Transcript of #2566 - Cody Tucker New

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. Cody, what's happening?

Hey, man.

Good to see you, brother.

I know. You wrote a book.

Look at you, you're a fucking author.

A second one. Yeah, I never—

oh, is it your second book?

Yeah, remember last time?

Oh, that's right, that's right. Where did that come from? I still, I

mean, I marvel at your Instagram page. Your Instagram page is excellent. Like, it's one of the best ones I follow. Thank you. For sure. But I just marvel at the fact that you're constantly able to create content like these non sequitur, very bizarre facts and strange coincidences. Like, how the fuck are you doing this?

Dude, I read so much, and I'm a pretty quick reader. Like, I've always been very fast, like a good skimmer. And yeah, I just like all day, every day, that's all I do.

So you read and then you, you, you go, oh, that one's crazy, and you just write it down?

Yeah. So like whatever I'm reading, like say I'm reading a book on like Ben Franklin, I'll— anything that comes up, I'm like, oh, that's pretty interesting. I don't think a lot of people know about that. Highlight. And then I go through, piece all together, check and make sure it's all, you know, real. And yeah, and then dive into other things off of that, like kind of spiderweb out and go down rabbit holes. I'm in a perpetual rabbit hole

constantly,

all day, every day, rabbit holes.

What is that like?

It can get weird. Yeah, I mean, there's some times where I'm like, ooh, I hope, you know, I hope the FBI is enjoying what they're seeing. Good Lord, like, I didn't want to be here today. But yeah, it can get a little odd. Yeah.

Yeah, because you're constantly like researching crimes and Oh yeah, yeah,

murders, weird things that have been done to people over

time. Speaking of, you know the Debbie Harry story?

Well, that she thinks may have happened. I don't know if I buy it.

Really? Tell people what it is. Okay, so Ted Bundy one.

So yeah, so Debbie Harry believes that sometime in the early '70s or late '60s that she was picked up by a man driving a Volkswagen Beetle and that that car didn't have indoor handles, and she escaped, and she believes that it was Ted Bundy. But if you look it up, like, on, you know, like a timeline of events, he was not anywhere around there at that time. So it could just be another guy.

Oh geez,

doing creepy things. Yeah, when there's one, there's many, you know.

Yeah, I'm sure that's not the first time a guy's figured out a way to close off the handles on the inside of his car.

Oh, won't be the last.

Trap people.

Yeah, I'm working on it right now.

Ha! I watched a video today where this young man in India robbed a guy with scopolamine.

What the hell's that?

Okay, I'm so glad I get to tell you something that you don't know.

Oh yeah, I don't— if it's science-related or anything like that, I'm probably not gonna know anything.

Well, it's crime-related as well. Scopolamine is a drug that is, I guess it's in the class of deliriant, and if inhaled, you literally become like a prisoner to whoever gave you the drug. Like, you become like a zombie. Really? Yeah, it is like a zombie drug. drug. Not only is it real, but it's also the active ingredient in anti-seasickness medication. So when you take Dramamine—

I'm the captain now.

Dramamine.

Look at me. That's what

he

was doing. He blew it right in Hanks's face.

Scopolamine is, uh, one of the ingredients in Dramamine.

Oh,

okay. So I don't know, I guess it's a very small dose, but in a larger dose— so this guy This young guy came up behind this guy in India and he put it on his neck, and the guy touches his neck, and then all of a sudden he just keeps touching his neck, and the guy just takes his bag off of him, takes his wallet out of his pocket, takes his phone out of his other pocket, and walks off. And the guy's just standing there just helpless. Lost and helpless.

That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.

Yeah, it's like—

That's so crazy. God.

What do they refer to it as? There's a— Devil's Breath? Devil's Breath, that's right. In Colombia, the drug dealers use it to force people to do things.

Yeah, okay.

They blow it in their face, and when they inhale it, it's like they literally just come up to you.

Right. Where have I seen that in a movie?

Um, there was a zombie movie a long time ago.

Serpent and the Rainbow?

That's right. Oh, I love that movie. Yeah, great movie. I'm so glad we just brought that up. I forgot about that movie.

Yeah, Serpent and the Rainbow is one of my— I used to watch that all the time when I was a little kid.

Like, that was sick. I think that that might be a part of the whole zombie lore, that scopolamine use.

Okay. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, it's apparently like— see if there's any videos of people getting dosed with scopolamine, because this— I didn't know that people did it to rob people. And this guy in India, he just like touched some of it on this guy's neck,

right?

He was standing behind him and he was looking at the guy's bag and, you know, looking the guy over. The guy's waiting across the street and he just reaches and touches the side of his neck with it.

So it's potent as hell.

Potent as hell,

man.

Well, he didn't go unconscious. Yeah, he immediately was just like, what the hell? And then it's just like, just, just delirious, just, just moving around weird. The guy just took a shit.

Wonder where you buy that.

It's a good question. Hmm, maybe you shouldn't search that either.

Well, I've searched worse.

What's that, James?

Patches of it for motion sickness.

Yeah, motion sickness. But like, how many patches do you have to take before someone could just steal your wallet?

Do you have to like mummify them just head to toe?

I know, right? What do you have to do?

Like, those were mummies. Yeah. I,

uh, is there any videos of people?

All the videos I'm plucking on YouTube are literally little like the patches and like people putting them on their neck, there is a Vice documentary from 14 years ago. Mm-hmm. That's in Colombia.

Boy, 14 years ago Vice was the shit.

Oh man, did you ever watch The Cannibal Warlords of Liberia? Liberia, yeah. Yeah, about General Butt Naked. Yeah. Charles Taylor. Oh my god, that's— I've recommended that probably more than I've ever recommended anything in my life.

It's so terrifying that they did that. And that, that guy just became a preacher and all is forgiven. He was eating kids.

Yeah, eating their hearts. Yeah, well, saving the heart because—

Cutting it right out of their chest while they're alive and then eating their heart. And then he found Jesus and all is forgiven.

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess that is, you know, what it says in there.

But what a great place to live though, in terms of like actual real forgiveness. Very few places give you that kind of leeway.

Yeah.

Oh, you found Jesus?

But didn't he— he caught a guy serving human meat.

Yes.

Like, a guy was serving it like on a stick, you know, while he was a

preacher.

Right, right. He tasted it and was like, uh-oh, I know this taste.

Yeah,

and reported him.

Yeah, it was true.

Yeah, guy was killing people and just, you know, turning them into like a lunch counter shish kebab.

Yeah, Liberia is a fucked up place. So do you know the story of Liberia

about James Monroe? Is that Liberia? Is that Libya? No, Liberia. Liberia was like a colony that was going to be, you know, like take basically all slaves back to—

Exactly.

This spot. And that's why the capital is Monrovia, because it's named after James Monroe. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So I mean, it was literally founded with chaos.

Yeah. Yeah, because yeah, we completely screwed that one up.

We fucked that whole country up. Yeah. What a shock. That General Butt Naked guy would literally take its fucking clothes off, fully naked, and run into battle with an AK-47

and a machete.

Yeah,

normally you just used a machete, which— whoo. Yeah, I don't think it would have the same effect if I did that

butt naked. Yeah, with a machete.

No, I don't think it is. Well, that's probably true, actually. I'd probably be even more effective than now.

It's a lot of, a lot of fear, a lot of fear coming off of you. A lot of machete. A lot of meat.

Yeah, a lot of meat. AK-47. Not a lot of speed though.

Not a lot of speed.

Actually, I'm faster than you would imagine.

A lot of momentum.

Oh yeah, once I start, I cannot be stopped. I mean, no, I'm faster than you think, you know, all jokes aside.

Do you run?

Well, if I have to.

But how do you know then? When was the last time you had to run away from something?

So you know how like when you're not running, you're not moving, you're storing energy.

Okay, right.

You know, like there's kinetic energy and potential energy. Wait a minute.

This is all I

know about science, really, is

about when you're not moving, you're storing energy. Well, of course, like if you're napping.

Well, yeah, because if you're doing something, you're expelling energy, right? So you must be storing some whenever you're doing nothing. Like if I eat and do nothing, I'm building up energy. Mm-hmm. It's ready to go. Well, I've been doing that for about 15 years, so the amount of energy I have stored up is Probably second to none.

I don't think that would work in a study. I think if you did a study, I think they'd probably have some other explanations as to what's happening when you just sit still.

If I paid the right person, I'd get the results I wanted. That's true.

That's what's crazy. I know when you find out that we had one of these guys that was on our podcast that was a litigator for these lawsuits against pharmaceutical drug companies. Oh yeah. And he's explaining how pharmaceutical drug companies do their peer-reviewed studies.

Oh, I'm sure that's— Oh,

it's so crazy. So first of all, there's no transparency. So like, say if you have a drug that you want to release, you could do 10 studies and 8 of them show this is complete bullshit, but 1 or 2 of them show just some sort of statistically significant improvement in something because you've kind of manipulated all the different controls in the study to make it look good. make it— then you get— once you have this, if it's peer-reviewed, the scientists do not get to look at the actual data. Okay. They, they get to look at the pharmaceutical drug company's scientists' version of what the study was.

Okay.

So they only get to use what they're like. So if they have scientists that perform this study, then these scientists submit a report, and then that report gets reviewed by by peer— it gets peer-reviewed, not the actual data.

Okay.

So like no one ever gets to see the actual study. So it's one of the reasons that they can say crazy things like it's 100% effective, right, right, in, in stopping death and illness. So when they say it's 100% effective, you know how they say that? So if you have one person in the control group, or, or two— one person in the vaccine group or the medication group, and that person dies, and then you have a control group where 2 people die. Well, 100% more died in the control group where they didn't get the medication, right? So that means it's 100% effective. I'm not bullshitting.

Oh boy, that's a—

isn't that wild?

You gotta have a— to reach that kind of sociopathy. That's amazing.

That's sociopathy at a— where you're delivering medication that could potentially kill people, and that's how you get things like

Yeah, see, that's the job I need because I'm very good at that kind of thing.

Moving words around?

Oh yeah, yeah, I can make all kinds— I mean, I've, I've been hired at every job I've ever applied to with zero experience in that field. And so, and it was just because I lied.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, like, what kind of jobs have you had?

Oh, it's nothing crazy. I've never been like a doctor or anything, but I mean, it was, you know, working like at an eyeglass place or, you know, or a movie theater, you know, like, hey, I've worked in movie theaters for years, so I've never— no, I just lie. And

well, movie theater, no one's gonna get hurt.

Well, that's what I'm saying. Well, no, I've never worked in a position where people— I did work in a pharmacy. I guess that could get people hurt. But

did you say you had a degree?

No, I said I was on my way to getting one, which I guess technically is true. If I— sure, I mean, start tomorrow, you're on my way. If, you know, I'm gonna be just— I just haven't started.

Speaking of that, how does this happen when the CIA guy that stole all that money, how does he lie about his past to get through the CIA to a point where he can then lie about a fake operation where he steals $150 million.

So he faked a college degree and he faked his military service and got into the CIA and was a senior CIA official. How? Well, they didn't check.

They

did the Cody Tucker.

No, he just didn't keep a straight face. I mean, he kept a straight face. That's all you

gotta do. That guy's wild. What a wild fella he must have been.

Yeah, that's—

Please tell me there's some cocaine involved in here somewhere.

Oh, there has to be.

He's got luxury watches, 35 luxury watches, 2 BMWs.

Well, there's your answer to the cocaine question.

Private charter flights, he spent $1.8 million. Woo!

Oh yeah.

Luxury Florida real estate in Palm Beach.

But also, he's just got caught. There's no way he came up with this out of a vacuum and just was like, I got an idea, I can take advantage of the CIA in this cool way.

Right.

I feel like I can do

it. Well, there's no way he's the only one.

That's what I mean. Yeah,

like, yeah. Well, that's where those— all those stories about like the, the dude from the Tom Cruise movie. What the fuck's his name again?

Georgiou?

No, um, the coke dealer. Barry Seal. Oh, thank you. Barry Seal.

Was that American Mena? Is that—

Yes. That movie?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Mena, Arkansas story.

Yes.

This guy was working for the CIA, going down to Colombia, getting cocaine, flying it into Mena, Arkansas, dropping it off. And, uh, you know, he, he got busted with it, and then Bill Clinton had him released. That's in the movie.

Well, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that was his MO, uh, quite a bit.

Well, I think the CIA, and I think probably a lot of the big government organizations— is this the guy's gold?

This is the gold and the cash he had. Oh, he had like $3 million in cash and $40 million in gold bars or so.

It looks fake. Like, it just looks like a movie. It looks like a prop.

Yeah. Well, it's also like the perfect box. Those might be like— is that how they found it, or is this like how the government stored it?

Probably how they stored it and then took a picture of it.

Because those look like, you know, government Pelican boxes.

I mean, maybe it was the ones he bought, because I don't know.

I feel like if I had that, I'd probably store it pretty nicely.

Right. I'd have like LED lights around it and shit. I'd take off all my clothes and dance in front of it.

Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, those could be ones in there and I'd still do that. It'd be like, uh, you know, Pulp Fiction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that gold light.

Yeah,

yeah.

He had 30 watches, many of which were Rolexes.

Well, congrats, there's a plug for Rolex.

2 2026 BMW Alpinas. That's the— those are the really nice ones. Woo! Uh, he's scheduled to be sentenced January 28th, 2027, faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, 3 years of supervised release, forfeiture, restitution, and a fine.

A fine.

Yeah. Meanwhile, they should probably rehire him and go, hey buddy, how'd you do this?

I feel like that's worth it. 20 years. Yeah, get to live that life.

Oh, he probably had a ball. I wonder how long he was doing it for.

Did it— no, it didn't really say that, did it? Um, I mean, even if it was like 10 years, you know, 10 years of awesomeness versus 20 years of prison, I feel like is a good fair trade.

He probably would have never gotten that awesomeness without that crime. So you gotta— and then like maybe he goes to like a fairly— I mean, it's not like he did violent crimes. He's probably not gonna go to the worst kind of prison.

No, no, no, no, no.

Not gonna go to a supermax. Uh, they'll probably put him in some medium security where he gets to read and go do exercises. Yeah, he could take courses. Martha Stewart prison. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or the fucking Ghislaine Maxwell prison.

Oh yeah.

She's kind of in the same prison. Right.

Yeah, that's probably— yeah, end up somewhere like that. I think I would do it.

Isn't she in the same prison as that Elizabeth Holmes lady? The Theranos lady?

Yes, she is.

Hilarious.

Oh, I can't wait to see that.

A sex trafficker and a lady who lied about blood tests. I haven't seen the documentary. It's not out yet, right?

I don't think— it comes this week. Okay. I cannot wait, bro. He's great.

Oh, he's actually— he's excellent.

He's amazing. Which I didn't really know about him until like pretty recently. So I've been doing like kind of a you know, deep dive into just his old, you know, stuff like on the show. And it is— he's amazing. He's hilarious and just so clever.

Like, the way he's holding his gaze with her in that, that, that little clip is just— her face is just wild. You got to just, you know, like, we all have empathy for people. Like, shit, I mean, I don't think she killed anybody. So the thing is, here's the problem. when you're dealing with health stuff and you're lying about health tests, you could have killed people because there could have been a guy who had a condition and the condition was not revealed by your Fugazi blood test, right? And if he had gone to a real doctor like Quest Diagnostics and get the whole thing done, they would have said, oh geez, we have to get you in and we have to do some further tests. Oh, it looks like this is elevated. We have some medication. You're gonna be okay. He could have, you know, like there could be some people that took those tests that wound up Not, not knowing about cancer that they had. There could have been a bunch of things where people actually did die. So I take that back.

But trade-off, she also could have told people that they had a bad disease, horrible disease, and then they are in, you know, deep despair. They go to get a follow-up and find out they never had it, and now they have a new lease on life.

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We just sat down, shoot the shit. I know you, you know me, we're gonna have fun.

Oh yeah.

But then there's other podcasts that are like really well produced, like Radiolab. Oh yeah. Super well produced. Or like Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Oh my god. Where he takes months to prepare for each episode. I'm— we're barely doing the same thing. I'm not really— they should have a much more elegant name to whatever it is that they do. But they had one, I think it's called The Dropout, and I forget who produced it, but it's all about the Elizabeth Holmes story from the beginning of Theranos to her scammy ex-boyfriend who was also the dropout. ABC Audio. It's excellent. Yeah. I can't recommend it enough. It's Fucking really good, and it just goes into long detail about what was going on and how much they knew it was bullshit.

Right.

It's— it was bullshit. Like, oh yeah, people weren't learning anything about what was wrong with them. It didn't work. And they, they got people, big investors. I think Warren Buffett, he might have dumped $100 million in there. Like, these people dumped big money in. Yeah, one lady dumped $150 million in there.

$150 million?

Yeah, and that money's gone, you know. So like, that lady, when she gets out, her life is in danger, you know. She's, she's fucked.

Oh, I would do horrible things to people for far less money.

$150 million, and you find out— the problem is, it's like, it seemed like such a great story. You have this woman who's a super genius, basically the female Steve Jobs. She even dresses like him, and she is the most successful self-made woman in history.

Yeah.

She was worth $9 billion at one point in time.

If only.

Crazy. Yeah. It's a crazy story.

It is amazing. I mean, just what a horrible human being.

But it's also just like Jamie said, like, how did it get that far? Like Jamie said with the CIA guy, how the fuck did you fake all those things? How did you fake your military career? How do they not check that?

I feel like oversight is much more prevalent than what people think.

Lack of.

Lack of oversight. Yeah. People usually aren't very good at their jobs, just in general. Anytime you work with somebody, you realize, oh, none of us know what we're doing here. And I think that doesn't stop at a certain level. I think most people are just barely able to do their job.

