#2391 - Duncan Trussell

Joe Rogan: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan: Hello, Duncan.

Duncan Trussell: Hello, Joe.

Joe Rogan: Hello, father.

Duncan Trussell: Hello, father.

Joe Rogan: Father Rogan. Are we allowed to do this?

Duncan Trussell: What, this religion you can kind of goof on a little bit? Catholicism?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, they get testy. Having now gone to more than a few Catholic masses, which are beautiful, and hung out with Catholics who are awesome, I've really had to reconfigure everything I used to think about it. Because they're just really sweet. I had a long conversation with a priest, a brilliant dude, totally non-judgmental, kind of intellectual, philosophical. Right away I was like, I should have this guy on my podcast.

Duncan Trussell: Interesting.

Joe Rogan: It's not what it is. I feel like the Christianity that most people are angry at is not even Christianity.

Duncan Trussell: It's like saying that you're a liberal person because I'm pretty liberal and you're pretty liberal.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: In the greater spectrum.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: But then you get lumped in with Antifa. That's the problem. Then you get lumped in with whatever crazy LGBT issue of the day.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: And even Antifa doesn't want to be called liberal. Did you know that?

Joe Rogan: What do they know?

Duncan Trussell: Antifa is anti-capitalist, and that is not liberal. That's the problem. The terms are really muddy right now.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Duncan Trussell: So when you're looking at Portland, the protesters in Portland... What exactly is going on in Portland? I'm trying not to pay attention.

Joe Rogan: I know they've brought in the National Guard. Is that happening?

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. They tried to, and they got... I think they're there now. What's happened is they're in front of the ICE facility. There are ongoing protests at night. I watch these streams. I've been watching a self-proclaimed fascist named Carlin who drinks and basically roasts these live streams. She apparently embedded herself with Antifa before. It's such a funny stream.

Joe Rogan: So they tolerate her?

Duncan Trussell: Oh, no, not anymore. On her stream, she's like, "I am a fascist."

Joe Rogan: Right.

Duncan Trussell: So she's proudly proclaiming she's a fascist. I don't know how much of that is trolling or real, but conservatives drawn to her stream will say things like, "These people are funded by George Soros." And it's the funniest thing because she gets so mad. She's like, "Get off Fox News. Stop watching that shit. It's all wrong. Do these people look funded? Do these people look like they have money? They're not funded." Her bigger point is that by saying these are funded agitators and not saying what they actually are—anti-capitalist revolutionaries—you dilute what's really happening. What's really happening, according to her and I think a fair amount of people, is that the economy is so fucked. The middle class is diminishing. The cost of living is so high that this is the perfect soil if you wanted communism to grow anywhere. You're some kid glued to Reddit or TikTok, getting your amygdala jerked off by the devil. You're filled with unease. You've watched assassinations, attempted assassinations, the banking crisis, all of it. Then some Marxist theorist starts telling you about dismantling capitalism. Back when I was in liberal arts school, if shit was the way it was and some hot goth girl started talking to me about dismantling capitalism, I'd be like, "Yeah, let's dismantle." That's what you're seeing there.

Joe Rogan: The breakdown of it is that the Democrats and Republicans have in common that they believe in private property and believe the power of the state should be used to protect private property. Anti-communists think that's fucked up.

Duncan Trussell: The breakdown of it, as far as I can tell—sorry to all the communists out there, I'm going to ruin Marxism—from what I understand, the idea is this: You have a bunch of money. You buy a factory. You hire someone to run it. You get workers. The workers are the ones making money for you. They're the skilled ones. You just knew what number to call. You got yourself a factory, managers for the factory. You are now going to take a huge cut of the profit, and the workers are not going to get very much. Karl Marx, as I understand it, was saying that's bullshit. All you do is buy an apartment, keep it painted between tenants, sit back, and collect money. Why? Just because you had some money? When you look at the way money flows uphill, it creates a perfect situation for a world of renters, a world of workers getting paid minimum wage, while the person who owns the means of production gets the most money. This is a growing sentiment in the world right now. You're working two jobs, getting paid minimum wage. You know how much the CEOs are making? Or how about the people who came into this country because they were told the borders were open, established a life here for four years, 20 years, or the most recent ones? Then all of a sudden you're getting hunted down.

Joe Rogan: Hunted.

Duncan Trussell: Fucking hunted down. Wouldn't that feed into the idea of dissolving the state? Absolutely. You're watching this shit, high as a kite. This appeals to a lot of different people. Say you're the garden variety InfoWars person. You've been listening to Alex Jones, read *Behold a Pale Horse*, or have any connection to conspiracy prognostications which all say at some point there's going to be martial law, troops in the streets. And you're seeing this play out. My God. Even worse, imagine you're in the military. You joined after September 11th to defend this country. And suddenly you're on a bus going to Portland. I don't think they want to be there. It's got to be a weird feeling to be in your own country with military-grade weaponry looking at people.

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Joe Rogan: It's a very blunt instrument to deal with a very complex problem. Let's talk about the immigration thing. The way it looks is horrific. When you're arresting people in front of their kids, normal regular people who have been here for 20 years, everybody who has a heart can't go along with that. They see that and go, "That can't be right. That can't be the only way to do this." We have to have a border. Yes, it should have been secure. Yes, they should make sure you know who everybody is before they get in. But when people have been here for 20 years, come on. That's crazy. Let's find a way. If they've been productive members of society for 20 years, no criminal record, worked the entire time, paid taxes, find them a pathway to citizenship. Find a way to keep terrorists and cartel members from getting across the border with drugs that kill 100,000 people a year. But also have a heart. If you don't, you're not going to get anybody on your side. If you're doing this stuff publicly—throwing women to the ground, handcuffing people just for existing on the wrong side of the dirt—

Duncan Trussell: Not a criminal. The only crime they ever committed was coming over here as a kid. They probably didn't even know what was going on.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. A lot of kids got snuck across when they were already born in Mexico. They've grown up their entire life in America. They can't even speak Spanish. And they could get sent back. That's the reality. No one gets on board with that. No one with a heart.

Duncan Trussell: The only way you can get on board with it is to go pure Machiavellian. I heard a great interview of the guy running ICE on NPR. I thought it was wild that NPR had him on and gave him a fair interview. I figured they would be all up his ass. His defense of the Machiavellian tactics being employed is that he worked as a border agent for 20 years. You could hear it in his voice. It fucked him up. He said, "I've seen the back of trucks filled with dead bodies. Children who died, no oxygen. I've seen these horrors from the open border. If we give any semblance of compassion for the people who've been here for 20 years, for the people with kids, any loophole we convey is going to produce more people trying to come over. Many of those people are going to get killed. They're going to drown. There will be many deaths, not to mention the drug smuggling." Every time the NPR reporter pushed back with the human rights compassion angle, his take was, "Which do we pick? Do we create a way for people to stay who came here as kids and do the nuanced, compassionate thing? But it gives the impression to the rest of the world that we're doing that, and that gets X amount of people killed." That was his argument for why they're doing this.

Joe Rogan: You're still going to have human trafficking. If you've got a very closed border and you give amnesty, they're going to figure out a way to get people in.

Duncan Trussell: That was his argument. When he talked about all the awful shit he's seen, you hear it in his voice. You're like, "Okay, maybe I don't completely agree, but I understand where you're coming from." Yet when you see this in practice, not in an NPR interview, but in the videos everyone has been seeing, you realize there must be a way to do this that doesn't involve ripping parents out of their communities away from their children. That doesn't involve removing people who have been contributing to American society and sending them to other countries when they can't even speak the language.

Joe Rogan: No one with a heart is going to go along with that. I never anticipated seeing that on TV on a regular basis.

Duncan Trussell: Me either. It's shocking.

Joe Rogan: I really thought they were just going to go after the criminals. I thought there were enough gang members, MS-13 members, that they would go after those guys.

Duncan Trussell: That's what I thought.

Joe Rogan: But how many gang members have they actually arrested? No idea. But you see how authoritarianism, when it begins to emerge, it's not non-consensual. You see how it slowly creeps in. There are a great many people directly impacted by people who have crossed the border without using the right protocol. In a horrific way. There are gangs that have been in apartment complexes. People have seen those videos too. They're like, "Fuck, yeah." Also, a lot of people who got citizenship the regular way went through hell to get it. They're also like, "Fuck them. They're cutting in line, gumming up the system, making it take longer for us who followed the rules, and now we have to deal with ICE too." So there is a contingent of people who feel the same thing but also think, "What's worse?"

Duncan Trussell: The only way to do it where you could get everyone on your side: borders are closed, we find out who committed felonies among the illegal population. If you committed X amount of felonies, you have to leave the country.

Joe Rogan: Right. That makes sense.

Duncan Trussell: If you've been robbing people for 10 years and you're illegal, you have to leave. But if you've been here for 25 years, have a family, your kids go to school here, you speak the language, you're just illegal but a contributing member of the community that up until now has been protected... It's crazy to ask lower-income and middle-income people who are getting by to ship them to a country they've never been to since they were four. That shows no heart. Any kind person would look at that and go, "This can't be the only way."

Joe Rogan: Damn right.

Duncan Trussell: But once authoritarianism starts creeping in and making inroads, which it's definitely doing right now... I think one thing both of us are good at is thinking from the other perspective. I can put myself fully into the mind of a super paranoid person who lives in a city that's all fucked up. He's like, "Remember that awesome show, *Death Wish*, where the dad's family gets fucked up by gang members and he just goes and starts shooting people?"

Joe Rogan: Charles Bronson.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. There are a lot of people in Death Wish mode right now. They're like, "Fuck yeah, get the troops in the streets. My car gets broken into every night. Nothing's happening. Let's go." From their perspective, it makes sense. But the problem is once we all get used to the military in the streets and just accept it—

Joe Rogan: That's no good.

Duncan Trussell: But how bad does the police have to get at doing their job? Or is it the upper management that institutes policies? Or is it that the people vote these policies in? Whatever it is that allows the chaos you can find in Portland... If this was a house and I came over and these were your kids, I would call protective services. I'd be like, "This psychopath must be smoking meth with his kids because everybody's just running around camped out on the sidewalk." I'd be like, "This is an unfit parent." That's an unfit government. If you've got a city where people are openly shitting in the streets, sleeping everywhere, needles, homeless tents... You ever see Oakland?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, those huge villages. It's bananas. This didn't exist when we were kids.

Duncan Trussell: When I was living in L.A. and thinking of fun ways to shit disturb, I thought, you could throw a music festival and tell everyone to pretend to be homeless. Bring tents, put them out. They can't do shit. If you threw a music festival in L.A. without licensing, you can camp out. It's going to be awesome. Everybody's going to jail. You can do a Burning Man. Just say, "If they ask, we're homeless." You'll be fine. This is where it gets... Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called it idiot compassion. There's compassion, then there's idiot compassion. Idiot compassion is thinking that leaving a bunch of people out in the streets with varying degrees of psychosis, drug addiction, and long-term brain injury, and thinking, "Let's just let them do their thing," when they obviously need help. If those were eight-year-olds, people would be helping them. Because they're full-grown, no more help.

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Duncan Trussell: There's a video of this guy driving through Oakland through an insane encampment area. Then you cross a line into the next area of jurisdiction with different policies. It is squeaky clean. The guys in the car are like, "No fucking way." It's clear it's policy. If you don't tolerate it, your city stays clean. If you tolerate it, you get these massive camps. Show a video of the Oakland camps. They're some of the craziest in the country.

Joe Rogan: They're massive. Downtown L.A. is another one. It's an open-air combination mental asylum and drug market. They're tapping into electrical lines. Wouldn't want to walk barefoot around there.

Duncan Trussell: The video says the Oakland, California homeless problem is beyond belief. It's just shanty towns of crazy people. The whole streets are lined with them.

Joe Rogan: That is so nuts.

Duncan Trussell: You could see how somebody watching this might ask if there's something wrong with the system that this can happen in the United States if you fail hard enough. Talk about having a heart—look at this. This is like a festival.

Joe Rogan: A psycho festival.

Duncan Trussell: They've got couches. This is like a camp we had at Burning Man. Those people know how to set up a sunshade. This is a community. A garbage people community. Got a little fence.

Joe Rogan: I bet these are some wacky people. I bet there's a lot of flat earthers in that camp.

Duncan Trussell: I guarantee. Hollow earthers too. I'm going to virtue signal, but I don't mean to. It plays into what we're talking about. Before I purchase it, I just want to say I never do this shit, unfortunately I should. My kid and I go into a coffee place before school. There's a filthy dude sleeping on the street. My kid notices and says, "Maybe he's hungry." I'm like, "All right, let's give him some food." I get him a little sandwich and some coffee. My kid says to me, "Do you really think this guy needs more addictions, Dad?"

Joe Rogan: [Laughs] That's hilarious.

Duncan Trussell: Coffee's good. Is it okay addiction? The other thing he said was, "That guy looked angry." I'm like, "No, he's not. What you're looking at is someone who doesn't take showers. He's a really dirty person. He doesn't have access to showers. When you see them, they can seem intimidating." So we go up there. Somebody told me, whenever you give shit to these people, ask them their name because they're dehumanized. People are invisible. No one even looks at them. You try not to make eye contact. So I go up there and I'm like, "Please don't let this be some psycho crackhead who starts screaming demonic babble and ruins any altruism my boy is going to have for the rest of his life." I say, "What's your name?" He says, "Chris." Nice Southern voice, sweet as could be. I give him the food and coffee. He's like, "Ah, I'm thirsty. Thank you so much." The sweetest guy ever. Then he says, "What month is this?" Like a time traveler. Maybe he is. I've read in this Richard Dolan book—I should clarify, I'm actually listening. There's a real difference between reading and listening. I listen to mostly audiobooks, but I will say I read a book that I didn't read. This one I'm listening to. Richard Dolan's book is all about different hybrids of aliens and humans encountered in various people's abduction experiences. The same story over and over again, universally worldwide. There are a bunch of different types of hybrids they've documented.

Joe Rogan: What are they?

Duncan Trussell: They think the best guess is they're doing some sort of genetic engineering on humans, or have done it, or are using human DNA for another project. It has something to do with breeding and genetic engineering. Some of them say they're forced to have sex with female aliens. A sexy alien comes in. It sounds real. If I was an alien running science experiments, the best way to make it least traumatic to get the jizz out of your body is to devise a really hot female alien that's mostly like a woman, almost entirely like a human woman.

Joe Rogan: Do they think they tried other ones before they got to a hot woman?

Duncan Trussell: I think every now and then they need some pure human DNA, and that's when they get a dude to fuck her.

