Transcript of #2517 - Taylor Sheridan New

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What's happening?

What's up, buddy? That's a hell of a fucking belt buckle. What is that? What is that? What's going on there?

So this one is for a horse I have called Maverick Buzz the Tower that won reserve at the Futurity.

And they give you a belt buckle if you win?

A belt buckle and money.

That's a dope belt buckle.

Expensive belt buckle.

So guys like you that understand horses, like if you saw someone with one of those, you would know exactly what that is right away.

Oh yeah. And the year, depending on the year, I'm going to know the horse.

It's like you and fighters. I guess. I guess it's probably similar. Yeah. But that's—

oh, that guy won the thing in 2012. He fought so-and-so. And that's the same with me and horses.

It's always so interesting to me how these— there's these different sort of categories of interests that people have that, you know, one person might not know anything. I don't know anything about horses, but you're like fucking balls deep, you know, fuck everything about it. It's crazy. It's such an interesting like pool of knowledge, the people that are really into horses. And then they start explaining, you go, oh, this is not as simple as, oh, that's a horse and that's a horse too. Like there's genetic lines and there's certain tendencies that certain horses will actually pass on to their offspring.

Oh yeah.

That's crazy stuff.

There's a stallion, and I really like him. I've got a number of horses by this stallion. His name's Spook's Got a Whiz. And they're just incredibly balanced, real feely, very, very quick-footed, big stoppers. But they see dead people. They see ghosts. So like—

What?

Once every 3 months, for no reason, this thing's gonna fucking check out. And I mean check out. Just decide it's not safe here, we're going back to the barn, you can come with me or I'm gonna buck your ass off or I'm gonna flip over. No, he just loses his mind.

Whoa.

And you never know when it's gonna happen.

And his children have this as well?

Yeah.

Whoa. Just a little quirk. And that's— But other than that, they're fucking automatic.

That's a big quirk. That's like if you have a Corvette and it decides to drive home.

Yeah, a little bit, a little bit.

Most of the time you can go to the store.

We all deal with it 'cause they're worth it.

I guess, but that seems so crazy that the horse see— do you really think it sees ghosts?

I don't know what he sees, some kind of boogeyman. A lot of them are deaf. So really? Yeah.

Why?

So, well, there's a gene. Typically, if you see a horse with a white face and the white goes above the eyes, typically that horse is deaf.

Wow.

And so they can't hear. But they can feel the vibrations. So like that, that could set one of those horses off.

Just anything pounding on the ground that might be something chasing it.

Yeah, I mean, they're prey animals.

Right, right, right. Wow, the deaf thing's crazy. I wonder if that has any sort of an advantage where they could sort of tune out distractions. You know, I would imagine if a horse is at a rodeo—

Yes, 100%, because, you know, this crowds of screaming and yelling is not gonna bother them. Now, if they start stomping their feet, I was gonna show this one horse of mine and I'm about to run in the pen, and all these guys are cheering for this Italian rider, and they're all beating on the side of the arena.

Oh.

And my horse checked the fuck out. He checked the fuck out.

Like a whole herd of elephants chasing him. Wow. I can imagine how weird that is for the horse.

Yeah.

Like it's being told to do something, but its instincts are like, no, we gotta get the fuck out of here. I can't hear anything. That's nuts. The hearing thing, there's a famous pool player, his name is Shane van Boning. He's like one of the greatest pool players of all time, if not the greatest, and he's deaf and he has hearing aids. And when he plays, he shuts them off. He just goes click and goes into this world.

The zone.

Just of balls and geometry and just doesn't miss. Just is a horrifying person to play.

Really?

And because the fact that he's got that extra sense shut off, like the hearing, he can shut it off. It's not just that, I mean, he's also obsessive. Practices 10 hours a day. I mean, he's an all-time wizard. Like, he's won the US Open, which is the hardest tournament to win in all of pool. He's won it 5 times, which is just not— there's only one other guy in history, Earl Strickland, that's won it 5 times.

Everybody plays pool, like everybody, a little.

Yeah.

But then the levels to the game, like, you start getting a professional pool player.

Yeah.

And they're playing a totally different game.

It's a totally different— at just watching it, you realize like, oh my God, what am I doing? I'm hitting the ball way too hard.

I don't know what I'm doing.

My angles are fucked up. Like, this guy's playing that with English. I would just hit it straight.

You want to spin up, backspin, it hits over here.

Oh yeah, it's just— it's the control of the ball. It's just like they're part of the— the stick is a part of their body. The stick and the ball, they're all connected in space and time, and they know where that ball's going within millimeters. Yes, it's nuts to watch. Like, some of these guys, they'll hit a ball and it'll travel— it's a 9-foot table— it'll travel all the fuck away around the table, like a 12-foot distance, and it'll go in a 2 2-inch spot and you just go, fuck me. It's crazy. And then if you do that and you're deaf too, like you don't even hear the cheers. You're just still in the zone.

Hyper-focused.

Yeah, just hyper-focused. Autism probably helps too. You have that.

Yeah.

You know, a little, little. Oh yeah, just a touch.

I got a little, I think.

I think anybody's good at anything. Anybody's good at anything is either ADHD or autistic.

Yeah. They tried to give me medicine for the ADHD.

Did they?

Yeah. I'm like, fuck no.

How old were you when they tried to give it to you?

Oh, when I— well, they did give it to me when I was a kid.

Really?

Yeah.

What'd they give you?

And then you're— who knows, but whatever, you're lobotomized, right? And then, fuck. And so I stopped taking it just because I was— now you're just like, guys, you know. And so my parents were like, fuck it, just let him run around.

My neighbor's kid, they gave it to him when I lived in California. It was such a bummer. He was this wild little kid. And they gave it to him and all of a sudden he was flat.

Yep.

And I was like, oh. And the lady was like, oh, he's on medication now because he's hyperactive. I'm like, oh my God. Not my kid, not my place.

Yeah.

I'm not saying nothing. I just go to work. You know, I was single back then and I was like 28 or 29 and I was just so confused how you could do that. And then I kept thinking like, if somebody did that to me when I was a kid, for sure I would have been on drugs.

Yeah.

If my parents knew about those options, they could shut me the fuck up. If I had the wrong parent, my parents wouldn't have done it, had the wrong parents. 100%, I had all the traits that would have allowed me to get on Ritalin.

A fucking superpower if you understand it. Exactly, it's a superpower.

Yeah, if you could find something you love.

People, people say, how in the world can you write a script? You write all these things. It's not that hard. Like, once I know what it is, I can sit— you could sit me in an airport around 1,000 people, I won't hear them, and I can sit there for 12 hours straight.

'Cause you love it.

I just get— I just hyperfocus.

But if somebody wants you to pay attention to the history of Pop-Tarts or something—

Oh, I can't. I can't.

It's not going in there.

I physically can't do it.

Yeah, it's not going in there. Yeah. That's the superpower. The superpower is you can find something you love and focus on it, but the way our education system is designed is so ass-backwards. You take kids that are so energetic and they have so much life and you just squeeze it out of them. Just sit Still, stay put, listen to boring shit. And all day they're just fighting this desire to scream and just run out of the building and go do something fun.

Wasn't the, like, essentially what we call the modern public education system founded by, or really by the Rockefellers? Yep. As a means to create workers?

Yep, yep.

That's it.

Compliant workers and soldiers.

Conform.

Just one of the reasons why they decided to start school so early for kids is the earlier you can start them, the more you can get them to do whatever you want them to do. And the more you can get them to pledge allegiance and get really excited about this, that, or the other thing, including all the trans stuff that you see in school, all the Pride stuff. And teachers are working with preschool kids and they're talking about sexuality and gender. Like, they're fucking 6. Like, they don't know what you're talking— like, why are you even talking to them about that? Because you can get them early and you can program those thoughts into their mind that this is a good cause. And it could be anything. It could be your religion, it could be your political ideology, it could be being a Christian, being a Muslim, whatever. If you get kids young enough, you can talk them into doing almost anything. That's why they have child suicide bombers. They don't try to get guys in their 40s with a family to strap a vest on. They try to get kids. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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Streaming war noch nie so wow. And you know what, what'll really bake a couple of noodles is if you look at— because all these things are funded, all these nonprofits and NGOs, they're off of— but where's the money from. And when you look at where the money comes from and you realize, oh wait a minute, and it's been coming for 40, 50 years from these places— Qatar, for example, obviously Russia, China— all these are enemies donating money to all of these various groups to divide, to just eat away from the inside.

Russia's been doing it since the '70s.

Yeah, '60s.

'60s. Yeah, that Yuri Bezmenov— I'm sure you've seen that video. Anybody who hasn't, please watch it. It's Yuri Bezmenov and it's in 1984. And this guy is essentially describing what America is going to look like eventually. And he's dead on, just dead on, dead on with the communism, the Marxism, the stuff in the universities, just completely poison their mind, push out any ideas of patriotism being a virtue, all the hate for America that you have, like all the division, all of it engineered. It's wild.

Just look at who it benefits.

That's it.

That's it. It's real simple. Yeah, just look and see who it benefits.

Well, it benefits a lot of people in this country as well. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people that really love division and they can profit off of it and they can work, work an angle, you know, we're with you. This is a big part of the problem with the whole idea of nonprofits, because nonprofits in theory are awesome. It's a great thing that people are willing to donate their money, like wealthy people who are doing well say, "You know what? I think my money could be best suited helping out other people." It's beautiful. It's one of the most amazing notions about people when they can be charitable when they don't have to be. They do it because they want to and they really want to help. Then you find out what's really going on and that the majority of the money is going to overhead and in employees.

Well, think about this. If I create a nonprofit, to go solve— well, LA is a perfect example. We can look at the homeless situation that they have there and all of these NGOs that are getting all of this money. And the problem is getting worse. It's not getting better.

Right.

It's getting worse. But if I form an NGO and that's my cause and I solve the problem, then what do I do with my NGO?

Exactly.

Now I got no money. Now there's no reason to give me money. So they don't create them to solve problems. The incentive is to totally exacerbate the problem. Make the problem worse, make it longer, make it bigger. Look how big the problem is, we need more money.

Some guy was doing a breakdown of the people that work in the homeless industry— industry, I say in air quotes— in California, because that's really what it is. It's— they spent $24 billion on the homeless problem, and no one can account for it. And they tried to get an accounting of it, they tried to do an audit of it, and Newsom vetoed it. Vetoed it. Like, why would you want to know? Let's stop. Let's stop all that nonsense and build this fucking train track to nowhere that's never gonna get built.

Well, they have a mile of it. They have a mile of that train.

Only cost $100 billion. Relax. Things take time.

They have a fucking mile. Well, we're trying to choose the path. How about right beside the I-5? How about that? How about right next to the flat fucking highway?

Everything they do sucks.

Yeah.

How about that stupid fucking road over the highway to make sure the mountain lions are safe? Yeah, it's like over $100 million still not done.

And they have them, by the way, that's not a new concept. They have those throughout the West. Yeah, and they don't cost shit.

Cost much money at all. They fix them quick. They do it quick.

It's just—

yeah, they're done in a couple of months.

Yeah, pour some cement. Yeah, put some sod down, plant some fucking grass, and away you go.

Away you go.

But they're— but we're applying logic to a state that doesn't use that.

It's—

it is— it's like, it is as goofy as it gets. And then you think it's as goofy as it gets, and then you hear that Portland just the— okay, so this is gonna be on the ballot in November. It got enough votes to be on the ballot. This is some law that's under the guise of stop animal cruelty. Well, who doesn't want to stop animal cruelty? I certainly want to stop animal cruelty. Let's stop animal cruelty. So what does it mean? It means no hunting, no fishing, no ranching, no agriculture, no animals that get harmed in any way, no killing chickens for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Nothing. No animals die.

And this is a city ordinance?

Oregon is voting on this in November. No fishing! No fishing! What are you saying? Are you fucking high?

And no—

so no hunting, no ranching. Ranching? You can't ranch. You're gonna kill a cow? What, are you crazy? That's illegal in Oregon.

And here's— that probably sounds like a good idea to one of those people. And then, but here's my question. All right, so let's do it. Let's just say, let's just outlaw ranching. Let's just say, fuck it. Well, there's 91 million cattle in the country. So what do we do with them?

You just leave them alone. Let nature take its course.

Yeah, but there's— but they're not— but there's no nature to take its course.

It's—

this is not— there's 91 million head of fucking cattle. And I can promise you this, if you outlaw me feeding them and taking care of them, I'm not gonna— then they're wandering the highway.

Yeah. And then the bulls are out.

Yeah.

So you're gonna keep the bulls contained? No, the bulls are gonna kill people.

Yeah, and make more cattle.

Yeah, and make more cattle.

Yeah, so now we have 900 million cattle in 3 decades.

Yeah, and fuck all your fences, bulls are gonna smash them. Bulls are gonna eat your grass, bulls are gonna stomp your dog. Like, what are you talking about?

I can't. But it's not supposed to be logical.

It's all just a vibe, man. It's like, and it's not even a well-thought-out one, but the problem is you don't have to be well thought out to get on the ballot. You just have to appeal to certain sensibilities, and then all of a sudden people are like, oh, that would be good, let's stop animal cruelty. And they're probably on SSRIs anyway.

It'll probably pass.

Yeah, yeah, I don't think it'll pass.

According to this New York Times article, it was a guy One guy.

One guy?

One guy got 135,000 signatures and got it passed to that level.

I wonder how many of them are homeless people.

Um, he moved to Portland from Denver from Southern California where I'm trying to figure out where he's from.

Do we have a photo of this dude? I want to see what this guy looks like.

Show him, buddy.

Of course he's from Southern California.

Of course he is. He's a vegan. Oh, that's weird. I would have never guessed.

Substitute teacher.

Oh, substitute teacher.

It keeps getting better.

Governor. I lost it. It.

What else?

That's all it was saying. They didn't frame him very well.

Well, they shouldn't. It's a crazy idea.

There you go. Mickelson. Yeah, substitute teacher, vegan, and petitions organizer.

It's to have a system where we're not killing or hurting animals anymore. I love how he said a system. What are you talking about? What does that mean? What's a system? You're talking about nature? What are you talking about? Like, they're gonna kill each other, stupid. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Is it somehow another less cruel with them when a mouse mountain lion gets into a pen of sheep and tears them apart. Yeah, he figured the chances of meeting another gay vegan were better in Portland. He's probably not wrong. Yeah, it's probably a good bet. Yeah, solid bet.

Yeah, he was sitting there going, Midland, Texas, Portland, Oregon, where am I?

Yeah, you gotta go to Portland and take some medication. Just Fuckin' have a good time.

There he is.

There we go. Hey, fella.

Oh, he's already gotten too much attention from us.

Yeah, it's, uh, there's a lot of silly people in the world, and, you know, like we were talking about with young people, if you get young people indoctrinated early enough to think these silly ideas make sense, which is one of the reasons why I love that Kevin Costner moment on your show when he had explained to that vegan lady.

Oh yeah.

It's such a good moment.

How cute does it have to be before you care if it fucking lives?

Yeah, and what the actual— like, what life gets killed when you're just talking about farming, just food, plowing a field. Yeah, just plowing a field, or, or go, or go build a road, right?

Want to destroy some fucking organisms? Go build a road.

Yeah, and if you're riding on those roads, you're in that system. And then there's the bees. Like, the amount of bees that die every year so we can have avocados is bananas.

Yeah, bring 'em in from Brazil.

Whew.

By the billions.

By the billions.

By the bee.

And they die.

Mm-hmm.

Bees, and then on top of the— so it's avocados and almonds. Those are the two big ones, right?

Yeah, almonds, you know what's fascinating, and I'm gonna— we can look it up. Almonds, the amount— it's something like 19 gallons of water is what you have to give to get one almond.

Is that real?

Yeah, yeah, we can— we can— yeah, it's fucking bananas.

My doctor told me almonds aren't even good for you.