Especially in government.

Oh, and very overgovernment. I mean, yeah, good Lord.

That's the problem, is a lot of these jobs don't need to exist. That's one of the weird statistics about California. When California was experiencing its— this mass exodus, its government grew substantially. Substantially. Yeah, so they're creating jobs. Like when they talk about creating— this administration has created over 100,000 jobs They don't tell you how many of those are completely unnecessary government jobs. And so to justify those government jobs, they have to do all kinds of crazy things like come up with new regulations and constantly like trying to enforce new laws and tell you it's to protect clean air or clean water or the environment or climate change.

Yeah. Yeah, no, if you can make your own jobs, I mean, you could have an endless supply of jobs.

Sure. If you are running a government and you decide to regulate some particular aspect of society Mm-hmm. And then hire a bunch of people to oversee that, then you have new jobs.

Yeah, you have an entire committee.

You have a department.

Yeah. And everybody in that committee has their, you know, person. It's just a pyramid scheme.

Exactly.

Which it really is. It's like multi-level marketing, but the thing you're selling is even more bullshitty than what most MLMs are selling.

Well, it's even scarier because a lot of these bullshitty things, they sell it to the general public under the guise, under this premise that you're gonna help people who are in need. Like the homeless situation in California, where they've, they've burned through $24 billion and Gavin Newsom vetoes an audit of it. Because what they'll find out is that money probably went to a bunch of nonprofits and probably went to a bunch of NGOs, and there was probably a bunch of people that were executives that got paid—

Oh yeah.

High 6-figure salaries working there, and they have no incentive whatsoever to fix this problem.

No, no, because—

You got a nice house in Santa Monica, you got a mortgage, you're driving around in a Lexus. Yeah, why would you fix that?

No, people don't police themselves typically once they get to a certain level. I think, you know, the average person does, you know, they choose to maybe drive the speed limit even if there's not a cop around or whatever. But I think once you get to a certain level when there's that much money involved, yeah, you'll usually just kind of do whatever the hell you want.

Especially if you're in government.

Yeah, that's amazing. Like, or you're in the CIA. gonna stop you.

Yeah, it's

like, if— oh, you mean I'm the guy who's supposed to bust me? I don't think so.

And you're literally, uh, like, you're part of the intelligence agency and you've got a closet in your house filled with gold and $100 bills and cocaine.

That'd be nice.

You've got 30 Rolexes. Yeah, you're fucking— you're balling out of control.

Yeah, I'm not slowing that down.

Why would he slow down?

No, no.

They probably feel like Okay, I'm gonna make one big score and then I'm gonna get out.

Yeah. Oh, that's— yeah, yeah, it's heat. Yeah, this is our last one. You know,

Michael Douglas was in here yesterday.

I heard it was great.

And one of his crazy stories was his dad, you know, when he turned 18, his dad basically said, look, I'm gonna write you a check for $10,000 and then that's it, you're cut off. And so the way he fund— and he was like, but I have student loans, I have this, I have that. So the way he funded his education is he was smuggling marijuana, like huge suitcases. And this is pre-TSA. Yeah. So he's literally like coming into the country with suitcases filled with marijuana. And he only did it twice. He did it twice.

How do you do it just twice?

That's what I said. I'm like, what willpower you have. But he said it is a lot.

Yeah.

He goes, it was so crazy and so nerve-wracking. And it was so much adrenaline and worried about getting caught, but he made a bunch of money and that's how he financed everything.

That's amazing. He produced, uh, didn't he produce One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

He did, with Creedence Clearwater Revival's money. So the manager of John Fogerty— John Fogerty talked about it on the podcast. Yeah, that guy was a scumbag and he was like stealing his money.

Yeah, he sued him for sounding too much like himself. Yeah, it was amazing. John Fogerty, you sound too much like John Fogerty.

When he left Creedence and started his own band, it's like, you sound too much like Creedence. Like, bitch, I wrote all this songs.

Yeah, like, of course I do. You want me to make a reggae album? I mean, yeah.

So Creedence Clearwater Revival's money financed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

That's amazing. Yeah, I did not know the CCR connection. I knew that he produced it because I remember watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I was like, why the hell is Michael Douglas's name on this and he's not even in it? And then I was like, oh yeah, he wasn't even really an actor at that point.

He was trying to act. What was going on was that his father had acquired the rights to the book.

Yeah, from Ken Kesey. Yes.

Right? Yeah, yeah. So Ken Kesey from the Kool-Aid Acid Test, from, you know, the whole Timothy Leary, tune in, drop out, all that jazz.

Discovering the Grateful Dead, kinda.

Yeah, all those people. So, um, so he writes the book, and then, um, they're trying to get it made, they can't get it made, and then Michael Douglas says, give me a shot at this. I think I can get it. He just becomes enthralled with the project, quits his job on Streets of San Francisco, which is a hugely popular television show. So here's this guy, he's a television actor, actor, and at the same time he wins an Academy Award for producing a film.

That's so crazy.

Crazy. It's right up your alley.

Yeah, I mean, your type of— oh, I love anything like that. I mean, yeah, yeah, it's like Mel Brooks produced The Elephant Man and he wanted his name taken off the credits because he didn't want people to think it was a comedy.

He did?

Yeah. So yeah, like The Elephant Man with John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins. Yeah, he produced it because he just loved the story of You know, John Merrick, I think is his name.

Yeah.

Yeah, just loved his story and wanted to have a movie, have the movie made. Wow. And he's like, God, I mean, if my name's at the beginning of this, Mel Brooks Presents The Elephant Man, people are gonna think it's like, you know, making fun of him.

Right, right, right. Yeah, he can't. Yeah.

But he still wanted to do it and did it.

That's cool. That's cool that he did that and then took his name off it.

Yeah, it's one of my favorite movies of all time. Love that movie.

It's a great movie.

What movie do you think you've seen the most, if you had to guess?

Unfortunately, John Wick.

Oh, okay.

I watch it when I work out sometimes. It's great motivation. Okay, it's a good revenge movie.

Yeah, you know, gets you hyped. Yeah, no, that's a good one. Yeah, yeah, okay, just curious.

Yeah, but it's not like— I don't think it's the best movie ever.

What do you think is the best movie ever? Like, if an alien came down and was like, I want to see one movie to know what y'all are about.

You know, I don't think I have a favorite movie, but one of the movies that I've seen, a modern movie that I've seen multiple times, is Ex Machina, because I feel like that is— I think that's the future. I really, I really do. I feel like a version of that is, is in our future. And this is a film that came out— was Ex Machina like 2017?

It was earlier than that, like '11. Was it? Yeah, 2011, 2013, maybe 2014. '14.

So when that film came out, I remember very distinctly going, oh my god, like, this is gonna happen. Like, this is not science fiction. This is just— they're just predicting the future.

Yeah. Yeah,

actually it says they released in 2015.

Oh, okay, okay. Oh, okay.

Oh, it wasn't released in America first?

Well, it's not an American film, is it? I mean, it's in

English, but like it says 2014 here and then yeah, here it says USA 2015.

So it just, it just was released probably in Cannes or something at the end of the

year or something,

right? Yeah, because in Cannes, you know, they'll release it during that film festival and technically it'll be a year.

It is a phenomenal phenomenal fucking movie.

It's so good. Yeah, she's amazing.

She's incredible. She's incredible. And like, you love her. Yeah, like love her. And she's a robot. And, and the— like, spoiler alert— the heartless way that she like leaves that guy trapped in that movie to starve to death, and trapped in that room to starve to death.

Yeah,

it's just like, whoa. She like has nothing. There's nothing in there.

It's very fake. Edgar Allan Poe. Yeah, Cask of Amontillado. Leaves him

Yeah,

but yeah,

but it's also— there's these weird, like, the— what's his name? Oscar Isaac, who's phenomenal as well. Yeah. Who plays this super genius guy. Like, there's something about, like, that super genius character is what we're all dealing with today. Like, we— that wasn't a concern amongst the general public in 2015. We weren't thinking about AI. No, we weren't thinking about the idea that someone could literally have superintelligence and also control the access to data that people get, be able to curate the data, all the stuff that we're seeing with Google and Facebook and AI and OpenAI and all these different companies. That was— I mean, it was like they predicted it brilliantly.

Yeah, it's like Her. That's a great one. It kind of predicts, you know, how people have gone with their AI, you know, people developing relationships with their AI, like the ChatGPT system or whatever. It's very weird. I mean, I guess it's kind of harmless in a sense because, well, you know, what's gonna happen? But like, it's just not good for people.

It's harmless for you because you're an intelligent person and you would realize that this thing is not real and it's blowing me up and blowing smoke up my ass and giving me therapy. Like, and there's some of those AIs, they'll, they'll gaslight you and they'll tell you everything's amazing. You go, boy. You're kicking ass.

That's what I need in life. Because in here, it is not that. It is not the case. I'm not a You know, you're killing it, buddy. So no, I use my ChatGPT to make me feel good sometimes.

Pump you up?

Yeah, just like, am I all right?

Do you instruct it like what kind of language you like it to use?

No, I think it's just figured me out. Just, you know, talk like, you know, talk in short words and sentences and, you know, make me feel all right.

Say you're going to be okay, Cody. Everything's fine. People love you. Got a lot of followers.

Yeah, I mean, I don't really care about that bullshit, but you know, it's nice to, you know, it's nice to feel good.

It is nice to feel good, but they also convince you that you should commit suicide. That's happened before too.

Yeah, I don't think I could be convinced. If I was gonna do it, it'd be on my own accord. I'm way too scared for that kind of business.

Well, you are a guy who's like, like I asked you, I go, oh, you got an Android phone? And you go, yeah, I'm not a sheep.

Amen. Yep, never will. Always have had an Android. I mean, that's also just out of kind of out of laziness because I just don't want to learn something new.

Apple's pretty easy to learn. Yeah, the, the thing is though, it is— it's like the Windows-Apple operating system comparison, or even, you know, Unix and Linux if you're into that. But it's that you are very limited by the hardware. The hardware choices are only this one company, whereas with Android you can get all kinds of crazy shit. I mean, you can buy unlocked phones from China and use them over here.

Yeah, I just, um, I also just kind of don't care. I don't care about Android or Apple. I don't care what someone has. I mean, I've found that mostly the people who do give a shit are people— it's always people who have iPhones. They're the ones who look down like, you know.

Oh, 100%.

Like, oh, you have an Android? Yeah, like, I also don't care. Like, I would be just fine if I didn't use this as like an easy way to read shit. I'd go back to having a damn You know, a Razr, you know, or like some flip phone.

Flip phone would be great if it was better at texting, because I do like texting friends, and it's like texting addresses and information and stuff like that I think is important.

What was that Paris Hilton phone? The

Sidekick?

Oh yeah, yeah, she was in the commercial, I think. Yeah, so that was a brick.

Those things were huge. Those things are so big.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what I want.

Well, they do have phones that open sideways that are little flip phones, and they have a little tiny keyboard and you can text on them. They do make those still.

I wouldn't mind something like that.

Yeah, it's not a bad idea if you just like— I know a few comics like Dave Itao, he has a flip phone because they just don't want to be connected to that toxic fucking hive of human thinking.

Oh yeah, I get sucked into Just doom-scrolling, as the kids say, you know, all the time.

Yeah, yeah, we all do.

And I hate that I do it.

You know, the thing that keeps me from doing it is if I don't bring it into the toilet. If I keep the phone outside of the bathroom.

Yeah, yeah, that's— that book will take care of that business for you.

There you go, that's way better.

Wrote it based on the length of the average dump.

Did you really?

Yeah, well, I calculated it. Well, just a brief, you know, roughly.

If you read the whole book and it takes you a dump, you need to go to a doctor.

Oh no, no, no, I mean like, well, yeah, well Well, some people just like their alone time.

Your legs are gonna be numb.

Yeah, no, like if you, you know, each little section for the average reading speed is equal to like the average dump length. So you just read that, take a dump, and you learn something and forget it immediately.

No, that's smart. How did— I mean, I must have asked you this when you first came on, but I don't remember the answer. How did you start doing this?

Had a podcast, just me blabbering about nothing, and at the end I would like end it with like a just a fun story from like the past, you know, called like Half-Assed History. And I would just end it that way and then started clipping it because one of my friends like, you should just clip that little bit and do like a separate thing, and started doing that. And then just slowly over time, thanks to people like yourself, it started to kind of take off because you, you know, helped out with that quite a bit. And a lot of it, Brian Simpson actually helped out a lot, like just sharing. He's one of the coolest human beings on the planet. I love him to death. And, you know, Greg Fitzsimmons, who's also an amazing guy. Like, you know, I just luckily had people see it that helped, you know, because otherwise I was just doing it for nobody, which was fine. Like, I like I just like making stuff and learning stuff and teaching stuff. So

what has it been like to watch it get so popular? Has it been weird?

Yeah, I don't really— I think mostly because I live in a pretty small town, so I don't like— and I don't go out ever really, so like I don't notice it. Like I'm not getting recognized, you know, and all that kind of business, right? I guess I have a few times and it's very weird, but I just don't really think about it. it. Like sometimes I'll see like a— because I don't read comments usually, but I'll see somebody follow me and I'm like, holy hell, like that person knows who I am. Like, that's weird. Like Johnny Knoxville the other day, I was like, oh my God, Johnny Knoxville. Like, that's, you know, like that's my Michael Jordan. Like whenever I saw this, like hard— like you'd be lying if you said like that, that didn't make you feel, you know, he's cool as fuck. Yeah. And I just— so little things like that will happen where I'm like, oh, This is cool. Otherwise, I'm just kind of like living my life, watching Real Housewives and working on videos. Yeah,

but you really watch Real Housewives?

Oh, every day almost. Yeah, I mean, right now I'm in the throngs of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which I would highly recommend because there's a lot of Mormon business going on.

Oh yeah, the Mormon business is fast.

What a weird little group of people. But, um, yeah, so you get that mixed with, um, You know, drink throwing and all that kind of business.

Apparently there's a lot of— and this is not a slight on the Mormon religion, don't get me wrong, but I think this is true amongst Catholics as well. But there's a lot— well, probably many religions— there's a lot of undercover homosexuality. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm sure.

So a friend of mine, a good friend of mine, is dating a lady. who was in the church from the time she was a young girl, got married when she was 19, and when she was like 35, 36, realized her husband was gay. And,

uh, there's a situation later—

now they're divorced. And the stories she tells, the stories, you're just like, oh my gosh. Apparently it's just rampant.

Yeah, there's a— there's actually a little bit of a situation like that on the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.

Is there?

Kind of. I mean, I guess I shouldn't say the guy's gay, but, um, The rumors are, you know, that he is one of the husbands. And yeah, he's a hairdresser, which immediately makes you think—

Does he also like musicals?

Well, I mean, I think they go hand in hand in my book, but—

Big fan of Cher?

Donna Summer. Yeah,

I'm a big fan of Donna Summer.

Well, all right, well, you're hitting it with them. Big Rocky Horror Picture Show fan.

Right, right, right.

Yeah, I just No, you know, and it kind of seems like he might be. I don't know. I mean, you never really know, but, um,

it's

just— I'm sure that is a prevalent thing. I mean, yeah, repressed homosexuality and religion is just pretty rampant. I think across the board. Yeah. Um, just like Baptists. I mean, I grew up around all Baptists, you know, here like in East Texas. Uh-huh. I knew plenty of kids in school that were, you know, you know, queer as a $3 bill. And they weren't, um, you know, they weren't out and proud. Some of them are now.

It's one of the saddest failings of organized religion is the, the complete absence of embracing gay people.

Yeah, because you can embrace someone and not embrace, you know, I mean, I guess there is that whole thing of like, well, I embrace you, I don't embrace the lifestyle, which feels like a real sly thing.

But also, like, why not? Here's the thing. It's like, it's The evidence in the Bible, it's all Old Testament stuff, right?

Leviticus and all that business.

But you gotta look at what else is in Old Testament stuff. First of all, the open condoning of slavery. Not just open condoning of slavery, but rules of like who gets the slaves after people die, how you treat the slaves. It's like, there's a bunch of morally abhorrent things that are in there. So why is a man shall not layeth with another man? Like, what?

Well, and there's also like, I mean, it's, you know, not planting crops together, not wearing— 2 different types of cloth. 2 different types of cloth.

Shellfish.

Yeah.

You don't see protests outside of Red Lobster.

No, I mean, you should, but you don't. I mean, I just think it's very bizarre.

It's bizarre and stupid.

It's never been my cup of tea, just religion in general. I mean, I'm not against people Yeah, I think whatever you want to have that makes you feel good, and as long as you're not being, you know, an asshole to everybody.

Yes, that's the problem.

I feel like people should have their own thing, you know. I would like to bring back, like, Greek mythology would be cool. I'd go to a temple. Yeah, and worship Zeus and all them people. Yeah, like, I enjoy that way more. I mean, I've read the Bible a couple times and it's nice, but I'm not like— I just don't, you know, buy into it. any of it? Not just Christian, not just trying to attack them, but like anybody really.

I think they're trying to tell a story. I think that it— I think it all— I think there's a lot of human influence and there's a lot of stuff in it that people obviously wrote, like the stuff about slavery, the treating women like second-class citizens. There's a lot of stuff in it that seems clearly the work of man. But I think the origin of it all is some kind of documentation of historical events that were incredibly strange. Yeah. And that they're trying— and you're getting these, like, you're getting a lot of the Gospels were written long after Jesus was dead, and they didn't even know Jesus. They had never met him. And so, they're attributing words to him. They're saying— so, there's that. And then there's also, like, and if you get into the Old Testament, like, the weird stuff, like, the ages of people, like, Moses was like, or Noah. Noah was like 600 years old when he built the ark.