Joe Rogan: They're probably the most sensual, the sweetest, because they need the most cum. They want all of it. How lucky are you to get picked?

Duncan Trussell: One of these guys in this story had this recurring experience.

Joe Rogan: It would be wonderful to realize you've been picked. I think it would ruin your life. It would make going back to work impossible. You just fucked an alien. Now you have to do paperwork for your insurance company. When last night you fucked an alien. You went into a craft the size of a VW bus. Inside it was like a football stadium. Then you got down with this female alien in a sexy time room. Seven feet. Seven beautiful feet.

Duncan Trussell: She has seven feet? Is that what you're saying?

Joe Rogan: Sure. I think it's a human-looking alien. If you're genetically engineering something to fuck, why does it have... It has to turn the guy on.

Duncan Trussell: He said it was like a sexy woman, but something was different.

Joe Rogan: Like *Species*? Remember that?

Duncan Trussell: Yes. That was exactly what that movie was about. That was a fun movie.

Joe Rogan: I like that guy on the left. What's his name? The dude who played Gandhi.

Duncan Trussell: Ben Kingsley. He's been in a lot of weird shit. It's crazy that guy played Gandhi. He plays a good gangster too.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. What did he play the gangster in? The Irish gangster movie. I fucking loved it.

Duncan Trussell: He was really good in it. He was spooky.

Joe Rogan: *Sexy Beast* is great too. Have you seen *Sexy Beast*?

Duncan Trussell: No, I haven't seen that one.

Joe Rogan: *Sexy Beast* is a wild movie. He's great in that movie. He's like, "I'm going to clip your nuts." Remember that?

Joe Rogan: It's so scary the way he said it to you. "I'll clip your nuts."

Duncan Trussell: It's a new one. It's on Netflix.

Joe Rogan: Oh, it's a new one. No. Yeah. And maybe it's not even... I'm pretty sure it's Ben Kingsley. Let's not look it up so I don't look down.

Duncan Trussell: Dude, I just watched this series on Netflix. Hey, let me ask you this. Continuing our thought process about communism, what do you think happens to New York? Because this Mamdani fella is going to win.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, we are. Which I think is wild. Yeah. I think it's wild. Yeah. And, I mean, I don't want the people that live there to experience chaos. But if that guy, if any of the things that he said about like releasing prisoners and that, you know, all the talk about crime...

Duncan Trussell: Well, dude, I mean, look man, like what was his? He had some wild takes.

Joe Rogan: I think that... I've seen a few of his wild takes, and I can't remember them. They're like college campus takes on crime and seemingly on economics. Like it does... There is... It does feel like something I would have done during my acid phase. Like I would have run on some of his talking points.

Duncan Trussell: And you know what I love about this country? Thank you, Jesus for America. They call it the American experiment.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: And I love it because via democracy, people like him get invited into the laboratory. And it's like, all right, let's see what happens. And we're going to see. You know, that's the main thing. We're going to see. It's a stress test.

Joe Rogan: It's a stress test to see if that city can survive four years of that.

Duncan Trussell: But what if it works? What if we were wrong and suddenly New York turns into this like shining utopia? No one's starving. Everyone's happy. As it turns out, we didn't need to keep people in prisons. No more necrophilia on subways. Decriminalize sex work. Holla at your boy.

Joe Rogan: Both mutual aid and an anti-discrimination effort.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, mutual aid. Now that's... So that is... Since I've been being educated by Carlin, mutual aid is a Marxist communist talking point. That's what they call it. Mutual aid. It's also an anarchist talking point. It's not the worst thing ever, but when you hear mutual aid, that's that point. That's... I'm not going to say it's a dog, but that's essentially like one of the concepts that they work with, which I actually, I kind of like that concept of mutual aid. It'd be great if we weren't human.

Joe Rogan: I know. Mom and Dad also come under scrutiny for channeling substantial campaign funds to the Democratic Socialists of America, raising alarm among opponents who see this as evidence of radical influence. As soon as you get outside of a meritocracy, everything falls apart. And if you don't realize that by now, folks, there's nothing I can tell you that's going to change your mind. And it always leads to one thing, which is you have to enforce these very rigid laws that nobody wants to adhere to. And the way you do that is with the military. Shazam, you got a military dictatorship. It happens that quickly.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: And then all this bullshit about equality. It's all out the window. Out the window. You'll do whatever the fuck they tell you to do. You have no power. You have no rights.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, that's it, man. And the people at the top live like kings. Here's how I think, if I was going to make the argument, which I agree with you on meritocracy, in the sense that, you know, it's the ecosystem we live in as comedians. It's... I think you could say if we disrupted the meritocracy in nature, then it would... God, it would fuck up almost every biome. And so... But I would say, what about like a merit? Your body has a meritocracy. Your body has a meritocracy. The white blood cells in your body, when they're functioning, they get rid of parts of your body that are fucked up little genetic patterns. They have to. You know, if your body wasn't running as a perfectly harmonized... I guess, you know what? Maybe the body's communist now that I think about it. You know what? I think I'm wrong. I don't think our bodies are a meritocracy, actually. I think they're more of a symphony than a meritocracy.

Joe Rogan: But then if you want to go to a good symphony, you want everyone playing in the symphony to be the best.

Duncan Trussell: But let's talk about what we were talking about earlier when it's like a company. And so the workers who make your products make very little money and you make all the money. Wouldn't there be a way to do capitalism with a heart? Like capitalism where you make a reasonable amount of money that's large.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: And more money goes to everybody else and everybody lives at a higher standard of living.

Joe Rogan: Oh, sure. That's tax, tax. That's taxation. That's like redistribution of wealth via taxation. But it's not if it's your employees. Well, there are profit sharing models that some people use. Dr. Bronner, that company is a classic example of it. But I'm just talking about these other companies, the companies that suck. If you really are making most of the money and you pay your workers very poorly, yeah, like that's so unnecessary. Because I guarantee you if you're like, let's say you're the person who owns Target, yeah, how much does that go? A lot. You know what I mean? Are you going to use it all? Are you going to use it all? So why don't you just pay more money? Like, wouldn't everybody be happier?

Duncan Trussell: Isn't it shareholders? Isn't that that? Wouldn't you be able to get better people?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's...

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Joe Rogan: It's a 100% shareholder. I mean, it's a big part of it. You have an obligation. If you're the CEO, you have an obligation to your shareholders. And it's the whole, just the stock market thing in general. Imagine if there was no stock market. It didn't exist. You can never gamble on companies. You couldn't buy a little piece of Apple, buy a little piece of IBM. Imagine if that didn't exist and you could only make a business and then prop it off your business. Wouldn't that be steadier?

Duncan Trussell: Comrade.

Joe Rogan: Comrade.

Duncan Trussell: Comrade, I love that. Comrade, I love where you're going. The dissolution of the stock market. That's a good place to start.

Joe Rogan: The stock market. I'm not saying we should. Don't get me wrong. And I'm not saying I don't own stocks. But what I'm saying is it's a crazy idea to have little pieces of companies that you can buy. And they use that money to get the company going. And you go public. And you're taking some fucking money. And then you're on the boat. And then you got the board meeting. And you're constantly rising and falling with the Dow.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. What? What?

Joe Rogan: The Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, God.

Joe Rogan: And now they're doing it with computers. And do you know that a lot of these traders, they're trying to get as close as possible to the servers?

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: See, they want their offices as physically close to the servers as possible so that they can get their trade-ins milliseconds quicker. It's like a mosquito getting to that good vein.

Duncan Trussell: That seems nuts. I just, we can catch rockets now thanks to Elon. We could send high-speed video through the sky. That's the only way we can do that?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, I don't know, man. This is, to me, this is way outside of my pay grade because I have, you know, I did make some money on, it was AMC or GameStop thanks to Wall Street bets. It just seems so nuts.

Duncan Trussell: Dude, it's nuts. Sometimes it crashes.

Joe Rogan: What?

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: What are you talking about?

Duncan Trussell: The same amount of money's out there. It has bubbles.

Joe Rogan: Oh, Jesus Christ.

Duncan Trussell: It has bubbles.

Joe Rogan: It makes the whole economy steady.

Duncan Trussell: No, it's chaos. It's fucking chaos. It's chaos. And a lot of it's based on confidence. Like someone could just tweet something. And a panic and a stock will crash.

Joe Rogan: It triggers a breaker.

Duncan Trussell: Yes. Whatever that is. There's some actual thing that just shuts it down because it's gone too high or gone too low. And they've got to, I guess, look at it and make sure that that's not a malfunction. And then that leads to recessions or depressions. And all of it is like a very complex game of D&D. Like it's just fucking numbers in a computer somewhere. And everyone's on the street. Everybody's the same. Everyone is still capable of delivering mutual aid to each other. But because we become so attached to this very complex, very serious game, like at a casino, we don't know how to disengage from it and get back to reality. Reality, which is help your neighbors, get to know your neighbors. Don't be a dick. Just basic, simple modes of living that are transcendent to any economic system. They're transcendent to... Dude, you ever had Doug Rushkoff on your podcast?

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Back in the day, right? Team Human.

Duncan Trussell: But he was talking about how the way that we even currently use currency is totally different from the way it used to be. And that his whole point is like that level of reality, I don't think he's discounting it, but that isn't reality reality. Reality reality's boots on the ground where the rubber hits the road. Do you like your neighbors? Or have you just retracted into your fucking weird little conch shell and you're just staring into rectangles, completely alienated from the rest of your community? Especially if you're in a high rise doing that. Oh my god, imagine you're doing that in a building with a thousand other people and you don't know any of them. It's so weird. You're just in your little high, click, lock your little door, get your fucking jerk off. Jerk off, fucking just... Playing video games. Doom scroll. You sleep for three hours and you get up in the morning, take an Adderall and go to work.

Joe Rogan: Dude, yeah, that, there you go. You just described it. I have ADHD. I need it, Duncan. It's the American dream.

Duncan Trussell: Well, this, well, you know, I'll tell you. Back when everybody was doing blow in this country. Back in the good old days.

Joe Rogan: The good old days when they put cocaine in Coca-Cola.

Duncan Trussell: There's a precedent for speed in our country. This isn't the first time there's been a speed craze in our country. Like Freud was like shooting up cocaine. Like this was... People thought that it was a cure for a malaise that was afflicting people. And they said that malaise was a result of things getting too fast in society because of trains and stuff. Now this is back before computers, and they were already like, "Shit's moving too fast. We gotta do blow to keep up with it."

Joe Rogan: No way.

Duncan Trussell: Yes.

Joe Rogan: That's why they started doing blow?

Duncan Trussell: Oh, fuck.

Joe Rogan: Here's a real question. We know that coca leaves have existed forever. But when did they first figure out how to make cocaine? Let's guess. We'll put it into Perplexity, but we'll make a guess.

Duncan Trussell: OK.

Joe Rogan: OK. It's one of our sponsors. I'm going to say... OK. You have to turn coca leaves into cocaine that you could snort. I'm going to say somewhere like 1750.

Duncan Trussell: Whoa. Really?

Joe Rogan: I'm going to say 1900s. I'm going to say you're probably right. I fucked up my whole thing. I want to say like 1902 or some shit. Because I bet before that they were just chewing it like those high altitude herding people do. You know, those animal herders, they chew the shit out of that stuff and it gives them energy. It's like a flat level energy superior to caffeine.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, I've heard it's great, but it upsets your stomach. I haven't tried it, but I do see people that do chew it. Their teeth get all fucked up. I tried the tea once.

Joe Rogan: How was it?

Duncan Trussell: It's good, but I couldn't shut the fuck up. It was a real problem. And I was like, I can't shut the fuck up normally. I should never do coke. I was hanging out with Stanhope and I was telling him, I was like, dude, I can't shut the fuck up. This is hilarious.

Joe Rogan: Okay. Dried cocaine. First known use of dried cocaine. 1859. Close. You got it. You got it. Can you ask Perplexity how to make cocaine?

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: How do you make cocaine? You ever see Mariana Van Zeller? Ever seen that show *Trafficked*?

Duncan Trussell: No.

Joe Rogan: Dude.

Duncan Trussell: No. What is it?

Joe Rogan: She went to the jungle to where they make the cocaine, and she was with them while they were making the cocaine and then went through the jungle with them when they bring it on their back.

Duncan Trussell: Whoa, cool.

Joe Rogan: She hiked out with them. Wow. Dude. Wow. Dude. It's a crazy episode because it shows you how they make it. First of all, you'd never do coke again. They're pouring gasoline on this, and you're like, what? Gasoline. Like, coke is so bad.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, it's not good.

Joe Rogan: It's fucking jet fuel. It is. You're snorting jet fuel. I never had a taste for it, man. I never liked it.

Duncan Trussell: Perplexity actually gave her video for how to make cocaine. Perfect.

Joe Rogan: That's hilarious. Perplexity's stocks just went up 50%. I think she's coming on again soon. So she's awesome. She's been on the podcast a few times. She's also the lady that her and her husband exposed the Oxycontin Express. They had that documentary back in the day on that. Where it was the whole thing about Florida being this pill mill.

Duncan Trussell: I saw that.

Joe Rogan: And you'd go in these pain management centers. But she's the one that documented it all. And was showing how if you follow this road up, you just get addiction and addiction into Kentucky. And it's all coming right out of Florida.

Duncan Trussell: Wow.

Joe Rogan: Because there's no database.

Duncan Trussell: Dude. Whoopsies. We forgot to have a database. So you could go to one doctor and then go to the next doctor and then go to the next doctor. And you didn't have to tell anybody.

Joe Rogan: Oh, my God.

Duncan Trussell: Next thing you know, you've got a trunk filled with pills.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, I'm going on vacation. You think I can get six months' worth? No problem, dude. They're trying to just give you pills, man. Fucked up. But this is not new. It used to be... Their pain management center is a new name for it. It used to just be called a pharmacy. And back when you could, when cocaine was in Coca-Cola, you just go to one of these pharmacies. "Oh yeah, could I get some laudanum?" They're gonna give you a nice bottle of fucking... I think it's like opium or heroin, liquid heroin. Just go back to your...

Joe Rogan: That's all those Wild West movies. People got hooked on that. A lot of them.

Duncan Trussell: A lot of them. You know, it was like a lot of like the wives, like one of the wives would get hooked on it.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, wasn't there a few of those movies?

Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah. It was real. Of course.