Well, you know, it's—

he said they're okay for you, he said, but you know, there's—

there was a time in the Mediterranean where they were— they were poisonous. They have strychnine in them, and it's one of the first domesticated plants. And what people realized— whoever, Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, whoever's wandering around— they're like, the squirrels are eating those poisonous nuts from that tree, huh? They're okay from this one, not okay from that one. Ah, so they started cutting down and uprooting all the ones where the squirrels wouldn't eat.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. And so that's— so the almond originally—

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And then, oh my God, here's, here's my new like like, look, I'm a writer, right? So words matter to me. And when we, when we misuse them in our society, it just bothers me, right? So all these things that we're calling milk, like almond milk, right? And I'm just determined to call it almond juice because that's what it fucking is. It's not even almond juice. It's not like we're extracting tea almost. We're taking almonds, pulverizing them, and brining them in water. Essentially leaching out the flavor of the almond and then adding a bunch of shit to it and sugar and whatnot.

Adding a lot of sugar. My friend Duncan was like, dude, almond milk is good for you. I go, you're looking how much sugar is in there? And we were on the phone and he goes, holy shit! I go, yeah, man, that's why it tastes good. But my doctor told me I had oxalates in my diet, in my, my blood test. He said, your oxalates are kind of high. He goes, are you eating almonds? And I said, yeah. I eat almonds all the time. He's like, yeah, cut back. He goes, that's where it's from.

Really?

Yeah. So you find out how much, uh, how much oxalates are in almonds. I just listened to him. And also it's a lot of like, um, a lot of that gluten-free flour stuff. If you buy a lot of that stuff, it's like almond flour a lot of the times, right? Almonds are a high oxalate food. Eating them can raise oxalate levels that circulate, get filtered by the kidneys, and appear in urine, which may increase kidney stone risk in susceptible people. Yeah, almonds contain about 296 milligrams of oxalate per 100 grams, roughly 4 milligrams per nut, putting them in the high oxalate category. Yeah, yeah, he said they're not bad if you just have them every now and then, he goes, but don't, don't do it on a regular basis.

Huh.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that has high oxalates that people don't think about that can really fuck you up. Kale, for instance. Like, I used to drink kale smoothies all the time until another doctor told me you really should cook the kale, cook it, and then filter out whatever the water's in it. I go, really? I go, why? He goes, oxalates. He goes, you want to cook the oxalates out of them.

Really?

Yeah, and that's apparently what causes a lot of kidney stones with some folks. They drink a lot of those green smoothies, which I used to do every day. I used to take a bunch of kale, throw in a bunch of apples and some ginger and some garlic and blend it all up and drink at the beginning of the day. I thought I was doing a good thing. And he was like, you're just blasting your system with oxalates. I was like, oh, alright.

Yeah, I know. Have some fucking eggs, bro.

He said have bacon. Have some bacon. I'm like, fucking bacon's better for you? Like, my journey of figuring out what to eat was a long one. It was a long one, and thank God I got this podcast, because if I hadn't had all those conversations with people where I realized like, oh, so we're— like, and now the food pyramid's completely flipped, which is hilarious.

Yeah.

It's like I've had enough conversations where I realize like, oh, all these people don't know what the fuck they're talking about and they're giving advice. And it's weird. It's weird how much bad advice there is for food and for health and for fucking fill in the blank. Almost everything in our society.

Our food pyramid was created by Johnson Johnson. Yeah. Or Kellogg's.

Kellogg's. One of those.

Yeah.

It's like, how do we get people to eat our shit in the morning and then again at lunch and then Well, the one thing that we can't control, and they talk about the one thing that we do not have is this massive industrialized meat production because there's no economical way to do it. They'd do it if they could. Harris Ranch, which you've probably seen off I-5 in California, the closest version of that. But what it is is a feedyard, right? Where you get them together and feed cattle for 90 to 150 days before you go send them off and slaughter them, right? That's the closest thing there is to an industrialized beef industry because it's a very inefficient way. It's way better to farm, right? It's more efficient to farm than it is graze cattle. So you only want to graze cattle somewhere that you can't farm. At the end of the day, you want to graze— cattle are great at taking protein from poor protein sources and metabolizing it, right? So you graze them in real rocky terrain with native grasses that you can't farm, can't till it, just can't. And it needs to be eaten by something or weeds will overtake it, right?

'Cause grass grows better when it's being grazed. And so there's no way to industrialize that or centralize it. The most centralized it is is at the packing house, right, where you've got 4 major packing houses. That control 90-something percent of the beef industry. And that's starting to change. COVID was extremely helpful for the smaller farmer and rancher to sit there and get their product out, right? And find small— they start popping up. People have opened these USDA facilities that don't process 800 head of cattle an hour. They maybe do 50 or 50 a day. And Now people can go there because they're a USDA facility. They can buy beef directly from them, buy it from the rancher, right? And you can control where your food's coming from, as opposed to what, what was happening, um, where you'd get a bunch of— if you're going to go get a burger, you're eating some Australian killer bull, right, for the most part, or some something from Brazil, or you're not eating something that you want to eat, right? When you go to a nice steakhouse, the steaks there are— they're going to come from most likely Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Montana.

There's select areas where people are spending that kind of attention and time to raise that kind of quality of beef, right? And it's being done by smaller ranchers. It may be a big ranch, but It's still operated by relatively few people. You know, 4-6 is 300,000 acres, but there's 12 cowboys.

Wow. 12 cowboys for 300,000 acres is nuts.

Yeah.

How do they keep track of everything?

I mean, we break it down into pastures, and then you have— and then the pastures fall under— the terminology is this. Let's say, oh, if you're in Guthrie, there's a, there's a camp. And we call it South Camp because it's in the south and it's responsible for 50,000 acres, right, which is broken down into multiple pastures that are between 7,000 and 10,000 acres. There's one big pasture in that camp that's like 14,000 acres. And so then you have North Camp, you have what we call— then we have camps around the town, little town of Guthrie. So you break it down into the responsibility of each cowboy's Or I'm somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 acres.

Wow, that's a hell of a responsibility. Yeah, that's a lot of work, man.

A lot of work.

What's it— you know what's really interesting about your shows, particularly Yellowstone? It got people like really attracted to the idea of brutal hard work as being romantic. Yeah, you know, people like really identified with those guys on Yellowstone. That were just like so dedicated to that ranch, so dedicated to busting their ass and working all day, hard fucking work, and then just hanging out together afterwards. And there's something about that life that's so simplistic and romantic to people that it just really resonated with so many people. They didn't even know that they liked that.

Well, it's uniquely American, right? And the amount of freedom That is, so we move somebody out to South Camp, and we go, "Okay, so here you are. There's your house at South Camp. See you in a week or so. Go figure shit out. Keep track of the cattle." And you give them a string of horses, and they work their horses, and they ride that property. They know every inch of it, and you don't ever— we don't have weekly corporate meetings.

How do they get supplies? Is the house stocked in advance?

Yeah, go to town, you know, towns, which is an endeavor, right? Town's 90 miles away. So you go to town once a week, right? Stock up, venture, stock up, go back. Wow. Yeah, but it's, it's, it's a crazy life. And people incorrect, not every— this isn't true of every cowboy. There's plenty of cowboys that typically they grow up on that ranch and that's the life that they know and that's what they want to do. Right? But they still go off to college. Like, almost every one of my cowboys has a ranch management degree. Like, they went to school—

wow—

to study.

What's a good school if you want to be a cowboy?

I mean, there's quite a few of them. Texas Tech, I mean, that's a phenomenal ranch management program. A bunch of the guys on the Sixers went there. TCU has a ranch management program, a good one. Texas A&M. You know, we have a— we have vets that live on the ranch. Obviously, we breed a ton of horses. And so our vets— there's Colorado State's an excellent veterinary school for large animal vets. Obviously, Texas A&M is a phenomenal school. Texas Tech as well. Those are—

dude, how the fuck do you pay attention to everything? You're running a gigantic ranch and you have about 48 TV shows. How the fuck do you do it? I don't understand it. I— every time a new Taylor Sheridan show pops up, I say to my wife, I go, how the fuck is he doing this? Like, where does he have this time?

Part of it is, if you think about it, so my crew, my core crew is the same crew I made Wind River with. Like, when we had no money. I remember one time, I'm on the top of a mountain with me and my first AD and my DP, Ben Richardson, and there's not a producer. We haven't seen anybody in a week. And I looked at— we're freezing our asses off. It's 7 below zero in northern Utah. And I'm like, "Guys, you know, we could just fuck off to Hawaii and nobody would know for a while." We have their money and they don't know. They don't actually know where we are. They're just trusting that we're gonna make this movie, which we did. And it was incredibly difficult, but that's the same team that went over and did Yellowstone, which is then the same team that went up and did Mayor of Kingstown with me, and then 1883, 23, Lioness, Landman, all of them. And we've promoted from within. I've got PAs that are now first ADs. I've got camera operators that are now directors. So we've promoted from within, so everyone understands the way we do it.

And it's so friggin' efficient. We don't ever have— and you know, because you've been in this industry forever— these people will have meetings upon meeting upon meeting. They'll have a tone meeting where a whole bunch of people are going to sit around and try and talk about the tone of the script. Wouldn't you read the fucking thing? You should— we have to have a meeting about it? How about we don't have a meeting about it? And then they'll have a— they'll have a— and this is also networks, they love this shit so that they can have a reason for their existence, right? All these middle management people, and they want to do a prop show and tell where someone's going to come show them all the props that we're going to use.

Really?

Well, we don't do that shit because I'm like, I need your permission to use which, which Bic lighter I'm gonna use in this fucking scene? How about I just make the decision? And how about we use the same Bic lighter in all these fucking shows and I don't ever have to pick a Bic lighter again? How about that? So we just streamlined it and made it to where it's so efficient. Typically a TV show will start up and they'll prep for 12 weeks before they start filming. We do it in 4.

Wow.

Well, that makes sense. It makes sense that it's streamlined because I've been on shows when they first start out and it's chaos and there's a lot of network involvement and there's a lot of bullshit. But then once it gets going, they go, oh, you guys know what you're doing. Yeah, leave me alone.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're there from the beginning now.

That's beautiful.

We haven't missed. If you don't miss, right?

Well, it's like you don't miss, like you don't mess with the writing, you don't mess with the storylines, like you don't have any duds, man, which is incredible. This is It's incredible. It's an incredible accomplishment to have that many fucking shows and all of them be good and all of them be, you know, like very addictive. You know, Landman is so addictive.

It's, it's that show. It's about something very serious and then I can just throw shit at it. Yeah, let's just take a bunch of old people to a strip club.

Billy Bob is fucking awesome.

He's a genius.

I love that guy. He's so good on that show. It's like it was made for It was made for him. I mean, he's done so many things.

I went to Billy Bob before I, before I wrote a word, and I told him, I said, if you don't do this, I'm not gonna do it because I'm not gonna chase my tail. He goes, what is it? I said, I want to do— I said, basically, I want to take your character from Bad Santa and put him in West Texas and run an oil company. He goes, you want the guy from Bad Santa to run an oil company? I said, that's what I want. He goes, that sounds fucking awesome.

Well, it's educational too. I mean, a lot of people like have no idea how the oil business works, and you watch that show, you go, Jesus Christ, what a crazy job.

It's an insane job. And the other thing about it is we're so completely dependent upon petroleum in every single aspect of our lives, so completely dependent upon it. And we can debate how bad it is or isn't, and or not debate it. The reality is we don't have an alternative. Like, it does not exist. It simply doesn't exist. And we could sit there and say, well, when did this— no, you sit down with any climatologist and any engineer, they're going to tell you our best hope for a replacement of petroleum fuels is cold fusion, and we're 30, 40 years from it being something that we can rely upon. And reduced little nuclear reactors, like itty-bitties. Like, yeah, the size of this coffee pot.

That's what they're talking about. They're talking about like individual reactors that people have in their homes. Like, how long does it take before there's disasters? That sounds fucking— having a really good nuclear power plant for a city is an awesome idea. Having everyone have their own nuclear power plant sounds fucking crazy. You know, how many assholes are gonna cut into that thing?

Well, people still put fucking metal in microwaves, so I don't think we should be giving— I've done it. I'm like, well, how bad can it really be?

There's people that leave their fucking gas on so that someone can die in the house.

No, we don't.

We're nuts. Yeah, people are nuts. If you literally have consumer-level nuclear power plants— not with these monkeys. That's what— not with the human beings that we are today, our current form. We're not enlightened enough to have personal nuclear power plants in our house. Oh, fuck.

Yeah, so we're, we're, we're dependent upon it.

Um, that's why we're in Iran right now. Oh yeah, also because Israel. But I mean, we're, we're in Iran. I mean, the whole thing about it is the oil, the Strait of Hormuz. It's like, I think it's 40% of the world's oil supply passes through there. Yeah, Christ.

No, that's— and, and, and I think also China. Mm-hmm. It's a big play against— it's a chess piece against China.

Mm-hmm.

That's what I think.

Yeah, all of us. Fucking terrifying.

What a— and I'm not saying we should have or we shouldn't have, I'm not commenting politically, but what those guys, those SF guys did in Venezuela was fucking gangster.

It's crazy.

Whether— I'm not saying they should or shouldn't, I'm just saying, right, the team was sent and then the team— I mean, can you imagine if I wrote it in a movie? People will go, that's fucking ridiculous, Taylor.

Right, we don't have the tech yet.

You're gonna fly a bunch of SF dudes, drop them off on the roof of this high-rise surrounded by the fucking Cuban special forces, and they're gonna kill all of them, and then they're gonna fucking snatch him and his wife, go back to the roof, and just fucking fly away? That's what they did.

And they're gonna do it with sound. They're gonna disable everyone with a sound weapon. Like, what? Like, there was— do you remember when they first started talking about that Havana Syndrome?

Yeah.

People were dismissing it. This is horseshit. This is bullshit.

Yeah.

Like, no, they're talking about people that are in Havana, that they've been targeted, something zapped them, low-level frequencies that made them nauseous. Yeah, and I think that is a fraction of whatever they unleashed in Venezuela.

Who knows?

The discombobulator, that's what it's called, classified secret weapon system President Donald Trump claimed US forces used during the January 3rd operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He stated that the weapon successfully disabled enemy equipment and air defenses, preventing them from firing back. So it's, it's both— it disables the people and it disables their weapon system.

What?

That's amazing.

What the fuck are we doing? Official silence when asked for specific technical or operational details about how the device functions. Trump famously told New York Post, I'm not allowed to talk about it. Mm-hmm. He says they press buttons. He claimed the defense forces press buttons and nothing worked, disabling both Russian and Chinese-made rockets and radar.

Wow.

If weapon affected both mechanical equipment and personnel, he also referred to it at— he also referred to a sonic weapon being used against Maduro's Cuban security detail inside a heavily fortified fortress. Fucking A, man. I would love to see what that looks like. You know, I bet they have video too.

Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, all wearing GoPros.

I'd love to go into a skiff. Just show me the video. I won't say nothing. I want to see what it looks like. I just want to watch. What does it look like when somebody gets zapped by sound and gets fully disabled? Like, apparently they just fell to the ground in agony. They couldn't move.

Yeah.

And they just went in and shot him.

Some freaking SF snipers just freaking on top of that, just raining down on him.

It's crazy. Like, that guy thought he was safe. Crazy. And there's a famous video of him saying, come and get me.

Oh yeah, bro. Yeah, be careful. Don't— what bear you poke.

Yeah.

Also, it's like We— none of us know what the tip of the spear technology and weapon systems is available right now. We don't know. They don't tell us. They don't tell us. Obviously no one knew this fucking discombobulator thing existed. This is science fiction. Yeah, right. If this was 20 years ago, you'd be like, that's not a real thing. But now you're like, oh shit, they used it. It's not just a concept, they fucking used it. What else? What are they cooking out in the desert in the middle of Nevada? Who knows?

Yeah, think about this. For that to be used, there's something 4 generations past that, 100%, that they're playing with now.

