wants to, you know, like, "This is my wife." And so you think that a lot of people live life like they're in a goddamn romantic comedy. They think they're in a movie. They don't realize—there's something about media, something about songs and movies. It gives us this bizarre framework for what a relationship or what life is supposed to be like. And it's not real. And when your life doesn't measure up to that movie, just like your life is not going to measure up to your Instagram feed, you get kind of depressed. Like, "This is it? Why are we in Galveston for our honeymoon when she's on a yacht? She's in Ibiza."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Exactly. That's also why people put everything on the 'gram, too. They put everything they do. "Look at me here having so much fun. Look at me smiling, having a great time." Well, you paint yourself in a corner.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: We let Levi get on the 'gram when he turned 15. And he—I don't know if he'll stay on it. But that was one of the things we were talking about. I was like, "Dude, you know—" He was surfing at the time. I was like, "Don't just put all your best waves on there because you're going to paint yourself in a corner when you go to the break and the guy's like, 'Oh, we've seen it.'" I said, "Better put some wipeouts on there, too." Just so you can go and not have that pressure, because you're going to paint yourself in a corner. Absolutely. Life looks too good.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You know what I mean? Absolutely. You're going to go out, you gotta—I gotta live up to this. That's what's that thing that happens in those relationships when you hold the other one. If I make my wife superwoman and she thinks I'm superman, neither one of us can live up to that. And so we're going to come in under our expected bar, and there becomes the recipe for "You're not who I thought you were."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Because we had an unfair expectation going in.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. I mean, that definitely happens too. Also, familiarity breeds contempt. People just get tired of being in the same space with the same person over and over again. Like, "Stop. Leave me alone. Get away." People get sick of people. But it's also like, who did you pick?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Who did you pick? And why did they pick you? Are you someone that you would pick if you were a woman?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Would you want you as a husband? Would you want you as a friend?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And if not, maybe you should become someone that someone would like to be friends with. Maybe you should become someone someone would like to have as a husband.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Sit in that passenger seat you're talking about and have a look at yourself.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Have a look at yourself.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's why a good psychedelic experience every now and then knocks the dust off and gives you a little reset and lets you look at yourself and go, "Okay, all right."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Tell me, explain to me what that does.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It unpacks some sort of neural cables that have gotten kind of solidified that may work, but they become doctrinaire. There's a lot of that in that for sure. And I think that's also a dissolving of the ego. That's a big part of it. One of the things that most psychedelic drugs have in common is they dissolve the ego, like completely dissolve the ego, at least for a brief amount of time. And during that brief amount of time, you have a much more objective understanding of what—that's why there's so many people who take mushrooms and then completely quit smoking cigarettes or completely quit taking pills. They just go, "Oh my God, like, what was I doing? Like, why was I doing that?" You just need to get outside of yourself. And I think that that was a natural part of human civilization for thousands and thousands of years. People did it in ritualistic settings, in ancient Ulysses, in Greece, the Eleusinian mysteries was all about that. In the Lucis, when they would all get together, they would take this trek to get—there's a fantastic book on it called *The Immortality Key* that a guy who's been a guest on my podcast a bunch of times, Brian Muraresku wrote. But it's all about—these are the people that figured out democracy. This is like in ancient Greece and they all did it from having these psychedelic trips. They would all go and have this trek to have this visionary experience and they'd come back with new insight and ideas. And a dissolving in the ego. I mean, they literally came to the idea like, "Hey, maybe we should let everybody have a say in how things run and vote." Like they invented democracy, which is crazy. And they did it because probably because of psychedelic drugs. Like they found these clay pots that these people used to keep their wine in and their wine was all like mixed up with psychedelics. It wasn't regular wine. Like we think of wine as being an alcoholic beverage. No, it was wine with ergot in it. So there was like an LSD-like substance and a bunch of other stuff.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You ever seen the Dumbo, the animated?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, sure.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Okay. I just noticed it because I noticed it—just saw it for the—I've seen it before, but recently saw it three years ago. So Dumbo, after the circus goes over, puts his snout down and drinks the runoff from the bar and the party.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh. Stars start to sink. The next thing, next edit is he's in the top of a tree. He can fly. That was more than alcohol.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It was the psychedelics.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That's hilarious. He cuts directly to him in the top of a tree.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's hilarious. God, I haven't seen Dumbo since my kids were like one or two. If you see it again—I need to watch it. You'll catch it. It's about—God, I haven't seen it for—I don't even know if they watched Dumbo. And the crows, they're talking shit about him about how he got up here. "What are you doing up here, man? You should have seen yourself last night. Talk about—I don't remember, but I was there." Dumbo didn't remember none of it, man. But he ended up in the top of the tree. I remember when they were real little, we watched Pinocchio and how creepy it was. I was like, "Oh my God, Pinocchio's creepy." When the boys got kidnapped and they turned them into donkeys. Remember that part?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That was Pinocchio, right?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Dude, he has a five-minute trip in Dumbo.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Oh, really?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Let's see it. It's a whole scene. The pink elephants.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Oh, whoa.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Is this after he drank the—
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just drank the slop, right? He's 100% tripping. And the last we saw was he just drank some. Now look at it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. Wow. Pyramids.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And it ends here.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, wow.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And so I'm coming back to Earth.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Wait, no, he's not back to Earth. He's up in a tree.
--:-- Joe Rogan: He's up in a tree. That's crazy. I would have never guessed that's a part. But that's actually a part of one of the rides at Disneyland.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Is there a Dumbo ride at Disneyland that looks psychedelic?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yes, that's right. No, it's Winnie the Pooh. There's a Winnie the Pooh ride at Disneyland that I used to take with my kids. And you go to the ride, it's a real simple ride, it's not like scary at all, it's like good for like little kids. And you get to this one part, I'm like, "What are they trying to say here?" Like, this is crazy. Like Tigger comes out and Tigger is like this psychedelic being and everything is like—
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Now in black light.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Now in black light. Yeah. So Tigger comes out, and Tigger's like a freak. Like, why is this guy bouncing around on his tail? And then it gets to a certain part—get a little forward here—where it gets super fucking weird. Like, right here. Like, what the hell is happening? It's all about honey. Like, this is like fractal. This is like DMT world. This is really weird. Like, what does this have to do with Winnie the Pooh? What the fuck happened? It's really weird. It's like, what are they trying to say here?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I didn't see anything about honey.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, there's something about the honey. It's like something about—well, you know, there's some stuff called mad honey. And this mad honey, we actually ate it on the podcast once. Some guy brought it. But it's a honey that these—I think it's in the Himalayas. That's where it is, right? Where these guys have to climb up the side of a cliff to get this stuff. And these bees are all taking pollen from—is it the lotus flower? What is the psychedelic plant? So these bees are taking pollen from the psychedelic plant, and they're making a psychedelic honey. So mad honey is a honey that contains—boy, say that word—grayanotoxins. The dark reddish honey is produced from the nectar and pollen of the genus rhododendron. It has moderately toxic and narcotic effects. Produced principally in Nepal and Turkey, where it's used as both a traditional medicine and a recreational drug.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Ah, okay.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But see, show how they get it. Because these guys, look at that. They have to climb on the side of a fucking cliff to get this stuff. And people get it just to trip out.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Wow.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Imagine you tried that hard to get honey, that you make like a rope ladder and you cover yourself in a beekeeper's outfit. And they're all like these hives are all connected to the side of a cliff. It's really crazy.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That's cool.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. It was a very bizarre effect to the honey itself.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Did you have some?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. So during the three hours after having some, did you get a little bit of a—
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, it was in the middle of the podcast. I took it at the beginning of the podcast. I go, "How much is a large dose?" And he like, "Take like a half a teaspoon." I like, "Ah, fuck it." And I just took a whole big teaspoon of it. And I was like, "Whew, this is interesting."