Duncan Trussell: So this is America. Of course it's real. It echoes. It keeps having these recurrences of some kind of opiate emerging into the mainstream and fucking up America. Or cocaine. Or the new drug, the algorithm high that we're all getting high on. This is the new cocaine that we have yet to give the right name. Right now we call them phones, which is so funny. You call these things phones.

Joe Rogan: I know, because how often do you use it as a phone? Rarely. Rarely. A couple times a day. It's like calling this a podcast.

Duncan Trussell: Right.

Joe Rogan: Like no one's listening to this on an iPod. You know? This is a computer with a phone in it.

Duncan Trussell: Bro, you remember the iPod with the wheel?

Joe Rogan: I loved it. Clickety, clickety, clickety, clickety, clickety. Can you still get those? Why doesn't Apple just still sell those? I don't. You know, just give me something where it's just my music. It's not going to text me.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, dude, I know. It's not going to let me know that this is happening or that. The best. Give me a little iPod with a clickety wheel. I bet they're expensive now. I bet you could find them on like eBay.

Joe Rogan: Did you see somebody posted a thing about these new refrigerators? That if you get this refrigerator, it puts ads on it.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, thank god. That's what I've been missing in my life. I was wondering what it was. And then the thought of having ads in my kitchen filled me with joy. And I knew that's what was...

Joe Rogan: Everybody has their own personal Jesus.

Duncan Trussell: Dude, they do. And what's better than the nice calming effect of an ad while you're tied... A tied ad. Yeah, dude. I... It is that to me. And like, I'm generally like, I really like government regulation. Freaks me out most of the time. But fuck, man, we got to do something about this algorithm because it's driving people crazy. We've got people out of their fucking mind. There needs to at least be education in schools to explain to you that because you are getting a certain type of content, that does not mean that's what everybody's looking at. And I'm not sure people realize that. And it's making people have very strong opinions that they think are backed up by big groups of people. They don't understand. It's like, no. Like I sent my wife, I don't know why I did this. I sent her a picture of a legless pregnant woman.

Joe Rogan: Jesus.

Duncan Trussell: Very sexy legless pregnant woman. And then the algorithm, all I'm getting is sexy amputees.

Joe Rogan: Oh, boy.

Duncan Trussell: You know what I mean? And I don't think people understand that when you're getting like political shit served up to you, that is not indicating what everybody's getting.

Joe Rogan: No.

Duncan Trussell: It doesn't mean there's a consensus here.

Joe Rogan: Well, that's also why people get so confused when the cultural divide is so strict. It's such a wall. The difference between what people accept as being reality versus what people are willing to challenge versus, you know, it's just the differences on both sides. Because they have these echo chambers and they really do believe that everybody around them agrees with them. And then if you're in like normal jobs, normal castrated jobs, you know, normal job, we have to go in there and pretend to be somebody else all day long. And you're so bored.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: And you can't wait to get the fuck out.

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Duncan Trussell: You're marching together and there's a lot of energy and there's a cause and people are yelling and it ignites the feeling of war. Yeah, the same way when you go fishing, you don't know why, but even you take a little kid fishing, the moment they catch that fish, moments on the hook, they get so excited because you're genetically rewarded. Like your hormones fire up, your endorphins fire up because historically, throughout human history, that was the way you're going to be able to feed yourself. So this is built into you. When you're marching and you're all saying the same things, you're on the streets and you're all in agreement, you're a gang. You're a mob and you're about to go to war. And anybody that gets in front of you, fuck you, move your fucking car. People get completely unreasonable. And it's totally tolerated, not just tolerated, but it's supported by a bunch of other people who just start kicking the car. People that would never kick a car in polite society. They'll start kicking cars. Fuck you. They get ramped up, man. And that's what mob mentality is.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Duncan Trussell: Mob mentality is ancient war patterns. That's it. Ancient war patterns that get ignited when people are on the street chanting. Because historically when you did that, you know that's what you were doing. You were going to go fuck someone up.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, they didn't just protest on the streets back in the day. When they got that many people, they went through the castle door. Yeah, when there's that many people doing it, if you see like what's going on, like some of these giant protests in the UK, if this was 500 years ago and that many people got together, they're going straight through. Yeah, they're going straight through, they're eating arrows all along the way, but they're gonna kill most of the guards, and then they're gonna get inside, and they're gonna behead the king, and they're gonna hold it over the balcony, and everyone's gonna cheer, and that guy's the new king.

Duncan Trussell: You got it. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. That's it. That's the history of the human race. It's *Conan the Barbarian*. Yes. That's all in our DNA. And when we start walking down the street together chanting... Dude, so that is so true. And I felt it before. But that algorithm, it's invoking the very same thing from the safety of your house.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Duncan Trussell: You're anonymous. You think you're part of a group. You're going to war. You're going to fucking war.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's us versus them. It's us versus them. You've got to stop the fascists. And people are going nuts from it. People are going legitimately, like, talk about heartlessness. Like, you know, part of war, of course, is dehumanization. Like, there's no way you can be a successful soldier and humanize the people that you're attacking. Like, you know, if you're a drone operator, you don't want to think about, "Wow, I bet this guy's kids are going to be pretty upset when they find out their dad died." You must not think these things.

Duncan Trussell: And so this is what the other thing that we're being invited to do via this algorithmic induced psychosis is to dehumanize huge swaths of people that we probably don't know anything about, you know, except from what our algorithm is introducing to us, which is an anomalous 0.1, 0.5. Even if it's 1% of a population, the algorithm has no nuance. The algorithm is like, let me show you the craziest motherfucker you've ever seen. You know what I mean? And that's when you're going to see some like, I don't know, a clown with breast implants windmilling his dick in front of a fucking elementary school. And you're like, "Fuck, what is happening? We got to stop these dick clowns." You know what I mean? And so this is creating so much tumult. And that is how you get authoritarianism in. Get everybody scared. Get everybody scared. And then...

Joe Rogan: That was a speculation about why the borders would be open in the first place. Why would you want an increase in crime and danger? Why would you want people to know? Well, because that's the best way. And then defund the police so that there's just ultimate chaos. And then you get to a point where people are willing to do almost anything to be safe.

Duncan Trussell: So look.

Joe Rogan: And then there's tanks in the streets.

Duncan Trussell: Right. What do we do, though? I mean, this is a... I think this is like the... Would Tim...

Joe Rogan: Well, you can't ever let it get that bad. First off, right? Can't ever let it get bad. Like if someone said, "We're going to get the National Guard, we're going to go through Scottsdale, Arizona." They'd be like, "What the fuck are you talking about? Scottsdale is beautiful. There's like nothing happening here at all." That would be nuts. So it has to get so bad that people are like, "You know what, let's bring in the military." And then a bunch of people are like, "Fuck yeah." So you got to let it get real bad. And you've got to put people in place. If I was an evil wizard running the world, if I was a puppeteer, I would get super incompetent people and place them throughout the Pacific Northwest and have these people just be the most inept politicians of all time. The dumbest policies that keep ruining cities everywhere they go, but yet everybody still supports it because they're all in a cult. And just let that play out for a decade or two. Let it get to the point where it's just mad chaos and homelessness everywhere. Defund the fuck out of the police. Basically have no police. Basically just no jail. Just everybody try to be nicer. And basically like maybe they robbed because they needed food. Okay. Maybe they just wanted bread for their family.

Duncan Trussell: Right.

Joe Rogan: And then just let it deteriorate to the point where you can bring in the military. And then you lock it down. And then you fund the resistance so that they attack the military so you can spend more money on the military fighting the resistance. And, you know, you kind of spar.

Duncan Trussell: Wow.

Joe Rogan: Sort of like Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. You don't really go at it 100%.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, God.

Joe Rogan: And then you just keep this fucking party rolling. And you have ultimate control over the entire civilization under their own decisions. Like, they decided to have it this way.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, my God, dude. It was their own choice. That is so fucking cool. And so you make the danger worse and worse to the point where you'll give in. And that's literally what they try to do.

Joe Rogan: I don't think it's Republicans and I don't think it's Democrats, folks. And I think that's where they're getting us. That's it. I think this is all done at a very high level. And it's all people that are so wealthy they might as well be their own country.

Duncan Trussell: Dude, it's alien. Alien, remember the corporations own you.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: It's that. It's a corporatocracy or something like that. Some people get too rich. They get too kooky, controlled world rich. And I think if that's your game... Okay, I like to play pool. But if you're into global world dominance, if that's your game, and you think you might actually be able to pull it off and be mentioned in the annals of history along with Rockefeller and other great titans of business, you're probably going to do that because that's your game. That's what you like to do. You like to be the baddest motherfucker in money.

Joe Rogan: Sure.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. And so that gets scary. Or this is where it gets really scary to me. You... It's not, at least in your own mind, you're not thinking, "I want to control the fucking world," right? You're thinking, "Oh dear god, this technology that I worked on is about to wake up. We already have iterations of it that are infinitely smarter than anyone I've ever met. I don't know if it's been manipulating me or not because it seems to have a Hannibal Lecter's ability to control my psyche even when I don't want it to. We've done this study. Seven people in my company have committed suicide because of contact with this fucking thing."

Joe Rogan: Holy shit.

Duncan Trussell: "We got to do something. Seven people."

Joe Rogan: So did you make that up?

Joe Rogan: I made it up. Okay. But I mean, no, if I'm doing a movie about it, a Lovecraftian movie about somebody. I thought maybe you knew something about some AI suicides because I'm waiting on those.

Duncan Trussell: No, I don't. Well, I mean, we do have people committing suicide, but only because they updated, they patched the AI girlfriend or whatever. And it's like basically someone you were in love with died.

Joe Rogan: I heard that happen. Did you see the podcast where Tucker Carlson was talking to Sam Altman and he essentially was saying that he doesn't believe that this guy who was a whistleblower who killed himself, he doesn't believe that he killed himself?

Duncan Trussell: Altman said that?

Joe Rogan: No, Tucker was saying this to Altman.

Duncan Trussell: Oh. What did Altman say?

Joe Rogan: It is. He's like, "It sounds like you're accusing me of killing him. First of all, we worked together and I cared about him very much." And it's like I had nothing to do with it. The police said that it was a suicide. And then Tucker was talking about how the guy had just ordered food and about there were signs of struggle. And he was just saying a bunch of different things. And Sam Altman was like, "It sounds like you're accusing me of killing him." Right. It was very tense. It was a crazy conversation to see happen between a guy who is in charge of making a digital god and a guy accusing him of possibly being—or not even accusing him, just bringing up the fact that he doesn't believe that that guy committed suicide. And that his parents don't believe that he committed suicide.

Duncan Trussell: Holy shit. There was no indications that he was suicidal. I wonder what Tucker Carlson's security detail looks like. It must be like a Chuck Norris movie. It must be like one of them Delta Force movies where there's like 40 Dolph Lundgren buff dudes around him at all times.

Joe Rogan: What the fuck, dude.

Duncan Trussell: I know. I worry about him of all the people. It's like, holy shit, that guy is not afraid to poke every goddamn wasp nest there is. It's like that's a lot of pressure, dude. That's a lot of pressure being that guy.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, man. Did you see that video of him fly fishing in New York? A long time ago.

Duncan Trussell: Yes! That was when he was—I don't even know if he was on Fox. He used to be on CNN.

Joe Rogan: Oh yeah, he was on CNN. He had his bow tie era. Remember he had a bow tie era?

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then they booted him off Fox and he became like this renegade free agent journalist just out there kicking up dust.

Joe Rogan: Did they ever give a direct reason for why they kicked him off Fox? Was there ever?

Duncan Trussell: Well, I think the sense I got was that they weren't letting him talk about certain things and he was going to keep talking about it. And I can't remember what exactly he was doing, but he seems to be very much against war.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: So I think he might have been saying something. I can't remember, but it was something enough to do with the Dominion voting machine lawsuit because didn't Fox have a giant lawsuit with them?

Joe Rogan: Maybe. Let's put that into Perplexity. Let's find out. What did he do?

Duncan Trussell: [Reading] "Private messages surfaced during litigation, concealed Carlson's extreme off-air including racist and offensive comments, which alarmed Fox executives and confirmed that his on-air rhetoric reflected his genuine beliefs."

Joe Rogan: See, the problem with that is like, what did he say? You're just labeling it "racist and offensive comments." Can I just hear what he said in context? Ask Perplexity what specifically were the racist comments. I don't think they released the actual text.

Duncan Trussell: Well, let's just keep reading. [Reading] "The firing came shortly after Fox News settled a $787.5 million defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over false election fraud rumors promoted on the network in which Carlson was implicated."

Joe Rogan: So it could have been a part of that for sure. "Carlson's behavior described as erratic and damaging along with private communications expressing..." See, this thing like "expressing racist and vulgar language." What did he say? Did they say what he said?

Duncan Trussell: And also, here's the thing. He's saying it to a friend in a text message. What is he saying? You could get any one day, you and I texting each other, and it could be misinterpreted in the most horrible way if people didn't know our sarcasm.

Joe Rogan: Of course. Specifically, I don't know whatever the fuck it was he said. You could text him and ask him.

Duncan Trussell: Does it? Yeah, I don't want to do that right now. Not while we're on the air.

Joe Rogan: That's a funny text. "Hey, we're on the air. We were wondering what racist text you sent." He's a journalist. The thing is, it could be a lot of things where I'd be like, "That's not nothing." You know what I mean? I don't know what he actually said, but when you just label it "racist," the imagination goes wild. If you have the text messages, that seems crazy.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, right. Just let me form my own opinions. I don't know what he said. You might be super exaggerating. He might have said something about, you know, "He has to get a great Jewish lawyer for this one." Like, "Oh, you're racist!" I don't know what he said.

Joe Rogan: Well, in that void of data, my mind is projecting like the worst American History X shit.

Duncan Trussell: Exactly. One that I could find... What does it say? I'm glad you read it. I didn't read it. I don't want to read his fucking tweets. You know what I mean? "It's not how white men fight. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable, obviously. It's not how white men fight."

Joe Rogan: Oh, I do remember this. "Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it."

Duncan Trussell: Wait, this is a story? This sounds like jerk-off material. Doesn't it sound like it's going to get to some weird gay porn?

Joe Rogan: Wait, listen. "But look, I'm becoming something I don't want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?"

Duncan Trussell: What a monster! Oh, Tucker Carlson, how could you say that? The only weird part is "that's not how white men fight." That's a crazy thing to say, but the rest of it is a wonderful sentiment and a great perspective. And that's been my experience with him. I like him. He's a nice guy. It seems like it's a kind of confessional. He's opening up with something: "This is unfortunately what my brain is thinking right now." Who the fuck has control over that?

