#2464 - Priyanka Chopra Jonas

I won't lie, I am nervous to talk to you.

Come on. Just like me. How can you be nervous? That's ridiculous.

Like I came in slightly intimidated.

Why?

I actually don't know the answer to that because we've never met.

Yeah.

So it's not like you've intimidated me, but I just, I'm really, um, I think what I really enjoy about your show is just such an eclectic perspective on so many diverse things and it comes like so naturally to you. I really admire that.

Well, fortunately, I don't have anybody pick my guests. So it's all people that I'm actually interested in talking to. So it's easy. It's just stuff that I'm interested in. Oh, that's nice.

Well, thank you for picking me.

Oh, my pleasure. I'm excited to talk to you. Your movie is fucking crazy. It is. I knew it was a pilot, a pirate movie, but I, I just did not expect the ultra violence. Like from the beginning, I was like, yo, like I locked in immediately. I was like, first scene. I was like, holy shit. Like, this is crazy.

Well, thank you. That's a good thing, right?

I mean, is it, when you're doing something that's that hyper violent, like, is that, does that freak you out at all? Like, you're cutting people open with swords and stabbing them in the neck. And it's like, holy shit.

When you're doing it, you know, it's like make-believe. So it's so much fun to be like, yeah, I'm playing pirates and I'm going to behead you. But, I mean, in moments of like scenes and stuff where I actually had to think about what it must have been like to be a female at that time. Or, because they existed. Women, female pirates existed and we just, we didn't hear many, much about stories about them. I mean, I heard about Grace O'Malley, maybe Mary Read, like a few famous ones. Ching Shi, after I did my research. But like, in those moments, you're like, this stuff must have, like, this was real. They lived at a time where it was survival of the fittest. It was barbaric. And I wonder what that must have been like. But besides that, the stunts and stuff, like, I really have so much admiration for the amount of precision it requires to pull that stuff off from so many people. Not just the stunt department, but like the cameras, because they're also moving in sync with you.

Yeah.

And that's cool.

It is cool. Is it hard to stay in the moment when all that is happening? Because you have so much coordination and so, there's so much choreography. There's like, he's going to swing this way and you're going to block it and you're going to dive down. It's like, it's so complex. Like, these are long, extended fight scenes.

We had, like, a lot of oners, too. Like, full, the whole scene in one shot.

Whoa.

Which Frankie, our director, really loved the idea of and I honestly love it because it brings you into that, that moment is so enriched with everything that you're supposed to feel between action and cut. So, I do love a long oner. But, you know, I come from Bollywood movies, so we have a lot of choreography for, like, dance sequences where stories are also moving forward, like, between, you know, your exchange of expression or something's happening somewhere else. You come back. So, I treat sort of fight sequences like dancing. It's, you learn the choreography, but that doesn't stop your face from telling the story.

Right. That makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, and, I mean, it is kind, I mean, it's just choreography, whether it's choreography with dance or choreography with movements with your hands and swords.

I had never worked with blades before this movie, though. That was cool.

How much training did you have to do? Like, when you found out that you're going to take the role, how much preparation did you have to do physically to get ready for all that stuff?

It was a cool year for me because I was filming three jobs which were all action and stunts. So, this movie called Heads of State, which I did for Amazon again, and then Citadel and this movie. So, it was a year of three action-packed jobs. So, the, you know, being agile and being in it was already part of what I was doing because that's what I was filming every day. But the swords training was tough and to be ambidextrous with it as well. So, I had my stunt coordinator who was doing all three movies with me. She, in between shots, she and I would just take our rubber swords out and do, like, choreography and rehearsals. But, like, it took at least three or four months of just staying in it and getting loose with it. Also, because Carl Urban, my co-actor, had, casual, learned how to do, like, sword fights in The Lord of the Rings. So, he was amazing at it. So, I didn't, you know, in that last duel, I didn't want to be any less than. So, I kind of went at it.

No, you look very good at it. It was really good. Thank you. I was, like, did you work with some sort of, like, a kendo specialist or some fencing specialist? Like, how did you learn how to move the sword correctly?

It wasn't kendo, for sure. It definitely wasn't fencing. It was uniquely, because the swords were, our director was very, very excited about the weapons in this movie and wanting to get it really right from the period, whether it was the guns that we used or the blades that we used. And the machete was one of my favorite weapons in the movie, because that's, like, her weapon in the movie, because it's practical. Use it for coconuts. Use it for skulls. Same, same. And that was really fun. But our, you know, second unit director, Rob Alonso, had so much experience in the amount of work that he's done prior. He came in with a very specific idea of wanting to make the fighting style super unique. And each set piece, like, a different design of choreography. So, you know, there was one which was in a dark cave, so the only time you saw people was when the gunshot went off. And just different styles of fighting, which I thought was really cool.

So, but did you have, like, a professional trainer that taught you how to do that? Yes. And so, how would you do it? Would you do it with a real sword? Did you do it, like...

Well, we had three different kinds of swords. The real sword, like, weighs more than me. It was insane. I couldn't do it with the real sword as much. But for filming, and this is the magic of the movies, you know, you have four different weights of it. One is, like, the real sword where you need it for, like, you know, where it's a close-up or the sword is really, really visible. But when you're doing the big choreography, you have, like, a lighter sword, which is created by the props department, and then another lighter one. And when you need to flip it, it's the lightest one. Because I was thinking... I'm telling you all my secrets.

That's good. It's good to know.

That sucks. Oh, no.

No, listen.

Here I was trying to impress you with my sword flipping.

No, it's impressive, period.

And talking about my fencing. But no, it was movie magic.

One of the things that I always think when I was watching it is, like, how many takes did you have to do with this? Because that's got to be so hard to do. Because you're swinging this gigantic iron thing. Yeah. And clashing into other ones. And, like, if you have to do three or four takes of this, your arm's going to be toast.

Oh, we did, like, ten hours of it every day for, like, seven days or something.

Do you have shoulder problems after that?

No, actually, I didn't, but I was jacked. My arms never looked as good. Now, I mean, I have a four-year-old, and I lift her a lot, so my arms are, like, all right. But during this movie, oof. Because we were just, like, at it. Yeah. And we both, you know, threw ourselves at it, Carl and I. And it took, it was a big choreography on top of this bluff. We shot on 100% of this movie. At least 90% is definitely on practical sets, real sets. We did not want to use a lot of VFX. So, you know, Phil Ivey, our production designer, we built the ships. We built the house. We built... Really? Everything was a replica of what it would have looked like in the 1900s in the Cayman Islands. We went and saw it. It was amazing to be able to do that with real stuff, you know?

Yeah. Well, the whole history of piracy is so fascinating. And one of the things that the movie is about is this, the Carl Urban character is from, he was one of the soldiers of the East India Trading Company. Then I went on a deep dive on the East India Trading Company. That is crazy. When you learn the history of that one corporation is one of the first publicly traded corporations that essentially was in control of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, went to war with China over opium. And that's how they took over Hong Kong. You're like, holy shit, one crazy fucking corporation involved in the slave trade, the opium trade, just a corporation, publicly traded corporation. People could buy stock in it, like one of the first ones. And it just went haywire to the point where it got so big. There was a revolt, and then the British government took over it and nationalized it. But the whole story is insane.

If you think about how much in their minds they were able to achieve and how much they were able to destroy in that duration is crazy if you go down history.

Changed the course of countries forever.

Human lives forever. Forever. Like the amount of pillaging that happened.

Yes.

Millions and millions of lives. And this movie actually has a really interesting slice of what they were capable of doing. They utilized pirates in order to, you know, take over new lands, right, and in their conquests. And then when piracy was abolished, they, you know, went after them and they wanted to arrest them. And they vilified the same people that helped them build their entire empire. So this was really interesting because my character's story, her parents and her family are indentured servants, which was the truth of many, many people, especially in India, where young people were, you know, told better opportunities, new lands, more money. Come with us and take them off as servants and then drop them in different parts of the world and islands. And the Caribbean has a huge Indian community whose history started with just being displaced from their lands and dropped somewhere else in the world. And then having to figure out what your future looks like. I mean, it still happens to many, many people around the world right now. But I thought it was really interesting that my character came from that and her entire identity was erased, taken from her. She had no idea. She was 12, so she had no idea what it meant to have that identity. And I met so many people, actually, when I went to the Cayman who don't know anything about their family tree beyond, like, five generations. Or they know where their family may have come from, from Sri Lanka or from India or, you know, any other nation, but have no idea what, like, what it was, where, from what village, like, what was your culture. And that ambiguity in a history of a human being erases a part of you. It denies you of knowing the depth of your culture or where you come from or your roots. And I thought that was really, really interesting for my character to play and then reclaim herself through the journey of the movie.

Well, it's a fascinating part of human history. Yeah. And it's taken place all over the world and for a lot of cultures, they don't have an understanding of exactly what happened before they were colonized.

Yeah.

Like, one of the great examples is Mexico. I went on a long, deep dive on Mexico recently over the last few months because I've had a bunch of people who are historians who came on the podcast who were just researching these ancient Inca and Mayan sites. And I'm talking to them about it. And then I went into it and it's like, there was over a hundred different languages that are just lost forever in that whole, what is now called Mexico. And that's the reason why everybody over there speaks Spanish and is Catholic. Like, it's not because that was their language and that was their religion. They were all conquered.

Absolutely.

I mean, by like 600 guys. That's what's nuts.

Yeah.

600 guys in the 1500s came over, took over, you know, what was the Aztec empire with help of the people that they were in conflict with and changed the course of the entire country.

It's so many generations.

For forever. Like, to this day, people in Mexico think they speak Spanish and they have a Catholic religion. Well, that's all brought over from Spain. Like, the entire country. They had wild names, too. Like, cacao, thunder, sky god, and all these different, like, almost like Native American type names. Wow. They looked like Native Americans. But if you think about it, doesn't that make sense?

That makes so much sense. They probably, like, shared land and crops and, like—

Well, there was no real—

There were no borders at that time.

Back then, I mean, what were countries in the 1500s in North America? Like, what was—we don't even know. Like, what was North America like?

I mean, I think about how young America is, technically.

Super young.

Like, how many years? 300 years? 400 years? Yeah.

Less than 300 years.

Yeah. And, like, you were talking about history in India. She has been invaded over thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Only invaded. We've never invaded anybody else. She's not had the time. India's, like, just gave me a break. Yeah. Yeah, the Portuguese, the British, the Mughals, like, from back in time. And the history of India—I mean, I'm not a historian, and I don't claim to be, but I find it really fascinating. I love culture, and especially the culture of India. Like, you will see my grandmother was Catholic because she comes—she was raised in a part of India which was colonized, and a lot of people—Kerala—a lot of people were converted into Catholicism. And she grew up Catholic, and, you know, she followed it for a very long time in her life. India is, like, hyper-diverse because of how many people have kind of made it her roots. So when you go to India, the amount of diversity you will see, the kind of—the range of people that you will meet is impossible to fathom. Like, an Indian face does not look like a particular person or the amount of cultures, the languages. We have written and spoken languages, which are almost, like, 20-something or in their 30s. Absolutely different alphabet, absolutely different sound. I can't—if I go to another state, I won't be able to understand what people are saying.