Yeah, 100%. You know, this whole UAP world stuff, like when they start talking about UAPs, all of my bullshit alarms go off. All of them. It's like, I don't believe if you knew things you would tell us, so I don't believe you're telling us the truth. I think they have some special access programs that they've been working on for decades and decades and some super high-level shit that involves some sort of novel propulsion system, and they have that stuff flying around in the sky. And I think that's what a lot of people are saying. That's what a lot of people are saying. That doesn't discount the idea that there's something else out there, because I think there is, but I think there's a giant chunk of the shit that people are seeing that's ours.

Yeah, testing.

Yeah, testing, doing stuff with it.

If there was an intelligent life form that had stumbled upon our barbaric asses, why would they not go, hey guys, fire up that fucking missile and take— we found this blue planet, we got to get rid of this thing.

Well, I think maybe every intelligent species that's tribal and territorial has to go through an adolescent period of their evolution. And if you look at human history. You know, I was reading about Vlad the Impaler last night. Jesus Christ, how many of the Ottoman Turks got killed? And his famous methods of putting people on posts and separating them down the line on the road so that as these poor guys are traveling to go and fight him, they just see the enemy stuck on skewers and in geometric patterns and shit. He would do them in like stars and stuff. Just, he was a vicious motherfucker. And he's the motivation behind, or the, you know, the inspiration behind Dracula. And I was reading about that guy, I'm like, fuck, people have always been awful. Yeah, they've always been awful. But they just, like, as time goes on, they get a little less awful. A little less. Like, we're a little less awful now than we were during Nazi Germany.

Not totally great, not collectively, right?

Certain We're still willing to do genocide. Some of us are, but it's less, less approved. It's less— more people are horrified at it. It's like human beings are getting a little bit better. It's not as quick as we'd like. I think if I was an alien life-form, I would say you have to wait this out. It's like if you have a kid, you got to let the kid fall down, stumble, stumble. You got to let him get hurt. You got to let things happen. You got to let him fuck up and figure it out himself. You got to figure this out, make it right. You fucked this up. You got to give them a chance to become better, right? I think as a civilization, I would think the same thing would apply. You have to give this civilization time to evolve and adapt and get past where it's at right now. And I don't think that you do that by intervening and like grabbing us by the hand and showing us the way. I think what you do is you hang back and make sure that we don't nuke each other and just sort of pay attention to all the different international ongoings and just let human beings slowly but surely evolve.

Yeah, that's what I would do if I was an intelligent life form observing people.

The interesting thing that we're as a civilization facing now, and, and it's always happened in some capacity, when a society gets wealthy, really wealthy, then people start to question wealth and how can we be more equitable. And it comes across like compassion, but it really comes down to a debate of what is more valuable to a society. Is self-determination more valuable, or is equity more valuable? And by equity, what I mean is everyone gets exactly the same shit. Everyone. So you take them off them— we're not in a monetary society anymore. Now you're working for the collective, and you're hearing that word thrown around a lot, right, these days. The problem with working for the collective is who decides who picks up the trash? And who decides who gets to go represent your nation at the Olympics? Who gets to decide who gets to— is someone gonna let me go make TV shows? Which, by the way, I wouldn't do for free. It's too fucking hard, right? So now I don't want to do it. Well, then you got to go do this. Well, I want to do that either. And that's the problem.

And then they force you to do things. Yeah. And then how do they do that?

And so then, yeah, so then, so, so the— you either have self-determination or in your attempt to be collective, you have to surrender that. And then you're surrendering it to who? And, and now you have a dictatorship no matter what the fuck you thought you had. Yeah, it always comes back to that. It always— you can, you can look at Marxism and Leninism and what Lenin was talking about, his hopes, whether they were his hopes or not, but it devolved into an authoritarian regime very, very quickly. And, and, you know, communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, they're all very, very similar. The differences are superficial. I think Ayn Rand said that they're just superficial variations between the exact same thing, which is the evil of the collective.

The evil of collective and human beings' desire to control their people. Yeah, they love to. They— and anytime you give them a chance where they could feel righteous about controlling people, they jump at it. And they can— they have an opportunity to classify people. There's good people and bad people. The bad people, you could do whatever you want to them. They're the other. And that happens with every, every time groups get into power like that and tell you what you can and can't do. And you're seeing that being embraced shockingly more and more all over the world. People are embracing more government power and more government control, and it's really crazy. It's really crazy to see.

It's unique. I think that Number one, I think in 30 years when they look back, like, we're still suffering from a society from COVID like, still. And not so much from the disease itself, but from our faith in the institutions around us, whether it's government, whether it's the media, whether it's pharmaceutical companies. And the, the way that it was manipulated to gain power for a political group, and it was effective. And so when something's effective, then people just keep doing the same thing until it's no longer effective, right? We did that in our military with the win hearts and minds, right? So that was all— that all comes from Japan, right? We're gonna win the hearts and minds of Japanese. Well, the Japanese surrendered. Like their emperor, who they looked at as a god, he told the people of Japan after we dropped two frickin nuclear bombs on them, hey, we are gonna endure the unendurable. We are going to surrender. It's the only way that we can salvage our nation. So they willfully surrendered. And then our government goes, look how great this hearts and minds stuff's working. It's not working. It's not working at all.

And then they tried it it in Vietnam, didn't work. Tried it everywhere else that we've had a conflict, we've tried it, and it hasn't worked yet because what it was based on was flawed, right? Because they, they chose to be subjugated at that time, and, and making that choice kept them an independent nation. So our, our government, our— and it's so dangerous what we're seeing. Um, you can like Trump or not like Trump, it doesn't I mean, people are gonna like presidents and dislike presidents, but now, defying the rule of law because he happens to be the head of the federal government and openly defying the federal government, the repercussions of that are gonna be, okay, fine, you can't stand this man. You think he's a terrible president and you're not gonna follow his laws, but that's the new normal now. So when a president gets in that you do support, then the other side, because we've established this precedent, they're just not gonna follow his laws either, right? And now we've eroded the rule of law. And yeah, and then, then what happens?

The slippery slope is very dangerous. It's— I mean, I was saying that when the ICE raids were going on because I was like, okay, I am not in favor of illegal criminals being in this country. However, we're setting a very alarming precedent where you have masked militarized police with no ID that are running around the cities snatching people up. Like, this, this could set a precedent that could be used by the left if they get into power for something different than this being— than just for ICE. We've already accepted the idea of militarized police on our streets. And that people with 7 weeks training, you're just sending them out to snatch up people. And a lot of American citizens are getting caught up in that trap too, unfortunately. And then they have to get released. Like, that, that could be bad if, if the next party gets in. So if the Democrats get in next and they decide, like, maybe there's a new— a new COVID strain happens, some new pandemic happens, whatever the fuck—

if you don't get the vaccine, they're going to arrest you.

And then they start the same Yes, we saw it in, I think it was Minnesota, or whoever they had the National Guard on the streets, but they had people enforcing lockdowns. And so they had people walking on the streets with fucking guns yelling at people to get in your house over a cold. Like, this, these kind of slippery slopes, you might think, no, we're just trying to get rid of the bad immigrants. I get it, I'm with you, I agree. However, The way they're doing it, doing it. I don't know. I'm not even saying there's another way or a better way. I'm just saying, you want to get them out all at once? Yeah, that's the way to do it. You want to get them out quick? That's the way to do it. Because they got them in quick. You're right. They opened the fucking border. They helped people get in. But now that they're in, if you're going to get them out that way, you're setting a weird precedent. You're setting a precedent that could be used in other ways.

Yeah, that's the The challenge is, okay, we're gonna— we need to enforce the law, right? Or don't have them, right? They've enacted no new laws. These are the same immigration laws that were on the books when Obama was president and Clinton was president. The same, right? The same rules. It's the methodology. And you gotta sit there and weigh the pros and cons about, okay, the pros of of trying to eradicate this issue, you can't give it a deadline.

Yeah.

Right? It's slippery.

It is slippery.

And again, it's what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and these politicians right now who are doing all of us a tremendous disservice in Washington, I feel, our elected officials, because they're not thinking beyond this next election. And maybe they never have.

They never have.

Right? But they were better at hiding it, maybe.

I think there was no internet.

But— well, true.

I think that's what it is. There was no social media.

But I think we've reached a point, as politicians talk about eliminating the Electoral College, they talk about eliminating the filibuster, eliminate packing courts, all these things because their side's not in power. And so we're just gonna take the structure of the government and totally rework it to benefit us temporarily. But then those same benefits that you have now will be used against you. Yeah, they will 100% be used against you. I think the most important legislation that we could pass right now is term limits. I think, I think 12 years tops in Congress, and I think probably 12 years in the Senate, two 6-year terms in the Senate.

That's more than enough time. Yeah, that's a lot of fucking time.

That's enough. We don't, we don't need any, anyone else I mean, I don't know how it's become— how the fuck is Nancy Pelosi worth $400 million? How the fuck? Well, I know how. Yeah, she gets in on all these fucking IPOs.

Exactly right.

She's gonna pass the legislation that allows Visa to go public, and then she's gonna get a big chunk of it. And then when she's confronted about it, look a reporter dead in the eye and fucking lie to him.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't do that. No consequence. We know you did it. We could look at how much stock you own.

Yeah.

Fucking liar.

They all do it.

Yes, they get—

people are calling out Ro Khanna on Twitter today.

Fucking rich. Everyone's getting rich. Yeah, they get paid $175 grand a year and they're all fucking millionaires.

Super millionaires. They're all like— and like, she's intensely wealthy. That's, that's a, that's almost half a billion dollars. That's nuts. As a public servant, that's nuts.

Yeah, it's insanity.

And it's, you know, that's what we're used to. We're just— we just We know it's bad and we just accept it. And people are busy and they have families and mortgages and shit to deal with, and so they complain, then they keep on trucking.

Yeah, I mean, I have— as we discussed, I have other jobs. I don't have a pile of time to dedicate to— it's tough for me to talk politics because I don't have hours in my day to sift through what's real and not real on Instagram or social, whatever. I'm not on that shit. But, but I can't— hard to form an opinion because, man, I don't know it. I don't know where to go. To get honest news. I'm not the news, I know that. I can't turn on the fucking news because they fucking been lying to us. They stopped being— I don't know if they were ever impartial, but I know that. I remember there was a guy, I was a kid, he was running for president. His name was Jack Kemp.

I remember Jack Kemp.

And I want to say it was Dan Rather. It may not have been. It may have been some other newscaster. And there's a debate amongst all these different potential candidates for president. And as he's introducing all of these various politicians, he's saying, so-and-so Harvard graduate and law professor from here and this former senator and this and that and the other and this person here. And they get to Jack Kemp and he goes, Backup quarterback and born-again Christian Jack Kemp. I'm like, wow, you just sunk that dude. Everyone else, you gave what their jobs were and talked about their accomplishments and this. You just said he didn't start at quarterback and he's— you call that his religion, dude? And that's the first time I ever remember. I'm like, I know your opinion. I'm not supposed to know your opinion. You're supposed to be— you're supposed to be giving me news, right? You're supposed to be giving me honest, unbiased information so I can make a decision. And you're making a decision for me, or trying to.

Yeah.

And they've gotten so— as news became entertainment, I mean, CNN's the worst thing that ever happened to news because it's 24 hours. And now all of a sudden there's not 24 hours worth of news all the time, right? There is during a war, right? You can show us news, you know, war footage the whole time and talk about the war and why war and why no war. But when there's not, you got to make some shit up. Or push an opinion. And that's where we've gotten with news now. Now it's— news is piss them off and scare the shit out of them. Yeah, that's how we keep them watching.

And that's the business model.

It is now.

And it's also piss them off and scare the shit out of them, but ignore certain things that your sponsors wouldn't like you to talk about. Oh yeah, this is why, you know, Tulsi Gabbard and her final act as Director of National Intelligence, as she's leaving, she had that— she gave that press conference about Fauci, and she talked about how he lied in front of Congress and that he absolutely used American tax funds to fund gain-of-function research through EcoHealth Alliance and through the Wuhan lab in Wuhan, China. And, you know, no one's covering it. This episode is brought to you by Visible. How many of you are currently listening to this podcast on your phone? If you are chronically online like most of us are these days, your wireless network should be too. With Visible, you get unlimited 5G and unlimited hotspot, all powered by Verizon's 5G network. The perks of big wireless for half the cost. Visible isn't just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to keep you connected and no contract holding you back. Switch today at visible.com. Go to visible.com. Plans start at just $25 a month, or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code ROGAN, an exclusive offer for podcast listeners.

No. And by the way, didn't we all know that already?

Well, we knew it, but my parents didn't. People that just like, just read the news papers and watch TV, they don't know.

I've never seen anything as flagrantly obvious as COVID coming from the Wuhan lab studying COVID.

Right.

Right, I've never, you've got fucking news anchors keeping a straight face saying, "It came from the wet market." Did you ever see Jon Stewart's bit on it that he did on The Colbert Show? No.

You never saw it?

No.

Oh, we need to play it. Let's play it because it's so funny because Colbert tries to like stop him from doing it and push back. And Jon, he's a great comic, he just gets up from his chair and gets louder and just plows through it.

Really?

Over Colbert's like trying to cockblock his bit. He's like, it's like, it's a funny bit. And he's getting in the way. Oh, I'd like to see if you have information on that. I'd like to see it. And he just keeps going. He keeps plowing away. It's very funny. And it's in the middle of it, right? He was a, this was a courageous step because he was doing this when calling it out and saying that it came from a lab in Wuhan, China was somehow or another conflated with racism. Remember that?

Yeah.

If you said it came from Wuhan, China, from a lab, you're racist.

Yeah.

Like, how did you pull that off? Like, how did it— it's like, no one's saying anything racist. It's from fucking China, and it seems like EcoHealth Alliance funded it, and it seems like we funded EcoHealth Alliance.

Yes.

There's a lot of fucking paperwork.

And by the way, there's studies on the fucking disease. Yeah. That they've been doing that are posted on the CDC website. They're posted on the fucking— my favorite was when you catch all this shit about ivermectin.

Yeah.

And, and literally when, when that happened, I went, oh, fucking look that up. But look up ivermectin and studies with ivermectin, and a study pops up on the, on the CDC website while people are telling us to not take that shit. And it, and it talks about the efficacy of ivermectin and antiviral properties Specifically COVID-19. Yeah, so it's on the government website that the fucking drug works while they're telling everyone to not take it, and they're mocking me for taking—

Yes, horse dewormer. Watch this, this is great, this is great. Now you stop because he still wants to put out that establishment position. I'd like to see any evidence if you've got any evidence. Yeah, well, wild times in the news because I think from then on that sort of sent a shockwave through the majority of the population where it just— whatever trust they had in the news just got severely eroded.

Yeah.

And if we don't have good news, if we don't have trust in the news, then we're kind of adrift. And then you get locked into fucking conspiracy theories and echo chambers online, and you can get trapped trapped in them too, and that's not good either.

Yeah, then, then there's nowhere to go get information.

Has anybody in NBC, CBS, CNN— if any of those people picked up on that Tulsi Gabbard speech about Fauci and had any sort of a reaction to it, I'd like to know that, because from what I was reading online, no, none of them had. But this was as of yesterday. I don't know whether or not that's changed. I don't know if like they were preparing an article and they wanted to make sure that they got all their ducks in a row.

I would think pretty much anytime the head of an institute is begging for a pardon when he hasn't been charged with any crime is a pretty good indicator you might want to look and see if there's been a crime committed.

Was he begging for a pardon? I mean, he got—

Yeah, Fauci. Fauci was like, he had attorneys. This is in part of that deal. He had attorneys reaching out to Biden's camp the last day when he got the pardon.

Jeez.

The very last day. Jeez.

It's just a preemptive pardon is nuts, especially when Rand Paul's questioning him and he's talking to him about specifically about what defines gain-of-function research. And by all account, by every definition, it's gain-of-function research. And Fauci's still saying, you do not know what you are talking about.

With all due respect, even though, even though he's a doctor. Yeah, Rand Paul's a fucking doctor and an actual doctor. And then they say, well, you're an eye doctor. Well, that's my specialty. But before I became an eye doctor, I became a general doctor, which means I studied all the same shit that Fauci studied. Yeah, you got to go through medical school before you go pick a specialty. So 4 years of studying the entire body before you specialize in whatever you're gonna specialize in.