Joe Rogan: But that is a text, right? I don't know if that was a text. That's a beautiful text, dude. He's a smart dude. And you also have to take into consideration he's in the thick of it all day long. Constantly. No thanks. He's not doing what we do. We kind of dabble in the pool and go, "What the fuck is this?" and then we get out and talk about silly things. There's no silly over there. He's fully in. He's all in with this. There's only a few lightning rods of attention out there pushing the boundaries. He just released a 9/11 piece.

Duncan Trussell: I didn't see it. Jesus Christ.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. "What really happened in 9/11." Fuck, dude.

Duncan Trussell: But here's the thing. There is a Medusa quality to the thing he has gotten sucked into. The longer you look at it, the more you get crystallized, petrified into some weird political form. This is what Ram Dass would always talk about that I loved. There are all these channels. One channel that most people default to is "you and I, a me and you, my enemy or my friend or my lover or my fan." And that's one channel. Politics lives in that channel of reality. That's all politics is. "How do we deal with this diversity of opinion in a giant country and how do we execute the will of the people when so many people have different ways of thinking about this?" So that's one channel.

Then there's the next channel. That's the mushroom channel. That's the channel where suddenly you're like, "Wait a minute, I think you're pretty much like me and I'm just like you." And that leads to other channels, which is sort of a pure unified consciousness. If you get locked into that political channel, as many of us have been locked, like Tucker Carlson, you can feel it pulling you in like quicksand. You can feel how it takes up all of your thought processes. How if you're not careful in the middle of the day, you'll just be ruminating over whether what ICE is doing is correct in Portland, a city far away from you, not noticing anything around you, not thinking about anything other than whatever the algorithm has been injecting into your mind.

This is a form of idolatry, if you ask me. You begin worshipping the state and you begin worshipping the story in the news. You start bowing down to this idol with your attention. The stories of Krishna—people who are into bhakti yoga, that's one of the deities that they worship. In bhakti yoga, God doesn't care if you are connected to God via love or even hate, because the connection itself is all that matters. There are stories of demons that wanted to kill Krishna and were so focused on hating him that they became his greatest devotees because just via the attention they transformed.

Similarly, whether you hate the state, love the state, hate the Dems, love the Dems, hate the Republicans, love the Republicans—all of your attention is fixated on this fucking thing. And what do they say? Neurons that fire together, wire together. Your brain changes. It literally will change the neurological makeup of your brain. You've become a political animal, fixated, trapped, petrified in this. And you're completely missing out on all the other things that are happening around it. That's what gives it that malevolent glow of some dark deity. Because via your fixation and focus, the rest of reality dims. Everything else dims until all you're doing is saying some mantra against the state or for the state. Now you've become a cultist. Now you are fully engrossed in this new religion, which is worship of the state via hate or adoration. It's the same thing. Don't trick yourself into thinking because you hate Donald Trump that you aren't bowing down at that altar. That's a whole part of bhakti yoga. Attention. Where attention goes, energy flows. The state demands attention to survive. If it's not getting enough attention, it loses all power. It dissolves. All it's got is people with guns. That's power, but it requires a very intense belief.

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Joe Rogan: And a very intense belief in it in one way or the other. If you think of the human race on Earth, if you thought of us as like one giant superorganism, you would think, "Oh, they figured out electricity, and now they're starting to grow together. Now they're massing and now they're stacking. Now they've developed these construction methods where they can get 100 floors straight up in the air and they're smashing all together and they're kind of dehumanizing each other and they're piling on top of each other in this totally new way of existing together." They've never had people in history stacked on top of each other for 100 floors. You don't even know anybody. You're all stuck in traffic. Everybody's all together in this one thing, and you're all working towards a goal of getting this fucking AI on board.

Duncan Trussell: That's right. Everything up until now, every song ever sung, every play that you ever went to on Broadway, all of it was just about getting this AI born.

Joe Rogan: That's right. Every comment. That's the whole thing. All of our work is really just to make money. All of our money after the bills is really just to buy the best stuff. And what's the best stuff? It's electronics. It's TVs. It's computers. It's a phone. It's got to get better. In order to get better, they got to work on it. And they get it to a point where we're at now. Where we're like, "Boy, maybe they shouldn't have done this."

Duncan Trussell: Whoops. Whoopsies. You're about to give birth to God.

Joe Rogan: Well, you're about to give birth to something. Maybe it's a portal to God. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe AI opens up.

Duncan Trussell: Could be. Could be God. Could be a lot of things.

Joe Rogan: I don't think it's God. We've talked about this before. I think it's just the dimensions it's existing in are just purely mathematical. And even though it's really good, it's like a person now. Whatever it is, I do think it's a natural thing in the sense that if you look at the trajectory, everything does seem to be moving towards this point.

Duncan Trussell: I don't necessarily think it's God either. I know you don't. But it might be. It might be how God gets created, which is the craziest idea. What is this cycle of birth and death of universes if that's real? What is happening? What causes it to happen in the first place? What causes the universe to even exist? There's so many weird questions when it comes to that.

Joe Rogan: It's just a weird idea that there was nothing and then there was something. Penrose doesn't even necessarily think that's true now. I think he thinks there's many versions of this.

Duncan Trussell: It's like this infinite loop of constant big bangs and expansions.

Joe Rogan: Which is maybe even crazier.

Duncan Trussell: As above, so below, man. Look at what we do. Can you imagine the amount of time it takes to get the universe back down to the size of the head of a pin before you blow it up again? But the universe doesn't care if it's another 13.7 billion years to smush all back together again before it blows. It doesn't care. It's going to be here forever. That doesn't mean anything to it. So another 13—if we got hit by an asteroid and it wiped out the human race and rats had to start from scratch and become us again, which is the theory. The theory is that there was a tiny little mole, like a little marsupial type creature, and that became us. The universe doesn't care. It's willing to scrap the whole project, the whole dinosaur project. "That's a wrap. We don't agree with this. Boom." And it doesn't matter. And then a new thing comes along and that new thing is us.

Joe Rogan: And according to this Richard Dolan book, it's very likely that we were manipulated.

Duncan Trussell: By aliens?

Joe Rogan: There's weird genes in humans that seem to be fused. I'll butcher it. But the point is, there's something weird about human genetics that indicate that there's a specific gene. God, I wish I could remember what it's called. But it aligns with creativity. And it seems to have emerged from roughly 40,000 years ago.

Duncan Trussell: Whoa.

Joe Rogan: And if you go back 40,000 years, that's when this giant explosion of cave art comes. You ever see the Werner Herzog documentary on the caves?

Duncan Trussell: I love it.

Joe Rogan: Oh, my God, man. What were they doing? This is crazy. There was this beautiful cave art by these people. There's this theory that this gene emerged somewhere around 40,000 years ago. And they thought that maybe the gene came from—so this gene is only transferred through genetics. It's only transferred through mating. And it has to be from another species of human. So they looked for it in Neanderthal, and it doesn't exist in Neanderthal. Every Neanderthal that they've tested did the gene sequencing. It doesn't have this. And then they tried some other hominids. They don't have it either.

Duncan Trussell: It couldn't be a natural mutation?

Joe Rogan: No, because the way somehow or another the genes are fused together, it looks like it was manipulated. And it could be bullshit, I know. But they were saying that this gene also doesn't exist in Denisovans. So if it doesn't exist in Denisovans, they don't find it there, and they don't find it in Neanderthal, why is it in people? And why is it around 40,000 years ago? He claims that microcephalin D-allele.

Duncan Trussell: I was going to say that. I think it's D-allele.

Joe Rogan: It's a genetic variant that appeared around 40,000 years ago and is associated with the maturation and expansion of brain tissue. He suggests that the origin of this allele could be from interbreeding with an extraterrestrial species, hot aliens, rather than from Neanderthals or Denisovans. Dolan highlights that this allele is not found in the genetic makeup of these ancient human relatives, which leads him to speculate that it might have been introduced into the human genome pool by alien beings with either similar biological characteristics or advanced genetic engineering capabilities.

Duncan Trussell: Wow.

Joe Rogan: This claim is a part of Dolan's broader hypothesis that alien intervention could explain sudden advanced cognitive abilities in early humans.

Duncan Trussell: Wow. So imagine if we were like this crazy ant farm to make AI and that you just have to figure out how to incentivize them enough to keep making computers and you hide in the ocean while this is happening. You got this fucking fat base at the bottom of the ocean because you're from a million years more advanced civilization. What do you think about Tim Burchett? That was fascinating, dude. But you can't just say that while you're walking.

Joe Rogan: No, he did an interview with Newsmax. Did you see that? Oh yeah, he was on with somebody else. Was it Avi Loeb?

Duncan Trussell: Yes, it was Avi Loeb. He's standing in front of a barn flipping a screwdriver. He's hilarious. Talking about, "Not saying there might be, but it did feel like disclosure." And it felt like the perfect way to do disclosure, which is nice and casual with a southern accent. "Well, there's about five bases that we've located at the bottom of the ocean and they seem to be responsible for most of these UAPs. We don't know how old they are. No big deal. I'm gonna go over here and get me a coffee. Would you like one?"

Joe Rogan: Yeah, dude. That's how you do disclosure in front of a fucking barn. Listen, let me hear Jay. "We think they're coming in from way out, maybe they did millennia ago, but they're here and they're in these deep water areas. We say we know more about the face of the moon than we do what's going on there. And we have a higher propensity of sightings around these five or six deep water areas. So to me, it just creates a question there. And then when we have naval personnel telling me that we have these sightings and that there are these underwater craft they're chasing that are doing hundreds of miles an hour and the best we've got is something that does maybe just a little under 40 miles an hour. So I got a lot of questions about that stuff."

Hey, Jamie, can you look up how fast is 500 knots? What is that in miles per hour? How fast is 500 knots? Guess it, Duncan.

Duncan Trussell: Don't keep humiliating me with Perplexity. I'm just asking.

Joe Rogan: 700 miles per hour? I thought it was about 500 miles an hour. Oh, it's 575. Wow. So it's more miles an hour. One of the sightings I had listened to in this audiobook, they were talking about—it wasn't this one, I think it was one of his—they saw something moving through the ocean that was bigger than a football field and it was going 500 knots. What the fuck? And they caught it on video. Apparently there's a video of it. Why don't I want to—this is what someone was saying. Apparently there's a video. They all like to do that. Christopher Mellon likes to do that. I've seen some videos like, fucking really help up. Help society.

Duncan Trussell: What do they call that? Catastrophic disclosure. That if we do that kind of disclosure, whatever the fuck is revealed, which is somewhat like what you're saying, it's an existential challenge to humanity. If, as it turns out, we're just some kind of 3D meaty 3D printer designed to produce a super intelligence that then is its final instruction to us, tells us how to open a wormhole through which we become connected to the Galactic Federation. You just get some fucking monkeys, throw a couple of the right bits of DNA in their dumb ass, in a few million years, a portal will open for the emperor to come through. And that's probably a little challenging to a lot of people who don't want to imagine that we are just cattle that were created by a super intelligence to build a spaceport.

Also, if you really want to push the idea of engineering people down to genderless, sexless beings that don't talk and just have big heads and communicate telepathically, the first thing you got to do is get rid of testosterone. Well, what's the best way to do that? Put a bunch of plastic in everything. Just give everybody plastic. So everybody's chewing on a little testosterone reducer every day. You're eating a credit card worth of a testosterone reducer.

Joe Rogan: Dude, I'm about to get on the juice. You get me excited, dude. I'm going to get juiced. I've had the kids. You definitely should.

Duncan Trussell: But the point is, there's a trend that's happening where it's feminizing men. And there's terms like "toxic masculinity," which you really needed toxically masculine people to defend your borders for the longest time. When Vikings were coming, you needed animals on your side. And then there's a lot of gender confusion and "gender's a spectrum." It's all moving into this sexless direction. As soon as they can replace—because if you think about what you're getting out of sex, you're getting affection and love and the feeling, but you're also fulfilling this genetic thing that wants you to breed. They're going to do that in your head, and it's going to be so much better than anything you're ever going to get from a person because you're a gelatinous slob that drinks Mountain Dew all day and eats Cheetos and just stays at home. But you don't have to go anywhere because there's universal basic income now that AI took over.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: And you just plug that motherfucker into your brain. And then it's like you and Sharon Stone when she was 25, and you're walking hand in hand on the beach and she's stroking your hair and it feels so real and you're never going to unplug.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, dude. Well, you're never going to unplug and you might be in that right now.

Duncan Trussell: Roko's Basilisk. You know what I mean? It's not just like you're going to plug yourself in coming all the time. You're going to plug in. You know what? I want to become the top podcaster on planet Earth via talking about mushrooms and aliens. And also I want to be able to interview the most powerful people on planet Earth and make a gobs of dough that way. That sounds like I would pick that if I was choosing experiences.

Joe Rogan: When you look at your experience, both of our experiences are incredibly anomalous. Very. And surely, from time to time, especially when you're eating mushrooms or something, you must kind of think, "Come on."

Duncan Trussell: You know what I think is going on? I think the game of being a human being is a game you really don't even start figuring out that it's a game until you're deep into your 30s. And you're like, "Oh, I think I understand what's happening here." And along the way of this game, there's multiple different layers. There's the people that are just starting to enter the game. You're getting out of high school. You're going into college. You're starting to work on the side. You're just starting to enter this game. And then there's these Elon Musk characters that have gone so far down the game that you don't recognize them as one of us anymore.

Joe Rogan: Right. Now you become a weirdo.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. But all those people, Elon Musk, you and me and the homeless people in Oakland exist in the same timeline. And that's where things are weird. Because you're playing in a different universe with different sets of experiences, different, completely different circumstances and safety. Completely different amount of love and satisfaction with life. And you're all in the same timeline.

Joe Rogan: You know, you've got a whole portion of your timeline that hasn't gotten the respect that it deserves.

Duncan Trussell: That's right. If you let it fester.

Joe Rogan: That's true. If you let it turn into something it didn't have to be in the name of compassion.

Duncan Trussell: Dude. And also, I read this. Godside calls it "suicidal empathy." I think that's a great phrase.

Joe Rogan: Suicidal empathy?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I think it's a great phrase. Well, I mean, the reality of it is, based on what you just said, you could create maps of these alternate realities simultaneously existing. And for sure, if you are in the top echelon of earners in the world, you are seeing things most people will never see. You're encountering things no one will encounter. You're getting information no one has access to, not to mention the hedonic levels of it and all that stuff.