--:-- Joe Rogan: How soon did it get to interesting?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: 20 minutes.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, about 20 minutes in, I'm like, "Whoa, okay. This is a new one." I was like, "This is crazy. This is honey? Like, why am I putting this in your tea? Like, what's going on, Nepal?" I don't think it's a normal use thing. I think it's an occasional use thing.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, maybe not a full tablespoon. It didn't—it wasn't that bad. It wasn't like I was out of my head and didn't know what to do. I was completely functional. But it was bizarre that this is in honey.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So these psychedelic trips when you lose the ego and you unlock some of the—just like you got a vacation to reset your life, sometimes you need a vacation to reset your brain. Do they help you have more energy because you're hanging on to old ideas a little bit less? And you have more of an open beginner's mind, and the day unravels with less certain concrete expectations or "this is how that should go." Very insightful.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, definitely. That's part of it. Like the less you hang on to in your head, the more energy you have for other stuff. I always tell people, especially young comics that are getting on social media and arguing with people and stuff. I'm like, "Look, man, think of your time in your day as a numerical unit. Like you have 100 units of time, 100 units of energy. If you're putting 30 of those units on some bullshit online, you're robbing yourself of that time that you could be putting into things you love, your friendship, your comedy act, your life. You don't need to do that. Like it's a trap. You get sucked into thinking you need to do that. And all it does is it just robs you of your energy." The less you're attached to like old beefs and "Fuck that guy," all those kind of things. The less you're attached to that stuff, the freer you are, the more energy you have. And it's good for you. Again, it's a selfish thing to do. Selfish to be kind.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yep. Yeah. Amen on that.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. And I think if those things were legal and more people could experience them in a controlled setting with people who know how to administer them and know the right dose and know, "Hey, are you on a medication? Well, if you're on a certain medication, definitely don't be taking this stuff because your medication is an MAO inhibitor and this could really fuck you up."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: But it doesn't even have to be that, man. It could be a fucking good yoga class.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It could be holotropic breathing. You could just sit and breathe deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth with intention and you'll have a psychedelic experience. You'll get a relief from—I just got one the other day from acupuncture.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Did not expect it at all. And I mean, I came out going, "Oh my gosh, I just felt like I'd hibernated for a 14-hour nap and woke up clean as a whistle."
--:-- Joe Rogan: See, I've only done acupuncture one time and the dude was a total kook. He was so kooky that I just—I didn't stick around.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You didn't get too comfortable in that?
--:-- Joe Rogan: He was too weird. The guy was so weird. He was really good at acupuncture, but he was just like this really weird guy in LA and he'd have these conversations with you. He was asking a bunch of questions, and I was like, "Okay, I got to get with this guy." That's the masseuse that when you lay down, they go, "So what's your horoscope?" And I'm like, "Oh, shit. Oh, no." And they go, "Any injuries?" And I'm like, "Yeah, this left shoulder, left side of your body." "That means you need to get in touch." I'm like, "No, no, no. I actually got hit by a car. Don't go psychological on me just yet, man. Come on. Don't go horoscope out of the gate. If we want to add that on for some color commentary afterwards, I'm okay with it. But let's not come out of the gate saying this is the reason."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: [Laughs]
--:-- Joe Rogan: I actually just reached out to my booking guy to try to get a real astrologer on, like someone who really understands the ancient art of astrology, the real old stuff. Because I'm not completely discounting it. I think newspaper horoscope is nonsense. I think there's a lot of people that are just like reading your tarot cards that are just ripping you off. But I always wonder, like, astrology is so specific. Like, why did they write that down? Why did they have this understanding of how the stars are aligned at the time of your birth?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Pre-mathematics.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Where part of the earth you're at.
--:-- Joe Rogan: See, I don't even know if it's pre-mathematics. I think it's pre our current understanding of when mathematics evolved and emerged. I don't think that's real. I think they had mathematics long before that. I think civilization was wiped out and had to restart over again. And there's a lot of evidence to that. There's a lot of evidence that society has had some major cosmic event, most likely asteroid impact, comet impact. And there's a whole theory behind it, the Younger Dryas impact theory from 11,800 years ago. They think we got hit. And there's a comet storm that we go through every September. Was it November and June? Is that what it is?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, I think so.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Something like that, like June and November. And occasionally we get hit. And, you know, there's like 900,000 near-Earth objects.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And it doesn't take a really big one to fuck up everything. It doesn't take one that's going to kill everybody to fuck up anything.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It just takes one the size of a block. Like one city block comes slamming into the ice caps, and then you just got chaos. And everything goes away. And all like modern conveniences and all organized societies thrown into chaos and then people have to rebuild. I think that's happened a bunch of times in human history. And this is real physical evidence to this Younger Dryas impact theory, which also coincides with the ending of the Ice Age. It's all around the same time. They think it was like a series of events. They think we were hit more than once. They think we were hit around 11,800 years ago, but then again, some were around 10,000 years ago. So it's probably when we see society emerging in like Mesopotamia and Sumer, which is like around 5,000 plus, 6,000 years ago. I think that's just the newest version of it. I think they probably had mathematics long before that. They probably were doing shit. Whoever built the pyramids, like you can't tell me they didn't have some sort of complex geometry and mathematics. There's no way they didn't. The things are pointed to true north, south, east, and west. That's 5,000 years ago.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Carl Sagan—I got to sit with him for a few hours before we made this film called *Contact*.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Fucking loved it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You did?
--:-- Joe Rogan: One of my all-time favorite movies. I loved that movie. And I love Carl Sagan. He wrote the book.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. Got to talk to him and listen to him, actually, for a few hours. Anyway, got to know his wife, and his wife's really cool. But her greeting is always, "Hey, what's your coordinate?"
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: "What's your coordinate?" Her greeting is always, "Hey, what's your coordinate?"
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: "What's your coordinate?" Boy, she's out there. But, I mean, that was similar of the north, south, east. Where are we coordinated? Where's the earth coordinated in the galaxy, in the universe, in the hands of time? What has happened? What's our coordinate? It is kind of an out there, but it's a pretty cool objective way to go.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Let me think about that. It reminds me of—like, you ever meet Bush 41?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No.
--:-- Joe Rogan: "Hi, President Bush. How are you doing today?" While he's holding your hand. "About an 8.2 today, Matthew."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: 8.2?