Methuselah, who's like, I think, the oldest person in the Bible, I believe, is Methuselah. I mean, yeah, there's

fucking

Abraham. Abraham was like, you know, hundreds of years old, I believe.

Weird shit. And then the flood story and how the flood stories in so many different ancient religious stories—

It's the Epic of Gilgamesh. Yeah, damn flood. It's the oldest story there is.

Yeah, so yeah.

Yeah, I just, you know, people like now want to have an answer to something. Like, I'm terrified of death. That's the thing I'm most terrified of in the world.

Really?

Yeah. You're not afraid of dying? Oh, dying's terrifying. What if something bad happens?

I mean, I don't want to die. What if you go to heck? Go to heck?

What if you end up in heck? That'd be horrible.

Heck is hilarious. You clearly live in the South, sir.

Yeah, well, yeah.

I mean, it doesn't sound like fun. No. And it's gonna suck that your family's gonna miss you. That would bother me the most. Yeah, absolutely. But it's inevitable. Everyone's, you know, everyone's afraid to die. No one's afraid to sleep. But you don't shut up every, every night. You shut off. Yeah, but I wake up. I hope you wake up. But do you? Are you in the same timeline? Are you in the same timeline? Do you know if it's even the same life that you're living?

Yes.

I don't know if that's true.

Yeah, because the plan I made yesterday is happening right now.

Right, but that's according to your memory. Oh

geez. Well, not according to my memory. I, I don't— yeah, I came here.

When you are out, you're gone. When you wake up, you have a pre-existing selection of ideas and memories and all sorts of different things that you just assume you've always been on the same path. But it's not necessarily true. Like, if you believe in the multi— well, there's no evidence, but if you believe in the— there's also I mean, what evidence do you have currently that subatomic particles exist? You know, there's a lot of weirdness to the world, the quantum world, quantum connections, and the multi-worlds theory. If, if you do— like, Philip K. Dick believed— he had a very strange idea about reality. I think Philip K. Dick believed that we are in a computer simulation. Wow. And he believed this in the 1960s. And he had this very strange idea that decisions you make, conscious decisions, alter the past. Hmm. I don't, you know, I don't know what kind of drugs he was on when he was writing all that stuff, but—

Yeah. Are you a big Dick fan?

Um, not a huge Dick fan.

Sorry. I'm a

medium Dick fan. No, I mean, uh—

Sizable.

Yeah, I mean, I think he wrote some amazing stuff, but he was, you know, one of those like very important odd thinkers that have sort of flavored our culture.

Yes.

Where you get to read these very unusual takes on reality, like—

Daniel George, Dream of Electric Sheep.

Hunter Thompson. Yeah, there's a lot of people like that that have just written wild things that just make you just rethink The world that we're living in.

Yeah, I'm a big Hunter Thompson fan. Yeah, just all that. Yeah, like sci-fi has never really interested me as much as I know it interests a lot of people. I'm not a big Star Wars fan or Star Trek, but I do love, you know, some things like Blade Runner, stuff like that. I just don't like thinking about the future.

You don't like thinking about it?

I hate the future.

How come?

I don't know, because it hasn't happened. I don't know. I don't know what to expect. Like, I don't like change at all. I hate change.

Really? Just personally?

Yeah. Oh yeah, any kind of change, don't like it. I like things to stay the exact same. I eat the same thing for breakfast, wear the same clothes every day.

Really?

Yeah, I'm a creature of comfort.

Interesting.

Like, uh, like if I was a turtle in a terrarium, I'd be happy as could be. Like, if somebody just—

You're a house cat.

I'm a house cat. Oh, without a doubt.

That's what Edward Snowden calls himself, a house cat.

Oh man, yeah, me and Eddie are Like, yeah, one and the same. I

mean, when I asked him about his life in Russia, I said, you know, what is it like? Like, do you feel isolated? He goes, I'm basically a house cat. I just need a computer and internet connection and I'm happy.

He's not missing anything going outside there. Jesus. Yeah, no thanks.

Well, they might kidnap him and send him to the front lines. Like, if you go out there, if you're of age—

Would not like— yeah, no thank you. No, I'm just a big indoor cat and I like my routine every day, same routine. Yeah, I just don't like change.

So the thought of the future, like, oh, the future's too much change.

Ex machina future. Oh no, and the flying cars, you know, like, I don't like it. Too many LED lights. Yeah, I don't—

When the hot robot assistants get created, are you gonna get one?

Well, I'm not necessarily against that. I mean, geez, you know, I could be swayed a little.

But that's ex machina. That's, that's, that's what it is. That's what we're dealing with.

I just like the past. I love the past more.

Why is that?

I mean, one, it's real. As far as I'm concerned, the future isn't real because it hasn't happened, right?

It's just speculation.

It's speculation. And I love seeing where we were and how we got to where we are now. So like, and also just like what people were doing 2,000 years ago, you think like, how the hell did they come up with that 2,000 years ago? Or the people who you know, like Marcus Aurelius or somebody who— the way they thought, like how it is, the— it perfectly maps up to now where like that same sort of stoicism, you know, can do wonders for people today. And he was thinking that shit 2,000 years ago. Oh, unquestionably. I think all that kind of stuff, and even like not that far back, but like the Victorian period, I think is fascinating. I think like when you travel around the US, no one like Well, what, what did this city or this place I'm standing at right now, what did it look like 150 years ago? Like, what did it smell like? It probably didn't smell the way it smells.

Yeah.

And yeah, I don't know, I like thinking about stuff like that.

Well, it's absolutely fascinating because, I mean, just think about the timeline, the known timeline of human history. Have you been to Rome? Have you ever seen like the Colosseum or any of those places?

No, I've never been out of the US. Don't I don't need to do that.

You don't need to?

No, no, no, no, no. I can just look at it in a book or watch a documentary.

Uh, I agree to a certain extent. Well, for— no, I don't. So I think watching it is certainly fascinating. I love documentaries, but there's something about being there. Like, I went to Greece a few years ago, and, uh, I was with my friend Brian Murarescu. Do you know who he is? He wrote a— he's a scholar, and he wrote a great book called The Immortality Key. that is all about the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece, which I believe Marcus Aurelius participated in.

Right, right, right.

And when Marcus Aurelius participated in that, I'm most certain that that flavored some of his writings, particularly Meditations. Yeah. Because there's a lot of the stuff in there that seems very psychedelically inspired. Like the wisdom of this guy. Okay, this guy is running Rome. Yeah, what is one of the most fucking powerful armies the world has ever known, conquering everything. And this guy is essentially like a psychedelic bard.

Right.

It's very strange. It's a very— like, his writings on forgiveness and, and, and truth and, and recognizing your thoughts. And just, he was— and you're thinking about like, oh my god, this is thousands of years ago this guy wrote this. This is insane.

Yeah,

and a lot of that I think probably came out of those Eleusinian Mysteries. But I went with Brian because I was there with my family, and Brian happened to be in Greece at the same time and met us there. He gave us a tour of Eleusis. So you get to— we were in the actual place where these people had these Eleusinian Mysteries, and it feels weird.

That's pretty cool.

And you don't know if it feels weird because you've— you're ascribing all these feelings because in your mind, like, oh my god, I'm here. So you're in this heightened state of suggestibility or whatever.

I'm sure. Maybe that's a big part of it.

Part of it. But it felt weird. Yeah, there's something about being there physically. I haven't been to the pyramids. That's one thing that I must do. That is like on my— the top of my to-do list is I really have to get there. So I went to the Mayan pyramids. I went to Chichen Itza.

Guatemala? Chichen Itza. Okay. Yeah, gotcha.

Yeah, in the Yucatan. It's fucking incredible. It's, it's so bizarre.

Yes, that would be— I'd go there. That's about as far as I'd go.

Yeah, it's actually sketchy now.

Yeah, actually coming down to Austin's about pushing it for me. Really? Yeah, and I'm only about a— it's about a 4-hour drive.

Too much.

Yeah, too crazy. Too many things happening. Too much change. Too much change. Well, Austin is drastically different from Longview, Texas. I mean, some things are similar, but no, I like a slow-moving place, you know, just like a— like I'm a slow-moving animal in general. Yeah, talking slow, everything. So,

well, whatever you like, man. That's the beautiful thing about freedom. Find your lane, find what you're into, you know. For you, it's reading a lot of shit and making cool videos.

And Real Housewives.

And Real Housewives. I can't watch those shows.

Why?

Because I just— I just don't want to be around those people. And so when I hear them yapping and trying to get all this attention, I'm like, I gotta get out of the room.

That's the best thing.

It gives me—

You aren't in the room. Like, you just get to watch it from your room. Like,

I don't know, maybe I'm an empath. I get, I get secondhand anxiety from these people's lives.

Do you like watching confrontations, like, in public? Not your confrontation, but like other people. Like, if somebody— 2 people getting like a fender bender and they get in like a little argument, do you like watching that?

Generally, I don't. I, I mean, okay,

I will

watch them if it's happening right in front of me, but I really wish it didn't happen. I'm very averse to, believe it or not, very averse to public violence. And I think—

Okay, I get that for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm— well, I'm not into violence. I don't want to see somebody get knocked out. I've seen enough videos, people have their heads bounce off concrete. Never want to see that ever in my life.

I've seen it, but a lot.

Yeah, but I would love watching 2 people just yell at each other.

Yeah, I don't like that because it just leads to— it generally leads to someone hitting somebody. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. We all have little things we do to save ourselves time, like shopping online or paying kids from the neighborhood to rake up all those leaves sitting in the front yard. Or if you're hiring, you rely on ZipRecruiter. They match you with qualified candidates as soon as you post your job. Now that's how you save time. Try it yourself for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. It's rated the number one hiring site based on G2. For a reason, because on top of the qualified candidates, it also shows you the most interested ones first. Save time and meet great candidates sooner with ZipRecruiter. 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

Yeah.

And I'm just not a fan of human stupidity, and especially that kind of stupidity. I think it's really fucking dangerous. I think people engage in it freely as if there's no consequences over things that mean nothing in the long run of your life. But that move, that moment of engaging could change your life forever. You could either get killed or kill someone or get irreparably injured or harmed I mean, I know people that have been beat up and it's completely changed their personality forever.

I know a guy that's a vegetable because of it. Like, I mean, he's about— maybe he's older than me, but yeah, his mom has to take care of him. Jesus Christ. Yeah, because he got in a fight, got in a fight and head hit the curb and that's it.

And there's so many people that that happens to and you never hear about them because they're still alive. They're still alive, you know, so the person doesn't get charged with murder, but meanwhile you have taken away that guy's life.

Yeah. Oh, without a doubt. Yeah, it's the equivalent, I think. I mean, I

mean, technically

it isn't, but

it's kind of odd that I don't enjoy violence because I've seen so much violence. I've probably seen more people get their ass kicked than probably— there's probably very few people who have ever lived on planet Earth that have seen more people get their ass kicked than me.

Oh, I think that's— yeah, without question.

Yeah,

like, who else could it be? I mean,

I've seen— I mean, I've just been there live for thousands of fights. I've professionally called thousands of fights on TV.

Are there any people who have called more fights?

Maybe.

Like, in other— like, I don't even mean here, like in Japan, or like— because that's the only thing I can think of.

It's not likely. I've been doing it since 1999. '97. So that's when I first started working for the UFC, was in 1997.

I was 4 years old.

Yeah, so that was my first— so that was the first time I started working for the UFC. And then continually since 2001, so 25 years of calling fights. And at one point in time, I was doing like 20+ events a year. So I was on the road like every other week. Yeah, doing UFC fights. So I don't think there's very many people that— and then on top of that, all the fights that I watch, not live. So a big part of what I do, you know, like, I take the commentary job very seriously. Yeah. And even if I didn't, I'm just a giant fan of combat sports. I don't— you think it's like because I like violence. What I really like is high-level problem-solving, and that's what it is. It's like very intense, very— I call it high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences. Like, it's just like an insane game that these guys are playing, and there's incredible amount of technique involved, strategy, determination, and willpower to get yourself into shape, intelligence in order to formulate the correct sort of style and game plan to be successful as a fighter. And so I watch a lot of fights.

I watch a lot of, like, jiu-jitsu matches. I watch a lot of kickboxing fights. I watch a lot of fights. Yeah. So it's just in terms of like how many people have watched more people get their fucking ass kicked. Probably I'm at the top 1% of people that have ever lived.

Yeah.

What's the number?

As of 2024, it was 3,250.

3,250 what?

Fights.

That I've called? Yeah. That's just enough called. So 3,250 fights that I've called just professionally. And then watching it, I probably watched that again, at least. Yeah, at least. So it's probably— I probably watched—

7,000-ish.

Yeah, easily. Yeah, easily. Maybe more, because sometimes I'll watch 2, 3 in a day. Every day I watch them in the gym all the time. I'm always watching.

So it could be up to 10,000.

Yeah, so I don't like violence, believe it or not.

No, that— I mean, what I can understand that though, because like, you know, it's not that you're loving seeing a guy get the shit beat out of him. It's loving seeing how does this guy handle this situation? How's this guy, you know, change his outcome? Like, it's looking like it's gonna go one way. What's he gonna do? Yeah, reverse it. Am I like kind of—

I love watching people achieve greatness.

Yes.

And I think greatness with the, the highest level of physical consequences in terms of like safety. Obviously war is number one,

right?

Get past— and then there's, you know, first responders, police officers, SWAT teams, that kind of stuff. But outside of that, in a controlled environment where people are preparing for a very specific contest, I just find that to be the most thrilling and exciting thing in all of sports. Yeah. And so that's my perspective on it. But I don't like people getting violent on the street. It bothers the shit out of me. I hate it.

Yeah, well, the risk-reward too is different. I mean, the risk in the— in an octagon or in a ring is drastically different when you have a medical team. I mean, not that things can't happen, but yeah, versus a parking lot. 100%. And then what's to stop some other guy to come up and just boot this person right in the face?

And you see it all the time, right?

You don't see that in the UFC. I mean, so you're seeing controlled chaos in a sense, or it's not even really chaos, but you're seeing a controlled, like we're both agreeing to do this, we're both at the right weight, like, yeah, like it's, it's different. Like whenever I watch, you know, whenever I watch a fight, like I, I don't think of it in nearly the same way because I feel sick to my stomach whenever I watch people get in fights in real life, like, like real. Yeah, I don't feel like that watching UFC. I feel like I'm watching 2 athletes. Yes, competing.

They hug each other after the fight.

Like I feel the same way whenever I watch a football game because I'm a big football fan. Like, that's my, you know, number one. And I hate seeing people get concussed. Hate it. Hate— there you go. Yeah, like, I'm a—

Yeah, I hate it too.

Yeah, I don't want to see somebody get helmet to helmet. This person can't even walk, like, doesn't know where they are. But I love seeing a big hit at the right time where, you know, you're making this amazing defensive play because you are 2 athletes who have agreed, you know, to—

yeah,

and you're at the height of your You know,

I love watching people do things that are insanely difficult to do. That's what I love. Have you seen that? There's this guy who's a Russian gymnast who figured out some new way to do an iron cross. He does an iron cross inverted.

The hell's an iron cross?

An iron cross is one of the most difficult moves in gymnastics where they're on the rings and they hold their body up like that with their arms out. It takes like insane strength.

Vince Vaughn in Old School when he's smoking the cigarette does Really? You never seen Old School with Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell?

Does he do that?

Yeah, I think.

That's probably CGI, right? It's fake.

Well, I'm not saying he's really doing it, but in the movie. Yeah.

So this Russian guy has figured out a way to do it upside down. So he's literally doing a handstand and he stretches out. Watch this. Okay, watch this, cat. This is crazy.

Oh my god.

The amount of strength that it takes to do that is fucking preposterous. He's the first guy to ever do it.

If I started today, how, how long do you think it would take for me to be able to do that?

It would take you 50 or 60 years. Oh,

I got time then.

Well, you would have to lose an insane amount of weight. You'd have to get on steroids. There'd be a lot of things that would have to happen to change your physique. You'd have to—

done.

Yeah, yeah, you have to change your— you got to get coaches, you got to go to Russia.

That would be— that's actually the biggest problem. The weight loss and the steroids, I can start right now. I

don't know if this cat figured it out on his own, if it was something he was thinking, can this be done? But I'm fascinated by people that are like the first person to figure out that a move can be done.

Yeah, or just the, the people who can do anything for the first time. Like, what was his name? Banister. Roger Banister that ran the mile for the first time in 4 minutes. Yeah, it had never been done. all this time. But then what's crazy is that like the next year there was like 6 people that ran it. Yeah. So it's weird how like, like, I wonder how many people are gonna be doing this a week from now, right? Like probably a couple at least. Yeah, there's something about knowing that something's achievable that makes it infinitely easier.

Yes.

Like weird, weirdly. Or like X Games. I grew up watching the X Games a lot, and you would see a move be done like a 900, Tony Hawk doing the 900 Now there's like 6-year-olds doing 900s. Oh, there we go.

It's a 9-year-old, but yeah, but still, yeah, the same thought process.

I mean, when I was like a crazy—

when I was a little kid, look at that, doing back to back, bro. Imagine that's your kid doing that. You'd be like, don't get hurt, Billy.

Dude, when I was like a little— when did Tony Hawk do 900? Was that '99? I think '99. Yeah, it was. I remember watching it and, and it was like, it's like you saw Jesus walk on water, like

3 back-to-back.

And now there's a 9-year-old Japanese—

9-year-old Japanese boy does back-to-back 900s. Wow, that's crazy. First— his first 900 at age 7.