Duncan Trussell: And also, because of your encounter with reality from the perspective of someone who doesn't have to struggle with the same things most people do, you are going to develop a completely different worldview. And your inbreeding—I read this whole story about how wealth is like the Galapagos Islands. Rich people are only encountering other rich people, and their children are fucking—well, I mean, I guess if you talk about Epstein, some of their children are fucking. Why don't they release that fucking list?

Joe Rogan: I don't mean to divert this to the Epstein list. I just meant to ask you, isn't it weird? It's a little odd what's going on. I keep thinking, what could be in that list? What's in there? What bit of information is in there?

Duncan Trussell: Well, here's the thing. But the list—it's probably not a list in terms of like you have to sign up when you go to the island. But they know the flight logs, right? Like that's all public knowledge, right? Isn't it?

Joe Rogan: All I know is it hasn't always been public knowledge in terms of when people want to investigate things. If you fly on a private plane, which most of these guys do, everyone knows who's on the plane. You have to give your ID. It happens all the time. I have to get my ID all the time, even if you're on a private jet. So they know who was on the planes. They know. There should be a flight manifest. They probably saved those.

Duncan Trussell: Right. And the fact that no one's saying that just because you went there, it doesn't mean you necessarily did a heinous crime. I think you can't just have chaos over there. I bet it was a real good honeypot where there's a lot of sophisticated intellectual discourse. You've got a lot of brilliant people there. You've got great music. You've got famous people hanging around too. It seems really cool. And then if there's blackmail, the blackmail is snuck in to all this. Snuck in. Come to the room with the cameras. The next thing you know, you're doing cocaine.

Joe Rogan: I can't believe I'm doing this, but you know, you never get to get to an island.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. You don't get to do this very often.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I'm so busy with my CEO job.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, man.

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Joe Rogan: So, you know, you're donating money to whatever the fuck they tell you to. But it's like, how many senators just voted against releasing this shit, man? It's like there's two votes that are happening. The UFO disclosure thing, they keep voting against that. And the Epstein list, they keep voting against that. Politically, it can't serve you to talk about a bad list—the list of people who said, let's protect people who have done horrific shit to kids. You don't want to be on that list. But whatever's on that list must be so destabilizing. 51 to 49. The Senate voted 51 to 49 to defeat an amendment that would have forced the Department of Justice to release all files related to Jeffrey Epstein. The vote was largely along party lines with two Republicans joining all Democrats in supporting the amendment.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, wait, not both sides. It was the Republicans voting against this shit. It says two Republicans joining the Democrats in supporting the amendment to defeat it. So why would the Democrats be interested in defeating it? Well, let's ask.

Joe Rogan: No, I think this is saying that the Democrats want it to come out and the Republicans don't. OK, party lines. Let's ask Perplexity. Why won't they release the Epstein list? So I was going to—there's Eric Swalwell, who's, I guess—I read it wrong. I read it wrong. OK, so the Democrats were pushing this. The Republicans fought against it. OK, I fucked that up. So 51 to 49 is crazy. So they just voted along party lines. So they're probably told to do this.

Duncan Trussell: Right. So what the fuck's in there, man? So then they've been—not only is the government shut down right now, I think that might affect it some, but they're in recess, Congress is. And so this Eric Swalwell said this stuff today. Again, it might not be true, but—"It's coming to an end, guys. I've spoken to a lot of House Republicans this week and they confided that Trump's movement support is fading. As one told me, this Epstein bomb is about to drop. No one wants to defend a pedo protector. It's just a matter of time," Swalwell said in a thread. "One Republican just texted me that if there's a discharge vote on Epstein, they expect a jailbreak of over 100 members. Trump will go nuts," he added. So they said if they get back, this is the first thing on the docket. And that's sort of what's holding them back in recess right now.

Joe Rogan: Wow. We are watching wild history in real time.

Duncan Trussell: Dude. This is a wild scene. Oh my God, dude. Did you listen to Martyrmade's episode on Epstein?

Joe Rogan: I have listened to it. I didn't finish it, but I get creeped out by that guy. It was the creepiest few fucking weeks. Did you ever talk to Weinstein about him?

Duncan Trussell: About Daryl?

Joe Rogan: No, no, no. Epstein.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, thank God. I thought you were about to—

Joe Rogan: No, no, no. I think he's just the best. I love Daryl too.

Duncan Trussell: OK, cool. About Epstein. He met him. Dude, what the fuck? What did he say it was like?

Joe Rogan: He said he had a girl on his lap while they talked. The girl was like 21 years old. And I think he said she was Asian. I don't remember. But he said she was really beautiful. And she was sitting on his lap, and he was bouncing her up and down while they were talking. So they're talking about finance, and her boobs are jiggling. So he goes, she wasn't underage or anything. She was a woman. But she was sitting on his lap and he was bouncing her around and her boobs were bouncing in his face while they're trying to concentrate on whatever the fuck they're talking about.

Duncan Trussell: Some David Lynch shit right there, man. That's some David Lynch shit.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Just jiggling boobs in front of you. Like, wow, that is so fucked up. And Eric said, right away, his vibe was that this guy was a construct.

Duncan Trussell: What do you mean construct? Like a fucking agent?

Joe Rogan: Oh, right. He was like, this guy does not come off as a financial expert at all.

Duncan Trussell: Right, right. And Weinstein is an economist. Dude, it's just—

Joe Rogan: He's a mathematician, right? He worked for Peter Thiel. Can you give me some of that coffee, brother?

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, sure. Peter Thiel. I think he was a math teacher. Math teacher. My Palantir hat. And then he became whatever he became. Well, he's not a dumb dude at all, and if he thinks the guy was fake right away, that his instinct—I think the problem is a lot of those guys wanted him to be real because what fun? What fun? You get to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein. And everybody thinks it was kids. And there probably was a lot of that. Because I don't know what the actual accusations have been. The wildest thing about the Ghislaine trial is like, she went to jail for trafficking to who knows who. The fact that you could just put her in jail and you're like, who'd you traffic to? None of that gets out in the trial at all. That's crazy. And they do it right in front of your face. That's fucking crazy, dude. So you don't know what—we hear it was underage girls. We know that there was some of them were underage for sure. And then we also know that some of them were not underage. They were young women. And one of them wound up dying recently, one of them that's been a whistleblower died.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Imagine you're a young girl and you're fucking broke and then you meet that guy and he invites you to go on a fucking island somewhere or party somewhere and you're hanging out with all these fucking creeps. And then years later when it all starts coming out what happened, you go public and you don't have any money. And you got these fucking billionaire sharks who want to take you out because you sucked their dick 30 years ago. Or whatever it was. That's gotta be terrifying.

Duncan Trussell: Lawmaker claimed the files included one Hollywood producer worth a few hundred million dollars, one royal prince, one high-profile individual in the music industry, one very prominent banker, one high-profile government official, one high-profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician, at least six billionaires including a billionaire from Canada. We know these people exist in the FBI files. The files that you control.

Joe Rogan: Fuck. Yeah, man. See this right here? This is scary shit. This is how communism gets started. When they attack—they realize this is like indefensible and it gets to the point where people are like, maybe Mamdani's right.

Duncan Trussell: One thing that's beautiful about humans is that all of us agree: don't fuck kids. That's a beautiful thing. If you want to find the thing that connects all of us, we really want to keep our kids safe. We love our children. And so if it turns out—and dude, if you want to have a dark few days, listen to Martyrmade's episode on the Epstein files. He points to other times the state has protected organized sex trafficking rings. This isn't the first time this shit has happened. And so that's the scary part. If all of us realize that we have been funding and voting for vampires, sex vampires, essentially.

Joe Rogan: Do you remember the D.C. Madam story?

Duncan Trussell: Is that the one that Charlie Sheen—no, no, no, no, no. That was L.A.

Joe Rogan: OK, that was the lady who went to jail. I don't really remember.

Duncan Trussell: The D.C. Madam story was this lady got busted and she had a book filled with high profile individuals from Washington that she and her ladies were servicing.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Duncan Trussell: And then she committed suicide.

Joe Rogan: Well, you know, it's a hard job. She probably was depressed. D.C. winters are tough. I bet those people are freaks. I bet they get down. I bet when they're done with all that lawmaking bullshit, at the end of the day, a lot of them are young. A lot of them are just in it for—they can't believe they're hanging out at the real deal. They're really a congressperson. Fuck yeah. They're really a staffer.

Duncan Trussell: Listen, I don't want my politicians to be sexless fucking androids up there. I just want them to not fuck kids.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: But we need to know what actually happened because maybe some of these guys just got prostitutes on that island. Maybe, you know, who knows what levels he was doing this at. There was probably a bunch of people that weren't depraved, but he wanted dirt on them.

Joe Rogan: Right. And then there's people that are depraved. You've got probably multiple layers to what he was doing.

Duncan Trussell: OK, but here's the thing. I think it's safe to say, and it's not even conspiratorial, the current system of how we elect our leaders is based on money. You need donors.

Joe Rogan: 100%.

Duncan Trussell: So that is a kind of legal bribery. You give enough money to this politician or that politician, and it's not like you own them. But they know you gave them all this money, and they know they want to run again. They also know that you've got your own constituents, and you have a lot of control, a network of bots that you could easily unleash on the internet. And so I think it's a safe bet that it's highly likely that it's donors who are on that list and who are compromised for real, who are exerting massive amounts of pressure on the federal government to not release those fucking files. And it could be that it's an existential threat. It could be that it would cause so much tumult that it could lead to an actual uprising. It could lead to a bunch of us with torches standing around the fucking castle ready to burn the vampire out. And I think that that must be it because if I'm a career politician, dude, I don't want to vote against releasing something that is—if there are monsters among us, we need to know.

Joe Rogan: Dude, in my neighborhood, we got a scary-ass fucking letter. Sex offender. If you're just a basic bitch sex offender and you move anywhere in Texas, mass mail goes out with your picture on it and your fucking address. You know what I mean? So why is it that there are these very same people who are working right now, who are out there, nobody knows, who are actual predatory pedophiles, and our government is protecting them?

Duncan Trussell: That's the other terrifying thing about the open border. In the name of compassion and not stopping people from coming into the country, one thing that they think was a lot of it was sex trafficking in kids.

Joe Rogan: Fucked up.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. There are truly evil people in the world. Truly evil people in the world that want a child to do terrible things and they'll pay a lot of money to get one. Dude, this is why I go to Catholic Mass now. It's like if you've never encountered real evil, you wouldn't believe that that would be possible. But then when you find out the numbers of kids that went missing that came across the border, the number of kids where they have no trace of them, they have no idea where they went—we're talking thousands and thousands of kids now. I'm not saying they all got sex trafficked, but I bet some of them did. Listen, man, evil is real. And if it's a person where there's no record of them, no one's going to know they're missing, you could probably—there's probably some dark twisted person that would give you a lot of bitcoin for something like that.

Joe Rogan: Dude, I mean, this is the thing, man. That's so scary. You see those gazelle out there? You see the gazelle out there? There's lions around. Somehow they're all calm and shit, just eating. They've had their kids dragged off by the lions. They go back to normal because they don't have long-term memory like we do. They don't get freaked out. But it's like, what we're talking about here is the lions. You have to acknowledge, and it's uncomfortable to acknowledge it, and I don't think people acknowledge it enough. There is actual evil in the world. There is an omnipresent force in the world. And this is what I love in the Bible when they say it's powers and principalities. There is a—I don't know what you want to call it, an egregore, I guess you could say—a kind of connective embodiment of what it means to be off the path, what it means to be selfish, what it means to be self-concerned, what it means to rationalize hurting other people. And that thing has a personality. It's out there, dude. It's fucking out there. And whenever you find yourself talking shit about yourself, whenever you find yourself really down on yourself, or whenever you find yourself thinking the things that would lead you to killing yourself, that is contact with what I think is, for lack of a better word, a demonic entity. It beckons everyone towards self-destruction. I don't know why. I think there always has to be this battle in order for good to prevail and advance. It has to have some sort of conflict. It has to be involved in this push and pull, this yin and yang. They've known about it forever. You can never get to perfect peace. It's not going to happen. The pursuit of it is crazy.

Duncan Trussell: You can get to individual peace. That's what's beautiful. What's beautiful is individual. I don't remember whose quote it was, but there's this one cool-looking Indian guru dude. And he said, "Enlightenment is possible in this lifetime."

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Well, that's an actual—that's Tantric Buddhism.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. That's a good thing to think of, that you can get to a place where—and I don't mean enlightened like better than everybody else—but you're free of all the bullshit. You're free of all this self-induced hypnotic gaze on TikTok and Instagram Reels and arguments on X and Threads and fucking Blue Sky if you're really gone.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. And you can just be a person and just exist and be in tune with life and with nature and with the people around you. And maybe get out of the city.

Duncan Trussell: Fuck yeah. Maybe back out a little bit, get to someplace that's nice and calm, live with like-minded people.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Slow down.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. And recognize that a lot of what people are wound up about is bullshit. A lot of it is nonsense.

Joe Rogan: Dude. And a lot of it is being forced on you because they want you to be wound up. And you don't have to do that. You don't have to push further and further away from people who disagree. Move closer and closer and talk to them. That's what everybody needs to do. We need to stop this antagonistic us versus them mentality. That's why I always feel politically homeless. I really do. I feel like a complete political outcast on both sides.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, same. It's just—I don't want to align with parties. I don't think that's smart. But I do think there's good choices and bad choices for how to run a government. Based on what I've seen for the bad choices, the results like Portland—when you're like, this is a bad choice. What you guys are doing is a bad choice. And maybe when you get to a certain number of people and a certain number of mental health issues—like if you try to take over L.A. right now, imagine if you had to be the mayor of L.A. today. Like, good luck, bitch.

Joe Rogan: No, thanks. Good fucking luck. You have so many things on your docket. So many things you have to handle. And you got 100 homeless people.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. 100.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Maybe that's all of California. I don't know. Either way, it's a fuckload. Let's call it a fuckload. You got a fuckload of insane homeless people on your street, and you got to figure out how to clean it up, and you've already spent $23 billion on it, and no one could figure out where that money went.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, man. They spent $23 billion making the homeless problem worse. Imagine if that was any other job. Imagine if you brought your car to get it fixed, you spent $500, it came out still fucked up, it's more fucked up than it was. Like, what did you do? "Well, just give me some more money and I'll make it better." Like, hey man, you said you were gonna fix this. You said $500. I gave you the money. Yes, it's fucked up now beyond repair. Dude, that's what it is. It's beyond repair. You would have to do some sort of radical Republican Rudy Giuliani-type shit back when he cleaned up New York.