Well, it's also then if you read RFK Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, you find out he ran this exact same playbook playbook during the AIDS pandemic. It was the exact same playbook. That's what the Dallas Buyers Club is about. The Dallas Buyers Club, that McConaughey movie about AIDS, the fucking villain is Anthony Fauci. He's the guy that's stopping them from getting alternative medications. That's the guy that wanted everybody to take AZT. You know why? Because AZT had already been approved. They had already used it as a cancer medication. It was a chemotherapy medication that they stopped using 'cause it was too deadly. It was killing people quicker than cancer was killing them. So the first medication they gave people when they had an immune system that was compromised was a chemotherapy medication that was killing people. And they were giving it to people that were asymptomatic. They were giving it to people that tested HIV positive. And then, you know, about the PCR testing. So the PCR test, Kary Mullis, the guy who invented PCR testing, said publicly about Fauci, he does not know what the fuck he's talking about. I don't think he said fuck, but he does not know what he's talking about.

And that it's not supposed to be used to detect a disease in a person's body. And that if you ramp up the cycles long enough, just like they did with COVID where we got some, by some estimations, 80% false positives because of the PCR method, because they were ramping them up so high. And so they cut it back quite significantly, and that reduced the amount of false positives they had. But there's a lot of people that got tested as HIV positive that probably weren't, and they put those fucking people on AZT, and AZT kills you.

Wow.

Yeah, nuts. Most mainstream outlets are treating it as a serious but unproven political bombshell. They're reporting that Gabbard alleges— what Gabbard alleges, stressing the documents are disputed and under review, and highlighting how polarized the reaction is. Mainstream print Jerusalem Post, Money Control, Newsweek summarize her accusations, emphasize that COVID's origins remain unresolved, and note that the claims about Fauci sparking COVID or lying under oath are heavily contested, not yet legally validated. Many stories frame this as reigniting a long-running fight over lab leak versus natural origin. Listen, that fight is over, kids. That fight's over. This— if you're saying— if you are in the news and you are saying that there's still a long-running controversy as to whether it's a lab leak or natural origin, shut your fucking dirty whore mouth, because it's not. There's— the fight's over. It's a fucking lab leak. They say the new documents will need independent scrutiny from Congress investigators and scientists. Before any firm conclusions can be drawn.

Okay.

Right-leaning media highlight her file dump as vindication for critics, focus on the cover-up narrative, and give prominent space to Republicans like Rand Paul. Why is it more centrist or mainstream outlets present it as a straighter news tone, often pairing Gabbard's and GOP's quotes with Fauci's past denials? And nothing— there is so far no judicial finding of perjury or criminal conduct.

What I've never understood is how this became a left or right issue.

So stupid.

When Fauci, who's a career bureaucrat, right? Through, I mean, when all this started, there was a Republican president.

Yep.

Right? And then he served that Republican president. He served the Democratic president before that and before that. And then he served a Republican. I mean, he's been there for fucking 50 years.

Yeah, it's been incredible.

This dude, it's not political.

Yeah.

It shouldn't be political. There shouldn't be a right-left side to this. It's, hey, a career bureaucrat fucking lied to us.

He used the exact same language when he was talking about AZT as a medication for HIV that he used for the COVID vaccine. The reason why it's the only medication is because it is both safe and effective. The guy's a monster. Yeah, so literally, like, he's one of those guys, like, throughout history where you're gonna look back over time and you go, holy shit, this one guy's lies, this one guy's aspirations, this one guy's career fucked so many people over.

Yeah, and I don't— and I don't understand why Democrats would want to fall on that sword with—

there's no reason to align because people are stupid and they just decide that because a Republican's a president and the anything the Republicans are pushing has to be bad. And that stupid fucking division, it's so silly. It's so silly, it really is. Because the same people during Trump's presidency were openly saying, "Are you gonna trust a vaccine that's created under Trump?" They were all saying it. Kamala Harris said it, a bunch of them, Joy Reid said it, they all said it.

And then they bet their entire political livelihoods on it.

We deserve better. We really do. Or we don't. Maybe we don't. We fucking think they're good. We're so silly. Such a fucking silly group of human beings we are.

That's fucking wild, man.

Not all of us though. You know, I think less of us now. I think it's gonna be way harder to divide people the way they divided everybody in 2020. It'll be way harder now. I think most people are just not buying it. And as long as people wake up to this left versus right nonsense, it's really just a big fucking hustle to keep you fighting with each other.

Oh, for sure.

Most of it. Oh, for sure. Most of it. Even the ICE stuff that we were talking about. Hey folks, do you think it's a coincidence that the biggest fucking ICE protests were all going on in the same place where they found all that fraud?

Do you think—

Kurdistan, you know, Kurdistan, that these organized massive protests were all occurring in the same place where that Nick Shirley cat found fucking billions of dollars in fraud.

Yeah.

Shocker.

Kinda crazy.

Didn't they pass, didn't California pass a law?

A Nick Shirley law.

To prevent that, specifically that guy from fucking poking around in California?

Yes, yes, yes. I mean, they've even referred to it as the Nick Shirley law. The idea is to keep people from investigating fraud, which is outlandish. That is outrageous. That is a crazy thing to emphasize. And the thing is, well, you want— these people are showing up at daycares and looking in, right? They shouldn't. You're right, 100%. And people, random people from the internet, should not be showing up at daycares with cameras. I agree. However, when there's no one in that daycare for years and years and years, and they can prove that fucking Millions of dollars are being earned by that daycare and there's no one in there. It gets a little weird.

Isn't there a—

It's not fully passed into law. Not yet.

Isn't there a video of that kid like walking up to one of these and these dudes get out and like drive off in their fucking Bentleys?

I don't know if those are real. There's a bunch of fake videos that were made by people afterwards that were just capitalizing on people wanting to click on something like that. And so they were just engagement farming. By pretending, like the guy would show up and they'd go, "What? What are you talking about? I have no idea what you're—" It was bad acting, and they get in a Rolls-Royce, like— It's just bullshit. It seemed like bullshit to me. I mean, I'm sure a bunch of those guys made a bunch of money, and I'm sure there is a lot of fraud. Just, like, they're admitting it. Minnesota's admitting it. They knew it was going on forever. You know, and then how about the fact that there's certain politicians that voted against this idea, One of those ladies that was killed, like there was a lady and her husband that were murdered in Minnesota, and she was one of the few people that voted against providing Medicare for illegals. They were trying to pass some bill involving Medicare and illegals, and she was one of the ones that voted against it, and she was killed. The guy who killed her said that Tim Walz, sent him to kill them.

Now, I don't know if he's full of shit. He easily could be. He's a fucking crazy person. He's a murderer. He showed up at their house with a mask on and fucking shot them dead and shot a couple other people too. It's like, he's, you know, obviously he's fucking cracked out, but kind of weird, kind of weird that the lady who wants to vote against this obvious fraud, this money that's being somehow or another funneled around through Medicare. Like, one of the things that Elon said when he was on the podcast is that Medicaid and Medicare fraud is one of the biggest fucking problems. And he was looking into it, Doge. He goes, I almost don't want to talk about it because I don't want to get killed. He goes, it's that bad. And this was before all this Nick Shirley shit. And now you're seeing it, you're like, oh, now I get it. These hospices that they have, these fake hospices in California, and then these— all the Somali daycare centers and all the different things. Like, these people are just making autism The autism diagnoses went through the fucking roof because now they can have these autism centers, so they just diagnose their kids as autistic, and then they're raking in all this money for treatment.

It's crazy how much fraud there is. Hundreds of billions. Hundreds of billions of dollars, and just what a shocker that that's the place where the big ICE protest broke out. Cool.

People forget that when Obama was president, he made a big public statement about going after government fraud. They were aware of it then. I mean, they've been aware of it for— it's always taken place, but on the scale. And he tried, and he caught resistance to the point that he wasn't able to do his version of a DOJ, right, which was his intention. He gave a big public speech about it and tried to look into it. And he's— if you're stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars, what wouldn't you do to protect that?

Exactly. And that was Elon's point. And also that money for sure makes its way into Democratic coffers and probably Republican too. And whoever the fuck is gonna be.

Whoever's enabling the fraud. Yeah, who's ever gonna help out?

Whoever wants a piece of this pie. It's a juicy ass pie. It's a $100 billion pie. Come get some.

That'll almost build you a rail system in California.

You can get a mile of track. Or a second Cougar Bridge.

Fucking car salesmen. Have you had that guy on?

No, no, he wants to be on. I'm sure he talks a lot of shit about me. At first he was saying, Joe Rogan's not a fan of me, but I'm a big fan of him. He was like saying all this. Doesn't he have his own podcast?

Yeah, because that city, that state is running so well, the governor doesn't need to govern.

It's so smooth. If you ask him, he'll tell you. He'll tell you how awesome.

Oh, he'll give you stats. He gets the stats. Statistically, people are moving there in record numbers.

Yeah, that's not true. It's not true. It's, um, it's, uh, the— all the stats, the positive stats, they were already going on before he was the governor. It's— it's— California is an awesome place. The fucking weather's perfect. San Francisco has always been an incredible tech hub of geniuses. There's always been a bunch of super wizards up there that are creating some of the best technology in the world, and that has nothing to do with him. Has zero to do with him and all these problems that their inept government has caused. Because that's the real problem with him as a governor. It's a real problem with Karen Bass as a mayor. It's a real problem with whatever the fuck happened to San Francisco. It's bad government. It's not upholding the rule of the law, not keeping people safe, being empathetic to people that are shooting up on the street over people that are trying to walk their fucking kids to school. Like, what you're doing is bad for society. It's bad.

And it seems to me That for the most part, for the most part, if you are the mayor of a city— and when I was writing Yellowstone, the governor of Montana at the time, who was a Democrat, I called him and asked him. I said, "Hey, can I just talk to you about what it's like to be a governor? What did you think it would be and what did it turn out to be?" And what he said was— Steve Bullock. What's his name? He said, "Well, I thought I was going to make all these changes and do this and shepherd this, and I learned that I am the CEO of a state, and that my job as the CEO of the state is take care of the people who live in the state, the employees of the state, attract business here, attract tourism here, and try to make the state make more money." and make lives better. That's my job. Infrastructure and city management and people management and tourism. That's my job. And to a— even more acutely to a mayor, you're really the president of a city. You're the CEO of the city. And your job is keep the lights on, pick up the trash, put out the fires, deal with the sewage, keep it safe.

Like, that's it. There's no social Anything secondarily, possibly, but run the schools, like run the city. And you have in a lot of these big urban areas where they're so agenda-driven and they're pushing a social agenda and they're not running the cities. They're not running them at all. And so they're running into the ground. And it's tragic to see because San Francisco, like you said, it's a beautiful city. LA used to be a fag, you know, place where you could go and make your dreams come true.

San Francisco was awesome 10 years ago, just 10 years ago. I filmed my special Triggered in the Fillmore in San Francisco in 2016. It was great, no problems. It was not— it wasn't homeless people everywhere. It was normal, was normal San Francisco. Go to a cool restaurant, people are cool. Always been like a smart city, interesting architecture. Always been a great city. I lived there from the time I was 7 to 11. Yeah, I loved San Francisco. It's unrecognizable now. 10 years, that's it. 10 years of fucking asinine government. And also this homeless thing, when you realize that it's an industry, when the homelessness is valuable, having homeless people on the streets is valuable because you can get more money to deal with this obvious homeless problem. The more obvious the problem is, the more money they're gonna throw on it. They don't have to fix it.

Well, there's no intention to fix it. Right. They're giving out free needles. Here. Yeah. Get high here. It's— and I was just somewhere where my first experience seeing the homeless in this magnitude. And the one thing that's evident instantly is they're all so completely strung out on drugs. Like, this fentanyl thing is no fucking joke. Like, the zombies leaning against every corner. And to me, it's cruel. Right? Yeah. Like, if someone's to that point and you want to help them, don't give them a fucking iPhone and some more needles. How about you pick them up off the street and you take them somewhere and go, look, there's a curfew here and you ain't doing no drugs. Right. We're going to clean you out. And, and some aren't gonna want that. They're gonna want to go back on the street and do drugs. And, and the addiction and the consequences of drugs that are that— I had surgery, they had put me on fentanyl. I had neck surgery and they put me on fentanyl. There's high, then there's that shit. And that was done by an anesthesiologist. I wasn't self-medicating in a fucking parking lot, right?

What'd you get done to your neck? C67. Fusion? No, no, no, no, no, I had the discectomy.

Yeah, just cut some of it down. Yeah, it's okay now. Yeah, how long ago did you get that done? Is that maybe 3 years ago? Yeah, I wish I'd— 2 years? Yeah, 3 years ago. If that ever happens again, don't do that. Don't? No. Well, it'll happen. Yeah, I'm sure it will. There's other ways. There's a way. Yeah, there's PRP can help it. Regenikine helped mine. I had a pretty bad bulging disc in my neck. What's Regenikine? Regenikine is They used to have to go to Germany to do it. I know Peyton Manning went there, Kobe Bryant went there, and Dana White actually flew to Germany to get it done. It is, it's like an advanced form of platelet-rich plasma where they take your blood, they, there's a process to it. Pull it up, Jamie, because I can't remember what the process is, but they spin it in a centrifuge for like 10 hours, and then you come back the next day and they inject it, and it makes this very potent anti-inflammatory, and they inject it around wherever the injury is to the disc, and it provides, like, within weeks, amazing relief. And for me, it completely cured it.

I had a point when my fingers were going— yeah, that's what— German— go back up, back to work. Yeah, so German physician Dr. Peter Welling— the treatment focused on blocking a specific inflammatory protein, interleukin-1. So they take the blood out, they draw your blood, and then the blood is heated to body temperature to trigger the production of a natural anti-inflammatory protein called called IL-1RA, and then they spin it in a centrifuge, separating out the protein-rich serum. The serum is then injected directly into the painful joint or tissue. Dude, it was remarkable for me for knee injuries. I did it a bunch of times. I used to do it at— they moved it. You used to have to go to Germany, and then Santa Monica, they opened up an office. It's Lifestyle Medicine. That's what it's called, right? Right? And then that's where I had it done. And you— it's incredible. Like, it— I had it done my entire back. Like, there's a picture of me on the— on Instagram with a bunch of these fucking tubes in my— that's me right there. Oh shit. Bunch of those tubes, my hairy ass back. And it was incredible.

I mean, it really fixed so many problems that I had. It's really great for specifically for back injuries, knee injuries, stuff like that. There's a lot of good biological options There's also decompression is very important. I have a harness that I attach to a pull-up bar and it straps under my chin and I just like let my weight drop down and decompress my weight on my neck. I do that every day. And I also have this thing called a Dex 3. It's a Dex 2 or Dex 3. You, you hang forward. It's like Teeter makes it, you know, that company that makes those decompression tables. But this one's even better because you just hinge from the hip. So you're not supporting it at all with your legs, and it's just your back. It just goes like pop, pop, pop. Like, you could feel it. One of those— I'll show it to you. We have one out here. We have two of them out here, actually. Really? Right out? Yeah, in the gym. It's— they're the shit. I have one at home. I don't— I will not not have one. I have to have one. It's so good for just decompressing your back.

You need to decompress the neck too. Anytime you're doing anything, if you're deadlifting or squatting, obviously you're lifting a lot of heavy weights. If anytime you're lifting weight, you got to think all that, all that pressure's on your back, all that squashing down, and you got to do something to stretch it out. Yeah, stretch it back out. But there's ways to heal it now without taking away the disc. So the problem is every time they cut away a piece of your disc, you got less disc. You got less disc. Yeah. So the good news is there's some treatments that they're doing now where they're actually injecting some sort of a hydrogel. I've heard about this. Yeah, into the disc itself. So I asked Brigham from Ways to Well about that, and they're looking into it, and they're trying to— apparently this is not being done widely yet. This is like, there's just experimental, but they, they think they're going to be able to do that. There's also some places like CPI, Cellular Performance Institute down in Tijuana. They've successfully been injecting stem cells into people's discs, and it causes the disc to regenerate tissue and get thicker and healthier.