I mean, isn't that wild? Like, this— 1999 is not that long ago. I mean, it is a while, but

not that

long. But for there to be history, that level of change in that amount of years where it's, it's like an easy thing,

that is crazy. That, that literally is crazy. Boy, that is a rough fucking sport. Those guys get some fucking concussions.

Yeah, Tony Hawk. Did you watch his documentary?

No.

Oh, you should really watch that. Um, Until the Wheels Fall Off, I think is what it was called. It is incredible. Tony Hawk's amazing.

I had him on the podcast back then. Oh really? He was great. Really interesting guy.

It starts with him trying to land a 900 now. Like, you know, as he's gotten quite a bit older. And the— just the amount of just the shit he's eating constantly, because he can't get it because he's, you know, older and harder to do it. But you still see, like, he's not doing it for anybody. He's not in a competition. He's like in his personal, you know, halfpipe, right? And just— but you see it in his eyes, like, like those skate— like skaters have no quit in them, right? And, um, well, you can't. Yeah, but there's something amazing about that. Yeah, like, I'm a big quitter. I love quitting. I don't know if I love anything more than I love quitting. Like, it's great. Like, when something's difficult, it's like, oh, I could just stop and do something better.

That's funny.

But those guys don't.

You and I would be like a funny Odd Couple show.

Oh yeah, what was it, Oscar and whatever it was? Felix. Felix and Oscar. Yeah, yeah. Oh, we We probably are the most opposite people. I might be the most opposite person you may have ever had on here.

In many ways, but in a lot of ways we're similar. We're interested in history, interested in unique facts.

Yeah,

obviously that's why I'm a giant fan of your page.

Thank you. Yeah, there's a Venn diagram, you know. Yeah, but ours is like, you know, barely touching. Like, there's— yeah.

Well, I'm always interested in like what turns people down certain paths, like what makes them go one way or another. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think anyone could go down any path. It could have happened. I think it happens oftentimes very young, and then you start building momentum and towards very specific areas.

That's a big thing I have with, like, anything pop culture, like movies, music, and like remembering dates and like, you know, when did this movie come out, when did this album come out, is because like my dad would, um, you know, like trivia, like give me tests like to like try to impress my uncles. Like he was like, Cody, who sings blah blah blah, at like 5 years old, and I would just name them. Right. But I like, I love the rush from like knowing something. Right. That it impressed people, because otherwise, I mean, I wasn't impressing people, you know, in any other way. So I was like, I got to do something, because my brother was like amazingly good at baseball. I don't have that. So I was like, well, what's my thing? And it just became facts. Yeah, knowing random stuff. And I like the feeling of like when you tell somebody something weird that they never knew. And you kind of see them like get like, they're like, oh my god, I never knew that. I like that feeling.

A very impressive quality. Like, I love talking to people and they, they can tell me things that I had no idea of. Like, what? Yeah, really? Brian Simpson's great at that. Yeah, Brian Simpson is a warehouse of interesting information. Like, he and I, like, anytime we find something like really fascinating online, we send it to each other, and he's just doing that all day long.

Yeah, see, that's my kind of thing. Yeah, I just, I want to know everything. It's one of the reasons why I want— I don't want to ever die. It's one of the things I'm scared about death is that like, yeah, but what about all the stuff I'm not gonna know? Which I know it's foolish, like there's no way I could ever learn 1% of everything.

If technology came along that could extend your lifespan literally indefinitely—

Sign me up.

You'd be in?

Yes. I don't know why people say like, oh, if I make it to 90, kill me. me, you're a pussy. Like, I mean, what are you talking about? I want to live forever. Yes, the— what's that movie with Johnny Depp? Transcendence, I believe, where they put him in the thing and it goes very wrong. I don't care. I would go to Jurassic Park even knowing what happened to all those people, all those innocent people.

Well, they're probably gonna do that eventually. Right now they don't have dinosaur DNA, but I don't think that's going to be able to stop them from creating a dinosaur. I think what they're gonna be able to do is use bird DNA and eventually engineer a dinosaur by giving each new iteration very specific traits. Like, that's kind of what they're doing at Colossal Bioworks. Yeah, where they're bringing back the, the thylacine, and they're bringing— I mean, they already brought back the direwolf.

Yeah. Oh, right. Okay, so that's who did the direwolf. Yeah,

I went to that. I went to the place where they have them. I saw the direwolves. My daughter was playing with with a 4-year— I guess 4-month-old, 6-month-old. I think it was like 4-month-old puppy, direwolf puppy. And it's like a puppy, like it gives you kisses, it sits in your lap, it's wagging its tail, cuddles with you. But they get to a certain age where you can't do that with them anymore.

For sure. You weren't worried it was gonna like disintegrate or like, you know, turn something like The Thing? I

don't know. It opens up a mouth,

like head just

chomps your arm off.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, because I spoke with them before and they explained what they're doing. It's mostly they're taking these genes from this— like, they got samples from like a 7,000-year-old corpse of a direwolf. They sequenced the genome and they started altering gray wolf genes. And

yeah,

next thing you know, they have this thing that is— people say it's not a direwolf. It's not technically a direwolf, but that's by our definition. Like, what is a direwolf other than a collection of genes that has the traits of a direwolf? Well, I don't know. You could— you can decide all you want what it is, but what it is is very different than any other wolf that's ever lived. Well, you know, since direwolves have died.

So why isn't it a direwolf? Why do they think it isn't one?

It's— they're splitting hairs.

Okay.

I had the head geneticist from— what was her name? Beth Cohen. Was that her name? From Colossal Biowars? Fascinating woman. Yeah. Like, brilliant. And she was— Shapiro. Beth Shapiro. And she was explaining how they do it and what the argument is that it's not a direwolf. And I'm in her camp. Essentially, we've decided, like, what— like, all these different animals, whether it's chimpanzees cockatoos, whatever. We've decided that this is what it is, right? But what it really is is just a collection of genes, right? They give very specific traits, and those traits are passed on by its offspring. And they've managed to engineer an animal that has all of the characteristics of a direwolf, and they look very different. They're all white and they have a mane, which is really weird. They have like this thick, almost like a lion's mane.

Yeah.

Around, kind of like my golden retriever does. It's very, very elegant when he runs. Yeah, but they, they look different. They have— they're stouter. They're a thicker, stronger wolf.

Okay,

really wild.

It's interesting, like, at what point does something become a new species then? Like, like, what's the difference between a mutation? So like, this one dog has, you know, or whatever, this one bird has a red beak, but normally they're yellow versus, oh well, all the ones with red beaks are new species. I've never really understood that. Like,

it's a good question. Yeah, well, it's— it's humans decide, you know, which is where— I mean, we have a very specific way of categorizing different species, and yeah, it's like these biologists make these decisions and these distinctions, but ultimately nature doesn't give a fuck what you say. Yeah, you know, it it has many of these different weird variables, and it's up to people to try to figure out, like, okay, well, does this— is this logical that this is a new species, or is this a— look at humans. Like, look at the differences in humans. Yeah. Like, look at, like, Shaquille O'Neal and, you know, Caitlyn Jenner. Like, that's the same species, right? Look at— it's very weird. Well, humans are fucking strange. You know, you have Bobby Lee, and then you have, uh, yeah, yeah, it's like they're very different, but we're all the same thing. Like, if we were something else in the wild, we would assume that these are multiple different species.

Yes. Yeah, it's like the, you know, kind of the Neanderthal versus Homo sapiens. Like,

look at that guy.

Yeah,

little tiny lady.

Oh, well, I shouldn't—

world's tallest person and the world's shortest woman. Like, that's crazy.

Which would you rather be?

I guess the tall guy, but he's probably in massive pain.

He didn't look— He's got a cane.

Yeah, when generally when they're that big, they have a tumor on their pituitary gland.

Yeah, was a hyper—

He's 8'3.

Jesus.

Yeah, he's probably in agony all the time. And I don't even know if that's— if you could mitigate that with like weight training or something, if you could get strong enough so that you can carry that amount of weight and frame. Because you're dealing with— I don't think human joints are designed to carry around that kind of mass and just that height. And also, if you have a tumor in your pituitary gland, things are probably growing the wrong way because what it's essentially is like secreting abnormal amounts of human growth hormone constantly.

Which is why they get like, yeah, like Andre the Giant.

Yeah, you get Like a long Easter Island head. Yeah, there was a guy that used to fight in MMA named Bigfoot Silva, uh-huh, and he had that, and he actually had the tumor removed from his pituitary gland and it radically changed his fighting ability.

Oh, that's in a better way or a worse way?

Much worse. His body wasn't producing the— his endocrine system wasn't functioning properly anymore.

Oh yeah, cuz you're not gonna shrink

Right, so his hormone levels were all like hugely depleted, and this is at the time where they had banned testosterone replacement therapy for mixed martial arts athletes, so he couldn't be on it anymore. But when he was on it, oh my god. Yeah, when he was on the sauce and he was like £300 and huge, he was killing people.

Yeah, that would suck.

Yeah, he was like one of the first guys to beat up Fedor Emelianenko.

Yeah,

who's one of the greatest of all time. But it was just, he was so big. He was like 300-plus pounds and a black belt in jiu-jitsu and a legitimate giant.

God, Robert Wadlow didn't have that. You know, I'm talking about the guy that was 8 foot 11. He didn't have that? No, he didn't.

No. Was he just abnormally tall?

8 foot 11.

What does he look like? Oh, you see pictures? A cane or anything like that, or did he walk normal?

He died pretty young, but not even related to the, to just being that tall. He died from— I think he might have had a cane later at some point. Yeah, okay. But he— I believe, unless I'm mistaken, he died because his shoes had to be specially made and the nails in the soles gave him an infection. Wow. And he died from the infection, I think.

That's crazy.

Look at him next to that. I mean, isn't that wild?

Yeah.

But I mean, it's like, well, how did that exist in, what, 1920 to 1930? And we've never had anyone like that now.

Right, and he doesn't look like a guy who has a disease. He looks like a normal guy who's just enormous.

I mean, so like, yeah, he— at birth, £8 5 ounces. Isn't that wild?

His great size and continued growth in adulthood due to hypertrophy of the pituitary gland. So he did have a pituitary gland issue.

I thought he didn't have one, that's why he was enormous.

Yeah, so it's basically the same, but he looks much more normal.

Well, I wonder why That happens then.

Oh, at the time, corrective surgery was dangerous and not guaranteed to work, so his parents decided against intervening.

By the time he graduated, he was 8'4.

That's crazy.

His burial is wild. Like how— oh, he had to have leg braces.

Yeah, had little feeling in his legs and feet, but he never used a wheelchair.

Yeah, there's something about his Look at his shoes.

Holy fucking shit. Size 37 shoes.

Ooh boy, that'd be rough.

What do you think of,

you know,

the historical depictions of giants?

Huh?

Historical depictions of giants,

like

giants in the Bible, giants in— there's Native American stories of giants, and they have a lot of similarities. Oddly, a lot of them are red hair. No, red hair, 6 fingers, 6 toes, weird stuff.

Yeah, wasn't that, um, who'd the one guy beat with the damn sling?

Goliath.

Well, didn't Goliath have 6 fingers, I believe, in the Bible somewhere? I remember that from Sunday school. I think I was pretty—

I don't remember, but I bet you're right.

I was pretty infatuated by the 6 fingers aspect of it.

Well, what's interesting is The Native Americans had very similar stories of large, red-haired, pale-skinned giants with 6 fingers and 6 toes with no access to the Bible whatsoever. It was completely different, whether it was folklore, mythology, or they're talking about a real thing. That's where it gets weird.

I feel like it can't be a real thing.

Why's that?

Because they're— I mean, they're not around now.

Well, that doesn't mean anything because Denisovans are not around now either, and we know those were a real thing.

Yeah, but were the giants— oh, okay, well, were the giants a separate thing from the humans, or were they just like humans that—

Probably a different branch of the human species. That's what I think. There's just too many stories out there.

Just kind of hunkered down, or for whatever reason didn't make it.

Died off like a lot of other— like 90% of all species that have ever lived are gone.

Well, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's been a ton of different versions of human beings that exist You know, like the Denisovan one is really weird. I don't know if you've— Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So they're realizing these Denisovans were much larger than humans, than Homo sapiens, like a lot larger, like much bigger head, bigger cranial capacity, bigger brain capacity, larger jaw, larger eye sockets, larger eyeballs, like really weird stuff.

So why'd they die out then? They should have been the ones killing us.

Well, we might have been the most clever because we're the softest. You know, we're the weakest, so we were probably the most vicious, and we probably figured out tools better than they did, and we probably slaughtered them because they were dangerous.

That makes sense. Well,

I mean, look, we figured out how to survive around lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my, my,

we're

clever.

Wasps. Yeah, all kinds of stuff.

It's entirely possible that we wiped them out, you know, like that might be a part of the allegory. That may be a part of Like when you read the story of David and Goliath, like what happens? Well, David kills the giant. You know, that might have been what we did. We probably hunted them.

Get what you get.

Yeah, and it's probably also— they probably required an insane amount of resources. It was probably incredibly difficult.

Like dinosaurs.

Yeah, to feed them.

It's like the main reason they went out wasn't because of like, you know, the asteroid didn't just kill them all. Like, it mostly died from a lack of resources. And obviously like the oxygen levels changed. and all that business. But

yeah, well, a lot of things happen, right? But that's what chickens are. Chickens are basically living dinosaurs.

But they're tiny.

You ever see a chicken go after a mouse?

No, I've seen chickens go after other chickens, or chickens go after worms or other little bugs. It's very dinosaur-like, very velociraptor-like.

But the way they go after a mouse is insane. It's like the, the ferocity in which they attack a mouse. Like, there's a video we played it a million times, but there's a cat and the cat has a mouse and the cat's kind of toying with the mouse, and a chicken runs over and snatches it from the cat and just rips it apart like a monster. Just, wow, just shaking it, pecking it, tearing it apart.

Yeah.

My— yeah, watch this. Look at this chicken fuck this— fuck this mouse up. That should have already happened, didn't it? I mean, they didn't try to steal it from each other. They all know what it is. They want that mouse. And you think of chickens as being these little cute little things that peck around the grass. No, if they catch a mouse, they will fuck that mouse up.

Yeah, cuz I mean, they'll do it to other chickens. Like, my grandparents had chickens and they, you know, they'd kill each other sometimes.

Yeah, that's what the pecking order is. Yeah, they literally peck at each other and tear each other apart. They're ruthless little cunts.

I mean, actually, really all animals kind of do that to an extent. Like, yeah, kill their young. And I know all humans do too, Lindsay Clancy. But, um, well, allegedly, I guess. But, uh,

allegedly she said she did it.

Well, she may have been under the— you know, she may still have been psychotic when she admitted. That's— that was so bizarre to me.

She might have been psychotic when she admitted that she did it?

No, that's what some people think. Some people think that she may. I mean, there's the people who are just trying to find any excuse for why she did what she did. have, you know, come to just a million different—

Yeah, that one is— that was not on my bingo card. I didn't think you're gonna see hundreds of women wearing pink shirts showing up outside the courthouse during the trial in support of her having strangled her fucking children with an exercise cord one at a time.

Yeah,

I did not understand that.

I, I still really don't. I mean, well, there is a just a huge number of people who've just gotten so invested in true crime, like true crime YouTube channels, and that's all they watch all day, every day. And so they have basically convinced themselves that they are detectives, but they suck at it. It's like, you know, like, like I've watched so much football that I do watch it, and I basically think I know more than an NFL head coach. Meanwhile, yeah, I don't know anything. Right. Why would you call that play, you idiot? I wouldn't have done that. I'm just sitting there, you know, eating pretzels. Of course. But there's like all these women who have done the same thing but with true crime, and they, you know, they think they're goddamn Clarice Starling. And yeah, so, but you know, so they think there's like, there's a cover-up, a conspiracy, though. Oh, the police department must be covering up things because the husband definitely did it. Like, you know, they just go down these rabbit holes of TikTok.

It's the Dunning-Kruger effect in real time.

Yes, yes, it is exactly what it is. Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating to see, but it is very sad when it comes to that type of thing happening, right?

Well, it's bizarre. I never thought we'd see it. Like, during the Casey Anthony trial, nobody was in support of Casey Anthony.

Hell no. Now, she could have been proven— well, she kind of was, but like full-on innocence, her, you know, nobody would ever believe that she didn't kill that kid,

right? Which, by the way, I'm gonna send you this, Jamie, because you're not even gonna believe this is real, but Casey Anthony has chimed in on the Shane Gillis whore joke. Casey Anthony wrote a long piece on Substack about the joke that Shane Gillis said about women dressing like whores on SNL. Casey Anthony, the lady who killed her kids.

I know, it makes you so angry you just want to strangle your loved one. I mean, good Lord, what a moron.

Well, not only that, I mean I mean, this lady was, if you wanted to use that term, strangled her kids so she could go out and fucking party.

Yeah.

Yeah, women can dress however they want. Women in the gym can dress however they want. Men who have opinions about how women dress need to all the way go fuck themselves. This toxic masculinity trend needs to end. These fragile men need to get out of the way of women in totality. This lady killed her kid. Yeah, yeah. And she feels like she could take the moral high ground and chime in about a joke on Saturday Night Live.

So wild.

Which is really— the joke is on Shane, because the joke is that he looks like a creep in the background of all these TikToks watching these ladies that are wearing nothing doing these exercises.

Well, he also didn't call them whores. He just said they dress like it.

Yes.

Completely different thing. I mean, you know, you can dress like anything, you know.

It's—

my nephew was dressed like Batman like last year, and he's not, you know, he's not stopping crime. I don't know, I just, uh, I mean, I get, I guess, a little bit of it, but like, I think people weren't understanding like the nuance, or, you know, really like thinking about all the way he's thinking. He's just come out there and said, oh, y'all are all whores for dressing No, no, no, no, you're not. I mean, and also you can dress however you want. Who cares? Yeah, who cares? But also when you do go to a gym, I mean, Jesus.