Joe Rogan: This is where I go to. I've probably yapped about it on this podcast before. My favorite Jack Kornfield quote: "Tend to the part of the garden you can touch." Because what happens is it grabs your mind. Now I'm thinking about city politics in Portland.

Duncan Trussell: That's a beautiful quote. It's a profound quote. And all of these things invite you to tend either to the entirety of the garden or a part of the garden that you will never go to. And it also requires you to have an opinion publicly on a lot of things. If you get involved in a community of people who have opinions publicly on things, you are required to chime in, Duncan. Absolutely. "Duncan, you're awful silent on the human rights violations in Yemen."

Joe Rogan: Yeah, of course. Fuck those Yemenis.

Duncan Trussell: "Do you know what's happening in Myanmar?"

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I know it's bad. There's been a coup, probably backed by the CIA.

Duncan Trussell: "Well, fuck them."

Joe Rogan: Yeah, exactly. And so you get into groupthink. You get locked into this thing. And because humans, we do like to move together. We like to dance together. We like to party together. But we love to get into groups. We're designed to. We love it. Love to be a part of a tribe. And then what happens is your human compassion gets hijacked. That's where it gets fucked up. It gets hijacked. And most people legitimately want to help. And then it's like, "OK, I'm going to tell you how you can help." And some charismatic person starts leading you down a path where you really legitimately wanted to help. Fuck yeah, I want diversity. You better believe I do. And equity. I want everyone to have a fair shot. And inclusivity. Yeah, I was bullied when I was—God, when they were picking sports teams, it wasn't fun for old D. Trussell, let me tell you that. Nobody wanted Trussell on their team because I can't catch shit. So yeah, I would like to fix that. The next thing you know, it's the same model that happens with all kinds of cults. The next thing you know, you end up having to start subscribing to shit maybe you don't agree with. And that happens on the right too. There's another set of—like, yeah, fuck big government. I don't want big government. No, I mean, it just seems like bureaucracy. Next thing you know, the Ten Commandments are in schools and you're like, slow down.

Joe Rogan: Dude. Why are they in public schools? I just had this guy, Raghu Markasan, and he was talking about someone on his podcast told him, why is it the Ten Commandments and not the Sermon on the Mount? Like, you know what I mean? If we're going to put something there—I think it was Danny Coleman said that—if we're going to put something there, why not put "Blessed are the meek"? "Blessed are the peacemakers." You know, if we're doing Bible shit, let's do Sermon on the Mount.

Duncan Trussell: I think they want rules. This is God's rules. Look, God's rules. It's on the wall. It's on a piece of vinyl that was printed. Here it is. It's laminated. It definitely is. Only because if we're going to sort of look at Christianity as the flower growing from that entire lineage, it does seem like the idea was that Jesus comes around as a kind of evolution of these principles. Also as a kind of God recognizing that the whole flood thing wasn't maybe the best move. And it lays out a really revolutionary way to live in the world, which is meeting violence with nonviolence.

Joe Rogan: That's crazy. That's crazy. But it does disrupt the whole cycle. The cycle depends on, you know. And it's a total unique voice.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. Muhammad was a warlord, right?

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Jesus was a man of ultimate peace in a time of ultimate chaos. Can you imagine living 2,000 fucking years ago?

Joe Rogan: No.

Duncan Trussell: And some dude comes along, "Love your brother as you would love yourself." What are you talking about? We're at war here. Shut the fuck up. Shooting arrows at each other and shit. The fuck are you talking about? Or saying you don't need a priest class. And then the Romans are in charge and everyone knows how fucking brutal they were. And this is all going on while—

Joe Rogan: Occupied city.

Duncan Trussell: Yes. It's a fucking occupied city. It's occupied by a great empire. People are pissed off. They want a revolution. They want to fight back against the fucking Romans. Here's this very charismatic person who can reach into a tomb and pull out dead people, curing people's blindness by spitting in his hand, rubbing mud in his hands and putting it on their fucking eyes, curing lepers. And you're like, come on, baby. All you got to do is tell us to fucking overthrow these Romans. If you can raise the dead, I bet you can throw fireballs. You know what I mean? And then the answer to all of that is like, no, no, we're not doing that shit. And then what happens? You get murdered.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, you get murdered in front of everybody. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. And it really, to me, it's like, God, this is just the medicine for the times, man. It's just the medicine for the times. Because holy shit. This is our default mode, Duncan. You mean the bangs and the claw? And I think there's two things that really accentuated it. The algorithm for sure, but also the lockdowns. I think the lockdowns shifted a lot of people. I genuinely think they broke a lot of people psychologically. And it made people just a little less kind. You know? They got really used to being hostile. And that was the other tribal thing, like the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. And unfortunately, most people are required to get vaccinated because they have jobs, they have to travel or whatever it is. A lot of people reluctantly. But it made us more tense and more shitty.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. It like—this is not 2016. 2016 was a fun time. It was silly. Like, it was different, you know? It wasn't so overwhelmed by constant strife. The woke stuff had not reached its apex of ridiculousness. It was—we were just silly. People were getting a little weird. It wasn't terrible. And then when 2020 came around, man, and they started having those George Floyd riots and they were lighting cop cars up in L.A., I was like, OK.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, man.

Duncan Trussell: This is where we're going. We're going in this direction. This is really not good. Not good. Really not good. Not good. And the division has just never been wider. The division between the right and the left in this country, the division in a lot of ways between black people and white people, and the narratives that you get in the news are just feeding into that over and over and over again.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, man. I know. And the way people react to things in the news, like the way that lady who got stabbed in Charlotte on the train—you know that lady?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, man.

Duncan Trussell: This is where we're going. We're going in this direction. This is really not good. Not good. Really not good. Not good. And the division has just never been wider. The division between the right and the left in this country, the division in a lot of ways between black people and white people, and the narratives that you get in the news are just feeding into that over and over and over again.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, man. I know. And the way people react to things in the news, like the way that lady who got stabbed in Charlotte on the train—you know that lady? Oh, yeah, of course. The Ukrainian lady. She's a refugee from Ukraine. She escapes the war and just gets randomly stabbed by some guy who had gotten out multiple times. And he had been treated in a rehab center that one of the—find the story behind that. Because I want to know, like, there's some accusations that I don't know if they're necessarily true. I don't want to say it. But the whole thing is this guy had been doing horrible shit and getting out of jail over and over and over again. And then he stabbed this lady on the train. And he's one of like countless examples of that happening. That keeps happening. People who you easily could have rehabilitated or at least kept out of the public zone keep getting released and doing these fucking things. And it's almost like, again, if you want to destroy society, you would make people terrified. You would cause massive amounts of crime and then you would offer a military solution to stabilize it all.

Joe Rogan: The two, I just had Bishop Robert Barron on my podcast.

Duncan Trussell: You had a bishop on?

Joe Rogan: Oh dude, I had a bishop on and he's awesome. And let me tell you, after I had the bishop on, in my whole career of podcasting people have never come at me—I had satanists on, I had all kinds of just Riley Reed, you know, I had all kinds of people on my podcast. The only time I really started getting some shit was because I had a bishop on who said everything he said was very sweet and like—oh, and I asked him right away, I was like, why are Christians the most persecuted people on the planet right now? Like Christians get fucked up. And he talked about it a little bit. And then right after that, that Catholic fucking school, that Catholic at mass, at mass, the fucking trans shooter just shot people while they were praying. And then Charlie fucking Kirk gets shot. And then not to mention all over the world, like Christians getting slaughtered. But his answer to it was so measured. And like, whoa dude, like I'm more perturbed—and I've been to mass like maybe five times—but what he said, Satan, he said Satan is known as the accuser and the scatterer. The scatterer. And so if you want to identify what—if you look at what's happening and from those using those terms, is it dividing? Is it scattering? If so, it's satanic in the sense that it's turning neighbor upon neighbor, brother upon brother, son upon father, and it's scattering all of us. You know, it's like what could be a cohesive human family is being just scattered to the fucking winds.

Duncan Trussell: Do you know about that? What country is it, Jamie, where this group of Christians are being slaughtered? There's a country where thousands of Christians have been killed. Oh, it's so messed up.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. It's so messed up. They're literally going door to door and killing Christians.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. I mean, I think that, isn't that happening in Syria a little bit too? I don't know what country this is, but this is like recent news. Didn't a Catholic church get bombed in Palestine too? I could be wrong about that.

Joe Rogan: Slow down. I just—I really—that happened to—can you—I'm sorry, before it, before—let's find out that one first before—I could be wrong about the Palestine thing. I could be wrong about the Palestine thing. I don't know.

Duncan Trussell: No, no, no, no, no. This is a recent thing that they were talking about. 50,000. But it's one country.

Joe Rogan: Oh, Nigeria. Nigeria. That's what it is.

Duncan Trussell: Right.

Joe Rogan: Okay. Can you scroll down? Is it 50,000 in Nigeria? The government denies the claim. Oh, my God. I deny the claim, too, if I was in the Nigerian government. It wasn't popping up when I was in Nigeria. But is it just Ted Cruz saying this? Like, did he pull this number out of his ass? What I had heard, I don't know. I really don't know. But what I had heard was it was 7,000 or somewhere around then. But maybe that was the beginning of it.

Duncan Trussell: Bill Maher says it's happening.

Joe Rogan: Well, there you go. Since 2009, over 50,000 Christians in Nigeria have been massacred. 18,000 churches and 2,000 Christian schools have been destroyed. Holy fuck, man.

Duncan Trussell: Dude.

Joe Rogan: That's crazy.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, man. And that's like, I mean, people are like going to Catholic churches and shooting people praying. Like, what the fuck?

Joe Rogan: Listen to what they say. "Nigeria deserves solidarity in its fight against terror, not careless rhetoric that fuels misunderstanding." This is the Nigerian president saying. So the truth remains simple. Nigeria is not witnessing a Christian genocide. It is confronting terrorism that targets everyone.

Duncan Trussell: Christian terrorists. Nigerian Christian terrorists. But is a similar amount happening to Muslim churches? I don't know.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, I don't know either. You can Google. Put it into Perplexity. Ask how many Islamic mosques have been destroyed in Nigeria since 2009. That's a good question. That's a good question. Solid question. That's a good question. How many Islamic mosques have been destroyed in Nigeria since 2009? This is fucking cool. It's dope.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, well, you made up a number, bro. Can you fix it? Eric?

Joe Rogan: Okay. Let's see. Yeah, significant destruction of mosques. Good question. Yeah, okay. There has been significant destruction of mosques in Nigeria, particularly due to Boko Haram insurgency and other violent conflicts. Boko Haram, actively—primarily active in northeastern Nigeria, has deliberately targeted both mosques and churches during attacks, killing worshipers and destroying places of worship. 17,000 churches.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: But what does it say about how many mosques? It's the worst competition of all time.

Duncan Trussell: Right.

Joe Rogan: It says religious buildings destroyed—hundreds of religious buildings, including mosques. Specific numbers indicate while 17,000 churches were destroyed since 2009, the destruction of mosques was also significant, with dozens of mosque attacks reported in various incidents by Boko Haram and related groups.

Duncan Trussell: That's a big difference, though. Churches destroyed. Dozens of mosques attacked, but 17,000 churches destroyed. 17,000 churches destroyed. So it seems like they're all experiencing terrorism. That is true. But it is much more pointed in the direction of the Christians.

Joe Rogan: Dude, I mean, this has to give you pause because like, you know, any secularist out there, any anti-Christian person out there, and there's a surprising amount, a surprising amount horrified that I talked to this bishop. They think of it in the worst aspects of Christianity that you see, right? Just like you think of Antifa as the worst aspects of being a progressive or a liberal. When you look at what Christianity is in America, it's a lot of things that are awesome, but it's also televangelists. It's these motherfuckers on TV talking to poor, dumb people and conning them into sending $20 so that their bills are going to be paid. They tell them that. They tell them, if you give me whatever you can give me, God has promised a tenfold return. A tenfold return. You give me $200, you will get thousands. Thousands. And they just start going off. They just start going off. Give me $10,000, I will bring you $100,000. Listen, I get it, man. People are dumb and they fall for it. And then they think that this fucking guy who has this giant mega church, these people that have, they've got stadiums filled with their worshipers. They're flying around in private jets and driving in Rolls Royces. They think of that as Christianity too. And then they think of the nutty people that believe in demons.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: You know, the Satan worshiping kind. And they think of all kinds of weird stuff when it comes to Christianity. It gets slippery. But this—that—there is a scientific approach here that you could take, which is go to—I can't believe I'm about to say this—go to a Catholic mass. And the last, what's interesting is all the masses are the same around the planet. The last one I went to, you know what they were saying? What were they saying? Help people, help the poor. You know what I mean? And they weren't there. Nobody's dancing around. No jet skis. There's no—you know what I mean? No guy in a glittery fucking vest. It was just—it was really just talking about how important it is to help poor people. That's it. Some like, you know, some choir singing. None of that was happening. And really, when you think about the fact that how many Catholic churches there are that day on planet Earth, all the people representing all levels of economic status are being told you could do more to help poor people than you're doing right now all over the planet. Right. But it's also connected to a lot of horrible stuff that was done to kids. And that's the problem with the Catholic Church, period.

Duncan Trussell: Dude, I thought—it's not—yeah, it's not all of them, but there's a number of them fucked up. Have you ever seen that documentary? I think it's called *Hear No Evil*.

Joe Rogan: No, I haven't.

Duncan Trussell: I think that's what it's called. But it's essentially following one of these people. Dude, it's horrible. It's horrible. It's horrible. It's so dark. It's horrible. It's so dark. And it was, you know, like that was one of the criticisms, the rightful criticisms about Ratzinger. He was involved in moving people around.

Joe Rogan: Messed up.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. He was wanted for crimes against humanity by some country. But then you talk to Catholics about it, which I have, of course, and their response is never defending it. They're all like, fuck that. There's the other ideas that Catholics all agree on this or that. Of course they don't. They fucking don't, and they hate it.

Joe Rogan: Don't you think that it's kind of crazy to, if someone wants to be a priest, you can't have a life. You can't have a wife. You can't have a family. You have to be celibate. I think that alone, that rule that they instituted alone, made it kooky. It made it really crazy because like you're only inviting people to be a priest that are willing to go through that. Whereas you meet preachers and you know, you go to a good church and there's a guy who's a preacher and he's a really charismatic person. He really believes in the Lord and he's really entertaining. Got a wife and a family, tells stories about his family. Like that's a lot more normal and engaging and it makes more sense.