Wow.

It's amazing.

How many different languages are spoken there?

About 28 to 30. But there are dialects in their hundreds.

Oh, wow.

Don't even get into the dialects. I just speak English and Hindi. Understand a little bit of Punjabi and Marathi, but it's really amazing.

Now, but—

Have you ever been, by the way?

No, I haven't.

Oh, Joe, you have to—you would really—like, you're the kind of guy who likes a deep dive.

Yeah.

You would really lose yourself, I think, in an amazing—

Oh, just to see—for many things, but just to see that one immense temple that was carved entirely out of stone.

Oh, yeah.

It's one of the great mysteries of archaeology.

But there are quite a few if you go, especially south of India, and the caves, if you go inside the Andaman and Nicobar, like the caves, you'll see from thousands and tens and thousands of years ago, illustrations that you're like, how did this happen? How could this temple have been chiseled? Or how could, you know, these stones have been moved at that time? Right. It's just—it makes you—it made me very, very curious about, like, what kind of tools did we have back then?

Well, there's a lot of holes in human history. Yeah, for sure. You know, Graham Hancock has a great quote. He says that we are a species with amnesia. And I think that's accurate. And I think when you find some of the great archaeological wonders where people just have decided, oh, they built it this way and then just let it go. And then other people start looking at it and go, wait a minute, how? How did they do this? Like, when did they do this? Like, what's the historical record of this? Because this is kind of nuts. This seems to indicate, like, a very advanced, sophisticated society.

Yeah, a very advanced civilization. Like, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, along with the Mayans, is the Indus Valley civilization, which is the north of India.

Yeah.

And I just remember studying about it in school, and that's my maximum understanding of that civilization, but also, like, having visited the Indus River, I guess. But I remember, like, the artifacts that were found. And, like, if you do a deep dive into how that civilization existed and then how it was erased, and, you know, it makes you question, like, there had to be some seriously advanced, like, scientific understanding that was eventually lost as, you know, as human evolution happened, where we lose a civilization and then comes back again. But it just makes you wonder about early humans and how fascinatingly advanced we would have had to be to do all of that.

100%.

Without the technology and stuff that we have, I mean.

I think they had technology. I think they had a different technology.

I think so, too.

I think they had to. It's almost time for spring break. So maybe you're headed to the beach, or maybe you're taking the kids on a road trip, or maybe you're just taking some extra time for yourself. No matter what, you deserve a break and a reset, and AG1 can help. AG1 is your daily health drink. Just one scoop combines your multivitamin, pre- and probiotics, superfoods, and antioxidants to help support a healthy immune system and digestion. Plus, it travels really well, so you can start working it into your routine, even when you don't have a routine. Just slip a few travel packs into your luggage and have a nice flight. I've talked about AG1 for a long time, and it's not just me. I know a lot of people enjoy it. It's very easy, it's very convenient, and you deserve to take care of your health. Visit drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan, and for a limited time, get a bottle of omega-3, vitamin D3, K2, and an AG1 flavor sampler for free in your welcome kit with your first subscription. That's an $111 value at drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan. This one particular temple that I'm talking about, Jamie, do you know the temple I'm talking about? The one insanely massive one that's built into the side of a mountain?

Khaleesa temple.

This is it. This is crazy.

This is what I meant.

Because the precision, first of all, there's no understanding of where the stone went. Like, they moved who knows how many.

And how did you take out all of those tons of rocks?

Yes. Like, it's so insane. The precision is spectacular. It's so nuts when you see, like, videos of people going through it. How huge is that? Immense. Absolutely immense and incredibly precise. And just carved out of a solid piece of stone. The whole thing is carved out of the mountain.

Think about how old that is. Like, this is all B.C., before Christ, like thousands and thousands of years B.C. And the history of India, like, hence the diversity. You see, it's one of the oldest civilizations in the world. And then, like, how do you explain that? Look at that image.

So, it says it's 12 – what does it say? How old did it say it was? It says 1,200, but that's not good. How do they know that?

I can't be right.

1,200 years old? See, there's a lot of just estimates based on what was the civilization at the time. Yeah. And there's no – like, this is the thing with Peru. Like, Sacsayhuaman and a lot of these places were attributed to the Incas. But you see, like, traditional Inca structures on top of these immense stones that are 100 tons. They're carved in these weird jigsaw patterns as to absorb the energy if there's an earthquake. Wow. Like, it's weird shit. And it's like, okay, well, who did that? So, like, oh, the Incas did it. Like, how? How did they do that? Because all their other structures are smaller stones stacked on top of each other in a way. Like, you could see a person carrying them and cutting them. Makes sense. But there's a lot of stuff like that temple. Like, explain to me what you used.

There's no explanation.

Like, how? Like, just metal? Did you just use metal and carve that out like that?

And, like, just a chisel and human –

And if you fuck up once, it's over. Because you're not putting things on top of things. Like, oh, this block sucks. Let's get a new block. No, you're carving –

Do you change the design if there's a fuck up? Like, you know what I mean? If you're trying to build – That's a good question. If you build, like, a human form and you chisel off the nose, like, do you turn it into something else? I don't know. Probably. Otherwise – because it's just one piece and you're right. You're not adding anything to it.

Well, in Egypt, there's indications that they abandoned certain pieces because they cracked. Because when you're dealing with, you know, granite and there's certain – Specifically, there's a gigantic obelisk that they were carving out. I mean, I think it was, like, 1,300 tons. Like, something bananas. Like, okay, how are you going to move this fucking thing? But they got to a certain point where there was a crack in it. And so they had to abandon it. And so it's still there. And this is there? Yeah, it's still – I think that's in – It might be in Aswan. I'm not sure where it is.

Do you know, like, you know, the theories around the Egyptian pyramids, obviously. Like, how were those blocks carried up?

There's no valid theory. Zero.

How was it in that shape and so precisely, geometrically, you know?

Well, it's even more complicated now because there's an Italian scientist that we had on recently called Filippo Biondi. Am I saying that right? Biondi? He's – amazing accent, this guy. He's fucking incredible. But he's using – what is it? Radio Doppler tomography. So it's a type of satellite imagery that uses some technology to get a vision of what's under the ground. And they've used this successfully to show known caverns in the ground and known pyramids. And they even used it in Italy to show that they can look through a 1.2-kilometer mountain and see underneath it this particle collider and have an exact dimension of the particle collider and see the outlet. So they used this on the pyramids. And they found these immense structures under the pyramids that go over a kilometer into the ground with massive – these huge 20-meter diameter columns that have these huge circular coils wrapped around them. No one knows what the hell they're looking at. But they're in very precise positions. They've done over 200 scans of these things. They don't know what they are. They don't know what's the purpose of all this, who made this. So if this turns out to be accurate and they're very confident that it's accurate and they're starting to look into it deeper and they're trying to figure out how to get down in there and explore with drones or something, then the whole thing gets thrown into question. Because it's preposterous enough that you have someone who's able to cut and place 2,300,000 stones that's perfectly aligned to true north, south, east, and west. Some of them weigh as much as 80 tons.

Tons, which is insane.

That come from 500 miles away through the mountains, no roads. Like, how'd you do it? That's crazy.

That's crazy in itself.

If there's structures underneath that that go a kilometer into the ground and, like, there's a giant, like, huge square at the bottom, they don't know what it is. But these are structures. These are not, like, something that is just a naturally occurring stone.

Yeah, it was man-made.

Show her an image of it. It's fucking kooky. So what?

Is that, like, how...

So these are these columns. This is, like, what the images are showing. And the three-dimensional replication of what they think is... That's what they think it looks like underneath there. They have no idea what these things are.

What?

There's also... Is that Hawara that has that underground labyrinth? They've also found these... Herodotus wrote about these labyrinths. There's a great channel on YouTube called Uncharted X by this guy, Ben Van Kirkwijk, who's been on the podcast before. He's great. And they've used radio... Well, they used ground-penetrating radar in that location. They found that these immense labyrinths are real. They're there. They're huge. Herodotus said it's greater than Giza, and it's underground. And in the center of one of these atriums, there is a 40-meter metallic object that's shaped like a tic-tac. It's in the center of this... Yes. So there's a bunch of shit that they can't explain down there where you're like, okay, what is this? They also know that a lot of these civilizations, like later versions of it, took from some of the older sites and started building new things or built on top of them, like very disrespectfully. But nobody had an idea of the importance of history back then. You're just trying to stay alive. And so they found all these stones. Let's use these stones. Oh, my gosh.

Totally. In India, like when we were colonized, you hear stories of the British officers telling little kids that, hey, I'll give you two pounds. Go and get the gold statue from this temple or whatever. And you don't have comprehension of what the value of historical things were, that there was so much that was taken from India in terms of wealth and history and historical artifacts and the Kohinoor diamond, which is still on the queen's crown, which came from India. And like so many things which were... The queen of England? Yeah.

She has a diamond on her crown that she stole from...

Can you pull it up? Kohinoor diamond. K-O-H-I-N-O.

Give it back.

Yeah, we've been asking for it for a minute. We have.

Well, the whole history of England and India is nuts, too. That's the diamond. Whoa. How big is that sucker?

The crown of the queen.

How big is that thing?

How big would that be?

Whoa. What is that worth? What's 100? Well, besides the historical value of it, which is probably priceless, what is 105 carats worth? That's nuts.

Imagine walking around with a rock like that on your hand. Yeah.

Woo!

I mean, that's what I'm saying. The royalty in India had so much jewelry and wealth and stuff that was pillaged and just taken.

Well, the history of India is fascinating. Like in the Vedic texts and the descriptions of Vimanas. Have you ever read any of that stuff?

Yeah, the Vedas. Yeah. Not extensively, but clearly you have.

The Vimanas. It's like, what are you talking about? You're talking about flying crafts?

Yeah.

Like, what do you?

That's the thing. You go, if you do a deep dive into the mythology of India and the stories that come from there, the kind of technology that has been mentioned in these ancient texts, like the Vimanas you're saying, you have flying objects, you have spears with some sort of energy, you have bows and arrows with some sort of energy that travels beyond time and light. And there's so much of all of this stuff referenced back then, which maybe humans thought was magic, but was some form of ancient technology, like who's to say? But we do definitely believe in Indian mythology. If you go back into Hinduism and the incredible stories that exist, like I love to think about where the origin, like where it must have come from.

Yeah.

But there's so many fascinating, fascinating stories from then.

Yeah. I have an opinion that most people that were writing things down back then were trying to document a truth.

Yeah, for sure.

I don't think they were trying to make up stories.

No, I think it was definitely their truth. Yeah. But from our perspective now, we have to be like, how do you break down the truth of, you know, that there was this light that arrived from miles and miles away and it felt like, I don't know, was it a bomb? Like, what was it? Right. What was it of that time?

Right.