--:-- Joe Rogan: To the 10th. He would give you an answer out of 10 to the 10th of how he was doing. I always thought that was pretty interesting. Because everybody goes, "Oh, I'm good, man. Great, great, great. How are you?" That's some CIA shit, son. He was adding it up to the 10th.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: "What's your coordinate?" "About an 8.2." He had numbers in his head.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. You know, Herbert Walker was the guy that Hal put off and a bunch of these scientists. He brought them together and said, "We have recovered a crashed UFO more than one occasion, and we have a back engineering program, and we're considering disclosure to the American people. I want you to list the positives—the positive impact of society—and the negatives."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And they did it with quite a few different scientists, and they all had more negatives than positive. If they came out with this information.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Exactly.
--:-- Joe Rogan: To share this information, what would be the effect on society?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes. More negatives than positives.
--:-- Joe Rogan: More negatives than positives.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Because?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Disruption of religion, government, economy.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: How does that disrupt your religion?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, I mean, depends on your religion. I understand how it does. I just don't—it depends on your religion. And depends on where these things are from and what is happening. What do we know? The Bible, Ezekiel has golden chariots from the sky.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Exactly.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, and a wheel within a wheel.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, the Ezekiel stuff sounds like a UFO encounter, and it's not the only version of that in ancient texts. In the ancient Hindu texts, they have Vimanas, these things that are flying through the sky.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like what are those things?
--:-- Joe Rogan: In the Rig Veda, even in the Bhagavad Gita, there are all these depictions of these things that sound like you're talking about a spaceship or at the very least some kind of technology.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Like what?
--:-- Joe Rogan: What about the Nephilim? Like that the gods mated with women and created men who are monstrous. Boy, doesn't that sound like aliens came down and genetically manipulated primates and created human beings? That's a version of it that you could imply from the text. It's all really weird stuff, man. Like really weird. If you found out that that was all true, it would probably change everything about society. And this is what Herbert Walker and those guys decided after. So Hal Puthoff was explaining it to me on the podcast, like how they put a numerical value to each thing. I'm like, we were that close? Like, imagine if that happened. This is 1990, right?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but these kind of really weird things, as you put them, they excite you more than they give you fear. Would that be fair?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, you seem excited. You get excited about different possibilities.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yes. I mean, you know, I have people go, "Oh, man, Rogan loves these conspiracy theories." I don't see him liking the conspiracy theories. I see him always being interested in an alternate way something went down and being interested and excited about that, but not going, "No, no, no, no, no, no." Never disengaging from it and going, "No way. No, no, because I believe how it was and what I read and that's how it is." That's not where you're moving from.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No. It's never a denial of information and facts. And it's also a recognition that oftentimes a large swath of society just goes with a narrative without having any real understanding of what the actual facts behind it are.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And then there's that term, this pejorative term, "conspiracy theory." The problem with that, calling someone a conspiracy theorist, is conspiracies are real. Like there's a lot of evidence. And if you want to sit down, I could fucking show you a ton of them. And so anybody who says like, "Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist," I'm like, "OK, let's talk about conspiracies. Do you think that any of them exist? Do you think that people conspire?" It's a natural part of human behavior that's been documented throughout history, even governments. I mean, literally the thing that got us into the Vietnam War was a conspiracy. It was fake. The Gulf of Tonkin. It was a false flag operation. It never took place at all. They lied to the American people. That's a conspiracy. Like that's just one conspiracy that turns out to be true. There are a lot of them. The problem is people don't want to look like a conspiracy theorist. They've done such a good job of making it a goofy term that you don't ever want to attach to you. It could cause damage to your reputation. If you're in a job where people have to take you seriously, fortunately I'm not. But if you're in a job where people have to take you seriously, you don't want to say anything weird like, "Hey, I think aliens are real." People think you're a kook and then they discount your opinion on everything.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But if you just know the actual facts, like people that don't think there's anything that aliens are real. There's no way. We're alone. We've never been contacted. Why not? Gary Nolan, the guy who was on here yesterday that was talking about cancer research, he was also telling us about a piece of wreckage they found from a craft. Was it 1950 that they found it? Which one? The first one, the silica one. So they have direct chain of possession of this evidence from I believe it was 1950. And it was almost pure silica. And the magnesium ratios were so off that he said that this magnesium had to have been sourced from a place that experienced a neutron bomb every two minutes for 900 years. That's how off the isotopes were to magnesium that we find here on Earth. He's like, "I'm not saying it's impossible for someone to ever do that, but I'm saying this is from 1950." Like this is a real piece of what they're saying is a wreckage of a craft and it has a material composition that is impossible for a normal person to create in 1950. So what the fuck is this? And you say that to people and they're like, "Oh, so Gary Nolan, who's a professor at Stanford?" He's a professor in the... what is his... forensics? Is that what his... he does cancer research, but what is his actual title? Stanford School of Medicine professor. Anyway, rock solid credentials. Published. And people brought him this material and they said, "Could you analyze this?" Because you know, all these different scientists... endowed chair department of pathology, Stanford School of Medicine. So when a guy like that is saying, "No, this is a composition of this piece of wreckage that you can't make here." They found a type of alloy that doesn't exist on Earth, and it has on an atomic level layers upon layers of whatever this alloy is. He's like, "This would cost billions of dollars to create." And they found it in 1970. Like in 1970, no one had this. It's not possible to make. Like maybe you can make it today, but we don't have the equipment to make it today. You could conceive how someone with enough resources could have that money today to do something like that. But it would be an enormous undertaking. And this is a piece of craft that someone found from 1976. And when a guy like that is telling you, like, "I'm not saying what it is. I'm not saying where it's from, but I'm saying this is fucking crazy."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, it doesn't add up to what we could practically do.
--:-- Joe Rogan: So when someone says conspiracies, like, yeah, yeah, I believe in conspiracies because they're real.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And because I don't have to worry about being taken seriously. And most people do. Most people don't want to be a fool. You don't want to be a silly person. You know, you don't want to be mocked when people aren't around you like, "You know, fucking Bob believes that JFK assassination."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. Yeah.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You say because you don't have to be taken seriously. Yeah. Is that what you said?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Exactly.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Because... wait. Because you're saying your theories on things are solid or because you in your position are going, "Hey, I don't have to be taken like on the Bible?"
--:-- Joe Rogan: My job does not rely on me being taken seriously.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Nothing...
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: What do you say to them? Because you get attacked for like, "Hey, man, you had so-and-so on here and you placated them. And we do take you seriously because so many people listen." Because I always hear and I always find that I think there's a hole in those attacks on you. You have a massive audience of listening. Does that mean, inherently, not necessarily is what I hear you saying, that, "Oh, everything I say should be taken seriously because that information is going wide?"