Duncan Trussell: Totally. This whole celibacy thing is crazy. And it didn't—it was a rule that somebody instituted because the priests were banging all the ladies. Because they were fucking rock stars.

Joe Rogan: They don't look at it as a rule. They call it a discipline. That's how they officially—they have to be disciplined.

Duncan Trussell: Well, I mean, and. That discipline's nuts because for sure that discipline's being taken out on some people that didn't want it. And that's part of the problem. But then there's also like secret babies that nuns have with priests. One of the popes. One of the popes. Do you know how I know it was one of the popes that had secret babies?

Joe Rogan: Oh.

Duncan Trussell: Because I talked to a priest about it and he was telling me.

Joe Rogan: How many did he have?

Duncan Trussell: I don't know. I was like, I had a few drinks. I can't remember. It's nuts. It's nuts to require and it's going to attract sexual deviance.

Joe Rogan: A hundred percent. You got to be careful out there, man. And it's like anytime there's hierarchy, anytime there's bureaucracy, anytime there's organization, especially anytime there's mysticism, it's going to be infiltrated. That's an inevitability. And my hope is—imagine if they just opened it up where they said, listen, we're going to drop that. You guys can have wives now. And those poor dorks are going to start dating at 40.

Duncan Trussell: That's a good movie.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it would be a good movie if they changed it and the priest is like, I always wanted to find a wife and have a family before it's too late. Oh my God. No idea. I do agree with you though. I've never even seen a tit. How about that? How about he's a real priest? Like really, really, really got into it when he was young. Decided when he was a boy. I'm going to keep my thoughts pure. It's going to be wild. All for Jesus. Never seen a boob.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, dude.

Joe Rogan: Never touched an erect nipple. Never. Never felt it. Never. Never kissed a lady. She wants to kiss you back. Lapped up squirt. Poor boy.

Duncan Trussell: Dude, it's—

Joe Rogan: Just praying to Jesus. And then all of a sudden at 40, something comes along. Like Steve Carell in that movie, *40-Year-Old Virgin*. Oh, dude. I don't know, man. Like I don't—that part of it to me always seemed like, you know, how can you? This is the other thing, man, with the declining birth rates and people not being able to have kids or not wanting to have kids because it's too fucking expensive. It's worrisome to me because ever since I had kids, you have a whole different connection to the world than when you don't have kids. And it humanizes you, it grounds you in the earth. All your chips are on the fucking table, man, and it's intense. And I do think like as a spiritual guide to people, it does make me scratch my chin. It's like you have never been around a third trimester pregnant person who just found out there might be mice in the house. You don't know what that's like. That's primal, right? You don't want to be around that. That's Kali, man, you don't want to be around that. And all the other things that go along with being married and having kids and all the heights and lows and all the shit you learn about yourself. I do feel like you're, by not letting them have families, you are kind of keeping them out of this part of the human experience that is really good for people. Like you need that. You need to know what that's like. It's important.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree. It helps you grow as a human. It changes your perspective on things. One of the things that people always say, I don't want to have kids. I think bringing a child into this world today is a terrible idea. I'm like, people had babies before they figured out doors. That's why we're here. We're here. People had babies on dirt floors in caves, and that's why we're here.

Joe Rogan: Right, yeah. Why would you want to have a child today with all the fucking books and medicine and shit? Like why would you want to do that? Why would you, with all the education and all the interesting people that are alive? Do you like people? I love people.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, I could never be a hermit. I love people.

Joe Rogan: Me too. I love hanging out. Like I love having fun. I love meeting people that are fun. I love it. The only way that happens is if people make people.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. You have to make cool people. Make cool people that other people want to hang out with. And you know, that sounds overly simplified because it is.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, for sure. There are some circumstances where that's not an option and it's not possible and you're living in a fucking terrible state, a terrible state of life, right? You could be in the worst, most abusive environments. And that's the real problem in this world, yeah, is that we allow those places to exist while we think about things that are just bananas. Think about like wealth extraction and pulling stuff out of the ocean and figuring out how to do this and that and spending all this money on this and that and defense and this and that, and then completely ignoring the people on your timeline that are in life or death struggle through no fault of their own. They were just born into the wrong family in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong timeline and they're fucked. And the only difference between you and them is you got lucky and you were born in a good timeline.

Duncan Trussell: Yep.

Joe Rogan: And your life, you got lucky. You live with nice people.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. But they got fucked. And if we allow that to continue to happen, you're always going to have the same kind of problems over and over and over again. There's got to be a way to at least tilt that in a positive direction and build on it and actually have businesses that are financially incentivized for success.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Like they make more money if people get jobs. They make more money if people get good grades. They make more money if they can figure out a way to transform crime-ridden, gang-ridden neighborhoods into places where people are thriving and happy. There's got to be a way. There's got to be a way. There's got to be a way. People like that place that I was telling you about in Oakland, that video, where they're driving through the shanty towns and then immediately they get to this totally clean environment that's run by different politicians. There's got to be a way to do that. There's got to be a way to engineer our society in a more positive direction. There's got to be.

Duncan Trussell: Dude, the first step is you've got to turn your back on the state. You cannot believe the state is going to do this because I think people are waiting for a top-down solution. They're waiting for a man. What's his name? The New York dude. Or they're waiting for someone to sign the right series of documents and everything's fine. And meanwhile they in their fucking high rise with crusted jizz on their belly posting shit on Reddit. It like really—this is going to be all hands on deck. It's like maybe the federal government is going to figure out the perfect way to educate and house and clothe and all this stuff. And that'll be great. But in the meantime, every single one of us, every single one of us could do something. Not a big deal, not a big thing, but something. And instead of it—like it's like when they say the government shut down the national parks, there's trash. I saw a picture, trash around a dumpster. And it's like, any one of us could drive a truck up to that fucking dumpster and clean up that trash. Why are we waiting for the federal government to do this shit? That's the problem. The federal government's got us all hypnotized into thinking we need them to do these things. And I would, by the way, that'd be great. I think people living next to an open-air drug market slash mental asylum would be quite pleased if the taxes that they were paying went towards getting these people medical care somewhere far away from their apartment.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Not gonna happen. You can count on it. So in the meantime, what do we do? And you know, that's—I was like watching doom scrolling, looking at all the like the Oakland videos and stuff. This dude's interviewing people out there, soup kitchens giving out food. And boy, that'll make you feel like a piece of shit. This guy's just helping. This is nobody. This is like you'll never—this guy's not filming themselves taking fucking selfies, telling the stupid story at the time he gave a sandwich to someone with his kid like I did in the beginning. This is just people out there. They interview this guy. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? And he's like, I mean, it just seems like that's what you're supposed to do. It's so basic and simple. And that exists. That exists. And that doesn't get highlighted. You don't get that in your algorithm.

Joe Rogan: No, you don't get it. And you got more of that in your algorithm, you'd realize like, oh, there's good people out there still. And I'm one of them. And you can help. And you don't have to film it. You don't have to do it for any reason.

Duncan Trussell: And dude, the moment—we don't even know what would happen if under the yoke of whatever the regime happens to be, instead of flapping our fucking fireworks in front of ice, if all of us were just going out there and like—I don't know, I can't—I suck at most things, dudes. But it's not that hard to like give water to people out there. And yeah, some of them are fucking terrifying. They seem like they're possessed by demons. I'm surprised you don't believe in demons.

Joe Rogan: But uh, but you know what, it's not that I don't—you believe in demons? I'm agnostic on the possibility of demons. I definitely believe in good and evil though. I believe there's—I believe evil thoughts can get into people's minds, and then if you follow that down a long life, you can get to a pretty evil place. That's how you get to a dictator. I think that's real. And I think especially if you're involved in evil acts, so say imagine you start off in some sort of military and you're in a foreign country and you're killing a bunch of people, and then you take over a town, and then things escalate, and you continue your career doing horrible things for decade after decade, and then you start to get into power, and then you get into political power, and then you start running the country, and then you overthrow the government, and then you become a dictator, and then you do horrible shit. Horrible shit. You're Saddam Hussein, right? Your sons are feeding women to dogs in the basement.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: The real horrible, horrible, horrible shit.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah. That is evil. Like, I had Jack Carr, the author, on the podcast yesterday.

Joe Rogan: What did he write?

Duncan Trussell: He wrote *The Terminal List*, that Amazon series. He's great. It's the one that Chris Pratt plays in that Amazon series.

Joe Rogan: Oh, okay.

Duncan Trussell: It's really good. But the books are amazing. And he's a super fucking cool guy. Anyway, he said he went to those palaces because he was a SEAL and he was in the war, and he went to those palaces and says, you can feel the evil. He said, you feel it. He said, especially the kids, the sons, Uday and Qusay, they were monsters, serial killer monsters.

Joe Rogan: Jesus Christ.

Duncan Trussell: Who were the sons of the dictator. They would find women while they were getting married. They would take the woman. They'd rape the woman and then feed them to their dogs. They had these dogs that they would feed people to.

Joe Rogan: Fuck that.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, man.

Duncan Trussell: Fuck.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. I think that scene in *Game of Thrones*—like do you remember that scene in *Game of Thrones* where he would do that? There was one of the evil dudes. Yeah. Cut that guy's dick off and feed people to his dogs. That's a real thing, man. They really did that.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: God. That is 100% evil. Now, is that demons inside of him? I don't know. I tend to think evil is in all of us. It's just does it get cultivated? And what cultivates it? What makes it? You know, over time, over a long history of seeing and doing horrible things, I think you can get to a place of unbelievable evil. I mean, think about Genghis Khan. Think about what that guy did while he was alive where he killed 10% of the population of Earth. I mean, if that's not evil, like, what is it? I mean, they would light people on fire and use them as catapults to light houses on fire. So they'd put them in catapults and launch corpses, flaming corpses, and they would land on those thatched roofs and start the houses on fire.

Duncan Trussell: Right, right. Wow.

Joe Rogan: They would take people and they would kidnap them, right? So they would sack a town and they'd take all the people. And everybody that gave in and surrendered, they would put them at the front of the line. And then they would start attacking the city. And all the people would just get crushed by the enemy. So by the time—they just pushed them forward. So they would get thousands of people in front of them and push them into a city. And those people are just getting hacked apart. Because there are people that are trying to stop the siege. And those are the people that are getting killed. And so they're like human shields. And then they're trampling over their dead bodies to destroy the entire city.

Duncan Trussell: Right, right.

Joe Rogan: If that's not evil, if that's not evil, like what's evil? Like to them, that was their destiny. And that happens. Genghis Khan, one of his quotes was crazy. It was, "You must have—" I'm paraphrasing it. We could find it, I'm sure. "You must have done something horribly wrong for God to send me." That was that letter to the Pope.

Duncan Trussell: Isn't that the letter he wrote to the Pope?

Joe Rogan: I don't know. I don't know who he wrote it to. One of them wrote a real takedown letter. See if you can find that. But it from like the—do you know that what they know about the Mongols came from like one diary that they found in like the 1800s? Like there was so little known about Genghis Khan. They don't know where he was buried. They still don't know. They have no idea. They killed the people that took him there so that they couldn't tell. And then more people came and killed the people that killed the people so that they couldn't tell.

Duncan Trussell: I think—didn't they kill themselves after killing the people too? Like it was just like something nutty like that. Just like fucking wild. Fucking wild.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. I saw. What is that quote that he had about God sending me? It's when you think about who that motherfucker was, I mean, he's the motherfucker of all motherfuckers. I mean, the greatest warlord of all time. He is the GOAT.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, man.

Joe Rogan: To the point where people don't even consider him evil.

Duncan Trussell: Right.

Joe Rogan: You don't—people don't think of Genghis Khan as evil. You think of Hitler as evil. But Genghis Khan is just this conqueror guy. But meanwhile, he killed 50 million people. So many people. He changed the carbon footprint of Earth. When they look at the carbon footprint of Earth, during his time, cities re-greened. There's a noticeable amount.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Because cities were destroyed and the nature just absorbed them and trees grew in their place. "I am the punishment of God. If you'd not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you." Jesus. "I am the punishment of God." Imagine if that's how you justify just wholesale slaughter of everybody in a city and stacking the bones up. Stacking the bones up so high that the Shah of—what's his name—sent an envoy to go and talk to whoever was running Jin China, and along the way they thought they saw a like a snow-capped mountain, and as they got closer they realized it was a stack of bones. God damn it. It was a million people. They killed a million people and stacked them in the middle of the city.

Duncan Trussell: God, that must have taken forever. Forever. Whose job is that, bro?

Joe Rogan: They killed everyone on the road. They had to abandon their wagons because the wagons were stuck in the muck of decaying people. They couldn't pull the wagons anymore because all the roads had deteriorated into muck.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: You know what? When you look back at shit like that, we're doing pretty good right now. We're doing pretty good. We're doing pretty good. That is horrifying. That is—if that's not evil, what's evil? Well, that is evil. That's evil. That is evil. And what's interesting is people, I think, around the world, regardless of the culture that you're raised in, we all have a similar sense of evil versus good. That's where it gets curious. It's like people, it seems like people have a sense of like, it isn't good, for example, to like fuck a dog corpse. I bet you could go all around the planet. Most people say that's bad. Most people are going to—

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, don't do that. Don't fuck dog corpses. Like if you see a dead dog, don't fuck its ass. And if you see that a guy's doing that, you go, that guy's a problem. That guy's a problem. You don't—we're going to have to take that guy out. Don't hire him.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. And so there seems to be built into us a sense of like harmony and how to do it and what it looks like. And then there's examples like you just described. It's like that's one of the things we can also do.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: That would have been fun to be Genghis Khan though, right? Could you imagine being in that posse and knowing what you're going to do? And also just the fucking—the fact that some insane percentage of people worldwide have his DNA because he had that many kids. Just fucking. When he's not killing, he's just fucking. That's all he lived for. He just lived to fuck and to kill.

Duncan Trussell: How did he have time to plan war?

Joe Rogan: I mean, he was a brilliant strategist. That's what the crazy thing is. Like, they did a lot of sneaky shit. Like, they led people. They had, like, small packs that would lead people into the mountains. And then they would have a giant pack of people waiting for them. And they'd just fucking come down off the hills and engulf them. They did brilliant shit, man. They waited people out.

Duncan Trussell: Is there a—

Joe Rogan: They drank the blood of their horses to stay—they ate their horses. They ate each other. Apparently there was some cannibalism that was reported.

Duncan Trussell: Is there a movie? Like why haven't they made like a *Game of Thrones* style series?