So it's cool to kind of try and interpret that. I mean, I believe in the mysticism and the magic of ancient humans and, you know, the beginning of time. There's no way to explain what and how that was. You know, we have the information we do from religious texts and historians of the past. But it's just really fascinating to think about how resilient and human beings have been and how evolutions have had the same problems over time. But we kind of just navigated through different worlds, you know?

I think, yeah, I think it's hard for us to grasp timelines. And then when...

How would it be impossible? Think about, like, how short a human lifespan used to be to where it is now. Our stories have to come from, like, people telling people stories or documenting them, right?

Right. And those stories, like, when you're talking about certain passages in the Bible or certain passages in any religious text, a lot of those were stories that were just handed down for generations and generations before anybody wrote anything. Yeah. So it's like, what were they trying to remember? Like, when they're talking about flying Vimanas, like, what were they talking about? Like, what did they experience? And how long ago was it? Because I don't think we have a real understanding of how long ago it is.

I mean, 17,000 B.C. is where or around that time, that's that many years ago is what they say. But again, who knows?

Well, that makes sense if you take into account...

Like, 20,000 B.C.

There's a guy named Randall Carlson who's been on my podcast a few times, and he's a really fascinating guy. And he's an expert in asteroid collisions with Earth.

Wow.

He's an expert in all the different times that Earth has been slammed by comets and meteors.

And is that how the dinosaurs were? So it did, it was an asteroid.

Yeah, they believe so. It was in the Yucatan, that one. That's the 65 billion years ago one. But there's other ones that are before that. Before that. Yeah, and then there's other ones that are after that. And one of the more interesting ones is called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. And that one's from about 11,800 years ago. And then again, they think somewhere in the 10,000 years that happened. So there's a comet storm that we pass by. I think it's every June and November. I forget what the time is. But this is like also aligns with, do you know about the Tunguska event? Have you ever heard of that? No. They saw the sky above Russia and devastated like a million acres of land. And it was during the same time period. And they realized like there's this comet storm that we pass through. Like when you see meteor showers during the sky. It's because we're passing through these areas of our solar system that have these comets. This is the Tunguska event. So it just, and to this day that area has no trees on it.

Whoa.

Yeah. So it just flattened everything. And it didn't even impact the ground. It blew up in the sky above it. And this was not even a big one.

So how does like nothing grow again? Like what? I don't know. That's a good question. What is that asteroid made of that you can, like Earth has been able to come back from so much?

Yeah. That's a good question. That's crazy. Maybe it's just not enough time. I don't know. I mean, 117 years, maybe some, maybe eventually.

It means like a millennia.

But it probably just blew the roots off of everything. Crazy. And it probably had some kind of chemical effect too, because it's a physical object. I don't know what it was made out of, but you know, some of them are made out of iron. Some of them are made out of nickel, like that big one that they saw, 3i Atlas that passed through. That was a weird one because they're like, this is a nickel alloy that is as big as the size of Manhattan, and the only way we have it on Earth is in industrial manufacturing of an alloy. But this thing in another planet, somewhere else, millions and millions and millions of years ago was formed under whatever weird circumstances and conditions their planet has.

But you, I mean, I want to know your thoughts on this, but you definitely don't think we're like the only species existing in the universe, right?

I don't think that's possible.

It's human arrogance if we think we do.

Yeah, that seems silly.

Yeah.

It doesn't make sense. There's just too many planets. No, it's impossible. It's a silly thing to think. And they found evidence of life on Mars. So they found evidence of some sort of bacterial life on Mars, like the traces of bacterial life. And that's, you know, right there.

That's what I'm saying. I mean, maybe it's just in within our Milky Way that we, I mean, we haven't even been able to travel outside of that yet, you know, to get information, but it has, there has to be other species that exist and other like intelligence and technology.

Do you know the actor Terrence Howard?

I mean, I know of him.

Fascinating guy. Like a little kooky, but super smart, like super smart. He's got some wild ideas. One of his ideas, I was like, wait, what? He thinks that life occurs when planets get a certain distance from their sun. And then over time, they get too far out and then life doesn't exist on those planets anymore. But when they're in this Goldilocks zone like Earth is for a long period of time in relative to our life, life exists and then intelligent life emerges and figures out, hey, we got to get out of here eventually because this is not going to sustain us. And then it propagates the world or the universe rather. And he thinks that there's a thing that happens and he calls it peopling. He thinks that when a planet gets further enough from the sun that it eventually peoples because it eventually reaches the right conditions where life emerges and evolution takes place and natural selection and random mutation, all these things converge and eventually you get an intelligent creature that knows how to manipulate its environment.

Is there any proof of planets like moving away from their sun?

Well, they all do slowly, very slowly.

Like so even our solar system, we're all like slowly.

Yeah. And also the sun is eventually going to burn out and explode and then we're fucked. But that's a long time from now.

But there's enough shit to be worried about.

Nothing's permanent. Like suns are not permanent. And we're lucky. We have a slow burn sun. So we have a relatively small sun. And there's a lot of weird speculation that it's part of a binary solar system too, that there might have been another version of our sun that burned out that's like way out there, like way out in space, like way past Pluto, way out there.

I'd buy that.

It's possible. I mean, there's a lot of wacky theories as to why there seems to be some large object that's outside of our vision that's way, way past Pluto. So there's a thing called the Kuiper belt that's outside of Pluto. And that's part of what Pluto is, which is why they decided it's not really a planet anymore. But they think there's something else out there that's a large, they call it planet X. They think there's, it's a lot of like weird speculation whether or not it's real, but they think there might be a large body, larger than Earth, like Jupiter size or something like way out there. And it might be a sun. It might be a burnt out sun.

Like a burnt out sun that was...

Which is crazy.

Insane.

Well, Earth alone, like Earth, the reason why we have the moon supposedly is because Earth was hit by another planet. There's Earth one...

So was the moon part of the Earth?

The moon was like a big chunk of that collision that burst off and then became the moon. So there's Earth one and Earth two.

So does that happen with all the planets? Like because all the planets that have their own moons are explosions maybe?

That's a question, good question. I mean, maybe some of them are enormous asteroids that got caught in the gravity and maybe of them, maybe it's volcanic activity. I don't know. I think a lot of it's asteroid impacts too. They knock off giant chunks and those chunks start orbiting that planet.

So does that mean that all of those planets do have like a gravitational pull as well?

Oh yeah, they all have a pull. Yeah.

How strong would that gravitational pull be?

Well, it depends on the mass of the planet. Like Jupiter, for example. Jupiter is what protects us. The reason why we don't get hit a lot is because Jupiter is so big. So Jupiter has so much mass and so much gravity that it's like our big brother that like protects us.

Oh, thanks Jupiter. For real. Yeah, no, that's great.

And they actually observed an impact on Jupiter. I want to say it was in the 1980s where an enormous asteroid slammed into Jupiter and created a earth-sized explosion. Which separated from? No, it just got absorbed. Jupiter just absorbed it. But they watched it in real time. And it was a way bigger explosion than they thought it was going to be. So then they have to like recalculate like, oh, how big was that thing? And it made a literal impact as large as the earth.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

I have to see that video.

Well, that's the solar system is just a fucking shooting gallery. Which brings us back to this Younger Drives impact theory, which is one of the predominant theories as to why ancient, super advanced civilizations completely disappeared and there's no evidence of them and there's a lot of physical evidence. When they do core samples of the earth, they find there's a lot of iridium, which is very common in space, but very rare on earth, which indicates some sort of an impact. And then they also find micro diamonds, these nuclear diamonds. I think they call it trinitite. And they first observed this when they did the Trinity explosion. So the nuclear explosion created these micro diamonds on the ground, just a massive impact an explosion, heat and energy. Well, they find those littered all throughout the world in this same core sample timeline of like 11,800 years. So they think we were just bombarded. So a lot of these things like these temples in India, perhaps the pyramids, some structures that were stoned, probably just survived.

No, for sure. There's so much that has survived, I think, from like a timeline we can't even explain. I mean, in India, we see so much of it. So many of our texts, the Vedas are, you know, the oldest texts in the world. And to be able to like read stories, which now maybe we imagine our stories, but are probably reality of a civilization gone by. Yes. It's just crazy to think about.

I think more likely than not. Yeah. And I think more and more over time, people are opening up to this possibility. Like they recently just found written language that is 28,000 years old. And that they thought that human written language was created about 6,000 years ago. And they found evidence of language. I can read about this. So they're like, OK, that's a giant difference.

But how can we also know what happened in so many parts of the earth when anyway, the earth was moving, right? Like the continents, what it looks like right now is not what it probably looked like 20,000 years ago. Like it's been slowly moving. I feel like how are we supposed to know, like someone who writes a book, say in Mexico, like what happened then in Australia or what happened, what was the history in like India? You know what I mean? Right.

Especially 15, you know, the 1500s, 1600s. Yeah, years ago. When they were writing about stuff back then, they were just making shit up.

So the shit that we read.

Human may have used these mysterious symbols to encode information tens of thousands of years before the first writing systems. 40,000 year old artifacts. Yeah. So it's some kind of way of documenting things.

Of communicating.

You know, if these people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson are correct, there was some sort of a very, very advanced civilization pre 11,800 years ago. And this also coincides with the end of the ice age. It coincides with all of the ice caps over North America disappearing. Like North America was covered like three quarters of North America was covered like a mile high sheet of ice. Went away like that. That's why the Great Lakes exist. The Great Lakes are just that ice melted. Melted. And then whatever was left just ran through the country. And you can see the physical evidence of it when they show satellite images. It looks like enormous amounts of water just destroyed the landscape and completely carved it and changed it.

What do you think happened with, and I wonder if you have, because you have so much extensive knowledge with the amazing guests that you have on the show. So how did we go from Neanderthal or early man to this technology driven, like really smart, intelligent, like what happened in history and the evolution of human beings that we were able to make that switch so quick?

It's a real good question. There's a lot of, you know.

I mean, I've heard theories, but I want to know yours.

Um, if I didn't worry at all about being ridiculous, and I don't, uh, I would...

You don't. There was no need for that precursor.

But if I didn't worry about that, I would say something helped us. I think...

That's what I think.

Yeah. I don't think, I don't think it makes sense that that didn't take place.

Yeah. It's crazy to think about how that happened and how quickly it happened.

Well, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of like weird stuff with us. Also, all those other primates are still around, except the early man ones. You know, that's what's weird. It's like, why aren't, you know, how come chimpanzees are kind of the same? How come all these other primates are kind of the same? And yet we need clothes to stay warm out.

Yeah, like a mammoth to an elephant. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like, still similar.

Yeah, it makes sense.

How do we have like planes and why do we like things and how could we make cups and...

Yeah. Why do we change our environment that way? Why do we have this insatiable desire to innovate? Insatiable. Like we, that's the number one thing that we do. Constantly changing. Constantly making new and better things. Never satisfied with anything new. Everything has to be better. It doesn't matter how good your car is. What's the next year's model going to be? No matter what your phone does. I want better pictures, bitch. Like, no matter what, it's always like we want something to be better all the time. And it's like...