I know.

Like, it is kind of hard not to be like, God, what the hell are you doing?

It's kind of crazy. I mean, I've seen ladies at the gym that wear essentially sheer pink, really small shorts with no underwear on, and they're doing deadlifts. And when they're bending over, they're sticking their vagina with the thinnest of cloth out into the air.

Oh, I knew one of them was pregnant before she did. Like, hey, I think you— I'd say you're about 6 weeks.

And by the way, I have no problem with women dressing like that. Have fun. God bless you. If you have a great body, especially show it off to the world. Who cares?

And don't be afraid to admit that that's what you're doing, because that's what guys do. Yeah, there's no reason to wear a sleeveless shirt versus a sleeve shirt in the gym, right? You're wearing a sleeve shirt because you want people to see your arms.

Show the guns.

Show the guns. There's nothing wrong with that. And everyone wants to wear like skin-tight stuff to, you know, show off. Who cares?

Who cares? I don't care. But I guess the word whore is what gets them.

Yeah,

I get it. I get you get upset. Well, it's also because like real misogyny actually exists. Like real women who hate— or real men rather, who hate women. do exist. And so when you see a guy joking around about a woman dressing like a whore, you connect it to horrible thoughts, like horrible actions, like real actual evil men. Yes. That actually— because like there's a lot of men that genuinely hate women. Shane Gillis is not one of them, right? And he's a great guy. It's just a joke. But, but for some people, those words— and then you see like the word police people Which is hilarious. We need to stop using that word. We're still using the word whore. Like, you're not? That's great.

It's a great word.

It's a great word. Yeah, it's a great word for also yourself. Like, like, I freely admit that when I did, like, especially the second iteration of Fear Factor, it's because I was being a whore. They offered me a fuckload of money to come back in like 2011 and host Fear Factor again, and I'm like, I'm a whore, let's go.

Why not? Oh, I would whore myself out for also far less.

Yeah, it's not— I don't think it's a bad word. I just think it has to be used wisely. And, you know, look, it's one of the good things and bad things about the internet is that everyone has an opinion. Yeah, it's good. It's good. You get to see it all play out, see the, see the chaos, and hopefully the dust will settle and there'll be some clarity and what's real and what's not real. But because of the echo chambers and bubbles that people live in online, there won't be any clarity, you know, because everything is connected to an algorithm and you're only interacting with people that agree with you. And it's like,

yeah,

okay.

And yeah, this is too complicated. Actually real or what's not real.

Well, that's a real problem.

Yeah. Well, and just forming your opinions on, like, I don't know, people are just so opinionated to the point where like it's their identity, like their, their take on a certain topic. That is who I am. And every conversation I have, that's gonna come up. And I hate those people. I do as well. So much.

And by the way, that's a new thing.

Yeah.

I'm older than you, and when I was a kid, that didn't exist. There were— I mean, there were some people that were ideologically— they were ideologically connected to whatever their political party was, right? But not to the extent that people are today, where flavored every single opinion they have about every aspect of society From paper straws to fucking electric cars to vaccines and healthcare and fucking everything. Everything is connected politically.

And if you don't say something about it, then you must be on the opposite side.

Silence is violence, Cody Tucker. Silence is violence.

Yeah, like you're silent— like, because if I'm silent on something, that automatically means— like, I could be silent about it but still be on your side, but no. Like, they believe that I'm silent.

And I remember people getting mad at people that didn't put a black square on their Instagram.

Well, yeah, because they didn't stop the violence. They could have stopped it by doing that.

With a black square. Would have been nice.

The black square would have ended all violence.

If the whole country just put up a black square, it would have been over. We could have moved into a new timeline.

Yeah, could have, but, um, Yeah, I know. It's just that virtue signaling.

It is, and it's also this sort of evolution of human thinking that's happening in real time, you know, with this. So you've got this thing, the internet, that gives you immense resources and access to information, but then you also have opinions that are inside this ecosystem that aren't even real. These are bots. Like, you— there's so many bots. I read an article There was an article in the New York Times about Elon Musk's ex-girlfriend, you know, so there's the one that he offered— Ashley Sinclair. He offered her allegedly $40 million. It's— she's his baby mama, right? Yeah. So she has one of his babies, and she offered him— or he offered her rather, allegedly $40 million to be quiet, and she said no, and she's blabbing to the world So she was at one point in time a right-wing influencer, and now she is a part of the Democratic Socialists of America. She's joined the DSA, which is fascinating.

What a swing.

What a swing. Always interesting when people do a complete 180. Yeah, but so there's this article that's written in the New York Times, and they post about it on Instagram, and I go into the comments. I go, okay, I need to see— because I'm saying this is ripe for bots. Like, this is gonna be a fucking bot farm, like 100%. And it's all it was. It was crazy. It was a lot of them are literally saying the same thing. Yes. He could have just given her a billion. Yeah, he's got a trillion dollars. He could just give it a billion, she would have stayed quiet. And you click on their page and there's no posts, and there's— there's— yeah, it's locked down. It's a private page there, you know, it's a name and a bunch of numbers. Like, this is wild. This is like a fake outrage account, and there's 1,000 of them that are posting on this, and it's all the same thing.

I've had it happen on one of my videos. I had to take it down because I was so like— I was like, what is happening right now? It's like one about Henry Ford that I did about him being just a massive asshole and about like his Nazi connections. Interesting. And it turned into a full— the Holocaust didn't happen. Like, it turned into that with thousands. I mean, I've never, like, at that time had anywhere near that kind of traction. I looked, I was like, it's like, goddamn, that one's getting a lot of— why is that getting so many views? And start reading them, it's like, the number's actually this, it's not 6 million, or like, you know. And it's just going, it's just constant. And some of them were real, or at least seemed real, because it's like, is this a real person saying this shit? Like—

Well, there are levels of sophistication when it comes to bots, especially today with AI. They generate One of the things you could tell is like how recent the page started. I like to go back to the first post. Yeah. And a lot of their first post is like 6 weeks ago or a month ago. And then you see that there's no interaction at all. No one's posting, no one's commenting. They have these posts, it's like them with their kid on a swing, them working on a car in the backyard. Like, and it might be AI-generated or it might be they have taken it from somewhere else, but they can create—

That's most likely, yeah.

They can create a page that seems like a real person. Right. And they say a bunch of things that seem like what a real person would say, like really simple captions for each picture. So there's like levels of sophistication, and then eventually it's gonna be ex machina type, you know, levels of sophistication where you're not gonna be able to discern whether or not it's a real person commenting or not.

No, and you can have the whole world believe something just if you have enough money to pay for enough bots.

Yes, because it's not even enough money. It's not expensive. That's what's crazy. Well, yeah, you could start a bot bot campaign fairly cheaply and, and have a bunch of people think, oh my god, people are really mad at Cody Tucker. Yeah, yeah, like you could really have people's— and you could shift a lot of the casuals who are just barely paying attention. You could shift their perception on you.

Yeah,

and that's what they're trying to do, and they're certainly trying to do that with Elon. But this thing with— do you think that was Ford Motor Company that was doing this?

No, no, no, there was— there's just this massive rise in Holocaust denial that's happened within just like the last couple of years, where like any post that has to do— I mean, a lot of it obviously has to do with like the Israel-Palestine conflict and like Zionism and all this stuff. And it's a lot of people who just like watch like this one documentary that like disproves the Holocaust, and it's all— that documentary is all a bunch of like—

Which documentary is that?

It's called like Europa, I think. It's like, it's all hogwash. None of it's real. It's just this guy who was a famous Holocaust denier. And now it's just become like the— I don't know, because it's not even necessarily like a right-wing versus left-wing thing, you know, where like, oh, all the right-wing people are Holocaust deniers, or, you know, vice versa. It's like all— it's like groups from everybody, but it's all like, for the most part, younger people, like my age or younger. Yeah, I just don't think it happened.

You know what's also interesting too is that it's such a disgusting subject that no one legitimate wants to debate someone who doesn't believe in the Holocaust, right? Like, you don't get like a legitimate scholar on World War II who wants to sit down and have a conversation with someone who's a Holocaust denier. It's like you don't platform those people, you know? And so because of that, like, there's a lot of people go, oh, they're hiding the truth, right?

Right. Yeah. Who do you think wrote the textbooks? It was the— right. Yeah, but okay.

And what is their argument? Their argument is that— is that less number, that the number's lower?

That pops up every single time is 200. And that's why I started realizing it might be bots, is because every one of them was saying 271,000, like every post, or 217,000. So they think that's the number.

How do they come to that?

Apparently that's what— in the documentary, that's what the guy Conclude or comes to by like crunching the numbers on like the amount of Jews in the area or something. I— it's— I don't know, right? It's— but it's absolutely absurd.

So do you think that's a foreign country that is doing this bot attack? Like, what do you think? Because like, if you were anti-Israel, like if you were against Israel's policies and you were a foreign country, if you're whatever, fill in the blank, Palestine, Pakistan, whatever it is. Yeah, you get some Muslim country that wants to fund some sort of anti-Israel thing, and then you would go after the core reason why people have sympathy for the Jews in modern society. Yes, it's because they were almost exterminated in Germany.

I mean, basically the reason Israel exists is, right, because, you know, after— because of the Holocaust. Yeah, so that would be the way to do it. I mean, and I just think there's a lot of people who, yeah, just believe it because they read it on the internet. They see the meme saying blah blah blah, and they just outright believe it.

I think bots should be illegal. I really do.

100%. I don't care, because I'm sure there's a lot of bots that follow me on social media. Oh, I know there are. I mean, I don't know what the number is, but I'm sure— I would guess it's probably about 25 Let my number— I don't care if my numbers drop, or I don't care like if my money goes down. Get rid of it. Yeah, the bots. Like, you should— I've always felt that you should have to have an ID to be able to prove who you are, to be able to create an account on any social media platform.

I agree.

Like, you know, I think there's like dating apps that do it, where you have to take a picture of your ID and you go through like a vetting process. That should be the same with Instagram, Facebook.

The problem with that is whistleblowers. And I think that there is a legit argument that, especially if you're like an Edward Snowden or, you know, Chelsea Manning type person who has access to information that is highly classified, but you don't want to reveal your identity, but people need to know, like there's a crime being committed on the American people or the people of the world or whatever.

Yeah.

You know, the whistleblower thing, protections for whistleblowers was a key part of the Obama campaign when he was running for office, was protection for whistleblowers. Meanwhile, he was like one of the worst people ever that was president, which is kind of funny. Yeah, but that's— they also even removed that part from the Hope and Change website. So the Hope and Change website had this whole thing about whistleblowers. They deleted that.

Yeah, yeah, cat came out of the bag on that one. Good Lord.

But so that's the argument against having to show identification, is that it's probably important that some people be able to post anonymous because there's like very powerful people that would try to take them out,

right? No, no, I do believe in like anonymity for like whistleblowers. It's just—

But like, how do you do that and then also have an ID to post?

No, you can't. But I mean, you just whistleblow the old-fashioned way and just write it to a newspaper that only about 40 people are gonna read now because nobody reads newspapers.

Unfortunately, you can't even count on the newspaper printing that. Well, no, no. Depending upon what you're revealing and what ideology would be opposed to that and whether or not this newspaper ascribes to that ideology.

Yeah,

yeah,

yeah. I mean, which, that's kind of always been a problem too, but if you went back to like, you know, the All the President's Men, you know, Nixon Watergate stuff. Like, at least, you know, they were able to do that.

Well, that was one of the most disturbing things about Elon purchasing Twitter was when they let like Michael Schellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and all these journalists review the emails that were with the executives at Twitter were in contact with the intelligence agencies and that the intelligence agencies were actively censoring accounts, were directing them to remove accounts that were posting factual information, but that was inconvenient towards the COVID policies of the Biden administration. So they were actively censoring legitimate scientists from Stanford, MIT, like legit people. And they were like, uh-uh, ban 'em, take 'em off.

'Cause they didn't fit in with whatever. Yeah, scary. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really any real right way going about any— I mean, we may be doing it the best, the most right way that it could be done, which that's terrifying if that's true.

I don't— well, I think there has to be a way to tell if something is a bot, and you should have some sort of filters in your system at least to mitigate the bots, to get to a point where you can't just have a letter and a bunch of, you know, name and a bunch of fucking numbers and have 50,000 of those accounts and bomb on someone's account because Henry Ford was a Nazi.

Or just— I guess that doesn't work either. I was saying like just have it where you're vetted and then only people who have been vetted can comment. But at the same time, that doesn't necessarily work because if a person's a whistleblower, right? That's the problem. Yeah,

yeah. The problem is anonymity is important when you're revealing something, especially when you're revealing something about a government or corporation where they could whack you. Yeah, you know, it's like, which I think— I don't want to say, but I think the best way to do is just ignore their comments and just let them. But there's a bunch of people who don't do that, and it does artificially alter public opinion on things.

Yeah, yeah. Which is— that was why, like, for that post, I just took it down because I was like, oh, I'm not gonna go through and sift out all these comments.

Did you think about just banning the comments? Just blocking?

Oh, disabling comments? No, not until right now.

That might have been the best way to do it.

Probably should have done that.

Because it's an interesting— I remember that post.

Yeah.

It was an interesting post.

Yeah.

Does it exist anymore anywhere?

No.

Wow.

They got me. I know, I was infiltrated.

Maybe that's how the, the people that are pro-Holocaust narrative do it. They put in so many scumbags that if you agree to— like, if you follow what they're saying, you're a terrible person.

Yes.

And people don't want to do that. And so they're shaming you.

Yeah.

For posting it. Wild.

It's not good. Yeah, no, I probably should have just taken out the comments, but, uh, I don't know.

How bad was Henry Ford though?

It's just not a good person overall.

Is this it?

Oh.

Where does it exist?

YouTube Shorts.

YouTube Shorts?

YouTube Shorts. Oh,

let's put the headphones on.

You wanna check the comments?

Let's start it from the beginning. Oh, you should actually.

That'd be pretty funny.

Start from the beginning. Here we go.

When I press—

Henry Ford revolutionized the automobile industry with his moving assembly line, allowing for the manufacturing of the Model T to go from 12 hours per car to 90 minutes per car. At that point, they were making 10,000 Model Ts a day. He also doubled his employees' wages and basically created a new middle class in America. Despite all of this, Henry Ford was also a massive anti-Semite. In 1920, Henry Ford began publishing a weekly magazine called The International Jew: The World's Problem. Henry Ford's views on the Jewish population struck a nerve with a young man in Austria Who included Henry Ford in his manifesto Mein Kampf. Henry Ford was the only American complimented in that book written by a young Adolf Hitler. Henry Ford even received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest German award for foreigners, by Adolf Hitler himself.

That's wild. Click on the comments, please.

Yeah.

Let's go. Here we go.

I'd love to see what these comments—

What does it say here?

Oh, for a second, one. Henry Ford, a man ahead of time. Wow. I bet they're not talking about the first part.

It always feels like we've forgotten more than we remember. Thank you. I live in Detroit, and ooh boy, is this topic taboo. I

wonder why.

The irony is that whenever the— when the war broke out, the same Henry Ford revolutionized the manufacturing of warplanes. Other admirers of that little mustached Austrian painter were Disney, King Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, and—

yeah, Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh? Was he really? Lindbergh's a massive Nazi. Yeah.

Whoa. Yeah, yeah, no way. Mm-hmm. So this isn't—

oh, this one's nowhere near as bad.

It seems like— scroll up. Stop, stop, stop.

Go back up.

Some of these seem like bots.

Yeah. I mean, Ford was— I don't know. None of it.

Ford was a great man.

I mean, the my type of guy thing is very— yeah,

it could be shit posters.

Well, yeah, which I think that's a lot of it too.

Yeah, who knows? Who knows? It's got Lionel Richie in his fucking— that's his image.

So it

seems like it's more of a social media thing than a YouTube thing where the comments were. But God, a lot of those seemed like bots. Yeah, these names with all them— when you see names like that with a bunch of numbers behind it, I don't Oh no, it's so much more respect for Henry.

That's the one. Yeah, I saw. Yeah, yeah, but these are definitely nowhere near as bad. I mean,

nowhere near as bad, but the same thing. I have more respect for him. And look at what it is. It's the same thing. It's these names with a bunch of numbers.

Yeah, yeah, almost all.

I mean, we— there was an article we've referenced many times where a former FBI analyst was looking at Twitter before Elon Musk purchased it, and he determined that it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% bots.

Really?

Because they were trying to say that it was 5%, and they did that by a 100-post random sampling. So they just randomly got— allegedly randomly— but if you're trying to sell something for $4 billion or whatever he paid for it, was it $40 billion? What'd he pay for it, for Twitter? Something crazy. $44 billion. So if you're selling something for $44 billion, the last thing you want to do is find out that it's mostly just robots, right, yelling into the abyss.

Yeah.

Or—

But this CIA guy, or this FBI guy, said he estimated at the high end it's in the 80%.

I mean, that seems so high, but probably—

But it makes sense though.

Probably right.

Yeah, if you think about it, that's the town hall. And propaganda has always been a thing, you know, distributing leaflets, putting propaganda films out, all this. That's always been a thing. So why wouldn't you— why wouldn't you utilize like the greatest vehicle of propaganda the world has ever seen and just have an army of people comment on things?

Makes sense.

Yeah, manufactured outrage.

Yes, which is what most things are now. It's like manufactured outrage or manufactured fandom. Like, I feel like most things that are so popular now, there's no way that's authentic.

Like what kind of stuff?