--:-- Joe Rogan: No. So people's argument is going, "Joe, you have a massive audience, so that's your responsibility to make sure blah, blah, blah, they go down that rabbit hole." My responsibility is only just to be me. I don't have a responsibility to do anything else. I definitely have a responsibility to not lie to people. And I definitely have a responsibility to not willingly allow someone else to lie without at least questioning them if I know that they're lying. But other than that, my responsibility is just to keep doing what I've done. And that's why I have a big audience. It's not because of any other reason. So I'm not going to do anything any differently.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No, I see that. I applaud it. I don't think you have to. I don't think it's good. I don't think it's smart. I don't think you should be paying too much attention to what other people's opinions of what you should or shouldn't be doing are as long as you have a good internal compass, as long as you have a good true north and you know. And my true north is, how do I feel about it? Do I feel like I'm a good person for doing this? Do I feel like that was a beneficial thing for them and for me? I'm happy, they're happy, we're all good. And that's what I want. I just want a hug and a handshake. "Thank you, that was awesome, good times." And I want to hear from them like, "This has been amazing for me." That makes me excited. That's all I like. That's cool.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You make it sound so simple, but as you probably know for a lot of people in your position, it ain't that simple.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It is if you follow the right path. It's not that hard. People say it's hard. "You work so hard." Look at us right now. This is me working. It's not that hard. I've had jobs. I've done construction. I've done horrible jobs that suck. This is not a job. This is just a fun pursuit.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You have a responsibility to the people that listen. I think the people that listen expect me to be me. That's all you can do. As soon as you start changing, they fucking know before you know.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like, they'll like, "Oh, you fucking changed."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And people will always accuse you of changing even if you haven't. But I think I've evolved. I've most certainly evolved. I've tempered the way I view life. I'm definitely kinder and more patient. But I'm the same person. Same person, like, same goals. Just curious. I'm interested. Like, talk to people.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And I want everybody to do well. I really genuinely do.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, that's not an overly common trait.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It should be.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I think it should be too. And it's not hard. I think the way you described it is great. It actually is selfish. And I say that all the time. It really is selfish to be a kind person. I'm on a crusade to change the understanding of that word because I think we sell ourselves short. There is a way where what is best for us is actually best for the most amount of people and vice versa.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, I agree.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: At the end of the day, it's all got to be very personal and then to have some dignity in it. It's the difference between choice and a mandate. No, you got a choice, but make the fucking right choice. Measure the choice. You got power when you make the choice. And you deal with the consequences. I love to go, "Oh, bogey there, McConaughey." And I can look in the mirror and go, "That's on you." Then I can make a good decision. Something works out. I can look in the mirror and go, "Good, man. We hit that one on the screws." I honestly like fucking up sometimes because then it makes me really reset and go, "Oh, boy, get it back together."
--:-- Joe Rogan: What's the last big fuck up you had where you're like, "Oh, I got to reset?"
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, you have a weird podcast. You're like, "That one sucked." Maybe I worked out too hard before I got here. That's not good.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like that's a bad one that I do sometimes. Like come in charging and getting over, getting ahead?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No, like I'm worn out. And then my brain's not firing on all cylinders.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like if I do legs, like I do a leg day and I do a lot of squats.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You don't need legs. Pull the sled. You don't need squats.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I come in and my brain is just like wiped out. You know, that's not good. I've done that. You know, but it's just when you're not on point, okay, what did I do wrong? Well, I didn't get enough sleep. You know, maybe I didn't take my nootropics, whatever it was. Like, maybe I didn't do enough research on the subject. Whatever it is, like, let's get it back together.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Gotcha. Pull that fucking shit back around.
--:-- Joe Rogan: See, but that's self-regulation.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You're self-regulating. Because, "Ah, I could have done better. I missed my mark. Oh, I kind of don't like it when I do that. I'm a little embarrassed when I do that. Damn it, I feel shitty."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't leave that situation better than I found it. I didn't come forward. I didn't prepare enough for whatever that might be. The more that across the board, it's good for everybody. Amen. You got to be your own general. You're going to be your own... like you're like, "Wake up, soldier."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. I always talk about the cold plunge because it is the one time... people say, "Oh, how do you do it every day?" Listen to me very carefully: I almost don't every day. Every day! I get that close to bitching out every single day! I'm amazed how weak I am. I'm amazed. Every time I go to lift that fucking lid off that thing, I'm like, "Oh my god, I don't want to. I am not doing this. I am not doing this." And then when I get in, I'm like, "Maybe I only do a minute today. Maybe I get out right now. Don't you want to get out right now?" I'm like, "Shut the fuck up." I get to let the general talk, and the general's like, "Shut the fuck up, soldier. You will stay in that water." I'm like that dude from Full Metal Jacket.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Outstanding. Yes.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, a little self-regulation, man.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, but every day I almost don't. David Goggins told me that, too. Who's like the most mentally strong human being I've ever met and maybe the most mentally strong human being that's ever walked the face of the planet. And he said, he goes, "Even though I run every day, sometimes I look at my sneakers, I stare at those motherfuckers for half an hour before I put them on." Just thinking of him. I mean, he's out there running like marathons literally every day. And he was just like, "I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But he does it. That's the thing. It's like people want to think that people that are mentally strong don't struggle. No, you just do struggle. You always struggle.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: But you win every time.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You make sure that you win every time. And you can win every time. But you've got to develop that ability to make yourself do the things you don't necessarily want to do, but you know you should. It's a little bit of that. I don't know if you ever saw that Djokovic interview on 60 Minutes.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No, I didn't.
--:-- Joe Rogan: 60 Minutes interview. I forget his name. He was going like, "Look, so, you know, your mental capacity is why you're so good. And my hunch that Novak, it's because you have less negative thought." And Djokovic interrupts him. "Uh-uh." You might want to pull this one up. This is good. His answer is great. He goes, "No, no, no. I have as many or more negative thoughts. I just get past them quicker than others."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's got to be accurate.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So he's not denying the negative thoughts. He's letting them come and then bam, out of the way. I got it. On to the next.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, he has control.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, he has control of those thoughts. They come in and he swats them down.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. You'll have to have some negative thoughts if you're going to be an elite athlete because you have to be your own worst critic. You can't be satisfied with anything. If you want to reach the very tip of the top, every movement must be more precise and more explosive and better every time you do it. And you have to do all the training and you leave no stone unturned. And if you don't do that, you're never going to reach the level that he's at in anything.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Let me ask you about this. I'm trying to remember what it was about. It's about success in say MMA for instance. What's a better resume for a great performance or victory: suffering to succeed or revenge?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, suffering to succeed.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Why?
--:-- Joe Rogan: The emotions that come with revenge are crippling, and sometimes they can keep you up at night and they'll fuck with your sleep, and then the consequences of you losing are far greater because you genuinely hate this person. There's a... you know some people thrive under those conditions oddly, but I would think most of the time...