Really. Yeah, Shane Dorian, my friend, he's a pro surfer and big wave surfer and bow hunter. He went down there and he said it was remarkable. He said within a couple of months, like a 30 to 40% increase in range of motion, really decrease in pain. Yeah, you could feel it. It's kind of an annoying process because once you do it, you can't really do shit for like 6 weeks. Like once you— I think it's 6 weeks.

Well, that's what's the same with the surgery. You're not doing shit for 6 weeks after that, but you can't lift weights.

You could walk You could walk, you know. You— it's all— it's a whole thing. It's like, let everything take. Like, let it take, let it heal up. Don't do anything stupid. Don't reinjure it. Don't aggravate it. Like, give it a chance to actually do its magic. Yeah, I'll look into that for sure. But any neck injury or back injury, there's such a motherfucker. Anytime your back goes out, you're like, everything you do is like, ah, it's so hard to do anything. It's like you realize like how nice it is to be healthy when— yeah, you know, whenever you get hurt.

Yeah, no back pain. That's, that's what killed my stepfather. Back pain. Yeah, they just get on pills.

Yeah. Yeah, I have a friend in the family that did that.

Yeah, he was in— I remember one time we were fishing up in Wyoming and, and he just, he was like, I can't do it, back hurts too bad. He went in and had a surgery and that made it worse, which is Yeah, people— a real, real risk when you start messing around with the spine, right? And so yeah, and then it was, you know, those are serious pain. Now we're talking oxy. Yeah, now you're in just agony. Now you're on a clock.

Yeah, and you can only do that shit for so long.

Now you're on a clock.

Oxys are fucking terrifying. They're so terrifying. Yeah, so terrifying how readily they were handing them out to forever. Yeah. Do you ever see Painkiller, that the Peter Berg thing that he did for Netflix? No, I didn't. Fucking great, man. So Matthew Broderick plays such a great creep. Oh, he played the Sackler brother, the Sackler. Really? Yeah, the head of the family that started this whole opiate problem that we have in this country. It's fucking terrifying because it's all real, and those fucking people never even went to jail. Who knows how many people are dead because of them?

Yeah, yeah.

They generated fucking billions and billions of dollars, killed a bunch of people, ruined countless lives. How many lives— people that were connected— your dad gets hooked on that shit, it ruins your relationship with your, your family. You, you wind up being all fucked up because you grew up with a dad who was strung out on pills.

Yeah, no, generation. Yeah, generational damage.

Oh God, yeah.

And these guys put their feet up Yep.

Yeah, they go to a fucking nice country club and have the lobster. Yeah, cocksuckers. There's so many of them in this world. There's like— that's genuinely evil. Yes, there's real demons. That's a real demon. Like, people want to think demons live in hell, and you know, that's, that's kind of maybe— may or may not be real. Well, no, they're on Earth. Yeah, there's demons. They're right here. Yeah, and they justify it. They figure out a way to justify it, and they're around a bunch of other people who justify it too, and they just immediately dismiss any pain or suffering because they got a huge amount of profit from it.

Yeah, yep, those are the fuckers.

Those are the fuckers.

Yeah, they're out there, and it doesn't take many of them to create like real carnage. I mean, think about that. Think about the opiate issue in this, and it's still going. It was the gateway to fentanyl, right? Mm-hmm.

If you think about it Yeah, it was the gateway to fentanyl, and it was, it was also, it's like they were doing those pain management centers down in Florida where they just, all they prescribed was pills. So you would go in like, I'm in pain. They're like, oh, Taylor, we've got the solution, it's right next door. And you go right next door to their pharmacy, and all their pharmacy has, like, they don't have Bengay over there, they don't have toothbrushes. Oxy. Yeah, they got oxy. Here you go, buddy. This is the solution.

Fuck.

Yep. Yep, that's the real drug trade.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, the cartel is basically getting the scraps. They're making trillions of dollars off scraps. Well, think about this.

Did you even know what fentanyl was 15 years ago? I never heard of it.

No, I don't even remember when we first heard about it, but when we first heard about it on a podcast, we were talking about it and we found the amount that's lethal. They showed it next to a penny. You're like, what? Yeah, that can kill you, and people are taking that and they're mixing that and cocaine. Holy fuck.

And they are bent-over zombies on the side of the road.

Yeah, Philadelphia is bad too. There's a bunch of cities that are just real bad with it, and it doesn't have to be that way. And what's interesting is this Ibogaine initiative that Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard are pushing in Texas. And that I went to the White House to get Trump to be involved in, and they're trying to make this so that it's— you have a right to use, or right— I think they call it right to use or right to try for people that are addicted, and they're trying to make it more readily available and accessible to veterans. That's the thing that could help all these people. What is it now? Ibogaine. You don't know what that is? No. Ibogaine is a— it comes from the iboga tree in Africa. And it is this very potent psychedelic that has no recreational use at all. It's not fun. Nobody likes it. It's not like you trip, you see zombies, and fucking hang out with the aliens. Uh-uh. You go into this very dark experience for like 24 hours where it like replays your life to you in a very uncomfortable way. And also, somehow or another, rewires addiction in your brain.

And for a large percentage of people, just one dose is good enough to get them off of everything. Whatever they're on, whether it's alcohol, gambling, coke, whatever the fuck it is. But for 2 doses, when they do it twice, it's significantly better. And it doesn't just do that. Rick Perry, who was the Republican former governor of Texas, was staunchly anti-drugs. He said this is his main focus in life now, is to promote this. This is his goal in life because he did it and he had an incredible reaction to it. And he knows so many veterans who have done it. It. It's incredible for PTSD. Somehow or another, it has neuroregenerative properties where he went there and they said— he went to his doctor before and, you know, doctor did a whole scan of his body and he said, "Look, you've got a certain amount of age-related brain atrophy." It's like, "It's fine, but, you know, it's normal that you're 73 years old or 74 years old." So he goes and does the ibogaine, sees his doctor a short time afterwards, and the doctor says, It's 25% less atrophy than when you got the last scan.

And he explains to him the whole ibogaine thing. He goes back 6 months later. It's all gone. He has no brain atrophy anymore, which is bananas. So it's regenerating brain tissue. It's making his brain work better.

And it's just Well, the pharmaceutical companies aren't gonna let that shit out.

Well, they didn't like it. They didn't like that I bypassed them and went straight to Trump and told him about that, but Trump was very open to it. He said, "What are you looking for? You looking for FDA approval? Like, let's do it." Like, that's literally what he said. And then a week later, we were at the White House and he was signing it. So it's incredible. But if so many veterans have had to go over to mostly Mexico, but Costa Rica, there's a bunch of different places that they go, where they can have these ibogaine retreats. And these guys have had incredible results. Marcus Luttrell, he had an incredible result from it. He had a real problem drinking. You know, obviously he's the guy— Lone Survivor, the movie's based on his experiences over in Afghanistan. So this guy, you know, he's done it. He's gotten over it because of that. Like, there's a long— Sean Ryan, long list of guys. Who have had this experience and it completely changed them. Wow. Dakota Meyer did it. So many of these guys did it. And because of those, their stories, because all these veterans, then it like kind of opened up the idea to a lot more right-wing people that would maybe be like more hesitant to accept something like this.

Then on top of it, no recreational use. Like, no one's like, boy, I can't wait to do that again. Everybody's like, holy shit, this sucked. I had diarrhea, I threw up, I felt I was horrified for fucking 12 hours. Apparently just takes you through every aspect of your life, like review, like a movie. All the times you've ever hurt people, you see it from their perspective. Like, yeah, it's like very— it's a very dark experience for a lot of people, especially a lot of people that have fucked up a lot of their life, you know. Wow. Yeah, but if those people had access to Ibogaine, all these homeless people that you see strung out out. If instead of just giving them needles and an iPhone and like profiting off of it, if somehow or another these assholes can figure out a way to profit off of these centers, we could bring people in and give them ibogaine retreats. Maybe that would be a nice little fucking exit strategy for all these grifters that have been profiting off of the homeless industrial complex for so long.

Yeah, well, you know, they're not trying to solve problems.

No, no, they're trying to make money. That's what I was saying earlier. We're talking about charities. That's the saddest thing that I've come to the realization that most nonprofits are fucking scams. Like, most of them, most of them. And this guy was like reading off like the average amount that these people that are in charge of the homeless program in LA are making. It's, it's extraordinary amount of money. It's a great living. They're not doing it because it's like like some sort of a very charitable thing that they really want to save the world and help people. They're making tons of money. It's the—

they're performative entrepreneurs, if you think about it. Come up with a problem, then go pitch some version of Karen's solution to a government and take the fucking money and never solve the problem. Because as soon as you solve the problem And if you do somehow accidentally solve it, then go find another one.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why shows like Yellowstone in particular, that show, like, people that are proud to work hard and really get, like, deep satisfaction out of that life. And there's something about that that really, like, resonates with people. Like, there's a better way than just bullshitting people. There's a better way than fraud and nonsense and all this political horseshit that's pumped down your throat every day. No, how about a fucking— just a sleeping bag and the stars? How about that? Just lying there with your horse tied to a tree. Isn't that really what everybody wants? Isn't it? Doesn't really everyone want to cook their dinner over a fire and laugh with all their friends? Because that's what they really want. That's— that's just really something simple. Something real, something that— it's like, there's— it's not that simple because it's hard to do all that shit, but there's something about it that's pure. It's pure. There's no ifs, ands, or buts.

You spend a lot of time outside, right? And, and the entire thing's an endeavor, right? If you go on— you go bow hunting, you know, you're gonna— you're gonna practice, prepare before you go, then you're gonna hike your ass in somewhere, you have to set up a camp, camp, and all of these are tasks before you've even gone to do the thing you went there to do, which is going to be another task. But the completion of them is the reward. Yeah. And the fact that you're doing it yourself, everything done yourself. I think that's— and that's why people are so attracted to the life. That's why I've got, you know, third-generation cowboys that went and got a degree in ranch management to come back and make, you know, $3,000 a month and couldn't be happier.

It's wild, isn't it? It's really wild when you think about it. It's wild what people actually gravitate towards. Because they say that— have you ever seen that Werner Herzog documentary Happy People? No. It's called Happy People: Life in the Taiga, and it's all about these trappers that live on the Taiga River in Siberia. And all these people do is trap and hunt and fish. They don't have any other way to make a living. That's all they do. And they're so fucking happy, and they're all laughing together and drinking together and hanging out with their dogs. And their dogs are sled dogs, and so they're on— they're on snowmobiles, and the dogs are chasing behind them, and the dogs hunt with them. And these fucking people have like zero mental illness. And when they're talking to them, they're talking in Russian, so it's all translated. But what they're talking about, like the way they talk, it's like that this is how you're supposed to live. This is real life, and they're all happy.

There's a guy— I'm gonna get his name wrong— it's like Preminger, something like that, and he, in the '60s—

Dick Premikan.

Premikan, that's it. Yeah, yeah, the guy who lived in Alaska.

Yeah, yeah, went up, said bucket.

Yeah, went up into the way into the wild. And built by hand a cabin and lived there and documented it, brought a little Super 8 camera or whatever, filmed the whole thing and filmed himself. I mean, he lived for 35 years. He was 80-something years old when he finally was too old to get through another winter when he came down. And he just built this cabin and just lived, hunted, fished, grew potatoes, had to build—

Pranicki. Pranicki. That's how you say his name. P-R-O-E-N-I-C-K-I.

If you haven't watched that documentary, it is fascinating. It's amazing.

Yeah. Look at the different— what is it? Oh, they've— oh, this is— they've— but why they show 2023? This guy, when he documented all of it, you know, it's so attractive. There's something about the way he's living, and he's by himself, which is also wild. Like, how do you not get lonely?

No, there's that. I mean, I'd lose my fucking marbles.

I need people. Yeah, I need to talk to somebody. I don't think I'd be liking that, but I don't know, but it's so attractive.

But then, but the notion of that kind of self-reliance.

Yeah, no, there's something about it that's like deeply ingrained in our DNA. It's not just that, it's like, it's a healthy interaction with the wild world.

Mm-hmm.

There he is. Look at that guy. Made all that shit himself. That's what's crazy. Yeah, the whole, the whole thing. I mean, he made his own tools. He made it. It was, it's really wild. I think he was a, wasn't he a lumberman or something like that?

I can't remember if he was.

Look at fucking pretty that is. My God. This is right in front of his house. He just built a house out there. Alaska's amazing, man. I mean, the winters can suck a dick, but the— just the actual being there in the place, and the people are— they're clearly like extraordinary people. Like, when you go— it's just even hanging out in a bar in Anchorage, like, you guys are different. They're like more reliable, you know.

No matter where—

sturdier people.

No matter where you live in Alaska, you're gonna have to be tough.

Yeah, you have to be. And they were laughing about some guy who got stomped to death by a moose because he was throwing snowballs at it in town. Like, okay, like, that's something you guys have to think about. You might get stomped to death in front of the ATM machine.

Or maybe, maybe don't throw a fucking snowball at a 1,000-pound animal.

Yeah, well, you can catch a cow with their calves and she'll stomp you no matter what. So it's a book. Prenicki says he turned his back on a tedious— on tedious 50-hour work weeks and moved to Alaska to do a thing to completion. He built the cabin when he was 51 and lived there for more than 30 years. Wow. Wow. Where is that area? The Twin Lakes in Lake Clark National Park? I don't know. There's another guy that lives up there. That lives near the Arctic Circle. Vice Guide to Travel did a piece on him years ago. It's the same kind of deal. He lives in a cabin, and he's been up in that cabin since the 1970s. He didn't— he never saw 9/11. He saw a photograph of it years later. He's just been up there in the woods. All he does is he hunts caribou, and he has them all like hanging up, like frozen, because it's frozen outside. Like, that's his outside, is his cooler. And while they're there, a grizzly tries to steal his stash, and he has to shoot the grizzly. It's like, it's crazy, really.

What's that called?

It's called Vice Guide to Travel, and it's Heinmo's Arctic Adventure is the video series. And what's interesting, this is like the early days of Vice when Vice was really cool, and they get this fucking nerd with glasses, probably from like Williamsburg, who flies out to Alaska to hang out with this guy. And the guy, they said like these journalists were like hardcore. These young kids were— they knew they were doing something kind of crazy, and they would go to war zones. Like, that's how Tim Pool started out. These guys would go to the fucking war zones and get shot at. They had bulletproof vests on and shit. They'd be doing investigate, like real investigative reporting. And so this guy did— just really went up there and hung out with this dude in Alaska for like a week. And was talking to him. It's like, what's, what's so great about this? And he's a very intelligent guy. He's not a— the guy who's— this, this guy, Haimo. See if you can find that. Did you find it?

I mean, they're still posting stuff. There's the last Alaskan— excuse me, the Last Alaskans.

Oh, he's still posting stuff?

They have a YouTube channel.

Oh wow, Haimo and Edna. Oh wow, he looks older now.

Hey, they're still talking about podcasts here a second ago.

Oh, interesting. They're talking about podcasts? Our podcast? Oh, because we talked about them?

I don't know, I just saw as you were— your picture popped up.

Oh, that's it. That's me talking about him. Yeah. See if you could find the Vice Guide to Travel, because that's where I found out about him. So this guy's— he's like one of the last people that's allowed to live up there. He has like a notice posted on his his cabin because he's grandfathered in. I don't think you could build a cabin up there anymore. That's not— this is afterwards, 15 years ago. Mm, might be it, but I think it's called Haimo's Arctic Adventure. Yeah, Haimo, Haimo Korth, Haimo's Arctic Refuge. That's the article.

I mean, the Vice website isn't really one of the most well-kept things on the internet these days.

Um, oh, put in Arctic Adventure.

I'm guessing that the article was the first thing and then they went and followed up to make a video and that's what this is.

Yeah, I don't know if, yeah, maybe that's it.