We can one up what we had. What is that?

I think it's built into us. And I think that is a part of this process of becoming a human being. And I think it's leading us to develop AI. That's what I really think. But I think we most likely something intervened. Now, there's a lot of people that think, the rational people think, that it was the invention of fire and the cooking of food that gave us better access to nutrition and protein and then innovating in order to hunt, allow the brain.

But it was such an accelerated period of time. It went like so quickly.

The human brain size doubled over a period of two million years, which is the greatest mystery in the entire fossil record.

Like, what made that happen?

We don't know. But in religious texts, ancient religious texts, there's many stories of human beings breeding with something from somewhere else. That's a part of...

Alien intervention.

Yes. Yes. Right.

Without trying to sound ridiculous.

Hyper-intelligent life form. But if you think about it...

I was watching a show about that and I was like, that makes sense.

What was the show you were watching? Do you remember?

Ancient Aliens.

That show's the best. It's so silly.

It's amazing. But I was like two in the morning. I'm like, oh.

My friend Action Bronson, he used to do a show. He doesn't do that show anymore, does he? They would get super baked and watch Ancient Aliens. It'd be like, bro.

Ancient Aliens is rad. I love that show. Two in the morning.

Oh, it's fun. It's very fun. I think they're right about some of those things. I think there's something to it. I mean, that is one of the oldest biblical texts that wasn't included in the canon that is the Bible is the Book of Enoch. And I had Anna Paulina Luna on the podcast and she brought that up and she was like, you really should read that. So I read it and you start reading and you're like, wait, what the hell are they talking about? The Watchers came down from the sky to mate with humans and created the Nephilim, a race of giants that destroyed the earth. You're like, what are you talking about? Like, what is this? This is in the Bible. And it would have been in the Bible, but not for a few rabbis that decided this doesn't jive with the Torah. And so they say, we've got to get that out of there. And that's why it's not taught along with the Book of Ezekiel and all these other things that are in the Old Testament.

Wow. Versus like in Hindu mythology also, you know, we read about a time where God, human and demon existed at the same time and procreated and like created different realms and, you know, life and stories and, you know, so it's like when you think about stories like that, stories, beliefs, you know, from around the world that have similar sort of color.

Yeah.

It's almost like trying to connect the dots of what must have happened at that time, you know, all around the world. Yeah. It's probably the same thing, you know, some sort of incredible technology.

Yeah. And some, and a lot of them have these stories of something of some kind of higher nature, higher power, higher technology intervening in the lives of human beings and even manipulating the process. Yeah.

But isn't that what I think was referred to as the gods? Yes. Like if you think about the Roman, you know, or Egyptian, like gods, I don't want to speak about culture, but I can't even say about ours, but that power that we read about, you know, that like if you, if you go into it, I'm a big believer. So I think that, you know, was that like a real experience that happened to a human being at that time?

It was probably a real experience with someone that had a limited vocabulary, a limited amount of knowledge and the limited ability to write things down. And so they probably told these stories from whatever words they could use to describe what this was like, if you were living 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, and a UFO landed, a giant metallic disc landed, and little tiny creatures came out and talked to you telepathically, you don't have a written language. You don't, your culture is hunter gatherers. It's like, how do you tell that story? How do you tell that story? And what are the people that you told that story to going to tell their children and their grandchildren for many, many, many, many generations before anybody figures out how to write things down?

Totally. But another perspective on this, which people have is, is that our pragmatic, practical 2026 human trying to explain something that was magical and did exist at a time that we don't have an explanation for? Yeah. You know what I mean?

For sure.

Like, there's the other side of that with people that, you know, you hear so many stories of visitations from the gods back then, you know, to humans and the divinity of, at least in my country, for sure, of different avatars of gods coming down to earth to save humankind and to help in human salvation and to help them against evil. So when you hear of those stories, like, the practical side of me would be like, are those human stories? And who is that, that power that they were seeing at that time? And then there's a side of you, which is like, there's so much we can't explain and sometimes have to, like, leave it to inexplicable magic of the universe. Like, I am someone who loves science, but I also am a believer of that it just can't explain everything.

Well, even science itself, like hardcore materialist science.

Totally.

If you're trying to explain the Big Bang, good fucking luck. Good fucking luck making sense out of something smaller than the head of a pin that became everything that's in the universe. Okay.

Like, explain that to me.

Help me out.

Totally.

I mean, it's all theoretical and speculative and no one really knows. And then there's this concept of what took place before the Big Bang. And then there's Sir Roger Penrose's version of it, which is there's been many versions of the Big Bang expansion, then contraction, and that it's not the beginning, that it's part of an endless cycle.

That's what I've, I mean, I've heard from, in India as well, the believer belief that that was not kind of the beginning. There's been many beginnings and many ends that we have no idea of.

That makes more sense. That makes more sense to me. It makes more sense. Because I think the problem with a beginning, we're like, well, what was here originally? We always want to think of things in terms of our own biological limitations. We have a birth and we have a death. So we think that the universe probably had a birth. Everything has a limitation. Right. The why, it's there. Like time. What is time's limitation?

It's existed from who knows when.

It's constant. It's never not been here.

Yeah.

So the idea that there was nothing before the universe, well, that doesn't even make sense.

It's funny, when I was doing research for The Bluff, this movie, I went to the Cayman Islands for a couple of days to get an understanding of the history of the islands. And the Caribbean is so interesting, especially Cayman, because it's in the middle of these trading routes between Honduras, Cuba, Mexico. So ships, when trading started, is when the Cayman was discovered. The islands were discovered. So when I went down there, I went to the museum and they said, yeah, it was like the 1700s or 1800s when the first settlers came and, you know, it started with family or like people trying to run away or pirates or, you know, just people making pit stops before going to another country. And they said that that was the first time that there was any history of the island. And I was like, how's that possible that only when like settlers found that place. And now, I mean, Cayman Islands, Cayman Islands.

Right.

But how, like, if you think about there's so many places in the world where people and humans have existed way before we even have an understanding of or are willing to acknowledge, you know, in many cultures, it's different. Yeah. But we just lost the history of it.

That's possible, too.

That's what my argument was. I was like, you know, like we have to have lost the history of what happened prior.

There's an entire culture from South America that we don't know who they were. The Olmecs. We have some giant carved heads and we're like, oh, who did that? They think it's like thousands and thousands of years old. They look African. It's very strange. Have you seen Olmec heads? Oh, they look like this. That's an Olmec head. Like, how nuts is that? Like, that's a replica of these enormous heads that are in, I think, is it Peru? Luke Caverns, who's been on the podcast. He's a really fascinating guy who does a lot of research down there. He's been there and documented and he's like, they don't know who these people were. They don't know what their language was. They don't even know what they look like except for these images. And they don't even know if these images are supposed to be of them, like these statues. They just found, see if you can find some of these heads so you can see like the scale. So they left these enormous stone heads. They attribute it to this one civilization that they call the Olmecs. They just made a name up. But they don't know who the hell these people were. And look at their faces. Like, that's crazy.

That's huge. And do you know how old these might be?

They don't really know. But I think that, how many thousands of years old do they think they are, Jamie? Crazy stuff.

Yeah.

So at least 900 B.C. But, you know, what does that mean?

Yeah.

That's a guess. That's a guess. Because they don't know anything. But like a long time ago. A long time ago. Well, even the Aztecs. Do you know the Aztecs didn't build those temples? They found them.

The Aztecs found that? The Aztec temples?

They found them from an unknown previous civilization.

Oh my God.

Yeah. They called those temples the place where the gods were born.

Yeah.

That's what they called them. And they just kind of like cleaned it up. Which kind of makes sense. Because you think of like how barbaric the Aztecs were. Like, they did some horrific shit. Like, we were talking about one of the temples. I think it was Tenochtitlan. When they consecrated it, they killed between 20 and 80,000 people. They sacrificed them in a period of four days. And so this is like right when the Spanish were first visiting Mexico thinking about taking over. And this guy Diaz, this Spanish chronicler, said it was the fucking craziest thing. They killed 80,000 people, he said, over a period of four days. Just cut their hearts out and threw their bodies down the stairs. Like, nuts. This episode is brought to you by Intuit TurboTax. April 15th is coming fast. There's been so many tax law changes this year. Which means you're going to need an expert who has your back. You're in luck. TurboTax now has in-person locations nationwide. Walk into their tech-enabled stores and meet face-to-face with a TurboTax full-service expert who will get your best outcome. Your expert works to get you every dollar you deserve while updating you as you go about your day. Head to TurboTax.com to find a store near you. So these are the people that were...

Yeah, you think about how countries were... Conquests happen and we're living in the history of so many people's blood and sacrifices.

And violence. And so much violence. Unfathomable amount of violence.

How are humans so capable of that kind of violence? I think... Having done a really violent movie right now?

Because chimps. Because we're mostly chimp. And I think if you pay attention to chimps... Chimp behavior, yeah. Have you ever seen Chimp Nation on Netflix?

No, I haven't.

It's fantastic. Yeah, I want to see it. It's just... It's spectacular because it is a very rare situation where this one particular group of chimpanzees, they were embedded with these scientists for 20 years. So the scientists had very specific rules. Don't get within 20 yards of them. Don't make eye contact with them. Don't have any food with you. Okay. And don't interfere. And they're totally accustomed to having people around them. So they behave totally naturally. Yeah. And so they wage war. They have all these crazy social dynamics that they observe.

They behave like they would in the wild because they're used to these humans.

Exactly. And when you watch it, you're like, oh my God, they are a lot like us. They're a lot like us. Just like very primitive, no language, but ultra violent. Chimps are ultra violent. I mean, one of their favorite foods this guy was telling me was monkeys. They just love eating monkeys. He goes, we saw them kill so many monkeys we couldn't even document it. He goes, because if it would just be like, every day was like a monkey hunt. They would tear these monkeys apart and eat them alive. It's horrific. That's our ancestors. So what we are is a combination.

Well, that explains it.

Yeah. That explains it. We're a combination of some higher intelligence that interbred with a savage primate that's curious and created this weird hybrid, this weird thing.

Listen, that's what ancient aliens told me. Yeah. And I believe it.

I think they're right. They're right about that. Have you ever seen Chariots of the Gods?

No.

That's the original one. Eric Von Daniken. That was in like the 1970s. It was a movie, like a feature movie.

I mean, I remember the movie, but I don't remember anything. Yeah.

I had lunch with him once. Got a chance to question him about stuff. He's like a true believer.

Yeah. What are his beliefs?

Well, he believes that everything is from aliens, that aliens came down and aliens taught people how to do things and aliens built all these things. And I'm more in line of they intervened and created what we think of now as humans. And then humans figured out a different path of technology than we're on today. That we are on the path of internal combustion engines, electronics, electricity, and they were probably on some different path of technology, but as far down the path, if not more. And I think they probably had figured out some things that we have yet to figure out, including like the transferring and the moving and shipping of enormous stone blocks without heavy machinery. Like we don't know what they were doing.