Like certain movies will make just an astronomical amount of money. I'm like, I don't think that many people want to see that movie. Like that new Spider-Man movie, A Brand New Day, it's like broke every record. Who the hell went to go see that though?

You'd be amazed. People love superhero movies.

Or like the Ella Langley, you know, that muse, that song. It's nothing against her, nothing the song, but it's like baiting all these records. Like, I don't know a single person who's sitting around listening to that, but maybe also—

I listen to that song.

Okay.

I like It Should Go to a Bar on 6th Street.

Yeah. Okay, is it really?

Well, that song's popular as fuck.

Yeah, maybe it makes— yeah, I think maybe I'm just— I'm not the best person to even talk about that kind of stuff because I'm in a dang one-person bubble.

Yeah, you're in a bubble. Have you ever seen her— there's a film of her, a video of her getting ready to go on stage, and she's walking through the backstage area and that song Stayin' Alive is playing and she's dancing.

It does little kicks and stuff.

Yeah, very compelling.

It is. It's— how isn't it weird how that video is so like captivating? Because I've watched it so many— yeah,

here it plays. I watched this video when— oh, because of the song. Yeah, yeah.

On that note, I'll talk to you later. Never

mind. Okay, you wanna just tell me now and edit it out?

Yeah, yeah. What, you and LL Cool J? reciting the lyrics to Going Back to Cali got flagged.

Oh my—

how the flags work. Yeah, recited the lyrics.

Oh my God, these fucking criminals.

Was he reciting them?

Yeah, both of them. Yeah, both of us.

But yeah, he probably doesn't own the—

no, it doesn't. It's not that.

It's just the flag itself. That's fucking bananas.

Bananas.

Wow. It's a weird world we're living in, man. Yes.

If you, if you hum a song. Like, you know that song— is it— I'm not gonna say— is it—

talk about songs anymore.

Is it the— is it the— is it Sunshine of My Life?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do that all the time. Like, whenever I think about someone like really high on drugs, I always like make that noise. And if you can't, well, I'll make it real quick and then we'll edit it, right? Here we go.

Sunshine of Your Love.

Yeah, Sunshine. Yeah.

Yeah, Cream.

So Cream, right. Um, so when, um, if you do that on a podcast, they'll flag you. Just do that.

That, that's so crazy.

Crazy!

Oh my God. I'm amazed mine hasn't, because I have a movie podcast. One of our categories is, uh, called Creed It and Weep, where we, um, you have to place the Creed song, arguably the greatest song ever written, My Own Prison by Creed, somewhere in the movie. Where do you put it? And we always end up singing the song. But never gets—

they probably haven't got you yet. They'll find you.

I know we do a good job.

They're gonna get you now. Yeah, now that you're talking about it here. I know.

Yeah, I shouldn't have mentioned it.

But that, uh, that Choosing Texas song is huge.

No, it is.

It's huge. There's something about this world that is so chaotic that, um, it has made simplicity much more attractive, and country music is making a giant comeback.

Oh my God.

A huge resurgence.

Yes.

It's because people want, like, they want to be by the river with a pickup truck and with, you know, just having a good time and praising Jesus. And they, they want simplicity. They want things to be clearly defined, and they want to take away the anxiety of the unknown because the anxiety of the unknown is looming over us constantly. a fog, like that, that giant sky demon from Stranger Things.

Yeah.

You know that fucking thing? Oh yeah. That's like looming. That's what our future, our uncertain future, and this technological hell that we have unleashed on the world. And that there's a lot of people that they long for the opposite of that. They long for Yellowstone. They long for cowboy shows. They long for things to be simple.

That's a big— no, I do agree with that, where people just want to have land and people want to occupy their land and they want to, you know, raise families on their land.

There's that.

It's like 90% of homesteading. Yeah. And but I think with music though, it's kind of interesting because like, I mean, you could kind of say that about any time, like the '60s. When was there ever a more like, what the hell's about to happen to us time? But then that was some of the most original music ever made and some of the most complex music ever made at that point. Sure. So it was like the chaos turned into chaotic music, whereas now the uncertainty has turned into, god dang, I just want to make sure this music sounds the same. I want to know what I'm getting before I get it. Like, well, now people just suck at making music now too. Not, not— well, no, not Not in like overall, but I think what gets pushed to the top is more like that. I think people, like whoever's, you know, marketing music, whatever company, you know, whether it's Sony, whoever, they're way less likely to take a risk on someone. And they just know like, okay, this worked the past 15 times, well, let's go ahead and do 16th and do it that way. Mm-hmm.

Where I think that wasn't always the case. I mean, you could definitely say there was like the pop, bubblegum pop of the '60s, where it was just how many versions of the Dave Clark Five can we make? But occasionally they would bust out like The Doors or Big Brother and the Holding Company or something. Now I don't think there's any version of that.

Well, I don't know if that's true. No? No, because I think that today, one of the very unique things about today is that you don't need anyone for you to go viral. All you have to do is be able to post it online. Like, Oliver Anthony's a great example of that, right? He comes up with Rich Men North of Richmond, and it becomes this fucking massive hit, like, out of nowhere. And it turns out he's actually really fucking talented and stays independent and does it all on his own.

Yeah, I think those are very few and far between.

But they exist, and they didn't exist before. So in the '60s, you couldn't do that. If you were gonna release an album, you had to go through a music company. You had to go through a record company. You had to, you had to have an agent. You had to have a manager. You had to have all these— there was gatekeepers. Yeah, to keep you from getting on the radio. You couldn't just have a song and bring it to the radio station and say, hey, will you play my song? That's not how it worked.

No, no, you had to bring it. Yeah, you had to bring your demo to a label and then the label took care of the rest.

Oh, for Anthony's first time performing live, was in front of like 12,000 people.

Jesus Christ.

So he's a guy who like makes a song literally like in a field with a fucking cool guitar.

Yeah.

And sings this song and it resonated with people so strongly that they just went out to see him in droves. That is— but he's a very unique talent.

Yeah.

But it's also like that thing now exists where it never existed before. And there are people like that out there. There's, there's a bunch of other ones that are, that are really interesting, that are popping off like left and right all over the place in that way, just resonate with people.

I need to actually listen to some newer music because I never do. I'm so stuck in like older music. And

have you ever heard his song Scornful Woman?

Oliver Anthony's?

Yeah.

Yeah, you played it for me.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was amazing.

Whoa.

Yeah, that was— that was so good. No, he is amazing, and there are some people for sure. I just feel like talent has— I don't know, there's something that just feels too robotic about music. Like, whenever I hear songs now, it sounds like it's made on a laptop. Mm-hmm. Like, even— but like, it's almost like too well produced. Whereas if I listen to like Van Halen 1, I can hear the times where Eddie Van Halen fucks up, right?

Right.

Even though he's the greatest guitarist of all time, like, I want to hear the imperfections in that. And now you would have a producer go through and cut out every little thing, and it doesn't even sound like a person anymore, right? So I— there's something that just feels like an uncanny valley about music now. Movies have become that way even.

Well, there's a lot of AI clips that I watch now on YouTube with these short AI movies like Dracula versus the Wolfman. Yes. And they're really clunky. They're clunky and the graphics are kind of— they're a little shitty. They're really good but not good enough. Like, you don't think it's real, right? But I'm just fascinated that a regular person gets to do these things. It's just like, it's really weird.

Yeah, I mean, there's part of me that thinks that's a good thing, but part of me that doesn't. Sometimes I feel like there needs to be a bottleneck, you know, where I think— yeah, I don't know, I feel like less is more almost always.

Well, it's definitely gonna be hard to find the quality things, but I think that the quality things are going to exist where they wouldn't have existed before. Like someone who's just a very creative person that has an idea that would have cost millions and millions of dollars to produce Instead is just sitting at home with a laptop and an LLM, and they feed it into that, and next thing you know, you've got this really cool creative video that came out of their imagination that wouldn't have been possible. But the amount of those versus the amount of bullshit, right, is crazy. That's the problem. That's the problem.

I think that's a big problem with, yeah, with music too, is that there's just so much. And

well, that's why live performance is so awesome. Yeah, like going to see a live musician. Yeah, you know, like Oliver Anthony played at our club. He played at—

yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw that.

Yeah, we've only had 2 awesome bands play there: Oliver Anthony, his band, and Red Clay Strays.

They're amazing.

Amazing.

That's like one of the few bands of like, you know, that I do actively listen to that's a modern—

lead singer also Android user.

There you go. Doesn't give a fuck. Yeah, I feel like there's quite a bit of— maybe quite a little overlap in between

There's a rebellion thing about Android users. It's interesting. Yeah, it's a bunch of people that I know that are— Brian Simpson, Android user. Andrew Wilson, Android user. There's a bunch of people that are like, you know, just unwilling, unwilling to give in to the call of the siren.

Exactly. No, I'm strapped to the damn mast at this point. Yeah, I'm not— yeah, well, I feel like if I change that now I'd be a real dickhead.

Well, that's the problem with committing to something like that, because if, if, if you tried an Apple iPhone and you realize, oh my god, this is so much easier to use and better and it does things for—

Yeah, I don't want to even think about that.

You'd give up on the convenience? What if it was able to do things that you couldn't do without it?

I'm not that interested in convenience. I don't really need convenience. No, because I don't do anything else, so I can— I have the time to, okay, to be having a less convenient life.

Do you ever think that you will make your life more complicated? Do you ever see yourself having a family or anything like that?

Oh geez. Oh, it's entirely possible. There may already be one now.

How old are you now? 32. Do you think about it someday? Do you have a little Cody running around?

Um, man, I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. I feel like I'd probably be an alright dad.

I'm sure you're a nice guy. I'm sure you'd be a great dad. It would change you.

It'll change you in the—

I don't know about it in a bad way. It's—

but I can't— I won't be able to do it, whatever I want to do. You will. Whatever I want.

You won't. Well, that's true. That's true.

You see, I'm a big like—

But you will love this child more than you've ever loved anything in your life. life. It'll change your life. I'm not ready for that. You don't have to. No, well, I'm not encouraging you as a person who is a father. I'm not encouraging. I don't— I think I do not like the idea that you don't— the only way to live a fulfilling life is to be a parent. I think that is— I think any sort of reductionist perspective on a person's life and purpose, I think, is ridiculous. There's a lot of people that have never had children that have greatly impacted the human race.

Oh, for sure.

In a super positive way. Yeah. And had wonderful relationships and friendships, and people loved them and missed them, and they genuinely changed the world. Mm-hmm. You don't have to have children.

No, but in all seriousness, I probably will at some point. Yeah, I'm sure.

I think you'd be—

Yeah, I think I'd be, you know, a good, a good husband, good dad, you know. So I'd probably—

You might have to leave your town to find to find— you got a lady right now?

Yeah.

Oh, well, good. Congratulations.

Yeah.

Does she want to have little ones? Little Cody's?

She already does.

She already does?

Well, she doesn't already have little Cody's, but she has children already. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess I kind of don't have a choice in that matter then. I mean, yeah. No, no, it's all gonna work out pretty good.

Well, I'm glad you're hopeful.

Yeah, good perspective. Well, I don't really have much of a choice, you know. Yeah, kind You know, be hopeful or dread life. I'm not too interested in that.

Well, people are always worried about the uncertainty and the unknown. And like, like we were talking about before, I really genuinely think that's why there's this genuine— there's a trend, a clear trend toward like simplistic music and simplistic lifestyles. And, and certainly during COVID a lot of people like turned to homesteading.

Yes.

They realized like, oh, we might not be able to have food Which, by the way, I saw maybe the worst movie I've ever seen in my life the other day.

Okay.

I think it's called The Last House. It's— yeah, you know what?

It kind of looked interesting.

Wait, wait, hold on. The Last House?

Yes.

Are you sure that's what it was called?

I think that's what it's called.

It just came out.

Yeah. Okay, it— oh, okay, it's good for a while. The ending is maybe the worst ending of any movie of all time. It's almost like they ran out of— yeah, this is it. Oh, this is it. Yes. So these people get— spoiler alert— they get trapped in the house by aliens. So aliens won't let you leave the house. You can't break the windows, you can't open the door for whatever fucking reason that makes no sense whatsoever. And then these aliens are like these big squid things that— like octopus things that hang out outside your door. And then most people starve to death because they can't leave the house. But this one family The dad's an engineer. They figure out a way to trap animals and drag them back into the house, and then they survive somehow or another. But there's these monsters that live out there. I don't wanna spoil it for anybody, but it's so— the ending is so fucking dumb. You're just gonna go, what happened here? And by the way, that guy was the lead actor, is the guy who played Pablo Escobar.

Yeah, Narcos. He's nominated for an Oscar last year for, um, some— I can't remember.

He's fucking great.

No, he was. He's amazing.

Holy shit, is this movie bad.

How long do you think you'd be lasting in that?

In that kind of a world? Trapped in a house? Trapped in a house is not good.

Yeah, but you got all kinds of stockpiles.

Yeah, for good. You go, okay, good for a year. What are you good for, 2 years? And then you're gonna need food. You're gonna need to get out of the house. There's no way you're gonna be able to live in your— the premise of the movie is ridiculous.

Yeah.

And they throw a trap out of the chimney, and that's how they catch animals on the front porch. It's the dumbest fucking—

That's pretty good. Good thinking.

It's kind of okay. Like, maybe it kind of would work, but it's the ending. I don't want to give away the ending. The ending, you're just gonna go, what the fuck just happened?

I wouldn't laugh.

One of the monsters is a good monster, and it tells them, don't kill these people, and it opens the door and lets them out after like 6 years.

Wait, so that's the ending?

Oh yeah! And then they never see the monsters again, and then they go sailing It's the dumbest fucking ending you'll ever see in a movie.

So now they're trapped on a boat.

Well, they're gonna— they're gonna go around and eventually find other people that lived too. Oh God. But there's like maybe like 30 people left on Earth. And the— and by the way, these monsters, they never see them again. That's also part of the thing. Meanwhile, they're everywhere in the beginning. Every time it gets dark out and rains, these monsters are outside their house and they have to cover the windows or the monsters will see them. And then one day the monsters enter in the house and try to kill them, and then they fight with the monster and then don't kill the monster, and that monster decides they're a good guy, and so he lets them out.

I don't like any of this.

Dude, it's so bad. The ending, you're going, what in the fuck did I just watch?

I wouldn't make it 3 days. I can't ration, so I'd be really screwed.

Just eat all the potato chips and that stuff.

Oh, everything. I mean, I I mean, I have plenty of things, and I could survive, but I'd get way too hungry.

But if you knew, do you think you would change your behavior, or would you say, like, let's just—

It's too embedded. I've lived this way way too long.

Till the wheels fall off, let's go.

Yeah, I mean, might as well. I have a clean bill of health as far as my doctor goes. I might as well go out with a clean bill of health.

What if you found yourself out in the woods, and there was no one anywhere around you? You, you like woke up and you're in a cabin, but you have like a rifle, a large amount of bullets, firewood, some sort of a wood stove, and water. Do you think you'd live?

No. So I would take the rifle and put it— I mean, I would, I would look out the windows and I would maybe like whistle.

What if there's a bunch of books, like really cool books in the cabin, and all you had to do is just figure out a way to shoot some squirrels, stay alive?

No, it wouldn't be worth it. I think I'd just— you just end it? Not— yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, I need to— I wanted like an easy life, you know.

That's just—

I'm not meant for a difficult life. No, I've ruined myself, you know,

physically.

Okay,

but mentally you do like challenges?

Oh yes, yeah, yeah, I'm a big— yeah, no, I love a mental challenge. I love keeping this thing thing going. It's just from there down, I'm not keeping my— you know, I'm— well, I'm conserving energy, like I said. Yeah, just in case.

I understand. I understand your perspective.

If something happens, you would be surprised. I'm telling you, I feel like you don't believe me at all on this, but something happened, I'd really be able to take off, you know, pretty quick.

What do you mean?

Like fast run.

Yeah, yeah, I think you're delusional.

Okay.

I don't think you'd be able to run. If there was like you and me and an animal was chasing us, it's gonna get you.

I'm coming in first, you're coming in second.

That's interesting. That's a hilarious perspective. That's actually hilarious.

It depends on the animal, I suppose.

It does not depend on the animal. It could be a fucking chicken chasing us. I'm gonna get ahead of you by a large margin really quickly, and there's no way you can catch me. It's not even physically possible.

What's the distance?

It doesn't matter. It could be 100 yards, it could be 100 miles.

40-yard dash, my 40 time was surprisingly quick.

I think that was a long time ago, Cody.

Okay, it may have been a long time ago.

It was a long time ago. I don't think there's a chance in hell that you could run faster than me.

Probably not.

No.

No, no. Well, we won't race, so I guess we'll never know the actual answer.

Yeah, but it's just a weird idea that you have in your head. A guy who's so smart and who is so interested in fast and history has this one delusional idea that you can run.

Interested in facts and history, yes. Smart, no. You're not smart. Yeah, I can just remember things, but I'm a pretty delusional person in most aspects. I think life's way too short to not be delusional.

That's interesting. So it's like a protective shield, like being delusional?

Yes, I just— I think everything's gonna work out always.

Well, that's a way better perspective than everything is going to be doomed. Well, those people are exhausted.

No, so I do— okay, I actually probably shouldn't have said what I said. I do think everything's gonna go bad, but I'm sorry, hold on. I think I did the wrong order. So I think everything's gonna be bad inside, but on the outside, I try to be like— I try to convince myself that everything's okay, and it does work, like, you know. But no, on the inside, I'm scared to death of Everything.

But everything is going well for you. Yes, you said you got a lady in your life, your page is doing fantastic, you've written 2 books. Like, things are going really well.