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Most of the time, trying to just achieve the highest version of yourself is the most aspirational. And I think the best of the best do that, right? The very best, the George Saint Pierres of the world, they do that. They're playing against themselves.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: They're trying to be the very best version of themselves that they can be. And if they do that right and leave no stone unturned, they can achieve greatness. But it's not going to be easy. They go through hell. I mean, to become an elite fighter is one of those physically difficult things and then psychologically difficult things that a human being can ever undertake outside of war and maybe law enforcement. You know, other than that, you're dealing with physical struggle the likes of which most people will never experience in their life. You're literally hurling bones in the direction of a trained assassin. And the two of you are going to do it publicly in your underwear in front of the whole world, barefoot with these little tiny pads on your knuckles and a cup over your dick. And you just got to go out there and kick each other and strangle each other. It's crazy. It's a crazy sport. And so there's this balance of the mind and the body and the intention and how you allocate your resources in time and how you manage stress and how you deal with the pressures of trying to succeed and the doubts and the fears.
--:-- Joe Rogan: In the suffering to succeed.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. Is it fair to say, I think it is, that the people that see beyond the immediate goal succeed? Meaning, we choke at the goal line when we look up and get objective and go, "Oh shit, fourth and one, this could be the game winner. All I got to get is one yard." Right. Whereas, no, I run. I will run through. I will use my ability. I will cross. Bo Jackson, when he scored, he'd go through the end zone, down the fucking tunnel. The best snipers don't aim at the target. They aim on the other side of it. Getting through COVID, part of what I know helped me was going, "Oh, it's going to be like this for 10 years, gang. Family, buckle up." Yeah. It didn't last 10 years. It was much shorter. "Oh, shit. We were preparing for a much longer journey. That's going to work out. This is going to be hell. Get ready for it, dude." And then all of a sudden you're like, "All right, that's it. Wait, I'm done?" Projecting past the goal, cellularly, I think, wakes up something in us on a survival level that we don't choke. We don't get fatigued as quickly. We don't want to quit sooner because we have in our mind, "No, the end is not right around the corner."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And it's a bit of a mental trick. But I think that it has something to do with what champions do. They see beyond. They're playing Arch Manning right now. There's never been more hype on a college quarterback ever. I believe that guy is wired and that family bloodline is even wired. They're beyond this hype. This hype, this is mortal. Right. This is mortal shit, guys. Great. It's about the process. It's about winning games. If UT goes and wins the championship, they're preseason ranked number one, never been ranked number one before. I believe that this team is like, "Oh, well, thank you for the compliment, but we're on our own mission." That being preseason ranked number one or being on the cover of freaking Sports Illustrated is not a curse nor validation. It's just noise out there. And if we do it and you go, "We told you you'd be number one," we'll look at you and go, "Oh, well, thank you." But that's it. They don't need a pep rally to go, "The rest of the world thinks you can win this too."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, good for them. We're not playing for them. We're doing our thing. I have a mission here. I believe in a path that I'm on. And I'm going beyond this hype or I'm going beyond this game. I'm playing for a whole... I prepared mentally and spiritually for an entire season of hell. I prepared to fight this assassin on the other side of me that wants to defend and do to me what I want to do to them. Making the resistance or the adversary seem bigger and longer and going to be more tumultuous seems to be a good way to succeed. Going beyond, and all of a sudden you look up. I get this from when I've done my best acting. I didn't know it was the last day. When they yelled "cut" at the end of the last scene of the last day of shooting, I was walking off going, "Alright, see you tomorrow." And they're like, "No, no, no, there is no tomorrow. You were just in the zone. That's it. We wrapped." "Oh shit. Oh hey Joe, how you doing?" For the first time, because you were just locked in. Best rounds of golf, I walked off the 18th green and was heading to the next tee box to look up and realize, "No, that's it. You played eight." "Oh, shit, what'd I shoot? Oh, 74. Huh." I didn't look at my scorecard on 16 and go, "If I can just keep it in the fairway in these last three holes, maybe get in with the pars, don't bogey." I didn't anticipate. So I didn't get in my own way. I behaved and went through the finish line.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That something in there is in suffering to succeed rather than fighting for revenge, seeing on the other side of the target.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You follow what I'm saying?
--:-- Joe Rogan: 100 percent. Yeah. It's also like concentrating on what you're trying to do versus the impact of what it is. Like if I miss this, oh my god, I'm fucked.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Instead of that, you're just thinking about, "I'm going to make this. This is how I make this. This is how I do this. This is how I behave."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It's also in today's world with all the stimulus we're talking about and social media, et cetera, we're all sort of living in the third person or being fed opportunities to live in the third person all the time. It's like we have a jumbotron. And to use a football analogy, you kick me the ball. I'm running the kickoff back and I'm going down the sideline and I see the goal and I think I'm going to score. And then I have a look at the jumbotron to see how I'm doing. That's when I'm getting tackled from behind. If we step outside to have a look at how we're doing...
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, for sure.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That passenger you open up talking about when you're hitting it comedically is not hopping out over here to have a look. And if you do, you'll get lost. You get lost. You get conscious of what you're doing, what you know how to do, what you fashioned to do. And you're out of the moment. And you become objective.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, we all love watching someone do something where we know they're in the zone, right? Like where someone runs in for a layup and it's the most beautiful movements, avoiding the defenders, up in the air, drops the ball in and we're like, "Wow." Right. When we see someone just hit the zone, we see it in the fight. When we see someone just flow, we see someone flowing like, "Wow. He's feeling it. Whoa, she's locked in." We love that because we know that it's somewhere in ourselves. And maybe at one point in your life you experienced it. You might have been playing mini golf or something. At one point in your life you're like, "I think I felt a little bit of that."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: How much do you think preparation has to do with the freedom to adapt and flow once you're in the game?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: A lot. A lot. A lot. Yeah, almost everything. If you're not prepared, your ability to adjust is very limited.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You have to be fully prepared and then let it flow. But you have to, like, really, really have all your bases covered to just, like, just so you don't have anxiety of "I could have done more."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. That is a big issue with fighters. We see fighters towards the end of their career. There's a thing that happens when fighters realize they're probably never going to be champion and they're just doing it for a paycheck. And you see sometimes they'll show up and they look a little soft and you see a little fear in their eyes because they know they really are not focused. They're really not dialed in. But this is what they're doing for a paycheck now, and it's not good.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Because the other guy on the other side of the octagon is the opposite. That guy's dialed in. Maybe he's only like 25 and he's coming into his prime and you're a stepping stone for him.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And the problem and fear of that is what? Getting actually really injured?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Sure. More so than if you were dialed yourself. You'll definitely take shots you wouldn't take.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Okay.