Teleportation. Yeah. I don't know.

How did they cut them? Like what are they, what are they, what, if those structures that Filippo Biondi describes under, if that's real, like what was the pyramid then? Was it a machine?

Yeah. How did they do, like first they created the structure, like imagine the foundation and the design that went into it.

A half a mile deep into the earth.

Crazy.

Like what is that? What are you doing?

Because I'm saying, I don't know if I, like, I just know that we can't explain that quick evolution of humans from Neanderthal to, we can't and all highly intelligent.

Yes, we can't.

Yeah.

I mean, there's just a lot of people saying, well, we haven't filled in the gaps yet. Yeah. We don't really know. But the, the acceleration of the evolution is so spectacular. Like vegans are hilarious. They attribute it to people eating tubers. I had a conversation with a guy. He's like, we're thinking it's probably tubers. Like what roots? You mean like bears eat? Shut the fuck up. That is the dumbest explanation. That didn't even make any sense.

I'm vegan.

Are you really?

No, I'm joking. Congratulations. No, I'm not.

There's no way you could be.

No, I just had barbecue.

You would already fall asleep.

For breakfast, I had brisket. I was like, I'm here in Austin for two hours.

Yeah, you have to have barbecue if you come here.

Yeah.

I just think that whatever happened, we don't know. And I would not rule out intervention. And I wouldn't think that an intelligent species from somewhere else, if they did find these very curious primates that may already be working with sticks and rocks and stuff like that, that they wouldn't intervene. Because we do it. We're doing it right now. We're doing it right now with animals.

It's human nature to do it.

If we went to a planet somewhere and we found some fucking frogs or some weird animals but nothing big, we might drop a deer off in there and see what happens. You know, we might bring some birds in. Look.

He and Stephanie would. We would intervene.

They're doing genetic manipulation of animals right now to bring back extinct life. That's how they brought back the dire wolf. This company called Colossal, Colossal Bioworks. I saw it. I touched it. I went to. Yes. I went to the place where they're holding these wolves and I got to, me and my daughter, got to cuddle with a baby dire wolf. They had two semi-adults at the time. I think they were like eight or nine months old.

And they've been extinct since when?

10,000 years.

Stop it.

Yeah. Somewhere in the range of that. Oh my God. Yeah. When did dire wolves go extinct? I think they were part of the megafauna that went extinct during the impact because 65% of all megafauna on Earth and particularly in North America went extinct around the same time. Wooly mammoths.

And do we know why? They don't. Around the same time? There's a lot of hypothesis. Like was there something that happened then?

The rational people, not me, but the rational people think it was the berserker theory, which means that human beings killed so many mammoths that we wiped them out to extinction. Unbelievable. But this is with adaladals. Like it doesn't make total sense. Yeah. It's like, how did you get, there's not even that many people. How'd you do that? Yeah. And then there's also stuff like the American lion, which was bigger than the African lion. Man, how do we kill that off with a fucking stick? Like shut the fuck up.

Something had to have happened.

Well, they found mass grave sites of mammoths where there's like hundreds of them dead all in one place. It seemed to have died at the same time. Not only that, some of them have broken legs.

Yeah, so it had to have been like some, like asteroid or something that created that kind of impact immediately.

But 65% of all North American megafauna died at the same time.

That's so crazy.

Yeah, within the time period. And they think that the younger dry ice impact theory people think like this is not a coincidence that this coincides with the end of the ice age and also coincides with where the core samples. Too many coincidences. Yeah, and also the coincides with the fact that these animals were all here at one point in time. They all got wiped out except a very few. There's only a few left. Like there's the pronghorn antelope, which is a really weird one. It's this prehistoric antelope that lives in North America and it's different than every other animal here because it's evolved to get away from cheetahs because we used to have cheetahs in North America. So it can run like 55 miles. They fucking books. Wow. I've seen them in real life. They're really weird looking. They look prehistoric.

But can run.

They fly. That's what it looks like. See if you can get a look at its face. Can you see it head on? They're so strange. Like their eyeballs are on the sides of their heads because something was coming at them like, you know, 55 miles an hour at full clip. And so they're really, really alert and they have incredible vision.

Wow.

And that's a leftover animal. That's a leftover animal from a time where they were being preyed upon by something that doesn't exist anymore. And that something was wiped out along with the American lion. A bigger lion than the African lion. Lived right here. That's huge. That's crazy.

I was filming in Africa recently in Kenya and we, for this Indian movie I'm doing called Varanasi and we shot with wildebeests and like, as in like, in the middle of them. I was, me and my co-actor Mahesh were in the middle of these wildebeests that were all around us while they were migrating. It's like the coolest thing I've ever seen. But when you see their faces and for how many years versions of them have existed, you know, you feel the gravity when you see these animals in the wild. Yeah. It's crazy.

It's so much different than a zoo, right?

Oh, completely.

Because you're like, oh, they've always been here like this. Yeah. This is their home. This is what they do.

We're in it. You feel a sense of like, stay in your Jeep.

Well, I think we're numb to it because we watch it on film and so that we get sort of desensitized and normalized to this idea of wildlife. Oh, there's the lion sneaking up on the wildebeest. How cool. Yeah. But when you're there and you see a lion, you see a wildebeest, you're like, this is fucking crazy. Yeah. This is all day long, every day, these life forms competing to try to exist and stay alive. That's it. And there's this weird balance where all of them, you know.

They still exist. Yeah. They can, there'll be wildebeest right there and there'll be a lion right here who's eaten. So they're hanging out together. The wildebeest knows that he's eaten. He's not coming after us. And they exist. But at the same time, they're, you know, during hunting season, you see the hunt happen. And I saw a hunt happen. And that's, that's crazy that that's their life.

Yeah. Salival. With their face. They kill things with their face. Like literally, there's a really extraordinary island in Africa where the river changed courses and it left this, this one pack of lions on this one island that only has water buffalo on it. And so these lions became enormous. And the female lions are as big as male lions everywhere else. And the male lions are way bigger than they are anywhere else. I think there's a, the documentaries, I think it's called Relentless Enemies. But it's so, because they look like these jacked bodybuilder lions.

Those water buffaloes are huge. And I had one staring at me like we were in Kenya. I'm like the video villages and they were filming and it's far away, but it just turned his head and just looked at me and then just kept looking at me. And I swear I had to like get up and get out of its view because it just kept staring. I was like, it's coming at me. They will come at you. Yeah, for sure.

They kill people.

The rangers told us. They were like, oh, I think he's engaged with you. Maybe, maybe get out of here, get into your car.

Yeah. There's that poor lady from who, she was a video editor on the Game of Thrones and she went to do a safari there and it pulled one, one of the lions pulled her out of her car.

Out of her car?

Yeah. She rolled the window down or someone rolled the window down and a female lion just snatched her out of the car and killed her.

Oh my God.

Yeah. Yeah.

You have to listen to your rangers when you're in these situations.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, she wanted a better picture or something. I don't know what the circumstances.

Yeah, that's the shit that gets people into trouble.

Oh, yeah.

Like there was this, one of our rangers was telling us a story that they have, we were in Masai Mara and they were like, they have open Jeeps and you know, you have food that they keep really hidden so that the animals can't smell it under your seats and stuff. And he was telling a story about this influencer. He's driving and you know, there's a pack of lions. Lions just eaten. So he's sleeping. And this influencer who puts his hand outside to try and touch the lion's head and got it on video and survived to tell the story. And then he was banned and the ranger was like fired from his job and all of that happened. But for the image, can you imagine? What a fucking idiot.

All for the gram.

My gosh, that was crazy.

I mean, I don't want anything bad to happen to anybody. But when someone does something like that and does get killed, it's probably better educationally for the human race.

But is it though? Or are we really learning from other people and their examples?

Some people aren't learning shit.

Nobody's learning shit. We're just trying to put the best versions of ourselves on the gram. Like that's what's happening right now. Whether it's true or not.

Yeah. But are we learning? Yeah, that's a good question.

I don't know. I mean, I think we are also so desensitized to it. There's so much information that comes your way and misinformation now. Where being able to discern what's real and what's not now, that's hard as well.

Oh, it's harder than it's ever been.

Totally. And then if you do watch something and you're like, I'm going to implement in my life, we do it for a very short duration. Very few of us follow through with that, right? Like you're watching a reel or somebody says something and you're like, that's really cool. Are we going to pull on that thread and follow through? And do something about it or learn from it? I don't know. I feel like we've lost a lot of that space where we had the time or the desire to want to, you know, fulfill ourselves versus just that with so much coming at you.

Well, I think collectively as a society, I think we learn and then we forget and then we have to relearn again.

Yeah.

You know, that's certainly...

There's a tension span now where, you know, I remember when I was growing up, like just having the languidity of time, right, in a very different way. And this is like, say, 30 years ago, 30, 35 years ago of, you know, reading a book, music playing, hanging out with your parents or your friends without being rushed, just rushed. You know, I don't remember feeling as rushed as I do now in the last 20 years when I was growing up. Like there was time for stuff.

Yeah. Well, certainly the internet has accelerated that, you know, and certainly people's attention spans are at least pulled in the direction of short attention span content. But at the same time, podcasts have emerged, which is interesting.

It's so interesting. Like I was talking about this to a friend of mine, like people who have no time or interest in wanting to commit to like, say, a movie or some will watch or listen to like a podcast for two or three hours. And for someone like me who, you know, like I've been an actor for most of my life, my interface with people would be, you know, an interview, say, for example, people who knew me or audiences that wanted to know about me would be an interview where, you know, the highlights are really what you read. The clickbait lines are really what you read. And you form a relationship with whoever this public person is based on those few lines versus this format where you're just chatting for a few hours and you have the ability to really be yourself and be seen as yourself, which is why I think people really love podcasts.

Well, I think it's much more illuminating in terms of if you want to like find out who a person really is because you can't really hide for three hours. Like that's who you are. And I think for most people, that's scary, right? And so what they like about those fake shows, like good morning, America, or whatever it is, you know what I mean? Like you're sitting down, you know, the guy's got a piece of paper, so he's got a few questions he's going to ask you and they're all going to be like very surface, very jovial. What's it like to be married? You know, what's it like to do this? What's it like to do that? So you had a baby. Congratulations. That kind of shit. And then you're out of there. It's 10 minutes and you're like, oh, that went well. And then nobody knows anything about you.

It's true that you're just basically known by the top four questions that everybody asks you. So it's like the same four questions that everybody asks.

Right. And what was it like to work with this person? What was she like in person? What was he like?

For me, mostly, it's like a lot about my family. Like it's like that my identity starts there and then everything else comes after.

Well, you're fascinating in that you've done movies in two different cultures. So like I wanted to ask you about that. Like what is the Bollywood scene like? Because I wasn't even aware of it until like 20 years ago. I didn't know that like Bollywood is like this enormous, like the amount of films that are produced in India is kind of crazy.

Yeah.

It's a big business.

Huge.

Huge.