Yeah, see, it says it presents Haimo's Arctic Refuge.

Right, that's probably it.

They could have just changed the name on YouTube also.

I think they did, or maybe I remember it wrong. Either way, this guy's premise is that this is really how you should live. This is how people— yeah, that's the guy. So you see this nerdy cat is hanging out. He looks so out of place. Yep, this is it. And he's got this caribou that he shot, and they're hanging frozen, and he just saws off a piece and throws the frozen steaks onto the grill, cooks it over wood, and this is how this guy lives, and that's all he eats. He's just eating caribou and salmon, and he lives up there all year round, man. And it's— I mean, he's just very happy. And that— this is the weird part about it, is how happy people who live like this are. So I think that's in our brain. That's how we're designed to exist with nature. Yeah, designed to be hunter-gatherers. Yes, we still have the same DNA as people that lived tens of thousands of years ago.

And, you know, cities started what, maybe 10,000 years ago in some form, right?

Yeah, depending on who you ask. Yeah, you know, I think we're a little wrong with that too. I think they're starting to change their perspective of when the actual civilization emerged. Because of stuff like Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. They found these immense structures that are 11,800 years old that were buried, that this guy who was like a— I think it was a sheepherder in the '90s found it. Really? Yeah, found like a stone that was like sticking out of the ground weird, and he kicked it with his boots, like knocking some dirt off, and then he brought in some archaeologists, and then they discovered this massive complex, these like huge circles of giant stone columns with 3D animals carved in them. And they carbon dated the ground, and it was intentionally covered up somewhere around 11,000-plus years ago. So they're like, really? Yes. Like, what the fuck is this? Like, they didn't even know, like, what the civilization was. Like, what— why did they build this? What's the purpose of it? There's lots— a lot of people that debate whether or not what's depicted on it is a calendar. Is it a marking of an event?

Does it show the flood? Like, what— what is this? It's weird stuff, man. Like, really weird stuff. And I think there's more of that than you'd like to— that makes people comfortable, and archaeologists are very hesitant to accept it.

Well, that whole deal, right? Like, your relevance being upon you discovered this thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. When they found the Clovis Point, so then we're dating everything off of that, and anyone finding anything else is going to render that guy's discovery less important. Yeah.— and, you know, there was— at one point we thought there was this logical evolution of man from Homo erectus into Homo sapiens, and now we know that there were at least 4, maybe 5 species of humanoid living at the same time. Mm-hmm. It's just fucking crazy. At least 5.

Not only that, it's like really difficult to make a fossil. Most people are going to die and their bones are going to be gone within 100 years.

Yeah, it's just what we've been able to find and we're basing an entire science upon— Mm-hmm. Incredibly incomplete discoveries.

We're basing an entire science on a very limited number that can even possibly exist. Like, I think if you take into account how many dinosaur bones they've found and then how many dinosaurs existed and for how many hundreds of millions of years dinosaurs existed, and you realize like, oh, Like, most shit doesn't make a fossil. So we don't even know how many different dinosaurs that we've— I mean, they just discovered a new one recently. This— we don't even know how many existed that we never found fossilized.

Yeah, if you— if they didn't run through some lava pit or tar pit or something, how would you know?

And every so often, some new form of ancient human pops up, and we're like, oh, what's this one? What the fuck is this one? There's weird ones. They're all over the place. There's a fucking ton of them. The Denisovans. There's the, the one in, uh, I believe it was in China, the big-headed people. They're quite a bit larger. These are in Texas. Yeah, that's Glen— Dinosaur Valley State Park. Wow, that's Glen Rose, Texas. That's crazy. How crazy is that? Look at those footprints. That's so nuts. That is so nuts that a dinosaur left those. How long ago? 113 million year old dinosaur tracks. What the fuck, man?

And you know, we're just lucky. So what is he— what, you know, that thing, and how much did it fucking weigh to imprint into that, which is now granite, right? But at the time it's probably some mixture of mud and ash from a volcano that came together, right? Probably some version of that, right?

I wonder what the animal was. Do they know which dinosaur it was? Picture of one here.

I don't know if it's— I'll just guess that's the one they assumed was there.

God, those footprints are so dope. That's so wild. Wonder who the first guy found that was. Says it was discovered after a drought, so it would have been— oh, that's even cooler. So it was underneath the water the whole time, and then they're like, holy— the river dried up completely in most locations, allowing for more tracks to be uncovered. Covered here in the park. Wow, that's sick.

That's the animal believed to be— I don't know. Yeah, they wouldn't know for sure.

Belonged to two types of dinos, including Acrocanthosaurus. Yeah, I think—

I don't think they found any fossils or anything, to be for the record.

That's even just crazier, right? All you find is the feet. Think about how many died there. Think about how many just got eaten by other animals and shit out. And I mean, most stuff that lives— I mean, you know as well as anybody, you very rarely find skeletons in the woods.

No, the mice are gonna eat them.

Yeah, something's gonna eat most of what you find in the woods. Within a couple of years, everything's gone. But like, when's the last time— like, if you're a hunter, good luck finding a dead mountain lion. They must die. They must die. I don't know anybody who's found a dead one. I've never found one.

I've never seen one.

There's thousands of them. They die. Where are they? Fucking nature takes care of everything, and that's what would happen to most fossils. Yeah, that's why most fossils don't happen. I mean, when people die, they don't get fossilized.

Says, uh, 1908, a local schoolboy found some of these.

Wow, look at the size of those next to that dude. That's crazy.

Imagine you ran home and tried to tell your parents Dinosaur. They wouldn't even know what dinosaurs really were, I bet, back then. How would they have known?

Well, there's a lot of people today that don't even think dinosaurs are real, which is hilarious. There's so many, so many knuckleheads online. But I mean, we don't— we have a very limited amount of information that we're basing our entire history of Earth on. Planet—

what do you describe that as? A 1910 three-toed giant? That lizard?

I don't even know. I don't— how would you even be sure that that was a footprint?

Come look at this, then you gotta go tell everybody else in the town to come follow you out there to find it, right?

In 1910, did they even have drawings of dinosaurs?

Well, I wouldn't think they would have found some of the bones.

I'm sure— I think we figured that out, right? I think we talked about that. Didn't they first start finding them in the 1800s? Isn't that what it was? But yeah, it's not— I mean, if you think about how many different things died and just were absorbed by the earth, just gets eaten shit out, swallowed up, just destroyed by time and erosion and never became fossils. We're basing the entire history of the planet on a limited amount of information. And that information, it never gets younger. It always gets older. The more stuff they found, like they found a modern version of human beings that pushes pushes the timeline of humans back another 300,000 or 400,000 years. And that keeps happening.

Well, they thought that people crossed the Bering Land Bridge 12,000, 14,000 years ago, and now they've pushed that back 10,000 years.

Yeah, they found those footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, and those are 22,000 years old.

It took a giant flood to come wash away layers of sediment that then revealed that. That's why it's so muddy around there. Around it, I guess. Wow. And then they started digging.

That's fucking cool. That is so cool. And this is in 1952 they did that?

No, no, no, 1908.

1908.

The pictures are from 1952 or something like that. Oh, okay. They must have just kept— maybe it flooded again 50 years later. Mm. Floods do happen here fast.

When did they first figure out dinosaurs? Like, what was the first year a dinosaur bone was discovered? On your ranch, do you find like a lot of like arrowheads and like Native American stuff?

The one I grew up on, everywhere. Yeah, every time it had rained, you'd find these points.

That shit enthralls me. It's so fascinating. You pick up some arrow— I found one in Nevada while I was on a mule deer hunt. I was in the high desert. We found this little tiny thing. I looked down, I go, oh my God. Oh my God, it's a fucking arrowhead. And you just think some dude who knows how many hundreds of years ago shot that at a deer.

Thousands. Thousands. Yeah. We found a bunch and my mother took them to Fort Worth to the museum and they dated them. And some of them— and they could look at them and they'd know various styles, right? And they go, oh, this was made by— this is 2,200 years old, this is 4,000 years old, this is when they started doing this. We have one here.

I got one here somewhere. It's a big one too.

1677 was when the first scientifically recorded dinosaur bone was described, although it says they've been digging— people have been digging them up for thousands of years, but they didn't know what the fuck it was. This one, he says he even thought it belonged to a giant human.

And then this is one for me. Oh yeah, yeah, look at that. Yeah, a friend of mine got that off of his ranch. Remy Warren told me that's probably one they used for fishing because it was so big. Interesting. Yeah, I thought so too. I was like, that's interesting, because I guess when you're dealing with old bows that didn't have a whole lot of power, they— you really wouldn't want a big wide cut because you wouldn't get enough penetration to get through the rib cage unless you're really close.

This would be more on a spear?

No, it would be on an arrow. It would just be something that you shot at a fish because it's easier to penetrate than, like, say, a buffalo. Where they would use a smaller head. They're just trying to get penetration.

That's fascinating.

It's just an amazing thing. You're finding just this piece of ancient history where people had no internet, no books, no nothing, just flint knapping and using tendons. Yeah. And then trying to practice with those bows. Figure out how to do it while you're on horseback too. It's crazy. So where you grew up, the— on the ranch you grew up, you'd find them all the time? All the time. What was the oldest shit you found?

I can't remember, but, but I remember it being thousands of years old, a few thousand years old. But we had, we had a— like, my mother had this wicker basket that was like this big, and, and it was full of arrowheads. Yeah. Wow. You'd find them, just toss them in there.

That's crazy. Yeah. Just makes you think, like, how long did people live on that land? How many hundreds, thousands of years do people live on that land?

Yeah, yeah. And, and, or pass through, or have battles, or Who fucking knows? Yeah. Or when you find them like we found them, I mean, every single time it rained, there was this stock tank behind our house and you, maybe it's half mile up to the stock tank, we'd walk that road and you could find 4 or 5. So was that a trading depot? Was that someplace where people went to trade? And then I always think like, how do you lose that many? As hard as they must be to make, right? You'd think once you've shot that arrow, you're gonna go look for the arrow. Yeah, you spent hours making this.

They must have shot so many for so long. They might— I mean, they're probably shooting them every day. They probably had somebody back at camp making them every day.

Probably some guy that that's his skill. Yeah, maybe that— maybe when people got older, they couldn't, couldn't hunt, couldn't run, right? You know, maybe they sat back and Right.

Yeah, and that guy makes the arrows, and maybe somebody else makes the bows, and this guy's going out and shooting the deer and bringing them back. When you're doing a show like 1823, how much research did you have to do to try to get that right? Because that was, in my opinion, one of the best theatrical things that I ever watched, movie or television show, that I feel like nailed what it must have been like to try to travel across the country, to be a civilized person living in the city, try to make your way across the country and just experience the wild shit those people saw.

Well, there's a few things. So a lot of research, but interestingly, I had— my family had come— one side of my family had come from Kentucky to Texas in the 1840s. And whatever great-great-grandmother journaled.

Wow.

So I had the journal. Holy shit. And then I started finding other journals. There wasn't— you know, some were published. And reading about just how fucking dangerous it was. If you think about it, rivers were the most terrifying thing, crossing rivers. 'Cause no one swam. No one could swim. And most of the— most of the people who came into either the port of New Orleans or Galveston, they were European. They were German, a lot of Germans. There were a lot of Central Europeans that came, and they were promised free land, right? There would be travel agencies that they would arrange the entire trip with before they've even left Germany or Croatia or wherever they were. And, and so by the time that they landed in Galveston, they would meet up with their group, and the group would, you know, they'd have chipped in all this amount of money, and they've got guides, and they would have already arranged for mules or horses and wagons and, and off they go.

And they had no idea. No.

And a lot of them had never fucking ridden a horse in their life, much less fired a gun, much less— you know, they're in a completely foreign area. Like, they don't— and they landed in Texas, most of them heading to Oregon because that area was the most similar to where they were from in Central Europe. And then, you know, for whatever reason, they didn't— some didn't get that far. Or some maybe never got past Waco or Fort Worth or wherever. And then off they went, and the dangers were from obviously rivers and sun exposure, disease. Obviously there were issues with bandits and the Native American tribes depending on the time of year, the era, right? By the '80s, that was largely not a issue, the 1880s. But bandits sure as shit were a real issue because there's no rule of law, right? Right. And we can look at— there's plenty of bad people doing awful shit today, and we got all sorts of laws. Now imagine if those people had the wherewithal to go to a place to where there's no laws, no law, and no enforcement, no help, no nothing.

You're on your own, on your fucking own. And there was a bunch of people that had been living like that for decades. Grenades, just fucking people up, waiting for you, just waiting for you, waiting for you. Here they come, let's get them. Yeah, and that was what their thing was.

Yeah, no, so river crossings were incredibly dangerous. And then trying to— if you didn't have an experienced guide, you're fucked, truly fucked, because you could pick the wrong way and run out of water, go wander around in the circle. You get up there on the Great Plains to where it's flat and there's— and you don't know how to read the sun. You don't know where you're going. People go out there and make giant circles.

Yeah, I was reading something about that the other day, that people tend to, for whatever reason, always walk in a counterclockwise direction when they get lost. And that even if they're left-footed or right-handed or left-handed, it doesn't seem to matter. Humans, when they walk, if they get lost like in the woods woods, they walk in circles, and they almost always walk in a counterclockwise direction. And so this article was explaining that if you find yourself lost and you think you're running into the same places, most likely you should veer towards the right because you're, you're most likely looping towards the left. For whatever reason, people tend to do that. What if there's like a scientific explanation. Put that in Perplexity. See why people move in a counterclockwise— it didn't come up with Perplexity. Doesn't know shit. Doesn't have any craftsmanship.

I never understood getting lost in the wilderness. I didn't understand it. Really? Can understand not knowing where you are, but you know, but I never understood getting lost.

Do you? Well, you must have learned how to use a compass early.

Yeah, or the sun. Yeah, right. If the sun comes up in the morning and you're facing it, right, then behind you is west, to your left is north, to your right is south.

Some people have zero experience in the woods though. People tend to loop often counterclockwise when lost because small errors in our internal sense of straight ahead accumulate, and humans also have a subtle left turn counterclockwise bias whose exact cause is still unclear. Isn't that weird? Wow, that's so weird. In lab and field experiments, blindfolded people tend to walk straight without landmarks almost always end up curving into large loops instead of moving in a straight line. People told, rather, to walk straight without landmarks. Wow. This happens because without internal clues or external clues like the sun, distant objects, or visible path, small random errors in balance and body feedback build up until the path bends enough to close into a circle. Wow, that's got to be so disheartening. You've been walking for days and then you pass the same dead tree and you're like, oh my God, we walked in a fucking circle. Pedestrians everywhere exhibit a counterclockwise bias, wired to walk counterclockwise. During COVID scientists studying social distancing noticed people seem to prefer moving counterclockwise. That's so weird. Hmm. Tendency is fundamentally individual rather than a collective. What does that mean? So every individual does it, I guess, rather than a group of people just following the leader.

Pretty wild. So when people get lost— some, but some, some people have just zero experience being in the woods at all, and they just don't know where to go. Where are we? And they just they just fucking freak out, and then they panic because they think, what's out there? Oh my God, I want to die. Yeah. And you realize that once you're out there, that nature doesn't give a fuck if you make it.

No, it doesn't care at all.

No, it's heartless, completely oblivious to your desire to stay alive. It's not interested in what you want to do at all.

Nope. Nope, not at all. It's ambivalent.

But that's also part of the beauty of it, right? Yeah. When you're out there, especially if you take yourself seriously.

Yeah, you're out there, you're like, oh, I ain't shit.

It'll, it'll test you. Yeah.

When you're writing a thing like 1823, like, you're doing all this research and you read the, the diaries from your— you said your great-grandmother, like, great-great-grandmother.

Mother.

Did you, uh, did you ever think like putting some of those letters online so other people can read them?

No.

There's plenty of— there's, there's any number of published books of very similar journals.

I know, but it'd be kind of dope for people to read about your great-great-grandmother.