No, no, it's not that. I just think like, you know, what if I have a heart attack right now? Or like, what if—

that is possible—

what if on the way home I die in a car wreck? Like, I'm always thinking— I'm a very what-if person, which is why I don't like thinking about the future, because when I think of the future, I'm not hopeful at all. It's always like something bad is gonna happen to me in the future. But right now, nothing is. So—

If things start to happen bad, like if your health starts to fade, do you think you'll make conscious decisions to become healthier?

Oh, I would like to think so, but I don't know. I'm very much like a, as long as everything's coming back all right, I'm gonna keep running this son of a bitch into the ground.

Right. As long as everything's coming back all right.

Yeah, but if I get an A1C test that It looks a little iffy.

Well, I think that would probably change if you had children.

Oh yeah.

That would be one of the things that would change. You would want to be around for your children, and that does happen to a lot of people. They have children, they say, oh my God, I have to be here for this little tiny person that I love to death. I have to change my diet, I have to change my life.

Oh yeah, no, there's no doubt about that. I would, yeah, I would change things up quite a bit. I mean, I have changed some things, like I quit drinking.

When'd you do that?

7 or 8 years ago. I don't know. It was, um, yeah, probably about 8 years ago. Yeah, actually, I mean, partly because like Sober October stuff, you know. Really? Yeah, well, that was like whenever I first tried it and was like, oh, like this is way better than drinking every day.

Yeah, you certainly feel a lot better. Oh, that's for sure.

Yeah, and then, you know, the month ends and then I go back to drinking, but I'm like not enjoying it that much. And then by like February of, you know, after that November, I was just like, nope, done, no more. I'm tired of this, tired of drinking every day. I'm tired of drinking as much as I'm drinking and feeling horrible, and just quit.

And good for you, man.

So I took— I have it in there.

I took 8 months off, about 8 months, and then I, I went out with my wife and had a— I think I had a margarita, margarita or a glass of wine, something like that. And then I was like, oh, I think I'm back.

Yeah, I like it. See, that's my problem. I can't, I can't have a little of something. That's the big problem. And that's why drinking was kind of easy. Not that it was easy, but it was kind of easy because I can just not drink. I'll live. Like, I can just have zero alcohol, but I can't have zero food. And that's where my problem is. Right. I overeat all the time because I just, I feel like I'm never gonna get enough. Like, it's like famine mentality, but I didn't grow up like, you know, poor or anything. So I mean, not rich, but like, I don't know why I have this like mentality of like, oh, I gotta have everything. everything. But that's how it was with alcohol too, is like, I can't buy an 18-pack of beer because that's not gonna be enough. Like, no, no, no, no. So I need to buy 2 18s because like, I know that'll be more than enough. And I don't want to ever run the chance of not having enough. And because there's so much, I'm more inclined to drink way more.

I eat a lot, believe it or not. I'm a glutton. I have a problem. Like, I can't stop eating. I just burn it off, luckily. But I get to points where I don't. I get to points where I start getting a belly. Yeah. I start getting fat on the sides, and I look at myself in the mirror, I'm like, oh, you look like shit, dude. It's time to like button down the hatches. I get to points— I've had some points where I got pretty fat, like right before I did the carnivore diet the first time, I got pretty heavy. I got like, I think I was like 208 or 209, which for me is a lot.

What do you— what are you normal run at?

Right now I'm 200, which is good.

That's— is that like—

That's normal. £200 is normal. When I get above like 205, I start getting a little nervous. That's what I'm getting.

You notice that much of a change?

Yeah.

Oh boy.

Yeah, you notice a change. Yeah, I know it's a change in how I feel. I know it's a change. I feel like I'm carrying around extra weight, and I also just feel like shit, you know? Just don't feel as good. But I'm a glutton, man. I eat. So when I sit down to eat, I just can't stop eating. I eat so much. I just— I eat— I'll eat like 2, like 2 entrees. Like, I'll have like 2 steaks. I'll have a steak, I'll have a big, big plate of pasta. I'll eat a bunch of appetizers. Like, if I go out to dinner with friends, I eat like a pig. I eat so much, especially if it's Italian food. Oh my god, I'm a glutton. I'll eat pizza, pasta, and, and then I'm just like, oh, my stomach is literally like stretched to the boundaries. Like, oh, then I'll sit there like a bear that's been shot with a tranquilizer dart.

That's me. Yeah, it's actually me like almost every day.

I just have self-control other times, and then I don't, you know. I do a lot of intermittent fasting where like if I eat at 7:00 PM at night I literally won't have any food at all until maybe 1:00 in the afternoon the next day, and then I'll work out, I'll do all this different stuff, and then I'll eat something before I go and do a podcast.

Okay.

And I do that all the time. So my body has these long stretches where it's allowed to digest all the food. But in the past, like, there's been moments in the past where I haven't done that. I'll eat late-night snacks, I'll get up in the morning, I have a big breakfast, then I have a big lunch. and then it starts getting away from me.

Yeah, so I've gotten a little bit better with it just, you know, over time, but I— mine is just very wave, you know, up and down, up and down. Right now I'm on an up, but an up in weight, not in goodness. Yeah, like I'm really going—

Do you make corrections when you feel like you're going in a bad direction?

Yeah, so then I'm like, let's add some salads into this thing, and then I start doing that for a little, and then there's the down. That's where I, you know, lose a a little bit of weight, my weight goes down, but then I'm like, yeah, but this kind of sucks. So then I go right back up. So it really always sucks. Like, it's just always either like it sucks but I'm feeling healthier, or sucks but I'm feeling I'm eating good, right? Like, it's just kind of—

Do you think you'd ever get to a point where you'd hire a trainer?

God, that just feels real dumb.

Does it?

No, I mean, a little bit, but I just, uh, I'm— I can't be Motivated by other people.

Well, you don't have to be motivated by other people, but the other people can like take you through a routine where you don't have to think.

So, okay, okay, so not like a boot camp type thing?

Not like Celebrity Fit Club? No, no, no, no. Okay, cuz I wouldn't— No, no, no, I mean like, you know, you have a scheduled meeting where you meet a guy at like 10:00 a.m. someplace and you work out for an hour 3 times a week.

So like a dietitian, like almost like what you do when you meet with a dietitian.

Sort of, but a trainer would be like someone who like can— they say, okay, what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? Okay, I'm gonna help you do that. And there's people that are really good at that, right? There's a lot of jerk-off trainers that are just assholes that just got a job at the gym. Most of the time they don't even know what they're doing. There's a lot of people like that. I've met them. But then there's also people that are like really good at their job and take it very seriously and really like helping people and getting people on on the right track. Okay. And recognizing that there's this moment where people start to feel better and recognize like, oh, this thing— like my friend Jelly Roll. Jelly Roll is a great example. Yeah. Jelly Roll was £500. Oh yeah. He's lost £300. I mean, that is insane. And he was a big excess guy. He was drinking and eating and, you know, just off the rails. Now he's running every day, and now he exercises. And I was just with him in Utah. We went on an elk hunt together.

This guy's hunting, he's going up mountains and shit. He's like super healthy now. It's crazy. Yeah, and I mean, he's like, I've never felt better in my life. Like, I feel so fucking good. It's like, I can't believe it took me so long to get on this path.

So I would do something like that, I think, like a trainer actually, you know, Sitting down with you and like—

With him, it just started with walking.

Well, that's the thing. So I did buy a treadmill, which has now become a clothes rack, but I did buy a treadmill, and I was like walking on it, walking on it. I was like, oh, look at me, I'm like you, making a difference. And then, you know, my heart started going a little fast, and I was breathing a little heavy, but it was, you know, just because it'd been like 30 minutes on the treadmill. And then I got afraid that I couldn't catch my breath, and I had a panic attack. And I was like, oh, this isn't good. And then every time I got on it, I immediately was like, oh, this isn't good. My breath— I'm out of breath. Which, it was fine. I mean, I was breathing fine.

It's just psychological.

It's all in my head. I have massive, like, panic shit, which is all, you know, from all, you know, the anxiety. Like, I'm sure if one thing got corrected, the other would correct.

100%. I like you. You're a really good guy. I want you to be better. I want you to be healthier. That's why I'm pursuing this line of discussion.

Yeah, it's an intervention.

No, not really. But you know what, one thing that would really help, huh? Putting your treadmill in front of a television and watching a movie.

Yeah, so that's what I was doing.

Well, that's a great way to do it.

Yeah, I was watching like Lord of the Rings because I was like, I want to do the walk to Mordor thing, you know?

It's a little nerdy, but I love Lord of the Rings. And I was like, and that's walking, like I can walk. Yeah. And so I was doing that, but then I was like doing some incline because I was like, you know, I'm really gonna test myself here. Probably shouldn't have done that. Start slow. I didn't start as slow as I should have.

Yeah, well, you just— this is one of the things that we've done, these comedian workouts. I bring comics in and we have a gym next door.

Okay.

And the first thing I tell them before we do it, I go, you are not gonna get exhausted. You're not gonna get exhausted and I'm not gonna push you, right? What we're gonna do is we're just gonna do do a series of movements, very gradually build your body up to the point where you can start doing more. Yeah. And that's the way to do it. The way to do it is not like kick your ass the first day where you wake up and you're like, oh fuck, yeah, you're sore getting out of bed. Fuck all that. You need to build up. Like, if you try to do what I do like for the first day, it'd be terrible for you. But you could do what I do eventually and be just like me. Whereas like, I came here today, I feel fine. I feel great. Yeah, but that's the thing. It's like you have to get your body to a resilience point. You got to build it up, but I think you should build it up slowly.

Yes.

And one of the best ways to do it is to do cardio while you're watching a good movie because you just get captivated by the movie. You know, you're on a fucking elliptical machine just watching a movie. That's why I watched John Wick so many times. It started during Sober October, right? I was like, you know, I was just thinking like this about this fucking revenge movie. Fuck

yeah,

this keeps you going. Or any— anything that just captivates your attention span and takes your mind off of the fact that you're breathing a little heavy, and you're not even breathing really heavy.

No, and I— even whenever I had the full, you know, freakout, I was— I was fine. And even after it was done, I was like, what the fuck were you freaking out about? Yeah, but then it just sticks in my head like it always just— I don't I have a—

well, you have an interesting head, you know. You're— the way your mind works, the way you're interested in all these different things, that also could like turn against you.

Boy, does it. Yeah, yeah. It's why I've slept with the TV on since I was 3 years old.

I mean, really? Yeah. I can't— To this day, sleep with the TV on?

Sleep with the TV on. Has to.

Wow.

Yeah, I can't be alone with my thoughts ever, ever. It's too much.

That's interesting.

Yeah, it's like—

You never like meditate or anything like that?

I've tried and like I can do it. Like, I can, you know, not try to have zero thoughts, but just let the thought come, let the thought go, you know, all that kind of stuff. But I don't feel any different afterwards, and I've done it for like months at a time. Really? Yeah, it just does nothing. I just, uh, no, I just try to, um, like suffocate it. I think I just try to, just try to suffocate the voices in there, you know, not voices, but like Yeah. Just with distractions.

Well, I think that's one of the interesting things about people. One of the things that I really love about doing this podcast is I get to talk to so many different kinds of people. And, you know, there's a lot of narrow-minded people that think that everybody should live one way. Yeah. Everybody should think one way and behave one way, and this is the right way. I don't think that's real. And I think there's a lot of different, very interesting, creative people that their brains work different than everybody else's, and that's a great thing. You know, and your burden is that you can't be alone with your thoughts. But that's also why you produce so much great content. Yeah, you can't be alone with your thoughts, so you're always, you're always engaging with stuff.

Have to be distracted, so why not distract myself with, you know.

But it's also you're distracting yourself with stuff that's— I mean, it's really because of all these facts and all this information that you've acquired and all the stuff that you've put out there in the world, you've like changed a lot of people's perspective on things. things. You've given people a lot of stuff to think about, you know, and that's a great service. It really is.

Yeah, I guess I never really think about it.

It's the opposite of Real Housewives, what you're doing.

I wouldn't go that far, but it provides a service for me. But yeah, no, I— yeah, I guess I never really think about it like that, that people really, you know, get anything out of it.

Oh dude, I get a lot out of your page. That's why I'm always sending you interesting information.

I know, which is fun because like a lot— some of it's stuff that I have like heard about. I'm like, oh, I did a video on that like a long, long time ago. But a lot of it isn't. It's like, holy cow, I never knew. Which, that's one of my favorite starts to a sentence is, did you know? Like when someone comes up to me and says, hey, did you know? I'm immediately like, oh, come on, come on. And there's times where like, oh, I already knew it, but it's like, oh well, that's cool That's cool, you knew it. But yeah, whenever they follow that up with like something I didn't know, oh man, that's like one of my favorite feelings in the world. Me too. Is learning something that I didn't know.

Yeah, especially something really wild and cool.

Yes,

like, whoa.

Especially if it's about somebody that is like well-known. You're like, wow, how do people not know that side of that person?

And some of it's not even cool, like the Henry Ford shit. Like, I didn't know that. Well, yeah, yeah, whoa.

Yeah. Not cool like good.

No, I know what I mean. But yeah, but, but it's, it's interesting to know that there's, you know, some of our most celebrated people were monsters. Well,

yeah, it's like Gandhi, Mother Teresa. Yeah, you know, Henry Ford, Cesar Chavez. We talked, you know, like most of those people were complete scumbags. I mean, some of them did some good stuff. I mean, I would argue Mother Teresa never did anything good, but I mean, Gandhi, you know.

Was Mother Teresa that bad?

Real bad.

What was Mother Teresa's deal?

Mother Teresa had a, um, you know, she would like heal the sick and all that BS, but she basically just had a giant concrete storage room that she would put sick people in and donate and give all the money that was being donated to her to the Vatican, not use it to treat any of them. She believed that like suffering brought you closer to God, so she would just walk up and down the rows of sick dying people Like, look how close to God I am. She's a scumbag, a horrible person. Really?

So she could have helped them with medication?

I mean, she— I think they were giving them like, you know, very basic things, but like, you know, they're sleeping on like concrete floors. Like, meanwhile, she's getting millions donated. Like Princess Diana, you know, giving all this money to Mother Teresa, and she's just this frail old, you know, nun. So, you know, nun the wiser. But yeah, she's just like funneling it right up to the Vatican.

And was she portraying her role very differently than the reality of it?

Yeah, it's the reason why she became, you know, Mother Teresa, like, to everybody, is this like sort of patron saint of, you know, which I don't know what she is the saint of, if anything. But like, to most people, in most people's eyes, like, that's a good person. Like, oh, you're just like, you know, Mother Teresa, synonymous like how Einstein is with being smart. Mother Teresa's with like caring and kindness and virtue.

And she was just sending all the money to the Vatican.

Yeah, the vast majority to the Vatican, and just having a, you know, basically a torture chamber. You know, people were just suffering constantly.

So you think you're gonna go to Mother Teresa and she's gonna take care of you, and you just get locked in a basement?

Yeah, yeah, you get locked in this giant concrete room with like basically no windows, no sunlight getting in. And just people just having like whatever, dysentery or, you know, whatever disease.

Just diarrhea all over your bedsheets and just slowly slip away.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, not good. It's like a frat house.

The whole Vatican thing is so strange. That's one of the places that when I went to, I was a little weirded out. I was like, yeah, you guys have so much money.

A lot of money.

It's— since they're There's billions of dollars in artwork there. You walk around, you're like, this is kind of crazy. They have masterpieces just kind of stacked all over the place. It's almost like they're hoarders for art.

They are, yes. It's— which, I mean, art is a, you know, embezzlement scheme anyways, but, um, most of it is.

You think?

Yeah.

You don't think Hunter Biden was getting paid all that money because his art was amazing? What are you trying to say?

Well, I mean, who am I to judge? you know, the talent level of an artist, but, uh, it is an

interesting way

to

launder money,

right? And they do it. I mean, like, there's no— like, what's to make a painting, you know, like $70 million, and then one from an artist you've never heard of sells for like $35 million? Like,

especially modern art, which is like very easy to make. I don't give a fuck what anybody says. There's one that sold— there's one that sold for— God, I want to say it was like tens of millions of dollars. It might have been like $60 million, but it's basically like a red stripe of paint, a black stripe of paint, and a red stripe of paint, and it's famous. And so there was this Christie's or Sotheby's, one of those auctions, one of those, and this thing got auctioned off for this fucking preposterous amount of money, and you're like, what is happening here? Like, is this a scheme? Is this like— how is this gonna be? How is this— how does this represent such an insane amount of generational wealth for just this stupid painting that you could make in a couple of hours? Not even in a couple hours, an hour.

Well, you just don't get it.

I know, I'm stupid.

I

mean, I'm uncultured.

It's amazing to me.

See if you can find that painting. It's, it's really crazy. When you see it, it's really crazy. Like, okay, this is— you're pissing them off. That's it. That's it. That's it. How much is that one, Jeremy?

Wow, I'm afraid to tell you.

I think that's amazing though.

I don't know if this one was— that's one— this is actually on the top of the article.

So that's really— I mean,

that's the one I'm talking about. Oh my god, does that say $105 million?

That's $110 million. No, no, it's a different one. Yeah, it's not the list. Let me find that picture in the list.

Oh, there was that Jackson Pollock. That's it right there. $186 million. $186 million.

So like Mark Rothko is like a pretty well-known artist. Look at that. But that is $186

million,

which is crazy because I think like a lot of the Rothko paintings are like that. And yeah, he's like— oh yeah, I think those are the Jackson— are those Pollocks?

Or— Look at this one.

Yeah, isn't that—

$300 million. Do you know about the whole CIA connection with modern art? Do you know that?

With modern art? Oh, there's— do you know that?

Do you know the PSYOP?