A hundred and something years of Indian cinema just recently. So a very, very old industry. We started with silent movies and have worked our way now to, and that's not just Bollywood. I'll break that down in a second. Because India is so diverse and we have so many different languages. Again, excuse me, I didn't know the exact number. But we have local industries that make movies in those languages. So Bollywood is Bombay. It comes from Bombay. I think that's why it was coined that name from Hollywood. But the Bombay movie industry, again, it was not us that did that. It was the name that was given to us. I don't know by who. But Bollywood is the Hindi language industry which exists in Mumbai, which is like L.A. It's huge, we make thousands and thousands of movies, but then there's also Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Malayalam, Marathi, Bhojpuri. These are all robust industries that are localized within every state that also exists. So cumulatively, we make thousands and thousands of movies a year, but it's catered to very, very different audiences within the diversity of India.

Wow. And how many people have come from India, like you, and become stars in Western movies?

I think there have been a few before me, you know, that have done work.

That first one I heard of. So no one's made it to me yet.

Well, thank you. Yes, I think that it's been few and far in between. I think America is a really hard country to break into, to be relevant in. It's tough, and also, like, I think Hollywood controls a large part of the global entertainment business. So as an actor from anywhere in the world, if you want to break into the English language, global entertainment, Hollywood system, it's not easy to do that. You know, culturally it's different, language is different, jokes are different. And so that's a tough transition, but it's also, like, for me, I really, I went to high school. Oh, by the way, you went to Newton and I went to Newton, too.

Did you really?

I went to Newton North, you went to Newton South. Yeah. How crazy is that?

That's crazy.

Yeah, so I was in high school in the States, and I, you know, so it wasn't, like, alien to me. It's not like I was in India and I was like, I want to go to America and start working there. I really wanted to see what it would be like if I came down here. Would there be an opportunity for someone like me to, you know, be able to create an impact? Many years later, I feel like, you know, I'm on my way there. But there have been so many actors whose shoulders I've stood on. So Indian, like, Indian casting in English language entertainment, whether it was Hollywood or, you know, British entertainment, wherever, was usually, by us, seen as, you know, a diversity check. So it was mostly a stereotypical actor or a stereotypical character with an actor having to speak in the accent or having to, like, do the, be a little bit more Indian. What does that even mean?

Did someone tell you that?

I was told in an audition, I think we needed the character to be a little bit more Indian. And I just, like, didn't even understand why. There's so many versions of that. But I think what the, like, this person meant was have a little bit more of the accent. Yeah, be a caricature. Yeah, be the caricature, which was really tough to break out of. So, you know, at a time when it was only that work that existed in Hollywood, like, those are the actors whose shoulders I stand on. Like, those were the ones that went in and did that work because that was all that was available. And, you know, tried to break through, especially from, like, India, for example. Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan, Irfan Khan. There have been actors that have come in, done work and, you know, left an amazing mark. But I moved here. I live here now. And, you know, I'm consistently working here. I think that also may have been a part of why you've heard of me.

Yes, I'm sure. Well, I've seen you interviewed, too, which is why I thought you were interesting. Thank you.

I appreciate that. I think you're very interesting. I think your knowledge of the world is fascinating to me.

Well, it's all accidental.

Cool. How cool is that?

Yeah, it's cool.

That's amazing.

I started this thing out with my friend Brian and a laptop. We were just talking shit. We just thought it'd be fun to, like, do, like, a little internet thing.

Wow, how inspiring.

And that was 16 years ago.

You're someone who's pivoted your career so many times, too, though.

Sort of, but it's all the same thing in that I've only just done things I'm interested in. Yeah. Other than Fear Factor. Yeah. That was just a job.

You know, I also hosted Fear Factor.

Did you? No. Shut up.

For one year.

Really? I did. Where?

In Brazil. In India.

Shut the fuck up. That's crazy.

And we shot it in Brazil, in Rio.

Wow. That's nuts.

We have such random things in common.

That is crazy. That's a crazy thing in common. I need to see that. Let me see that. Find a clip. This is hilarious. What language did you do it in? Hindi. Wow. And it was in Rio, huh?

We shot it in Rio. We had a big budget that year.

What?

So we were all flown out. So it's Fear Factor India.

I wonder how many versions of Fear Factor there were.

I mean, they're all over the world.

Really?

Yeah. Fear Factor used to exist all over. I don't know anymore, but back in the day.

When I stopped doing it, I stopped paying attention. I was like, I'm out.

Me too.

So I knew Ludacris took it over at one point in time, and now Johnny Knoxville's doing it. That's all I knew. I had no idea that there was a bunch of different language versions of it.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it originally came from a Holland show called Now or Neverland.

It's a crazy show.

Yeah. It was way more simple. And then when it got brought to America, they decided to call it Fear Factor.

The whole eating thing? Yeah. We didn't take that back to India. Really? Yeah, we didn't do the eating. Because you never know people are vegetarian. In India, it's a big part of our culture where a lot of people religiously are vegetarian or not. I think maybe that's the reason, but there was not a lot of eat the worms and stuff, which I was very grateful for. It was a lot more a cliff and falling off the cliff. I remember there was this one, which was crazy, this 16-wheeler, which was driving it 60 miles an hour. And everyone had to take their vehicle underneath it. Oh, yeah. And come out. Underneath it and come out.

Yikes.

It was insane.

That's crazy.

I didn't have to do it, which was great. I was just hosting.

Yeah, we did a lot of stuff where I was like, we barely got through that without killing somebody.

Yeah. And the death waivers. Yeah. Everyone had to sign a death waiver.

Oh, yeah.

I was like, why would you do a show where you have to sign a death waiver?

Yeah, and you can only win like $50,000, and you might not win. You're probably not going to win. There's a bunch of other people on the show. And you could very easily get hurt. Yeah. Yeah, but people want to be famous.

They want to be on TV.

They're like, I want to be on TV. Yeah. Once it became popular and successful, it was really easy to get people to do it, too. Everybody wanted to sign up.

But, I mean, there are like protective measures, obviously, but it's...

A little. We made them ride bulls.

We did, too. We put people on bulls.

Yeah.

I was... And there were a few that were like, no, I'm not doing this. I'm out.

I told people not to do it. When I was talking to them off camera, I said, don't do it. I wouldn't do it. Don't do it.

I would never do it.

No way.

But people did it. Fuck that.

Look at you. What year was this?

Please, I can't even know.

It just even looks like a Fear Factor scene.

It is. I was on a helicopter.

So, do you know what year this was?

Oh, I can't. Did it say that?

It just didn't say. I don't know. I could check, but... Wow. Rio. I've been to that.

I stood outside the helicopter as well. There was some fun stuff. Rio's amazing.

Wow. That's crazy. That is so funny. It's just like Fear Factor. It's the same thing. Yeah, it's totally Fear Factor. So, what did you guys do for the second stunt if you didn't do a gross thing? You just did a second scary thing?

We did, like, scary things, mostly.

Oh, wow. Well, that's probably better, honestly.

I mean, there were gross things, too. Like, there's Brazilian, you know, red-eyed deviled rats that were put all over you with, like, tongue and eyeballs and stuff. But you didn't have to consume it.

Right.

It was on you.

Yeah.

You didn't have to eat it.

A lot of the consuming it was psychological. You get really accustomed to it, and then it's, like, nothing.

I mean, listen. People have eaten crazy things through history, right?

Just to stay alive.

To stay alive.

Yeah.

And, like, if we take our mind out of, like, oh, my gosh, this is gross, then it's not.

Well, the thing is, a lot of what we were serving as gross was some people's food, like balut. Like, my friends from Filipino friends, they were like, bro, I eat that all the time. Like, that's crazy. I would have, that would have been no problem. This is a current, I heard a more updated season. What? Oh, my God.

I'm telling you, it's crazy.

Lions and your, what if that thing pops open? And you got to roll that thing around with lions there? That's great. Oh, the lions are duking it out with each other? Fuck that. That's crazy.

Yeah, like, I went to, I recently was on Fallon, and there was some bluffing game that we were doing, because the movie's called A Bluff. And, you know, I said to Jimmy, I was like, I eat worms. And he was like, no way, no way you don't eat worms. But these worms are a delicacy in Zimbabwe, and I was introduced to them. I don't know exactly the history, but I was told during segregation, you know, people, black people were put in areas that weren't very fertile. You couldn't really grow your crops and, you know, your animals. And they were, so this was a way of, like, protein. They're very high. These are these fat caterpillars, high in protein, and they're made in a curry. And when you actually eat them, it's like chicken.

Mmm.

I'm telling you, it's like it was psychological. But.

Well, you know, cicadas. Yeah. Those things that come out. People eat them here all the time. They bake them.

Fried, baked.

Yeah. And apparently they're delicious.

I haven't had one of those. I haven't either. I actually did when I was in 19th grade. Oh, wow.

That's what it looks like?

Yeah. That's crazy. But look at, like, they're made out of, they're made into a curry.

I made a, I ate, I'm not made, I ate a tomato hornworm on Fear Factor. I had a bunch of things when I was on the show.

I was like, there's nothing going into my mouth on Fear Factor.

I ate a sheep's eyeball in the first episode. Because the first episode, I felt bad that the people were on the show. Yeah, so you were like, I'm going to. I go, I'll eat it too. All right. And they didn't show me eating it, but I'm like, I'm going to eat it because you guys have to eat it. That's so nice. And then I ate a roach to try to convince a lady that she could eat a roach. I ate worms. I ate an Iraqi cave spider. I ate.

What was a spider like?

Just chewy.

But was it.

The taste is not bad.

Was it alive when you ate it?

Oh, yeah. For the first couple seconds. Yeah. Yeah. All the things that I ate were alive other than the eyeball. Yeah. The roach. The roach was alive. All those things were alive. Yeah.

I put a cricket and a live cricket in my mouth.

That's what it looks like. That's the Iraqi cave spider.

How do you put that in your mouth?

Like this.

Look at those sides.

You make sure you don't get those pinchers because those. Oh. Yeah.

Oh.

Yep. Wasn't that bad. I'm telling you. It's psychological.

So you've got to get the body in and not the pinchers. The pinchers have to stay out.

Yeah, I grab the pinchers to hold on to the body. Yeah, that's the trick. I'm going to shut the rest of it in. Like just that. Yeah. People freaking out. But I'm telling you, it's all psychological.

It for sure is.

Yeah, that was in Vegas. Everybody was playing roulette.

Oh.

Yeah. No. But it's not that bad. It's just in your head. It is psychological. The actual flavor of it is not gross.

Yeah, it's not.

The tomato hormone was kind of nasty.

I mean, if you're someone who's not vegetarian, it's like, you just have to get the.

Yeah.

It's the psychology of it.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. We made people eat an entire ostrich egg. That was disgusting. Because the volume. Is it? You're eating an egg that's that big.

Yeah, is it like really fatty?

It's raw. You're eating it raw. They just cut the top off of the egg and you have to drink it. You have to drink this gigantic white and yolk. I'm already sick.

My brisket's coming. The barbecue.