Yeah, nothing happened, right? Like, but still, we had freaking whatever weird shit they had for dinner that night, and, you know, so-and-so was rude, and it was this, and we, you know, we stopped in this beautiful valley, and it was hard to get across the river, and I was scared, and, you know, but no attacks, no, it was pretty uneventful.

They got lucky. It's just, it's interesting just as a window into time. Yes.

You know. Well, what's interesting really is how well-written the journal was, right?

Because everyone was very educated, was better educated. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, that's, that's weird, right? When you read like Civil War letters and you're like, why are these guys so fucking smart?

I have letters from my grandfather who died in World War II, love letters from him to his— to my grandmother, years of them. Because, you know, he enlisted in 1941 and, and then went off and became a— he He— they flew a— I guess it was the B-19, a bomber. And yeah, and wrote all these letters to her. Yeah, and I have all those, and they're just magnificent. Just the way that people would just be so eloquent in a letter to, you know, your wife.

Yeah, my beloved. They would write things like that. Yeah, it is weird, like the deterioration of our ability to express ourselves, the common person's ability to express themselves. You wouldn't have expected that back then, I bet. If you could tell people about the future, go, "Oh, you're gonna have the answer to any question on your phone. You have a small device in your pocket. It also acts as a flashlight. You're gonna be able to pick that thing up and ask it anything you want, and instantaneously it's gonna give you a result." Like, "Oh, people must be brilliant." No, no, they're half retarded because they didn't learn anything, right?

Right. You can ask a machine, the machine's done all the learning. Yeah, just get an answer that you didn't earn, right?

That's the word, earn. Yeah, yeah, just like equity. The problem with equity is you didn't earn it. Yeah, the problem with having the same results as everybody else when you don't put the same effort People in the 1800s often spent blocks of time, typically 1 to 3 hours at a stretch, on letter writing, and heavy correspondence could easily spend several hours most days. Wow. Most people treated correspondence as a regular daily or weekly task, similar to a modern email block, accepting that it would be— take a significant chunk of their time.

Wow.

I mean, how important was the fucking mailman back then? Everything. Guy was everything. Everything. Some dude on a horse with a fucking bag of letters. That's for a quarter. I mean, how much did they charge? A quarter was a lot of money back then. Probably was less than that.

That's probably half a penny or something if they had a— well, they did have a half penny.

How much do you enjoy writing that kind of a show versus writing a show like Lioness or like Landman? Like, what is do you have a favorite or do you like all of them?

No, I can't say I have a favorite necessarily. You know, the fun thing about Lioness, which is sort of— I can't say it's ripped from the headlines because I don't— I've tried to be— I've tried to guess what's gonna happen politically and then fictionalize that. And the fact that I've managed to be right Pretty fucking wild. I thought surely in season 2 when I said that the cartels had been listed as terrorist organizations, I'm like, this could be my 18-month cancel vacation coming. And then it fucking happened. And then it came out, you know, the show came out within weeks of that and I looked really— Like a soothsayer. Yeah, so that— it's a lot of fun because it's so political, and it's not— it doesn't choose a political side. It just looks at the tradecraft of espionage and how it intermingles with our military, and it's just fascinating shit to me. Just fascinating.

But there's so many different things that you have to be aware of to write the shit that you write. You know, like, is the Harrison Ford one 1923? Is that what it is? Mm-hmm. That one is fascinating too, 'cause you got the guy who goes off to Africa And, you know, and he comes back and you got all these people that are trying to steal land. So it's not totally lawless, but it's on the border of lawlessness.

Yeah, you're watching, you know, Montana in the '20s was fascinating. It was a fascinating place because you've got the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution in full swing, and you have washing machines and refrigerators and telephones and electricity, and then you still— you're still traveling by horseback. Yeah. So very, very interesting. And so, so that, that's a really fun thing to explore.

That one dude who was the evil rich guy on that show, oh yeah, he killed it. Tim Dalton. Oh my God, that's right, Tim Dalton, who was Bond at one point. Yeah, right. Yeah, crazy. Yes. Yeah, my God, does he play a good fucking creep. Twisted. So good. Yeah, I forgot that it was Tim Dalton. Maltin. That's how good it was.

Yeah, my wife watched that and looked at me like, how'd you think that shit up, dude? Like, I got the side eye for— it's a couple of scenes where she's like, bro, what are you thinking?

Yeah, there's a couple scenes I wondered myself. Yeah, I was like, this is rough.

Like, I was like, that's evil.

Some of the S&M stuff is like, Jesus Christ, twisted. But there's people like that in the world, 100%.

Yeah, yeah, I had to— I'll tell you what, my computer— I just assume that the CIA and FBI have like a whole team because the shit I look up when I'm researching, like how to make a bomb, SM practice, CIA hot regions in the Middle East, and it's all at once, right?

Yeah, yeah, there's no way they're not looking at your phone. They're looking at it going, yeah, Taylor's writing something new, look at I think anybody that has any influence, they probably look at your shit no matter what anyway, which is also dark. Like, we don't even know how much actual real spying on people is occurring.

We're just guessing. No, we don't have any idea. I think within the world of tradecraft, a tremendous amount. Oh yeah, I think within the world of— I mean, within that world, I think how—

when you're writing that How difficult is it to really keep your finger on the pulse of what's actually going on with espionage and like what tools they actually have available? Like, are you making some up? No, I mean, most of the—

I mean, I'm sure there is some extremely high-tech tradecraft going on, right? For sure. Tracking devices and various things, satellite imagery Facial recognition, all of these things, but a lot of it's also very low-tech by design because it's harder to trace, right? And it's a lot of leverage and manipulation. You're either bribing someone with money or blackmailing them, and that's typically— those are the two tools that are being used the most in tradecraft. In the spy game, right? That's really— you're— it's leverage, leveraging individuals. And they're all doing it, everybody, right? Every single— and then if you look at some of the— and again, I'm not getting on any— completely apolitical, but from a tradecraft standpoint, what the Mossad was able to do with all those fucking cell phones and pagers and shit— like, you want to talk about play the long game? Game. Like, build this dummy company, sell all these, get all these devices to all of these people who are your enemy, and start setting them off years later. Crazy. Detonate.

Insanity. I mean, it's genius. It really is insanity. Not endorsing it, but just saying. No, but if you— the actual act of doing it, to look at—

incredibly— the patience and and the planning and the risks, and that they were able to execute that is shocking.

When you saw that in the news, did you think, if I wrote that, no one would fucking buy it?

Dude, I do that all the time with the news. The Maduro raid, if I had written that—

Right, right. No one would— Right, they'd be like, that's too simple. Fuck outta here. That's not how it goes down. Even the bin Laden raid, a helicopter crashed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The fact that they were able to— and I know it wasn't as smooth as it was led on to be, but the fact that no one died, not an American, in invading the Venezuelan military base in the middle of Caracas, it's fucking insane.

It seems like it went pretty smooth. You think it went less smooth than they're saying?

I'm sure that there's elements of like quick, I'm sure, right? I don't know how any— the one thing I've learned with all my research into the military is any of these operations, there's actually a line in the upcoming Lioness where someone says, did it go smooth? And the guy says, well, smooth as these things go, right? Right. Because that's— because just by the very nature, you start sticking a bunch of people in helicopters with guns and, you know, shit's going to happen, right? But the fact that there were no casualties, that no one was killed, no American was killed, is incredible.

Yeah, it is incredible. It's pretty groundbreaking. Like, this is a new benchmark for what could be possible in terms of an invasion, at least of a third-world country. It's just shocking, the difference in the technology that the United States possessed versus them. Well, and whether or not they were even available— that's— no, knew rather that that stuff was available.

Yeah, war is gonna change very, very quickly with drones. AI and drones are gonna alter the landscape of war. We're gonna— we're getting real close to some Terminator shit. Yeah. And I'm not saying that like it's a good thing. No, it's a— it's— it's a very, very— you talk about adolescence of— of us as a species. We're seeing an adolescence in the teenage years of new, a new type of warfare. And, and when it grows up, it is going to be a beast. A beast. And I just think about it, you can, you know, now they've got drones that are the size of airplanes. They can have a payload that is devastating, right? Beyond just simply a Predator drone that's got a couple couple Hellfire missiles or whatever it may have. And someone sitting in a Connex in the desert in Nevada can fly that thing halfway around the world, or don't have anyone fly it, pre-program it, and the thing flies itself. And that's— you give, give the drone a mission and send the drone off to do the mission, and it's fully automated. Yeah, that's some terrifying shit. I bet a lot—

that's a lot of what this UAP is too. I bet it's experimenting with that type of technology with some sort of a novel propulsion system, because they were working on novel propulsion systems way back in the '50s and the '60s. They were working on anti-gravity in the '60s. I don't think we're—

I don't think we're there.

I don't know. I don't think we're there. I don't know. I don't know where we're at. I don't either. I don't know where we're at, but I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced that they haven't done something.— in fact, Eric Weinstein makes some really interesting connections between— there's a college in upstate New York, a university in upstate New York that has a very overqualified physics department and it's connected to a hedge fund that does bigger than Bernie Madoff type numbers. And he's like, "The whole thing stinks to high heaven." And he goes, "And I have a feeling that there's some sort of an undisclosed or a top-secret secret, above, you know, top secret access program that's going on.

Oh, I can promise you there's something. Yeah. I've always thought a possible solution to petroleum as far as transportation goes, and I wonder why they've never tried it, is using magnetic force, right? If you have— you take a positive and negative charge. They're gonna come together, but if you take a positive and positive or negative and negative, they're gonna— I'm no fucking scientist, but you know, it's gonna repel, right? We've taken magnets and they push each other away. Well, how can, how can we not use that? If you had a vehicle and the base of it is essentially a positive charge or a negative, whatever it takes to make the magnets repel, and then your road base was essentially the similarly charged metal, wouldn't that— wouldn't that make it some bitch?

Wouldn't you have to redo all the roads to make something like that real?

Or put it in the road.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, it certainly could be a potential source of transportation for the future, but I think the things that they're doing now probably relates to some sort of anti-gravity propulsion system. And then there was that, you know, I'm sure you're aware of this. All those scientists that went missing or wound up being murdered. Yeah, dude, how fucking sketchy is that?

Oh, it's a coincidence from Los Alamos, all up there at the nuclear—

yeah, coincidence. Yeah, yeah, who knows? I mean, who knows what the fuck those people are working on and whether or not they made breakthroughs and they don't want other people to know, or whether or not they want to stop the breakthrough because they're aligned with with whatever the conventional propulsion systems are, and they don't want to lose money. This thing makes them obsolete. It could set back the science for a few years.

Or is it tradecraft? Is it Russian or Chinese or Iranian? It could be that, yeah.

Oh, sure. And that's the other thing that Weinstein was saying. He's like, it's really shocking how little these incredibly important scientists are protected. Yeah. They just fucking driving their Volvo to the university and working on top-secret shit. Yeah, and no one's making sure they don't get whacked by China. Yeah, yeah, I'd be curious.

And when they look into that, what was it, 11 of them in a year?

15 over a course of a few years. And some of them, people are not— they're going, ah, this could be coincidence. But there's a few of them where it's like, okay, these people, like like this lady was specifically working on spacecraft metallurgy, this guy was specifically working on cold fusion, this guy was specifically— like, there's a bunch of them where you go, okay, something's weird, something's weird here. Yeah, well, enough to the fact that the government's looking into it. They're like, okay, there might be something here. So Justice Department's investigating it, they're trying to figure out what the connection is and what could have happened. But it's, you know, it's hard after the fact to try to figure out who something, especially if somebody got hired from another country. Like, they're not gonna tell you. Like, how are you gonna know? You didn't catch them. Did you not catch them when they killed the guy?

Okay, well, you're probably fucked. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's— it's 15. Yeah, and they're all from that area, aren't they? Los Alamos? Around—

I don't know. I'm not sure. I think that's part of the problem. It's like, there's— whenever you have a thing like this where people start looking for connections, they can make some connections that aren't necessarily valid. And so let's say if there's 15, let's say 10 of them, 10 of them are bullshit. Yeah, that means 5 aren't bullshit. If, you know, if that's true, that's a lot. It's 5 super fucking brilliant people that got whacked.

Yeah, and it's, it's interesting that you'd have that many in this specific field in this period of time. Yeah, and, and they're not, you know, you— I would think of a scientist as being pretty fucking healthy, right?

And I don't know about that. I think a lot of them are just in their own head, you know, and they're probably not even paying attention to their body.

Did they all disappear?

Different people died from different things. And one of, one of the weirder ones was this one lady who was— I think she's the metallurgy lady— where she was hiking with her friend, and they were just hiking together, and the friend turned around to talk to her and she was gone. Gone. And she was just behind her, like 30 seconds before. They couldn't find her. They brought in cadaver dogs, they brought in search parties, never found her. And I think they might have found her body recently. See, they found— I think there was a report a few days ago that they might have found her body.

I'd be looking real close at the friend. Just— that's just me.

That's a guy who writes scripts.

Hey, so me and Joe went for a hike. I turned around That fucker's gone. Hey, I don't know where I looked everywhere.

I mean, I swear I had just talked to him 30 seconds ago and he's just not there. No sign of struggle. It's weird. Yeah. Yeah. Like a husband and wife go hiking and the lady falls off the cliff. They're like, hey, buddy. Yeah. What the fuck happened? You guys arguing? Can I see your text messages?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or the one that just fell off the boat. Oh, what happened there? I don't want to say it wrong, but I think she— I think it was out in the Bahamas. I read about it.

She was at a cruise ship one.

No, no, no, it was him and his lady and they're out on a sailboat or something. And oh, she would think the thing is the side. Yeah, he had to— yeah, something, something weird. They're not, they're not buying it.

Goes all the way back to the Natalie Wood story. You ever look into that one?

Oh yeah, that's right. Her and Walken and Robert Wagner on that. Yeah, and Robert Wagner and her had a big fight apparently, and then she just— whoops.

Yep, not the same person as the metallurgy.

Uh, which one is this lady? But she was one of the scientists, correct? Uh, I believe she was one of the missing scientists.

She was definitely missing for a year.

Which one was she?

I mean, I don't know what it— I don't know which ones are—

what was her specialty? Missing lab worker. Does it say what she worked on? No. Administrative assistant. Yeah, I remember this lady.

Yeah, the other one was, uh, her name is Reza.

And the Reza one, that lady, she was the one that has the, uh So she served as the director of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and she was in the materials processing group. She specialized in burn-resistant, high-strength metal alloys and rocket propulsion metals. And wasn't she one that had like some weird videos which she had made? Anyway, the whole thing's creepy as fuck. Wild.

She was hiking in the Angeles. National Forest. Yeah, outside of Pasadena. Hmm. Yeah, that could actually be a fucking mountain lion.

It could be, you know, or it could be a lady who's working on top-secret rocket propulsion fucking metals. Yeah, like, this lady's a problem.

Wasn't there some, some town— I want to say it's Arcadia in California— they, the, the mayor of that city.

Yeah. Yeah, Arcadia. Yeah, she was a Chinese spy.

I would have to think, if you're— if you've worked— how many people have you recruited that you finally go, well, fuck it, let's try and get the mayor of Arcadia?

We got everybody else. Yeah, they probably like worked her into position to run as mayor, you know.

I mean, and then, and then with the hopes of— she was relatively young, right? Maybe you go run for a state rep and then Congress and be the fucking president. There was, there was a thing in the '70s called ABSCAM. Do you remember this? Yeah, where there were all of these politicians, a few congressmen, some state reps, and they were all like Russian spies, or at least on the take, right? Right. Yeah, Soviet, Soviet spies.

Did you ever see that show The Americans? Uh-uh. I didn't either, but I heard it was great. It was all about sleeper cell Russian family that was pretending to be normal. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, that's real. They did that. They really had Russian agents pretending to be American citizens.

Oh, I wouldn't say had, I would say have.

Oh yeah, no, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, and Chinese. Yeah, for sure, for sure, 100%.

Yeah, no, plenty of them.

100%. Yeah. Well, how many Israeli agents are in Hezbollah or in Hamas? Like, probably.