With modern art? Yeah. No.

Oh no, I'm so happy to tell you this.

Oh my God. Okay,

so the CIA, during the time of Jackson Pollock— okay, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is while we were in the middle of the Cold War, the CIA started this thing for modern art to, uh, to pump up American art because we didn't have any art that compared with the classics from Russia.

Right, right.

So yes, there's a documented basis to CIA modern art psyop. This is from Perplexity, our AI sponsor. The CIA secretly supported the international promotion of American abstract expressionism during the Cold War. So what actually happened in the 1950s? The CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a Paris-based organization that sponsored magazines, concerts, conferences, and exhibitions it presented itself as an independent cultural organization while covertly advancing an anti-Soviet agenda. So American abstract expressionism, the work of Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Willem de Kooning, those guys that we just saw, fit the agenda. Mm-hmm. Its individuality and experimentation could be presented as evidence of American intellectual freedom in contrast to the ideological constraints associated with Soviet socialist realism. The paintings didn't need to contain an explicit political message. Their freedom of form was the message. So how the psyop worked: indirect funding. Money, money moved through cultural organizations and intermediaries rather than appearing as overt CIA sponsorship. This is described as a long-leash approach. International exposure: exhibitions held established American paintings' prestige abroad Historians have identified CIA backing behind the New American Painting, which toured Europe in 1958 to 1959. So all that art that you look at and you go, this is fucking bullshit, how did this become so famous and so valuable?

Right,

fucking CIA.

That's so weird. I mean, it does make perfect sense.

Same people who brought us MKUltra. Yeah, like they engineered so many very weird and twisted aspects of our society.

Yeah, well, there's all the connections, like, or what people think of connections, you know, with like the music scene in the '60s. Oh yeah, because like so many—

Strange Times in Laurel Canyon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like Morrison's dad, Jim Morrison's dad being, um, he's an intelligence agent, he's the Navy Admiral during the Gulf of Tonkin. Yeah, he was responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin. Yeah, and Jim Morrison used to always like in interviews and they'd ask about his parents, he would just say they died in a car wreck. Yeah, that was always his response. They died in a car wreck. They hit a group of Indians.

That's what he said?

Mm-hmm.

Is his dad still alive?

Yeah, his parents are alive. Yeah, alive and well. They were in one documentary about The Doors I watched. Like, they finally interviewed his dad and asked him like what he thought about Jim Morrison. It was kind of weird, but it was like back in the maybe '80s or so,

but Yeah, the thing is, they were good. They were really good. So the question is like, can you really engineer that kind of creativity and talent?

Well, that's what I— that's where I get kind of skeptical about that side of it, is that, yeah, like, or were there a lot of military kids in that area? Because it's where there's, you know, there's a lot of military base in that area. And are there just naturally gonna be a lot of kids? And kids tend to rebel against their parents. Well, if my parents are involved with the military, you know, screw the military, I'm gonna make— I'm gonna get involved with the group that doesn't like the military.

Yes.

And then some— and 90% of them go on to be, you know, teachers, lawyers, doctors, wherever the hell. Yeah. And then there's like 10% who just happen to be good musicians. Like, how much of that is like— yeah, is the CIA just plucking kids of, you know, whatever?

Well, people tend to definitely create like like a picture that doesn't exist. They tend to draw lines and connect dots. We look for patterns that perhaps don't exist, but it's because so many patterns do exist.

Well, and your brain's wired to look for patterns. Yeah, why? It's why you can convince somebody of fake memories. It's why, like, you know, I mean, people will give whole explanations for an event that never occurred, but it's because they know the beginning and end, so they have to be able to connect that, right? Like, you have to have the pattern. So I mean, optical illusions— like, when you see an optical illusion, the reason why it's an illusion is because your brain is trying in there somewhere to establish a pattern.

What was that one that we looked at the other day, Jamie, where they look like 2 different colors until you put your fingers over the line in between them and then they all of a sudden become one color? It is— Oh, there's so many of those.

Yeah, there's some interesting ones with that, or like where you'll have like a Coca-Cola can that looks red in the picture, but it's actually all black and white. It's just because there's these tiny green lines. Oh yeah, okay. I remember seeing this one. Yeah,

that's crazy. Yeah, like that thing right there. Make that large, please. That thing. Yeah, that's— they're both the same color.

Yeah.

And you don't realize it until you take your fingers and cover the line, and then you go what in the fuck is that? How is that possible?

It's because of a— what did they call it? Because of a— Jesus, what is it called again, Jamie?

What's that? Corn sweet?

It's called the corn sweet illusion.

Yeah, that's nuts. That one's nuts because you, you would swear to God that the lower one is a lighter color than the upper one until you block out that line in the center and you're just like, holy shit.

There's so many of those too. Like, there's something in the They're just so— they're fascinating to me, of like how your brain can trick itself.

Yeah, it's just the whiteness of the top of the bottom one that makes it seem like it's a different color below it.

But that's because in patterns, that's how it would be. Like anywhere else in nature, if something had that white of a top, then surely it must be a lighter color, and the thing that's darker, like that dark, would normally be darker.

It's just weird that your brain fucks with you that much.

Yeah, it's trying its damnedest to, you know, get you where it needs to be, but right, it'll definitely—

And I think that applies to like connecting these dots. Oh yeah, like Jim Morrison's dad was— and that's just the CIA engineered the hippie movement, right? Which I think there's some evidence that they probably were involved in that as well. There's definitely some evidence they were involved in promoting hip-hop.

Oh yeah, well, with the hippie movement too, there's— there is evidence that they were, you know, helping to stage protests and like, yeah, organized protests. But even like, was it like Gloria Steinem was working with the CIA at one point? Yeah, you know, like these things. So like, there's always been that version of it, but then it's just, you know, whether or not all of it is because of that.

No, I don't think you can engineer Hendrix.

No. And then, right, you know, I mean, because I've heard that argument, anti-war person. Hendrix didn't give a damn. He was in the war. He was in Vietnam.

Oh, well, he, you know, he had songs that were anti-war.

It was not necessarily—

Machine Gun.

Well, yeah, yeah, but I mean, as far as like outwardly— so not necessarily the music, but like outwardly speaking against the war, he was not necessarily one of the, like, you know—

He spoke out against it on stage.

Against the war?

Yeah.

I don't remember ever seeing him like actually speak out like fully against the war. I thought he was—

He's speaking out against the war and against violence on stage in the live version of Machine Gun.

Oh, maybe so. Yeah, well, no, I think— no, it was more like in his day-to-day life. Like, he used to get really angry with people who would like criticize the war if they like said certain— or like were critical, not the war, but of like soldiers. I think he used to get like really upset about that.

Yes, Jimi Hendrix expressed anti-war views through his music, especially Machine Gun. Gun, but his politics are more complicated than a simple lifelong pacifist label. Accounts of his early career describe him as supporting US involvement in Vietnam before his later music became closely associated with opposition to war. Well, he was a young man. I mean, he died and he's only 27.

Yeah.

Machine Gun is the clearest example, released on Band of Gypsies in 1970. It portrays the brutality of war through lyrics and guitar sounds resembling gunfire. Fucking great song. Explosions and cries. Hendrix dedicated it to people fighting in Vietnam and Berkeley and within themselves, connecting the battlefield violence with conflict at home. Fuck, that guy was good.

Yeah, but even that's not necessarily anti-war. Like, you know, depicting war isn't necessarily being anti— I mean, now going on stage and saying like, you know, anti-war things, but I think he was more like— I know he got in a fight with Was it like Pete Townshend or Mick Jagger? It was somebody, because they were criticizing like the troops who were in Vietnam. He was like, hey, hey, hey, like hold on, like I was a troop in Vietnam. Like, well, they're not the problem. It's the— like, yeah, being against like the government. Yeah, I'm sure. But yeah, yeah, but like Jim Morrison wasn't like anti-war. Like,

he just liked to pull his dick out.

Chuck Lorre

was here the other day. Yeah, and he told us that he went to see Jim Morrison in concert. concert. He didn't even get through the first song. He tried to pull his dick off, and they, they came on the stage with horseback to remove him. Got horses.

I mean, he was just such an animal. It might not—

this is not the same fight you said, but this is an interesting fight between Jimi Hendrix. Oh

yeah, backstage argument, not a documented fistfight. Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend clashed at the Monterey Pop Festival, June 18th, 1967, over who would perform first. Neither wanted to follow the his explosive stage act.

Read the quote. Mm-hmm.

It was just Jimi on a chair playing at me, playing at me like, don't fuck with me, you little shit.

Standing on a chair playing guitar at him. Yeah.

That's what Townshend said Jimi did.

Attacking him by his play.

Not only that, like, imagine like him playing in front of you going, I'm not following that.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then that's when he set his guitar on fire.

Yeah, it was, uh, yeah. Townshend's— oh, so it wasn't Townshend's guitar. I've always heard that it was Townshend's guitar that he was playing.

I mean, it could have been. They might have just left that fact out of this. Yeah.

Oh, so they wanted to play first. So The Who wanted to play first.

Yeah, because they didn't want to—

they didn't want to follow Hendrix.

Yeah.

Injured. Townshend smashed his guitar during their set, and Hendrix later famously set his own guitar on fire. Yeah. Wow, interesting.

Yeah, there's some interesting stories like that too, like with Jerry Lee Lewis You know. Oh yeah, with Chuck Berry lighting his piano on fire.

And then following that motherfucker.

Yeah, amazing. I mean, he almost killed a couple people. May or may not have killed a couple of his wives.

May or may not have. Seems like he probably might have tried to kill

Elvis.

Did he try to kill Elvis?

Yeah, he showed up drunk as hell at Graceland and tried ramming his car through the gates and stepped out waving a gun in the air saying, I'm here to Like, like, let's see who's the— or he said like, let's see who's the real king now. And was trying to kill him. And Elvis meanwhile was inside watching him through the security camera, you know, going like, oh, you gotta get down here, you know. And, uh, cops show up and Jerry Lee Lewis gets back in his car with the window still up, doesn't realize the windows are up, grabs a liquor bottle and throws it at the cops and just shatters in his car.

Yeah, that guy was a loose fucking cannon.

Yeah, I'd say. Yeah, I mean, well, Jimmy Swaggart's cousin.

That's right. Did you write it? Did you make a video about that?

I don't think I made one about them being cousins, but I made one about him, you know, being a lunatic.

Yeah, he was a legit lunatic.

Yeah, absolute like psychopath. Which, Jimmy Swaggart's a lunatic. And their other cousin was like Mickey Gilley, I think, who's also a very famous country singer. But, um, yeah, Jimmy

Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis. Well, it's interesting, like the preacher connection. to entertainment.

Well, it's the same. It's one and the same.

Yes.

Especially that type of preacher, like a televangelist. Oh yeah, there they are.

Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis. Look at them. They both look like psychos. Let me see that. Close in on that picture again. Look at— they both look like complete psychos. If I was alone in a room with these guys and they were drinking, especially Swaggart, I'd be like, I gotta get the fuck out of here. Look at his eyes. Yeah, like he looks dangerous. Yes. He looks like a fighter.

Yeah.

He looks dangerous.

Yeah, and then Jerry Lee Lewis.

I have sinned! Remember that? Yeah. I have sinned! He got busted with hookers.

Didn't he get busted a second time too?

No! I've sinned! It was amazing.

Didn't he get busted a second time after that? I wanted to say he did, but maybe not.

You know, Kenison was a preacher too.

Yeah. Which there's— that's a perfect crossover too. Perfect. Just that stage presence. And well, I mean, obviously that's a different kind of stage.

I'm sure you've been to church. Churches, yeah, if someone's a good preacher, they're entertaining. Yes, part of it.

Yeah, when I was a kid, we went to this like non-denominational church and like our preacher was like, yeah, very captivating. Everybody loved him, just very friendly, and he's a good guy. I mean, there was no like dark side to him as far as I know, but, but there's definitely ones that have a big old dark side.

Caught in a second prostitution scandal in California in 1991. Oh my goodness. I mean, you lost the first one. What was the first one? '88 and then '91, 3 years later. They had their eye on him. I mean, I've sinned against you, my Lord.

Oh, speaking of, what's his name?

Fun times.

What's his name just died? Old Jim Baker.

Did he?

Yeah, like a couple days ago.

Oh, that's right.

Timmy Faye died like a little while back, but, um, poor Jim. Rest in peace, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah. And who was the gal?

Tammy Faye?

No, the other gal that he had the affair with.

Oh, oh, um, oh boy. I always get the Clinton scandal—

She's very pretty.

Mixed up, like, names-wise. Jessica Hahn.

Jessica Hahn. That's it. And Jessica Hahn went on to become Sam Kinison's girlfriend.

Oh, really?

Yeah. And went on the Howard Stern Show and talked shit about Sam Kinison.

That's amazing. God, that's a good— yeah. Wow, I did not know that.

Yeah, yeah, that's the connection. Yeah, you should put a video out. 100%.

Yeah, I didn't— yeah, I never knew that one.

Yeah, uh, Jessica Hahn had a fling with Sam Kinison.

God, can you imagine?

There she is. She was hot back in the day. See if there's a photo of Jessica Hahn with Sam Kinison. Look at her, dirty.

My

God, dirty hot. Lots of makeup. That's all right.

Yeah, that's—

yeah. Oh, that's her in the— Sam Kinison and Jessica Alba.

Is that the, the Wild Thing video? Remember when they did Wild Thing, like the COVID Yeah, Wild Thing.

That's her. I'm pretty sure that's her. Yeah, that's her. Go back to that last picture, bro. She's hot as fuck.

Super hot.

Woo! Jim Baker, let's go!

Yeah, so Jim Baker, I mean, my God.

Yeah, killing it.

I mean, who—

How could you fucking be mad at him?

I mean, who wouldn't be tempted by that.

That's what I'm saying. I have sinned. Oh my God, I've sinned, my Lord.

I mean, it could be worse. It could be the Hugh Grant situation, you know, with Divine Brown. Like, he, you know, Jim Baker went the opposite way.

Yeah, he was driving around getting street hookers. Yeah, that's what you want.

You want somebody to cheat on somebody with a hot— yeah, hot, because then it's like, goddamn.

Yeah, hot, big eyes. What a good actor.

Oh, they all kind of are.

For me, he will be that photo with him and Jerry Lewis forever. Yeah, young man. You look in that young man's eyes. Yeah, the darkness.

Do you ever watch Great Balls of Fire? Yeah. It's an Alec Baldwin, isn't it? Plays Jimmy Swaggart.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah, and Dennis Quaid is, uh—

Dennis Quaid was awesome as Jerry Lewis. He's really—

I love him big.

Oh, he's great.

You ever seen Breaking Away? That's another one.

Yeah, look at that.

Yeah, look, yeah, there they are.

Wow.

It's actually like perfect casting.

Yeah,

like Alec Baldwin is a good— a pretty like convincing Jimmy Swagger.

I haven't seen that movie in a long time.

Oh yeah, me either. There's Winona Ryder too, I think, isn't it, that played the cousin that he married? Yeah,

she's the one that went crazy and started stealing things. That was odd. I think people just like the pressure of that kind of fame and that, that, that life just— oh God, for a lot of people it's just too much. They just go crazy.

Oh, they're all nuts. I mean, James Brown was a lunatic.

Oh, James Brown was amazing.

He tried to kill Joe Tex at a restaurant. Well, I mean, at a club. I

mean, he got in a shootout with the cops and a high-speed chase because someone was using his bathroom. Someone

was taking a

shit in his personal bathroom,

which is actually understandable. Yeah, it was like across 4 states, wasn't it, or something like that? Oh, that's one of the best.

Shot his tires out.

Oh, that's one of my— Drunk driving. One of my favorite videos ever is that news interview. CNN. Oh my God. It's like, we don't need to ask him. We got it straight from the source.

You're out on bail.

I'm out on bail. Well, and he just keeps like reciting his song lyrics.

He's like, I feel good. Exactly. Shooting erupts over James Brown's height. His height?

Him and his friend.

Police in Atmore say a man shot his friend when the two of them argued over James Brown's height. Oh, was it James Brown? I thought it was too. Some other dude. Oh, that's hilarious. The guy died. He got shot and killed. He was 73 years old. He got killed over an argument. It was unclear exactly how tall he was.

How's James Brown? You have any thoughts? I don't know.

All right, Cody, listen, man, thank you very much for being here. Oh, absolutely. Always fun to talk to you. Dude, thanks for having me again. My pleasure. Yeah, like I said, I love your page. Your book is Where'd That Come From? The Hidden History of Everyday Words and Phrases. Cody Tucker, out now. Is there an audio version of this?

No, not yet, but I am working on one. I got the person who did my, like, the graphics, which I gotta give a shout out, Carly. Amazing job with, you know, making it look like an old-school book, like how it does. Yeah, her husband's a comic, KP Burke, a great dude. He does a lot of like this kind of stuff, like the long-form history stuff. Oh, so he's gonna read it? No, no, no, but I'm just saying like that's— hey, he just does that. He's a very interesting guy you should check out at some point. Does like really cool history, like long-form videos.

But no, I'm weird. What is his— does he have a channel? What is it called?

I don't know the channel. KP Burke. He does stuff with like, uh, like the SDR, you know, like Ralph Sutton and like, uh, Jason Ellis and like all those guys. Okay. Yeah, good dude. But, um, his wife set everything up and she's gonna do like the audio, but And everything.

Oh, dope. But are you gonna read it?

No, I'm gonna read it.

Okay, good. Yeah, beautiful. No, you gotta read— you gotta read it.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, that would be very disappointing if you—

No, I'm definitely gonna.

All right, beautiful. Well, thanks for being here, brother. Thanks, man.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. All right, bye everybody.