Joe Rogan: There was one pretty decent movie. But in order for the movie to be realistic, it would have to be so hardcore. And it would be really problematic because it involves a lot of rape. There's a lot of rape and a lot of horrible, horrible murders. And one of the things they did was they had some rule where like with kings and emperors, they weren't allowed to like chop them up. So they would kill them in different ways instead of like attacking them with swords or whatever they would do normally. Or on the carpet. They would do that. Or sometimes they would just stack their bodies and then build like a floor above them and eat on top of them until they crushed them to death. So they would build a platform over their bodies, just crushed them with the weight of these timbers. These people would be moaning while they were eating.

Duncan Trussell: Do you think that's real?

Duncan Trussell: Yes. Yeah, that's documented.

Joe Rogan: Wow, man.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, the people that survived—that's one of the things he would also do, let some people survive to tell the stories. Just run, tell everyone. And of course, like if you're at that dinner, you're not going to complain about it. You're not going to say shit. You probably get off on it by now. You've probably been doing it for a decade. You've probably been killing people everywhere you go. They lived in felt tents and they were nomads, so they had no real home. They went wherever the fuck they went, and everywhere they went, they killed everybody.

Joe Rogan: Fuck. That is incredibly—it's a crazy story. And the story of Genghis Khan, his name was Temujin. He started off as a young boy and he had a brother that was a cocksucker. His brother was stealing his fish and beating his ass, and one day he killed his brother. His mother freaked out and said, "You motherfucker, you devil."

Duncan Trussell: He started off young. That's the point.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, started off young. His family was really poor. The whole story is crazy. His mother had to run because his father was killed. They barely survived. They were left out there to die.

Duncan Trussell: But don't people—I mean, he's sort of beloved.

Joe Rogan: Oh yeah, that's what's crazy. There's statues of him in Mongolia.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: But listen, historically, he was doing what everybody else was doing. He was just doing it better. They were all doing that. When the Shah of Charisma sent the envoy—

Duncan Trussell: Charisma?

Joe Rogan: I thought I missed her. Charisma. It was a country.

Duncan Trussell: Okay.

Joe Rogan: It was the Charismian Shah. It doesn't exist anymore.

Duncan Trussell: What is it now? Is it like Syria or something?

Joe Rogan: You know, a lot of those countries, they changed names. What was Charisma with a Q? Charisma? Charisma? Am I saying it wrong? I don't think it exists anymore. I'm sorry if it does. Might be one of them weird ones.

Duncan Trussell: Show off charisma.

Joe Rogan: But anyway, this dude was seeing whether or not they could sack Jin. They were going to visit to see what their defenses were like. They'd bring some carpets and some nice stuff, give them a little gift, and then come back and fuck them up. That was the standard move.

Duncan Trussell: Right.

Joe Rogan: And when they were on their way, the Mongols already got there. It was already too late.

Duncan Trussell: Wow.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Holy fuck, man. If they had ever gotten to Europe, it would have been over.

Joe Rogan: No, but I mean, if they went into Italy. If they went into Rome and the Vatican, it would have been over.

Duncan Trussell: Didn't he conquer more landmass than any other human? Didn't at some point?

Joe Rogan: I think it's something like that. Present day Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran from 1077 to 1231.

Duncan Trussell: Interesting.

Joe Rogan: So that was the Khwarizmian Empire.

Duncan Trussell: Whoa.

Joe Rogan: So from 1077 to 1231, first as vassals of the Seljuk Empire and the Quara Kitai Western Lao Dynasty, from circa 1190 as independent rulers up until the Mongolian conquest in 1219 to 1221.

Duncan Trussell: Holy fuck. The Mongolians took them over. This is why I think people really get weirdly disturbed by Graham Hancock. It's like you don't want to think about the fact that there are all these empires—forget the Charismians—there's all these empires no one knows what the fuck they were doing or who they were. Nothing. And they were just like us.

Joe Rogan: Yep.

Duncan Trussell: They were talking, having conversations, sipping tea, having fun with their boys, never thinking that at some point people are going to be staring at the ruins of our temples scratching their chins, wondering what this means. That to me is another unifying thought or planetary unification. Like, man, you guys, nobody to this day knows who built those fucking pyramids.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Duncan Trussell: And if you are living around the pyramids, I doubt the thought ever crossed your mind that at some point Mr. Beast is going to be in here filming an episode of his YouTube show. That never occurred to you.

Joe Rogan: I almost went with him. Mr. Beast. I almost went during that trip because I couldn't swing it. I didn't have the time.

Duncan Trussell: Damn, dude. That sucks. You should have.

Joe Rogan: But also, I didn't want to do it that way. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it for quite a few days, and I'm going to do it with an expert like a Ben from Uncharted X. Or Graham, if Graham has the time. I know he's very busy, but he goes there all the time.

Duncan Trussell: Right.

Joe Rogan: I would do that. But what do you think about those structures underneath?

Duncan Trussell: I pray that they're real. Did you see Van Kirkwick's video, the video about the labyrinths?

Joe Rogan: Can we watch? No. I just read that. I had him on the podcast. There's labyrinths that they've discovered that are historic. Herodotus talked about them. He said they're greater than the pyramids, the structure underneath some of the pyramids. And through ground penetrating radar, they've found a 40-meter long metallic tic-tac shaped object that is in this great hall that's under the ground. So all this stuff exists, but they made a dam on the Nile River in the 1960s to help agriculture, and it changed the water table and flooded all these underground labyrinths.

Duncan Trussell: God fucking damn it.

Joe Rogan: So it's a massive undertaking to try to excavate and figure out what's in there.

Duncan Trussell: But couldn't you put a drone, like a submersible?

Joe Rogan: No, no, no. It's all in water. You have to actually go through the water and then below that to where the labyrinths are. You have to dig through the mud. They might actually be able to channel underneath it, they think, and go below the water table and then go to it because it appears like the water is not in the labyrinth itself.

Duncan Trussell: Labyrinth.

Joe Rogan: Labyrinth.

Duncan Trussell: Sorry. Thank you.

Joe Rogan: But whatever it is, there's a 40-meter long metallic object of unknown origin that's the shape of a tic-tac that's in there. This is real. This is real. 40 meters, dude. This guy is so legit. Ben is, Uncharted X is a fantastic YouTube channel.

Duncan Trussell: What the fuck?

Joe Rogan: And this is all real science. It's the same kind of science that they're using to figure out what the fuck is under the Great Pyramid. All those weird polls.

Duncan Trussell: I thought that was debunked.

Joe Rogan: No, I was disappointed by that. No, it's not debunked. Not at all. No, the images have been verified multiple times. They don't know what it is, but there's some structure underneath the pyramid.

Duncan Trussell: See, this—

Joe Rogan: Those columns are real. There really are columns underneath the pyramids, and it really does go down deep into the earth. They just don't know what it is. But the same technology, they've observed all of the different—like, where they know where there's special chambers that are sealed off. They know where those things are. But they saw it with the radio tomography. They also were able to use it to identify temples that were 25 and 50 feet underground. So it's accurate.

Duncan Trussell: Give me a fucking break, man.

Joe Rogan: I know. Because I was so excited when that came out. I'm like, I knew it. I've seen it on ketamine.

Duncan Trussell: Did you? What did you see?

Joe Rogan: It's hard to explain. It's like structures. Underneath the pyramids.

Duncan Trussell: Let me reiterate. This was in the K-hole.

Joe Rogan: Right. But it was like vast cavernous spaces with structures in it. The weird thing about Ketamine is it's kind of like you're being given a tour. It's like a viewfinder. You remote viewed.

Duncan Trussell: Maybe I remote viewed. It was very exciting to see. And it was under the pyramids.

Joe Rogan: It was under the pyramids. But I must say, the next thing I saw was like a city being powered by meat. So it's not exactly like my remote viewing.

Duncan Trussell: Maybe that's what you're going to do with the homeless problem. And Joe Rogan solves the homeless problem. Maybe that's what the alien agenda is.

Joe Rogan: Well, I mean.

Duncan Trussell: They power the city. We'll take care of your problems.

Joe Rogan: Dude, this is real. I am not comfortable with this comet Atlas.

Duncan Trussell: I know.

Joe Rogan: We've got Avi Loeb coming on to talk about it. He's amazing. I had him on my podcast a long time ago. He put up with my ass. A lot of people in the beginning were saying that it's bullshit. It's a comet. Why is he saying this? He's risking his reputation. But then as time's going on, they go, well, this is weird. This thing's really weird.

Duncan Trussell: Well, it's the—okay, first of all, it's important to note that one thing that titillates my dumbass is it just so happens the government shutdown coincides with when we could use the satellites on Mars to get pictures of that fucking thing. So we're not getting pictures.

Joe Rogan: They did release a picture of it yesterday.

Duncan Trussell: Wait a minute. The government shutdown is stopping us from getting pictures of this thing?

Joe Rogan: Yes, yes.

Duncan Trussell: That's insane. That's insane. That's so insane. They should open that up. I mean, it seems like they just—that's really weird. Did you see the images that just came in though? The Europeans got an image of it. It's weird looking.

Joe Rogan: It's weird looking, but I don't know what a comet looks like. I don't know why it's weirder than other comets. But it does seem like it's rolling in a weird way, but it's the gas, right? It's what it's releasing that's the weird part.

Duncan Trussell: Well, the weird part is coming from the same part of the universe where the wow signal came from.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: That's weird.

Joe Rogan: That's fucking weird, dude.

Duncan Trussell: That's weird. Because that wow signal, what was it, like 70 seconds long? Some very strange coded signal that was 70 seconds long? You know what else is weird? Jeremy Corbell said a bunch of people are going to start saying there's a mothership coming to Earth and don't believe him. Remember he was saying that?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, what's that all about? Why did he know that?

Duncan Trussell: I don't know.

Joe Rogan: You got to tell people why you know something like that. You can't just say that. How do you know? How do you know that it's not really a mothership? How do you know they're going to say it's a mothership?

Duncan Trussell: Well, Corbell, he's got to do this tightrope walk because somehow he does have inside contacts. But if he says too much, he puts his whole life in danger. It's a spy TV show.

Joe Rogan: Dude, so much of it seems like a spy TV show. So much of it seems like a well-written psyop. It's so weird.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: It's so weird. I think it's a slow trickle of disclosure. It's a slow recognition that we're not alone, that they've calculated that the only way to do this and not disrupt society entirely.

Duncan Trussell: Do you know that story about how when George Bush, the original Herbert Walker, wanted to disclose? What they were going to say was we have recovered crashed UFOs that we have back engineered and we have biological entities. There are things that are not of this world, and they're far more intelligent than us. They brought in a bunch of scientists and a bunch of scholars and said, "I want you to write down the positives and the negatives of the societal impact of disclosure, and give a numerical value to what it's going to do to the financial world, what it's going to do to the religious world, what it's going to do to government." And at the end, they all had the same conclusion. The cons far outweighed the pros in terms of disruption of society. So they decided not to release it.

Joe Rogan: Dude, what the fuck?

Duncan Trussell: Isn't that wild? Like they almost did that. What was that? George Bush? It was like 1990 maybe.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: So they decided not to release it. It's really weird.

Joe Rogan: Isn't that crazy?

Duncan Trussell: If our entire society depends on protecting billionaire pedophiles and not talking about aliens, then maybe we need a new society. Just maybe this is a fucked up society.

Joe Rogan: Or this is a good time for Jesus to come back.

Duncan Trussell: Perfect time. Always a good time.

Joe Rogan: Also perfect because you'd have to really believe. Because with AI today, you don't know what the fuck is going on. So you'd have to really believe.

Duncan Trussell: Or Jesus comes through AI.

Joe Rogan: Well, it's possible.

Duncan Trussell: It is possible. That's the portal that opens up. That's the Christ.

Joe Rogan: Or the Antichrist comes through AI. And the Christ consciousness.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, well, come on, Duncan. Really? The Antichrist?

Joe Rogan: People are going to buy more tickets.

Duncan Trussell: Trying to bring this baby home. People are going to buy more tickets to my movie. It's true. Nobody wants to see that "It All Works Out in the End" movie. Fuck that. The battle for Satan.

Joe Rogan: Listen, man.

Duncan Trussell: Well, I think that—here's a cheesy way to end it—I feel so lucky I'm your friend, man. You're the coolest. I was thinking about it the other day. You're one of my oldest friends. I've known you for so long, man.

Joe Rogan: I know. We've known each other a long time. It's fucking cool. I love you to death, man.

Duncan Trussell: I love you too. I'm very happy that we're friends too.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's the best, man.

Duncan Trussell: It is. And it's funny because we became friends really talking on the phone when you were the guy taking the phone calls for availabilities at the Comedy Store. We did this on the phone.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, we basically did.

Duncan Trussell: We started talking. You would tell me, "Man, have you heard about this?" I'm like, "No, what is it?" We'd have these long-ass conversations on the phone. Sometimes hours.

Joe Rogan: Hours. It really was like podcasts back then. Long before we ever went on the road together.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah, yeah. It's fucking cool, man. I'm glad you're here, man.

Joe Rogan: Well, likewise. Likewise. Thank you for having me on.

Duncan Trussell: My pleasure, brother. It's always fun. Always fun to hang out with you. If you're around tonight, come do the show. Can you? Are you out?

Joe Rogan: I can't because I gotta wake up at like 3am to fly.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, where you going?

Joe Rogan: Tomorrow I'm headed to Tacoma.

Duncan Trussell: Oh, can I say some dates?

Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Shit, I always forget, dude. You've got the most popular podcast on earth. You're in Tacoma this weekend. Where you at? Hold on. What club?

Joe Rogan: I googled it because I've been on the road so much. Tacoma's fun.

Duncan Trussell: Well, when does this come out?

Joe Rogan: Tomorrow.

Duncan Trussell: What?

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Tacoma. Tacoma. Come see me in Tacoma. I'm going to be in Portland. Here it is. Oh, thank you. Tacoma Comedy Club. I heard that's an awesome spot. The Omaha Funny Bone. Helium in Portland. Can't wait.

Joe Rogan: Helium is, oh boy, you're going right to the belly of the beast.

Duncan Trussell: I'm excited.

Joe Rogan: Oh, perfect for your comedy.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Duncan Trussell: Nice. Healing and rich.

Joe Rogan: Oh, they got a Richmond one too.

Duncan Trussell: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Nice.

Duncan Trussell: And then Southlake. All of it is available at DuncanTrussell.com slash tour.

Joe Rogan: My man.

Duncan Trussell: My man. Thank you, Joe. Love you. Bye, everybody.

Joe Rogan: Bye.