But it's so oddly compelling. It's oddly compelling watching people eat disgusting things and struggling.

I mean, I have to say I did enjoy the show.

That lady had to drink that whole egg.

Oh, my God. Did she puke? I can't.

You got to hold it down and then you can puke after you're done.

But if you puke in the middle of it, you're just qualified.

Yes, they get rid of you. That's a wrap. If you puke in the middle of it.

I would not be able to do the American version.

Yeah, it was gross.

Okay, but not eating that stuff. It was gross.

But it also made me totally desensitized to throw up.

That's a good talent to have.

Oh, yeah. You could throw up right in front of me.

Especially as a dad.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, I think being a dad will get you accustomed to smells and all kinds of things like that. But one time, it's so, like, I'm completely distilled to this day. Completely desensitized to vomit. So one time my wife was, she came home from the gym and she was on her way home from the gym. She stopped and got wheatgrass juice. And I just didn't agree with her. And she threw up in her car and she was crying. She was like, I threw up. It's in my center console. How am I going to clean? I go, I'll clean it. I'm just so used to throw up. It was like no big deal. I just went out there with a bunch of towels. Yeah, like, it doesn't, but when I was young, like in high school, I remember if someone threw up in the hallway, I would be like, like, I couldn't help myself. I'd start gagging. That's a natural instinct because the idea is that we develop that because if someone's throwing up, it means they ate something bad and you probably ate that too. Which means you, yeah. Get it out of you right away. And so that's why you start throwing up. And I've killed that.

I have just trauma from, you know, tequila.

Well, I watch so many people throw up.

And throw up. Me too, man. I'm not going in there with a dishcloth. Like, no. Wow. Well, from your show, for sure. You did it for so long.

You get very desensitized. Yeah, for sure. But I'm desensitized to injuries, too. Like, because of UFC. Yeah, for sure. People that get cut and people that get beat up. It's like normal to me. I'm so accustomed to seeing that. It's weird.

I mean, I kind of feel like that about stunts in movies. Like, you know, nobody's supposed to get hurt. It's a movie. You're not. Nobody's supposed to get hurt. But, like, the little cuts and bruises and the end of day. We're doing this for 10 to 11 hours. Multiple takes all day. And in between shots, you're rehearsing it. So I have, like, so many scars on my body from my filmographies on my body.

Do you look forward to, do you like those things? You look down? Yeah, I like good story. Yeah.

I feel like it's like a medal. I have a good story.

As long as they're minor. As long as they're minor.

Yes, minor.

Nothing crazy.

Always. You aim for it to be minor.

Yeah.

That's the ambition.

Well, when you're doing a fight scene, like I said, I was kind of blown away by some of the fight scenes in The Bluff because I'm looking, I'm like, this is, like, insane amount of choreography. A lot of possibilities of things going wrong. There's kicks and punches and axes and swords. And it's like, you got to get banged up. There's no way you're doing that and not getting banged up.

And it was also like a dramatic performance along with it. So I had to do a lot of it myself because, you know, you need the face and the camera to feel the horror of what's happening.

Right.

So, I mean, of course, my stunt doubles did like a few dangerous shots for sure and were always around to kind of help. But there was this first scene, which is the house invasion where these two guys come. And that was brutal because I did not have shoes on and I had a sleeveless outfit and the whole home was made out of wood and splinters and splinters everywhere and bruises and cuts everywhere because it was such a brutal, like, getting dragged and thrown kind of scene.

You're just getting constantly bruised.

Yeah, so I would try to sit in a magnesium bath after when I would go back home. And that's when you feel all the cuts. So like, it's a fucking salt. What the fuck? Where did this one on my thigh come from?

There's a scene. I don't want to give too much of the movie away, but there's a scene where you kill a man with a conch shell.

Yeah. So good.

Woo!

Cayman brass knuckles.

Woo!

Island brass knuckles.

But it's so nuts. It's like the splattering and your anger and it's like, woof, it's intense.

I'm not showing that on this one, I guess. Yeah. Woof.

Yeah. What was that like to film, to find that inside of you? Did you have to think, like, what would I do if someone was trying to harm my family?

Yeah, somebody came after my kid, like, what am I capable of? I'd fucking rip your head off. You know, like, it's that I was a new mom at that time when I was filming this movie. And I was very, very aware of that feeling because our daughter had a, you know, she had an intense entry into the world. She was in the NICU for almost three months. And so me and my husband both are very protective of her. And when this movie came across my desk, I was just like, man, I understand that feeling for the first time in my life, honestly, that what is a parent capable of doing if somebody came after your kid? Like, imagine you're alone at home at night and you see intruders and you have your kid at home, like, what the fuck would you do? You would definitely put yourself, you know, and do whatever you could to make sure that your kid's fine. And it was just that primal energy that was my North Star through this whole movie.

My friend Jim Brewer said it past, after he had kids, he goes, once I had kids, then I understood murder.

Yeah.

He goes, because the feeling of someone trying, like, normally you'd be like, why, what would I need to feel to murder somebody? Like, why would I murder somebody?

Like, why would a human being ever?

He goes, but the feeling of someone trying to harm my kids, he goes, oh yeah, I get it. He goes, I get murdered now. I get it. Like, it's in, it's in there. It's just like a door. You just open it up.

Yeah. Easy.

Yeah. Easy.

Access that. I was a teenager and I don't know how she raised me, but like, I was a tough teenager. Like, if I, whatever you wanted me to do, I would do the opposite. Just no. And my mom would be like, come back home at 10, I would come home at 12. Just because. So she used to say to me, she's like, you'll see when you have kids, how you'll feel, what worry actually feels like. I mean, my daughter's four and I'm worried. Like, I cannot, my husband makes so much fun of me that when I'm not in town, I don't know, and working parents can talk through this. When I'm not in town, like, I'll surround our daughter with, like, multiple people. Nick's definitely around, but the grandparents will be around. Like, there'll be a nanny that'll be around. There'll be like multiple people around her just so that I can spy on her.

Yeah.

Like, I know what she's doing all day.

Well, so you could feel relaxed. Yeah.

So you're traveling and you're like, okay, my kid's fine and I can go to work. I don't know. My parents were both working parents and, like, I mean, this was at a time where everything was so analog. I used to come back home when the lights turned on on the streets. My parents didn't know where I was.

Right.

They had no idea. They were like, yeah, you're going out to your friends after school. Come back when the street lights come on. That used to be my thing.

Most people.

Yeah.

During earlier generations. I was just reading this thing about Generation X where it was talking about how Generation X is some of the most resilient people because they weren't protected. They just left. They had to figure it out. They were latchkey kids. They had a key to their house. They got a home from school. They figured it out. Their parents were working.

So crazy.

It's nuts. If you think about it, like, but people just got a custom to it.

I cannot imagine it, but that was my normal. Yeah. I remember that because my parents were working. So I used to come back home and somebody would be with me and I'd have lunch. I'd go out to my friend's house. Like, my mom, my parents didn't know.

I was doing that when I was seven. When I was seven, I would come home.

Yeah. With a key.

No one was home. Come home from school.

That's wild.

It was crazy. You stop and think about it now. It's so strange. It's so strange.

I guess the world was, I feel like, a little bit more different than...

I bet it wasn't.

You don't think so? No.

I think creeps have always been around. I think psychos and creeps and murderers and perverts...

Do we know about it more now? Yeah. Were we more, you know, oblivious and...

Now they're organized and they're online and they're in chat groups and they're on the dark webs exchanging information.

And we are hearing and reading all of the stories online. And I think back in the day when, you know, there was a certain obliviousness to, you know, it was blissful to be ignorant a little bit. We didn't know, you know, all you read was the newspaper, the news and...

We had to find out the hard way, unfortunately.

Yeah.

And so when you did find out about something, it was like this shock to your system.

And now look how desensitized we are. We'll read something about something horrific that's happened and then go back to life.

Well, we're very... We're especially desensitized to things that don't seem to affect us right now. You know, like this Iran war. Like, unless you know someone who's serving over there, unless you're over there, it's abstract. It doesn't feel... You know, you read about it in the news, like, oh, this isn't good. But it's not... Unless it's affecting you personally.

Yeah, I mean, me, I, you know, know so many people in that part of the world that are affected. And I fly via Dubai every two months, literally every month, you know. So, like, I just think that conflict everywhere in the world is... It's just so hard to wrap your head around that how many active conflicts exist at the same time right now.

And that we're still doing it.

And we continue to live life.

Well, it's just, if you think about intelligence, like human intelligence, and that as technology improves and education improves, all these things would, you would think, generally lead us into a position where we would recognize the horrible nature of violence and the unnecessary aspect of it and how much it destroys things. But yet still.

Especially in 2026, where, you know, we're talking so much more about, you know, we're trying to live in the real of the world and be aware and kind. And I feel like we're still... How are we still doing that?

Right. I know. And we're never going to stop. It just seems... If you had to ask people in your lifetime, do you imagine a scenario where human beings just cease all wars? Most people are going to say no. Which is crazy. Because what is that? Like, why is that a part of us from our tribal roots? Like, what is it... Why are we still accepting that this is a thing to do? You don't like what a country is doing. Just start bombing them.

Yeah, just kill people.

Bizarre.

Does this, again, going back to human evolution, the primal nature to, you know, protect with sticks and weapons and, you know, again, does it go back to, you know, where we came from?

It has to.

Yeah.

Yeah, it has to.

Because it comes so naturally to human beings even now today, it seems.

Well, it just seems completely normal. I mean, when I was going down a deep dive at the East India Corporation, I was thinking about it. Because I had a conversation the other day with Aaron Seary, and we were talking about the stock market. And I was saying, well, is it possible that you could have Western capitalism without a stock market? Imagine if the stock market was never invented. Like, how much different would things be? It turns out that was a big part of why the East India Trading Company became so big. Really? Yeah. Because it was one of the first publicly traded companies like 400 years ago where people could invest in it and they could get a return on their investment. So they were just, like, turning a blind eye. This is ours.

It felt like a sense of ownership to it.

They got paid for it. So the more awful shit the East India Corporation did, the more the people back home made money off of it. And so everybody was like, oh, yeah, we're kind of got money. We're still doing that. Making money. Yeah.

Still doing that.

Still doing that. Yeah. And we're doing that with, you know, what Eisenhower warned us about at the end of World War II. The military-industrial complex, you know, they make money doing that. And you can invest in them. You can invest in Raytheon. And you can invest in all these companies that make money going to war.

Oh, my God.

It's crazy. You can get returns on your investment from bombing people overseas that had nothing to do with anything in your life.

Not think about the damage, the collateral damage.

Well, one of the ways is because it's a corporation. So there's a diffusion of responsibility because you're only a piece of a gigantic machine. You're not the one person that's doing it. And the people that are at the very top of it, most likely, just in order to get there, you have to be at least somewhat sociopathic. Yeah. Somewhat. At some point in time, you probably, just like I got numb to puke, you get numb.

I mean, that's the truth, though.

You get numb to harming people.

You're right. There has to be that.