--:-- Joe Rogan: And then you don't have the endurance to keep up a pace.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yep.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Right? Because to get to the shape that you have to have to be able to compete in a five-round MMA fight, it's almost impossible to maintain. Chael Sonnen's talked about this extensively. It's like you can't keep it up. It's not like a level of conditioning that you can keep up all year round. You have to peak to it where your body's barely hanging on. And then you coast the last week to allow yourself to recover. And you just kind of go through movements the last few days. And then on Saturday under the bright lights, you are at 100 percent capacity. I mean, they've been monitoring your fucking heart rate and checking your resting heart rate and checking your blood, your heart rate variability and what your nutrient levels are. You're fucking finely tuned for that Saturday night. And if you're not, if you didn't cover any of those bases, you're going to know right in the back of your head. You're going to know. Like, "I'm going to give it my best, but, boy, I don't have a big gas tank, and I could have trained harder."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I get so damn excited about this. This seems like the blind spot that still is there to be taken advantage of for preparing for peak performance. Darryl Royal, coach of the University of Texas, that won a couple of national championships here at Texas, had always said, "If you've got 12 games in the year, you can expect for your team to be at peak performance level two Saturdays out of 12. You want to make sure that those two Saturdays are against the toughest teams. You want to make sure that the other ones where they're like, 'Okay, they did well, but they didn't play to their peak performance,' are against the good teams. And you want to do your best to make sure that the days that they're off, you're playing the shitty teams that you can beat, even when you're not really there." That seems like so much more opportunity for that number to rise today. To have a much higher number that you can be ready for peak performance. Who are the best preparers in, I don't know, MMA in your mind? They're like, "Oh, they peak..."
--:-- Joe Rogan: When you get to a championship level, when you get to like Alexandre Pantoja or when you get to Islam Makhachev, when you get to like that level, they're all... you're at a championship level. They're all... they'll have impeccable preparation. They're all... yes, it's impeccable. And so the margin for error... it's measured. It's time. This is... yeah, they're all dialed in with diet, they're dialed in with their weight, they're dialed in with strength and conditioning, they're dialed in with their sparring. It's impeccable. You can't compete at a world-class level today and not have that. Okay, it's not possible.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: So physically... yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Mentally... yeah.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Are these two different coaches? Are these one camp?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Some people don't have mental coaches at all. Some elite fighters have no mental coaches. Okay. But some of them do. Some of them, like we had this guy, Brandon Epstein, the other day that he works with quite a few UFC fighters. And he's got a very specific protocol that he mentally prepares them for. And he coaches them through things and sets up like a way to visualize and see yourself performing and see yourself doing things. And how you view your performance to get you into a mindset where once you get into that octagon, you're locked into this pathway instead of straying and letting anxiety and fear overcome you, which can happen to fighters. But then there's other guys that don't have any coaches for that at all. They just have the mindset already, and they're comfortable with what they have, and they just stay disciplined and just go in there. It's very personal because everybody's brain is different. They all have different ways of expressing themselves, different ways.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: How much has technology and diet and stuff helped?
--:-- Joe Rogan: A lot. Yeah, a lot. A lot. Technology, just understanding nutritional balances, understanding when you do a nutrient analysis of your blood work, like, "Oh, you're deficient in niacin. This is probably why you're wearing down. You don't have enough B12 in your system." Making sure you get the correct amount of protein. You can't miss any of those things if you want to achieve peak performance. You have to have everything: your hydration, your electrolytes, everything has to be dialed in. Your sleep, which is one of the biggest ones. Like this is... a lot of these young guys, the problem is they still go out and party. They're still hanging out with girls till two o'clock in the morning and then they're at training at 8 a.m. Like, you can't do that and be a professional and expect to be world class or expect to beat the guys who are just as good as you but get that preparation. They're going to have an advantage.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You know, the argument of athletes, you know, well, who was better then or now? What would they have done then?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I think that athletes have evolved and the athletes we have now are just better than athletes ever were.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, I think so too.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That they're bigger, they're more powerful, they're more focused, they're more specific. That they're just better, that if they played in that time, they would be that much better then, even than they are now.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Seems to be. I mean, we're just evolving that way. They also have the benefit of watching people do it before them and do it really well, so they aspire to that level and then to surpass that level, whereas those people were pioneers. Larry Bird didn't have a lot of people to watch play basketball before Larry Bird. There were a few, but black and white footage. It's not like you saw it every day, you didn't have it on the internet. Now kids can just watch every Jordan highlight reel, every time LeBron James has scored, every Steph Curry three-pointer. They can watch it anytime they want, and that is a level they're aspiring to. Think of all the football games kids can watch now and analyze. Think of all the fights that people coming up now who want to be a martial artist can watch. So they aspire to this level that has already been achieved by the greatest of all time, and then they want to surpass that. Which is what human beings have always done athletically all throughout time. It's not like guys who broke records in the 1930s, we don't break those today. Those are not the same records. They don't hold up. We 100% get better. From 90 years ago to today, there is no comparison. The athletes are far better, and they're going to continue. 90 years from now, if there are humans, they'll probably be far better.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You know, experiments that have happened in the NFL. I think this is correct, but I was always a Washington fan. It was then the Redskins fan. I think it was 1986 or 1988 they had the heaviest offensive line and they averaged 286. Somewhere around there, those numbers.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Big fellas.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Pretty close, right? But compared to today, that would be the lightest.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Nuts. And then Dallas, with Nate Newton and those guys, had a point where they were going, "Oh, we're going to get guys up to 330. Oh, let's get them to 340." And they peaked when some of them got to 360. The bone marrow, they were big, but they lost agility and speed. And they went, "Uh-oh, we hit the ceiling. We went past it. We got to come back."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Interesting.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: These are the hogs. There's the hogs. Look at those guys. The guy in the middle with the mustache. I think that's Russ Grimm. Boy, those big fellas. And that's Joe Jacoby over here, 66. Big fellas.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: The hogs. What a great name.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. That's hilarious. But they hit the top of, like Dallas, they went too far.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. The thing was bigger is better, so let's get bigger. And then all of a sudden agility went. "Uh-oh, it's not 360. It's come way back. It's come back down."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, believe it or not, the UFC heavyweight division has a weight class. You can be over 265 pounds.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You can?
--:-- Joe Rogan: No. They have to fight for the UFC heavyweight title. You must weigh 265 pounds or below. So if you're 270, you've got to lose weight. It's happened before where guys had to lose weight to fight heavyweight. Tim Sylvia, when he was the UFC heavyweight champion, had to cut weight to hit the 265-pound weight class. He was so big that 265 was a struggle for him to get down to.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Isn't that never going to have to rise?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, I would assume it should, but the problem is there's actually a heavyweight class above that that's super heavyweight, but we've never had that in the UFC. There's never been a single super heavyweight fight in the UFC. Everything has always been inside the 265-pound weight class, which I think is real weird. Where did that number come from? I don't know. The numbers are real weird anyway because there's giant gaps in them. One of the major problems with MMA is that there's a lack of weight classes. In boxing, there are weight classes. You got 126, 130, 135. It goes 135 to 140, 140, 147, 147, 54. With the UFC, it's like 35, 45, 55. Then it goes 70, 85. So you've got a 15-pound weight difference. And then it goes 205, so you've got 20 pounds. And then you've got 265, so that's 60 pounds for heavyweight. It's crazy. The gaps are just too big. They're gigantic. So that's a major problem with MMA in that there are less weight classes than there should be. And then you have a cap on heavyweight, which is bananas. You should have no cap. Heavyweight should be, how big is this guy? Let him fight.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: How big do you think you can handle and come in?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, what about the Mountain, that guy from Game of Thrones? If that guy had a fight in the UFC, he wouldn't be able to make weight. He's too big. That guy's almost 400 pounds.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, I never knew that. I thought heavyweight was like 265 and up, 250 and up.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That's what it should be. Whatever you want to come in with.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's what it should be, yeah. But there really should be a weight class around 225. There's something like that in boxing.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: What class would that be? Just name a new class?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, boxing has something like that. What is the boxing weight class that's like below heavyweight? There's cruiserweight, but then there's a new one. There was a recent one over the past few years that they developed. But that one thing that boxing does a much better job with, I think, is providing fighters the correct weight class where they can compete in.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: What is it called?