Or in the IRGC? Yeah, probably.

They probably got a bunch of those guys in there. 100%. Yeah, it's just wild.

Fucking— it's tradecraft, man. That's a fucking whole other thing.

How hard is it to write about that stuff and like get it right, to get it accurate?

Yeah, I mean, you I don't know. You speculate a lot and you look at the past, right? Because there's been enough. It's funny because when they get caught, it's never that big a deal. Like, there are always some— it doesn't, for whatever reason, the news doesn't— we could pull it up. There's been any number of Chinese scientists over here and they were stealing this and they caught them doing this. It happens all the time.

See the ones that got caught trying to bring in bio They were trying to bring in— what were they trying to bring in, diseases or something? Something.

I was looking, there's another one in Vegas recently, but it's like they have these bio labs that are like being run out of like an apartment or something.

CCP-linked bio labs in American soil exposes major biosecurity gaps. Policymakers must act to improve oversight and biological research activity. Wasn't there a guy that got busted that was an Israeli agent and he got released East, and he took up—

I think was in Vegas.

Yeah, that's the one in Vegas. Yeah, so this guy, he had all these fucking diseases in his garage. 1,200 samples. Conclusion: the conclusion of the FBI lab that the community could not be harmed by what was contained in that lab. What? Finding possible biological laboratory in a garage. Inside, investigators found refrigerators with vials containing unknown liquids. Police said in the immediate aftermath, the home is also operated as an unlicensed short-term rental. What is this fucking guy doing? Why is— so the question— go scroll up. Yeah, so the question is, why does somebody have these materials in a private residence? It's not a doctor, not a lab, not a licensed medical facility of any sort. And then homeboy got released.

Yeah, but check out the names on some of the vials.

Oh boy. They located pathogen-labeled containers with labels such as dengue fever, HIV, and malaria, along with 1,000 mice, according to a federal report. Federal government never tested the items, and the CDC only made its determination based on the labeling. What? What the fuck? So in that case, Chinese citizen David He faces federal charges for allegedly manufacturing and distributing misbranded medical devices. He does not face charges connected to the Las Vegas raid, and a trial in California was scheduled for April. What the fuck? Just a bunch of vials of HIV and AIDS and fucking dengue fever and malaria. No worries. Jesus. Normal. So what was the Israeli guy? The guy who owned the lab? There was like an Israeli guy who they caught who owned it, and then they released him and he went back to Israel. And everybody's like, hey, what?

It's the same case, I think. It says feds drop case against man arrested in Las Vegas bio lab investigation.

What's his name?

Ori Solomon.

Oh, Ori, what were you doing? Ori, Ori, why do you have the HIV? Ori. There he is. Feds drop case against man arrested in Las Vegas biolab investigation. Yeah, I mean, why investigate? Let it go, guys. No big deal.

Yeah, he's only charged with illegal possession of a firearm in Nevada.

His immigration status precluded him from owning or possessing a gun. Well, listen, if he doesn't have a gun, how the fuck is he gonna defend all his malaria Malaria. People try to steal malaria, bro. Gotta be careful.

Oh boy. Yeah, this doesn't— seems like someone made that go.

There's too much fucking shit in the world to pay attention to, and too much of it is so disheartening. The more you look into it, the more like, is it all fucked? Is the whole world fucked? Like, what is going on?

And, and My guess is because there are so many different— two things, right? There's so many different— there's no secrets with the internet and social media and phones. Shit's getting out. But it's also getting out at such a volume that none of it seems to have an impact. Right, right, right. So much, right? Think about that in the 1990s, right? They're talking about that on Nightline and this and that and and Meet the Press and Chinese spy, Israeli, you know? That's news. But now it's just another.

The news cycle's a flood. It's like you drop a rose petal in the river while a flood's going by, like it's gone. It's here, it's gone.

And it's a sensory overload and people are tuning it all out.

They're tuning it all out also because nothing ever gets done. Nothing happens. And the more people like that get released, the more people like, ah, they throw their hands in the air.

Rather just watch sports. Yeah, yeah, just forget about it. Yeah, well, I can't believe Simon Schuster didn't send you my book.

Yeah, well, I don't know what happened, but I'll listen to it on audio tape. I'm glad you did the audio tape though. Yeah, that's important. Yeah, pull up the—

you're gonna fucking love it. It's, it's oddly entertaining and informative.

How did you have the time to write a book?

Book. So what—

writing 150 different TV shows.

So, so you know what it is? Do you know anything about it? No. Pull it up. I just want to— I'm gonna try and— I don't want to tell you what it's called. I just want you to see the title.

How to Not Die in Prison.

So here's the— so, so here's the deal. So when I lived in LA There was a gym on Beverly Boulevard, right at like Beverly and Sweetzer, and everybody called it Buns on Beverly because they had all the treadmills kind of right up there, and all the girls are there, and you get stuck in traffic, you're staring at all their asses. That was my gym. So me and a buddy of mine shared an apartment together, and we'd jog down there, work out every day. And there was this dude that showed up and started working out in there, and this dude was jacked. Yoked, but different than like the West Hollywood fit. Like, this fucker was yoked and had all these crazy tattoos on him. And we became kind of like friendly and ended up kind of becoming friends. And his name's Tom Nelson. And one day I'm like, so what have you been doing? He goes, well, you know, I'm gonna start a personal training— I'm gonna start personal training here. I was working over at the vitamin shop. Guy's like in his 40s. I'm like, I'm 40. A vitamin shop in your 40s. That's kind of weird.

I said, yeah, have you always lived in California? He's like, well, I've been here 19 years, 20 years. Yeah, yeah. I said, where are you from? Somewhere in the Southeast. I said, you always live in LA? He goes, well, no, I just got to LA. See, I've been in prison. I said, oh, how long? 17 years. I said, oh, and I didn't ask anything else, right? He does become a personal trainer, and I'd see him over— one day we have lunch and we're bullshitting, and I'm like, so what, what, what, tell me the deal. He's like, oh, I was a fucking criminal, dude. Like a criminal, like a real criminal, like biggest drug dealer in Hollywood and armed robbery and ran over a DEA agent. Like, I was a fucking criminal. But now, you know, when I was in, I I discovered, you know, fitness. I started working out, and I'm like, when I get out, I'm gonna— you know, he got himself in good shape. I'm gonna start— this is my passion. I'm gonna do this. So he was a trainer there for a while, and then he opened his own personal training gym, and, and I would go work out over there and hang out with him.

He's a cool fucking dude. And, and it became the biggest private training gym in independent in in Hollywood. So I go off and I start writing and I'm shooting Yellowstone and he reaches out and he goes, "Hey, I wrote a movie about my life. I'm gonna send it to you." So he sends it to me and I read it and it's actually pretty good. But it's sort of a fun '90s kind of— they don't make movies like this anymore. It's like it's The Rock, but we're celebrating the guy I was a fucking criminal. But it was good. I said, "Hey, I'll pass it on to some producers." But nothing ever happened with it. Anyway, so COVID happens. I'm stuck up on this ranch in Montana, and I call him and I say, "Tom, where do you get your gym equipment from? 'Cause I need to build a gym 'cause we can't go to a gym. I can't leave the ranch. COVID restrictions. The whole fucking cast is stuck on that ranch." And he said, they shut my gym down, dude. So I mean, I'll sell you anything you want. So I sent a flatbed trailer to LA and picked up a pile of gym equipment from him and didn't hear from him again.

He calls me maybe 18 months ago, 2 years, and I answer and he's like, hey man, I'm in a bad way. I'm like, what's the deal? He goes, fucking— he's a single father, I got a 5-year-old kid. I got fucking colon cancer. I'm fucking dying, and I don't— I'm tapped out, dude. I'm a fucking 60-year-old felon. I can't get a job. I can't do anything. Is there any work on your movies or anything that I could do? And I said, well, first, colon cancer, how bad? Like, what stage? What's this? He goes, I don't know. They saw it on an x-ray and diagnosed me. And I said, well, let's deal with that shit first. So So I fly him to Texas where I know people and I get him in and he sees a doctor and fortunately the mass wasn't cancer. So they help him out, do the surgery, get that done. And then I say, well, I mean, I get you a job on a movie, but it doesn't pay very good and the hours are shit and you've got a 5-year-old daughter. I mean, you know, to just be a production assistant or something is not going to pay enough to— it's not a great.

That's not a plan, right? Because you think you could like just spot me for a few months while I try and figure shit out? I said, I have a 100% failure rate of loaning money to friends. It doesn't work, right? I'm not a bank, and buying you 90 days ain't gonna fucking help. So, but let me think, let me think of something. And so it doesn't take me very long, and I'm thinking, here's a guy who's spent 17 years in prison. And you know what I've never read? I've never read a how-to-not-fucking-die travel guide to prison. So I call him back and I go, I got it, Tom, we're gonna write a book about my life. Kinda. We're gonna write a travel guide to prison for the accidental inmate, right? Somebody fucks up and they end up and they don't know how to navigate this place. He goes, a travel guide? I said, I'm gonna send you— so I bought a bunch of Lonely Planet travel guides to Thailand and Mexico, and I said, look at these, right? It breaks it down. It tells you an overview of the country. Then it gives you a glossary of the terms.

They teach you the language. They talk about the food. They talk about where you stay. They talk about navigating the country. We're gonna do that for prison. And he goes, I'm in. I said, great. I'm gonna write all the intros. I'll build the structure and walk you through it, and you're gonna— so it's literally a travel guide to prison, and it walks you through day one, how to navigate the yard, being processed in, the food, the commissary, the gangs, the diseases, prison riots, how to get a job in there, how to fucking make a shiv, how to do everything. Whoa. It's a— it is a tour guide to prison. How many pages? Couple hundred.

Sounds awesome. It's the craziest. I hope I never need it.

No.

Well, most people who read it hope they never need it.

I'm gonna guess 99% of the people who do read it, the one thing it'll do is tell you you don't ever want to fucking go there. That's for sure, right? And typically, if someone's going there, I even say in the intro, I'm like, if you're, if you're buying this book because you're going to prison, finish the book before you get to prison. Do not bring this book with you to prison or you'll die on fucking day one. Leave the book at home. But yeah, so, so then we did. I took the— we wrote 3 chapters of it. I took it out and Simon Schuster read it, flipped, and me and Tom got a book deal. So that's awesome. So he, you know, he was able to sit with me and we wrote it, and he was able to take care of his kid.

And that's very cool. Yeah, good, good for you, man, for doing that. That's really awesome that you did that. Yes, I know you're busy as shit. Shit. Like, you having another project on your plate, not fun probably. That's awesome.

That one was a lot of fun, right?

Yeah, but not fun to take something else on. I mean, I'm sure you—

yeah, but it was a very entertaining diversion from, you know, from my other— you know, I can bitch about my other job, right? Bitch about something on Landman or whatever, and then, you know, I'm gonna sit down and, oh, we're writing about smallpox today. Okay. There's some perspective. It's not quite so bad that Billy Bob is an hour late to work, which he's never an hour late to work, but you get my point. Yeah, yeah, it's a sobering thing. It's a— that's a broken system. You want to talk about a broken fucking system? Yeah, the prison system is broken.

I had the guy on Alabama Solution on, you know, the guy who did that documentary on Alabama prison system. Folsom. It's fucking heartbreaking, man. Heartbreaking.

I used to be roommates with the guy that edited all of those Locked Up. He would go and film those Locked Up. Remember those? Yeah, go to Folsom and Corcoran and all these prisons. Just, dude, it's a fucking— tell— rough and, and not designed to rehabilitate, right? At all. It's an institution that guarantees you're a criminal when you come out. That's what you'll be if you weren't a criminal when you went in, which you clearly committed a crime and got convicted, but you're gonna be a fucking criminal when you come out. Like, the people, the guys like Tom, who— I mean, there's an 80-something percent recidivism rate in the US. So for a guy to get out of prison and not go back to prison, the odds are fucking 4 to 1 against you. Like, it's at least—

yeah, it's probably higher than that, right?

I think it's 80-something, 80-something percent. 86. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah, it's brutal. It's brutal.

Well, I'm glad you wrote it. Yeah, I read it. I promise. Listen, listen to it. I'll listen to it in the sauna. There you go. Thanks for everything, man. Thanks for all the awesome shows. It's been great watching them. Dude, thanks for watching. You're the man. Appreciate you. Appreciate the guy.

We have time to talk about one more thing? Sure. That UFC 250. Oh man, yeah. Justin Gaethje, dude.

Yeah, I just had him on.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, it was incredible. I saw him— remember when I bumped into you at that fight in Vegas? That's the first time I'd seen him live, and I go to a bunch of prize fights. I love boxing, and I'm watching that guy If he had decided to be a professional boxer, he would— his striking is, is that level. Like, that dude, he went to work. Yeah, guy.

Now he's a man. I'm glad he's an MMA fighter because he started out as an All-American wrestler in Division I. He's like very— he's just a great athlete all across the board. And just his particular style of aggression is so well suited for MMA.

Oh yeah. It's just shocking that he's that good a striker and he was a wrestler.

I know, and he's, he's just a wild motherfucker, like, across the board. But for him to pull that off the way he did at the White House was nuts. I mean, his— some books had him at 6-to-1 underdog, and Ilia Topuria is so fucking good. Yeah, so good. And he had him in sick trouble in that second round. Let's I watched it again yesterday. The second round was brutal. I mean, Ilia was just destroying his liver. Yeah, almost put him down. Yeah, but even in the second round, Justin still bloodied Ilia up. His face was busted up. Like, he was getting the most damage to Ilia's face, and that was a giant factor in the fight because I don't know what the accuracy of these reports are, but what's being reported is that he had two broken orbital bones and a broken nose. Nose. So both his eyes were broken and his nose was broken, and Justin was here a couple days later and he looked great. It's just nuts. It's just like, he's very deceptively good at rolling with shots, and you know, he's fucking durable as hell and just very clever, very clever in how he sets things up and where he finds openings.

And one of the things he kept getting off is this— he does it like— he does a collar tie into an uppercut, and he got that off multiple shots. He did that with Fazeev too. He's really good with that move. He's a beast, man. I'm just so happy for him to win. I'm, you know, I'm a giant Ilia Topuria fan as well, and I think he'll be back better than ever. And I think sometimes a loss is like one of the most important things a fighter can ever have, because they realize like you can be beat, and you need to know that you're human. You need to know that you can't just throw caution to the wind sometimes. —just engage in these wild scraps. Sometimes you have to be a little bit more tactical, and sometimes you got to realize, like, you can't take everybody out. And, and that's the case with Justin. They couldn't take him out, and he almost did in the second round. Got real fucking close, real close.

But you know that, that frickin' Justin, he, he can time that transfer of power to right at the end of the punch. Mm-hmm. And just his hand His hands are so heavy.

Yeah, everybody says that too. Everybody who he's fought has said he's one of the hardest guys that's ever hit them, including Khabib, who's, you know, one of the all-time greats, said Justin hit him harder than anybody. Yeah. He's a fucking animal.

Yeah, it was impressive.

I mean, the fight was like— to be there at the White House while that was going on and to have Justin so happy— like, there's something about a guy winning who's an underdog that is just so fucking inspiring.

Ring. He didn't look like an underdog that night. No, he did not.

After the second round, he didn't. Especially the third. Once the third rolled around, he dropped him, and then he, he, uh, got a head and arm and snatched him down to the ground. I was like, holy shit, man, he's, he's fucking dominating him. This is crazy. Yeah, it was wild, wild to watch. It was wild. It was awesome though.

It was fantastic. Should have been there live, man. That would have been a good one.

Oh, it was crazy. It was crazy to be there It just felt surreal. I mean, they had a flyover.

They all saw that together. Jets come shooting over, bro.

They were like separated by like that far from each other. It's— I don't know how the fuck those guys do that. It was incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Yeah, well, it was awesome. Thanks, brother. Once again, the book is called How to Not Die in Prison. Yeah, and available now, audiobook, everything. Yep. Thank you. Awesome.

Thank you. Bye, everybody.