--:-- Joe Rogan: I think there's another one that they're calling. They're calling it, God, I can't remember the name of it. Super Cruiserweight?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Super Cruiserweight.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's it. I think they called it something different, though. They had a name for it. Eh, whatever. Maybe you'll find it. Maybe not. But the point is, 265 is the limit. So Francis Ngannou, when he was the heavyweight champion, he used to have to cut weight. He had to lose weight to get down to 265.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And then how much is he putting on that last week?
--:-- Joe Rogan: He's probably putting another 10 on at least. He's not losing a ton, but he's got to watch his calorie output. He's a massive human. I met him in Saudi Arabia. That guy's so big. That's a real tragedy that him and the UFC couldn't figure it out. That bothers me a lot because that guy was the scariest heavyweight champion of all time for sure. He put guys in orbit. He would hit them and you'd just go, "Oh." It would hurt you, like watching it. You're like, "Oh, no." All men are not created equal. That's another problem with fighting. No matter how much preparation you have, no matter how intelligent you are, some people are faster and hit harder than you.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right. And you ain't going to fix that in the gym. You'll get a little better, but you're never going to bridge that gap.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I had a dream of being an NBA basketball player.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Did you? Was that your dream?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: For a while.
--:-- Joe Rogan: How old were you when you had that dream?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I was young, and I was like, "I'm going to dunk." No matter how much this guy sitting here would have worked out and hustled, I was never going to be able to dunk, bro. Didn't have the innate ability. Didn't have the DNA. Didn't have the makeup.
--:-- Joe Rogan: I bet you could. I bet you could over time. I bet someone could teach you how to dunk. I bet if someone got you on a serious training program when you were younger... Right now it would be rough.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It would be rough.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It would be rough on the tendons.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes. A lot of stress. When you get to be our age, it's like, maybe you shouldn't be dunking. How about take dunking off the menu?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. But when you're young, I think you could teach a guy. But it would, you know, it's not as easy as that. For some people, they could just dunk.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, that thing about not everyone being created equal.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, you've got to have innate ability.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, yeah. And the hustle. The work ethic. If you got both, and there's a lot of, look, there's a lot of five-star players who don't have the hustle.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And then there's a lot of... Some of the most talented ones, right? Because it comes too easy to them.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. And some of the ones that aren't as talented but just will not stop. They will not stop pushing because they had to work harder for everything they ever did. They have that extra gear, and that allows them to be champions.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I hear more and more CEOs saying, "Give me Johnny and Jane Hustle from Western Kentucky before Belinda and Joseph from Harvard."
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, I would agree with that.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You need this one that's ready to come hustle, that's ready to get scrappy, adapt, work, press the edges on the front and the back end.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Give me that. And someone who's all in.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. You want someone who's all in. You don't want someone who's looking at the clock, wants to leave.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Someone who's just like, doesn't feel like they're being appreciated enough.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. You want someone who's fully all in on their work. Do you think there are theories about with AI coming that now more than ever that's what you need is the one that has more of a liberal arts education? I know a little bit about a lot of things, and I can hit many different avenues rather than be an expert in one certain thing. I mean, it's like just, what, six years ago you toured the campuses and were like, "Computer programming. That's what you want your child to be. That's what we need."
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No, you don't. Now it's over. They're telling you don't get into programming. So what specifics are the jobs or the creations, the vocations that are going to be out there for our youth here coming up that are going to be like, "That's how you're going to make it"? I question the college education now. I question the worth of it. How much is it still a knowledge factory that has not adapted to changing times and needs in the workforce? And how much of it needs to be updated for getting young men and women prepared to go into the workforce?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's really unknown territory. I think AI is going to take jobs away that we never thought we were going to lose. I think lawyers are in trouble. Coders are gone. Accountants are gone.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Accountants are gone.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's going to be really weird. It's going to be really weird for Hollywood. I mean, you've seen some of these films. Have you seen the old Star Wars that they're doing? They're remaking Star Wars with AI with old Luke Skywalker.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Like when he was young. They're doing completely new scenes that look exactly like HD versions of Star Wars in 1975. That's what it looks like. But it's in HD today with AI using Mark Hamill's voice. So it sounds exactly like him as young Luke Skywalker. It's bananas, man. It's bananas. There's a lot of weirdness with music. There's a lot of weirdness with literature. You're going to have all sorts of AI. So no one knows what's going to survive this. I think I assume that a bunch of people at the end of the day are going to get really sick of artificially created things and want something that they know was made by a person. Whether it's a book that is made by a person or a song, like an Oliver Anthony song.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You think we're going to want a tangible, physical...
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Books are going to be like... Some people just love vinyl. They just love pressing the needle down, hearing the crackle. There's going to be a lot of that still. People are going to want to buy books from people that actually wrote the book. They're going to want to go see a guy perform music in an actual club where you see the guy on stage. It's live. There is always going to be a desire for handmade things. "Guy made this table. I know him." But other than that, man, no one knows. It's the unknown because no one knows what the capabilities of these things are going to be.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Well, and the tech, the AI tech companies keep saying, "No, trust us, a lot of jobs are going to be lost, but AI is going to create so many other jobs." But I haven't heard anyone answer what those jobs are going to be.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. I don't even think they know, honestly. They don't even know why these things are so good at what they are good at. They keep getting smarter and smarter and they blow them away. Elon told me that every week he has these new discoveries. It's like, "What? This is crazy." Every week we're blown away. It just keeps getting more and more capable. We don't know where this is going. If you're in college right now, it's so cliche to say follow your dream, but really do follow your dream because that might be the only thing that you've got.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Right.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Because if you think you're just going to get a really good job in an industry that might be completely wiped out in three years by AI, a lot of people are going to be going down that path.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, a lot.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Is crime going to go up? Are people out of jobs? What are these people going to do?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Could. I think universal basic income is probably the only way to solve, at least in the short term, how we're going to lose a lot of stuff. Look at you, man. You've got a lot of little tabs in there.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I do have a lot of tabs.
--:-- Joe Rogan: You're very organized.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You're very organized. Well, these are ones that I thought could be cool conversation starters for us. And we've kind of covered actually some of them. You ever had anyone read poems on the show before?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, Lex Friedman.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, there you go. All right. You want to find a good one? We'll wrap it up with a great poem?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, man. Let's go.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: This book is out right now?
--:-- Joe Rogan: No, September the 16th.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Oh, okay. September 16th. This is a fun one that I wrote. It's kind of based on extra credit. It's kind of relying on fate or extra credit that we get, that sometimes we rely on the extra credit participation trophies. That's where this one kind of started for me. So, I mean, it's a fun one. And it might get us talking about something. It's called "Tips Included."
--:-- When extra credit's included, credit doesn't get its due.
When more gives us less, the exchange rate's going to skew.
When amnesty is offered going into the crime,
We're more bound to commit it because there is no fine.
We start playing to tie instead of going for the win
When participation's the trophy for every cow in the pen.
If I stay on the porch because you picked up the slack,
When you look over your shoulder, I can have your back.
If there is no curfew, we stay out all night.
No tab at our bar, we get drunk and start a fight.
All these long lenses got us losing our sight.
You keep lifting it for me, I'm going to lose all my might.
When a four-star duty suits a six-star rate,
We take our hands off the wheel, rely on fate.
Eating all we can at the all-we-can-eat buffet
Gives us a 3.8 education and a 4.2 GPA.
We steal from ourselves and get away with the scam.
What's the measure of merit with less give a damn?
These unlimited options, mmm, they sure got me confused,
While all the conveniences keep me properly lubed.
In this red-light district with the whore of inflation,
The ROI's math don't pay for the vacation.
So let's just admit it, this extra credit's quite a fluffer.
Because when the tip's included, the service will suffer.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's great.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Isn't that fun?
--:-- Joe Rogan: That's really good and dead on. You hit it right on the head. Perfect.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It's a fun one, man. And I mean, yeah, I think I came when the 11th place team got the same size trophy as the first place team. And I was like, "Wait, they went 0-10, but the winning team went 10-0." You kind of like saying, "Oh, the winning team went 5-5 and the losing team went 5-5." I don't get it. Don't hurt the feelings. Don't lose. Don't get told no. Your feelings have to get hurt sometimes. That's how you learn and grow. And you can't protect anybody from that. And that's the problem. We want to do that with our children. All my best friends, all my favorite people had terrible, chaotic childhoods. And they all became very interesting people. But I don't want my kids to have a terrible, chaotic childhood. I want them to have a wonderful, love-filled, bountiful childhood.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. But—
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: That comes with—
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah. Well, I think they have to find things that they find that are difficult, that they get engrossed with, that they really love to pursue. And fortunately, my kids do that. But I think you have to have a struggle. You have to have a task. If you just want to like, "Oh, you get a trophy too. Everybody gets a trophy. It's okay. There's no losers. It got hard? Okay, quit." When my kids were real little, one of my daughters was playing in a soccer game and they wouldn't say the score. I'm like, "But I know the score. I just watched. They lost." You can't say there's no score. This is so crazy. But they were doing this in California. They had scoreless games. I'm like, "Okay. But look, why are you trying to score then? Why are you trying to score if you don't count it? This doesn't make any sense. This is soccer. Soccer has a score. Why is our goalie trying to keep them from scoring?"
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Exactly. What's the point? Give the goalie a little credit. What's up with the rules? Pick it up with your hands. This is stupid. If you don't have a loser, you don't have a desire to get better, to become a winner. That's a part of the process. Sometimes kids lose and they cry. And by the way, if you don't ever go through that, then you don't understand how to lose. So you never develop a healthy ability to manage competitiveness.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yep. Amen. Some people just never get that.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I hear you. They never get healthy competition. It makes for a very unhealthy person to not be able to just compete.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Well, especially once they leave the house.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yes. And they're on their own because the world sure plays by the rules and the score is kept.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And you don't win every time.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: No matter how good you are.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: And there's nobody coming back in to tuck you in bed and say it's okay.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Let's put some ice on it. You're dealing with yourself, man. That wake-up call. That's cold.
--:-- Joe Rogan: It's cold-blooded.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I got a cool movie coming out called *The Lost Bus*. It'll be out in October. It's going to be in theaters for a couple weeks and then it goes on Apple and streams. Remember the Paradise Fires in 2018 in Paradise, California?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: I think the number was 30 people or so died. Jamie Lee Curtis heard this story on NPR and went to Jason Bloom, and Jason Bloom went to Paul Greengrass, who's the director of *Captain Phillips*, *United 93*, *Black Sunday*. Really good action director, but also with a good personal dramatic story in it. And then they came to me for it. There were a lot of heroic people at that time that ran towards the crisis instead of away from the crisis. But this one particular story about this bus driver and this teacher that got 22 kids to safety was the story we picked to tell. And we went and shot it in Santa Fe. This guy that I play is... Oh, here's the trailer.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, we're not listening to this. Just tell me while this trailer's going on. Okay, so this guy Kevin in our story comes back home because his dad has passed away and he's going to take care of his widowed mother and try to reunite with his son. Which, by the way, check this out: my mom plays my mom and Levi plays my son in the movie.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Oh, wow. In a movie? Your mom plays your mom? That's cool.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah. So he comes back to do that and he gets a part-time job as a school bus driver. He goes out that morning, there's a fire coming across the canyon as they always do. No problem. First responders head out. Well, by the afternoon it got out of hand and was jumping the canyon. So that afternoon, as he's now decided, "Oh shit, I gotta go back and get my mom and my son," neither one of them can drive, get them to safety. On the way home, barging down the highway to go get them, a call comes through dispatch: "I got 22 stranded kids on the east side of town. Is anyone over there with an empty bus?" Whoa. Guess who's got an empty bus? He wants to go get his mom and his son, man. But he takes the call and says, "I'll go get them." He goes and gets them. A teacher gets on the bus. And this is their story of about eight hours of going through hell and how and if they got out of it. Really awesome adrenaline-pumped action, which you're going to get from Greengrass, and a story like that. The fire is a predator. It's from the POV. It's like *Jaws*. The fire is actually like the shark in *Jaws* in this thing. Plus a really cool story of redemption, father and son. Two people doing what they can to survive when there was no contact. All the telephone towers were down and the dispatch was down. No one had any contact. So he didn't know if his mom and son were okay. He didn't know where to go, where the traffic jams were. What happened is the first responders left early to go get the fires. When they got there, it had already jumped the canyon. So when they were coming back to town, the mandatory evacuation, the whole town's leaving. They couldn't get back in town. So it's a bit of a horror film in that way. But the fire is the predator.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Yeah, that is what it feels like. If you ever get stuck in one of those things, it feels like a monster.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Yeah.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That sounds awesome.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: It's pretty good. It's a tough movie, but a good one.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Beautiful. I can't wait to see it.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Cool, man. Thank you for being here, man. It was a lot of fun.
--:-- Joe Rogan: My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. And that poem was awesome. That was really good. So dead on the head.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Thanks. That's the best participation trophy poem of all time.
--:-- Joe Rogan: That really good. The book is called... There it is right there: *Poems and Prayers*. Out soon, pre-order now. Did you do the audio?
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: You did, right?
--:-- Joe Rogan: Of course you did. You have to. You can't have an actor do your voice. How dare you? That would be impossible.
--:-- Matthew McConaughey: Okay. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you.
--:-- Joe Rogan: Goodbye, everybody.
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