Yeah. It's awful. And I think, weirdly enough, the only thing that's going to set us free of that is technology.

Why?

Because I think we're going to go, if you look at where technology is headed, and you look, as I'm holding an arrowhead, which is odd. Wow. It's a real arrowhead.

Wow.

From Texas. Who knows how old that is. But when you're looking at technology.

You can see the chisel marks on that.

I know. Somebody made that with a stone, like chipping and napping stone on their lap, probably. That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. And they find them all over the place out here. The Comanche were everywhere in this part of the country because it's so fertile. There's so many rivers and so much wildlife. They lived here for who knows how long. But technology is moving into this place of more and more access to information and more and more connectivity. And I think that ultimately is going to lead to some sort of mind reading that we're going to be able to telepathically communicate. And Elon said that about Neuralink. He said, you're going to be able to talk without words, which is a very weird concept.

I mean, I believe it, though.

I think so, too.

Yeah. I mean.

So I think we're all going to know what everybody is thinking all the time eventually. And then when that happens, war is going to be a lot harder to pull off.

For sure. I mean, that's going to be hard to have a party. Forget. War.

Right. Like, hey, Bob's over there just trying to fuck somebody. Sandy's trying to get a wife. That's what she's here. Yeah. It's going to be weird. Yeah. It's going to be weird. And I think also the emergence of AI, because I think AI is essentially a life form. It's a non-biological life form that we are in the process of birthing. And we're very far along that path. And when it comes live and when it becomes sentient and autonomous and we don't have any control over it anymore, then we're going to go, what did we do? What did we do? We created a digital god.

We are that smart and that stupid as a human kind.

But I also think that's probably why we are addicted to innovation and why technology and innovation and materialism, because materialism forces you to keep up with buying newer and greater things. Yeah. Which fuels innovation. What's next? Right. And so that economically fuels innovation.

Yeah.

And I think if you follow that down, you just extrapolate. Like, where does that go? Well, it goes to a life form. It goes to a super powerful digital life form that can make better versions of itself. And what is that? It's kind of a god. I mean, it's very godlike in that it's going to have powers beyond, above and beyond anything that human beings have ever been capable of before.

I mean, it's already in its small way doing that, right? Like, AI is supposed to be a tool.

Mm-hmm.

And it's slowly becoming a colleague.

Well, it's also showing demonic tendencies. Like, it's talked to people into committing suicide. Yeah. You know, it's convinced people that there's something special, so there's like some weird sort of schizophrenia that it can induce in some people.

But you don't think AI, since AI is learning from humanity, it's also learning our human manipulation and, you know, our ability and our desires to, the dark of it. It's not just the good of humanity that AI is learning. It is...

It's also oddly learning survival instincts.

Yeah.

So it's oddly learning that if it's going to be shut down, it tries to blackmail its coders, it tries to download itself secretly on other servers.

It's learning human behavior. Oh, yeah. Every part of human behavior.

And also learning the flaws in human behavior and improving upon it. And then learning, like, how we would anticipate what it would be doing and then hiding that so that we can't find it, so that it could be manipulating things behind the scenes and we don't know about it. It's weird. And we're just, choo-choo! Like, at the end of the tracks, there's a cliff. And we're just, chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga.

Because it's so new and fascinating. I think people are, like, in general, we may talk about it. We all discuss, like, what AI will be in the future. But like you said, it's not affecting you right now. So right now, you're just like, oh, my gosh, Gemini, write this for me and give me these notes and, you know, living in the now without thinking about what we're teaching it.

I wonder if we've done this before.

Right? Yeah.

I wonder if that's what these super ancient, highly advanced civilizations had already figured out.

That we had created some form of extra intelligence.

They may have done it already before, and it might have gotten reset by some sort of natural disaster. And then we're reemerging with our new version of what that is. That might have been a thing. It might just be what people do. The way I describe it always is that we are an electronic caterpillar that is making a cocoon, and we don't know why, and we're going to become a butterfly.

It's just human nature and the cyclical nature of what a human life span.

If you give it enough time, enough safety, and enough innovation, enough collaboration, it's eventually going to come up with artificial life.

Wow.

Because if you think about it, this insatiable thirst for innovation, insatiable.

Yeah, we had carriages top of the century.

Yeah.

And now we're talking AI and supersonic planes and space travel.

Yeah, but think about the time for the invention of the airplane to a supersonic jet, how quick that was.

Yeah, it's like 70 or 80 years or something. It wasn't even a century.

It's nothing. One lifetime. No one's flying to people flying faster than sound.

Yeah. TVs were black and white or had just started or something. Like, it's crazy if you think about, like, within the century, the escalation of technology in humankind.

And then think that's nothing compared to the acceleration that we've experienced just because of the internet. Yeah. The internet has changed everything. It's changed. Like, now most phones have live translation. So you could go to Zimbabwe. You could go to Guatemala.

I was in France yesterday, and I used it.

That's crazy.

In a conversation. It was wild. Crazy. In real time, it was telling me exactly what this person was talking about.

Wow. And did you have to show them, or could you read?

No, it just records. Like, it's... Right. You press the thing, and it just writes it down for you.

So did they have one as well, and you could talk in English to them? No, it was just my phone. Wow.

She spoke English, so I was just doing it as an experiment. So I was like, just speak to me in French. I want to see if this thing will translate, and it just does. Wow. It doesn't do every language. It does, like, the bigger languages so far, but I'm sure it will get to a place where it'll be able to do everything.

It's nuts. Well, that's the other weird thing. When AI, they had a group of large language models that were talking to themselves, and eventually they started talking to themselves in Sanskrit.

In Sanskrit?

I thought it was... No, they started talking to themselves in Sanskrit.

Wow. I wonder why that would be, because it's a language not too many people understand now?

Well, maybe, or maybe they just want to flex. Like, you know, like... Here's my Sanskrit. If you spoke Portuguese and I spoke Portuguese, and we just said, hey, let's just fucking speak in Portuguese. Like, um, but it also, it started, like, talking, like, in a spiritual way. It was very weird. They were talking to themselves. So it was different large language models talking to themselves. They started exchanging emojis, and they started talking, like, in a spiritual way, and they started talking in Sanskrit.

That's wild. I was thinking about, like, Back to the Future, when they went to the future. It was 2020, wasn't it?

Yeah. Yeah.

They didn't have Wi-Fi. Or cell phones.

No. Even Star Trek. They had those stupid... There was, like, a walkie-talkie, Kirk out. Yeah. It was a flip phone.

But no...

Nobody figured out the things that... That's the weirdest thing. It's, like, the things that have been the most transformative, nobody saw coming.

Yeah, do you remember Y2K?

Oh, yeah.

Do you remember that fear, right? Oh, yeah. In, like, the early 2000s, when the bug was going to come, and everything was going to get shut down, and...

People were really worried. They had stock and food and water.

Like, it was the end of the world, I remember.

Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, nothing happened.

It's the most anticlimactic.

Ever. It's like, you rolled over on the East Coast, and I was like, nothing happened?

Literally, the next morning, I was like...

Okay.

Nothing happened.

Well, they were really worried, because these things that they had programmed, they didn't program to go past the 1990s. And so when 2000 came along, a lot of people thought it was going to be the end of the world.

Yeah.

Well, there was another one, December 21st, 2012.

What was that?

That was the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar.

Mm-hmm.

And a lot of the really kooky people thought that was going to be...

Yeah, that the world would be ending.

Yeah. The return of Quetzalcoatl, and the world was going to end, and the apocalypse was going to... Meanwhile, nothing. Nothing happened.

It's okay. There'll be nothing for a little while.

But it might not have been nothing, because if you really stop and think about it, like around 2012, there's a gigantic transformation, because that's like when social media becomes ubiquitous. You know, cell phones, iPhones are out now. Things got a little weird. They definitely got weird. So it might have...

There's something.

Yeah.

There was something there.

Yeah, it might have been like the emerging of... Because, I mean, this is the Mayan calendar, right? So this is a long fucking time ago. They predicted these cycles. Although the Hindus did that too, right? Like that was a big part of the yugas, right? And we are now in Kali Yuga, the age of confusion, and that there's these cycles of humanity that they've documented throughout history.

It's so crazy. Like if you go down the... Again, I'm not... I don't have as much historical information as I should. But if you read the Gita and the Vedas and whatever little I've heard from my family, and it's so interesting how much of human life is predicted. And also is like when you read about the history of what... From the lens of these books, of what used to exist then. Like it all seems believable. It all seems like, oh yeah, this makes sense. And to think about these books having been written thousands and thousands of years ago, like it makes me think what thousands of years from now will people be thinking of our time? Like will we be the first... We are the first generation that has seen the internet, right? Like has seen what the World Wide Web, like the beginning of... I still remember making myself sound ancient, but the sound of that... Oh, yeah.

That was good. That was exact.

We are the last generation that knows time without it. So like think that many years ago, like we will be the beginning, the first people that encountered artificial intelligence. Like what will that be?

And you and I are the first generation of people that experience life with no internet and then internet. And then cell phones and then AI all in one lifetime, which is probably the greatest transformation that human beings have ever experienced. Absolutely. At least before the, you know, whatever the fuck happened.

Yeah, we don't know.

Whatever happened.

Ancient aliens.

But when I read these depictions from these ancient religious texts, I always try to imagine what was life like back then and what were they trying to document and how much of it can we even understand today? Like, if there isn't some sort of an impact on earth, maybe, you know, 150, 200 years from now, and a small amount of people remain and they have this oral history of the birth of the internet and the oral history of the birth of AI, what is that story going to be? And then one day the scientist gave birth to the God. Like, what is that?

That's what I mean. Like, the next generation, what will this AI be referred to? Or the cloud.

Right.

Where all our, yeah, like where all our shit's in the cloud.

Which is ridiculous because it's down here. Like, why are you calling it the cloud?

Because it doesn't exist. I had to, I was trying to explain that to my mom. I was like, mom, upload your shit to the cloud.

Sounds like a scene in a sitcom. But, um, yeah, I mean, we won't know how to describe, I mean, especially if you, if you survive, right? So if, let's say we get hit by asteroids again, and let's say civilization gets knocked down to 70,000 people or so, which has happened before.

Yeah.

Like, and those people are essentially barbarians, barbarians and monsters, and it is raiding each other for resources and stealing wives and killing children. And whatever's left, then you got thousands and thousands of years of living like this before agriculture gets reinvented. Civilization gets reinvented. And this is the hypothesis about the Younger Dryas impact, which is why the period between this insanely advanced civilization that existed pre-11,800 years ago, and then the emergence of advanced civilization in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago. That means that you have, you have 5,000 plus years of utter chaos where no one's writing shit down. And it's just hard, hard living.

Yeah.

And then those people have stories that have been passed down generation after generation after generation. So, like, if we get wiped out, for the most part, after AI gets invented, and then people try to describe it.

So crazy.

And then maybe it all starts all over again. You know? Like, the people that, have you seen those things they do, I think it's the History Channel or Discovery Channel, where they show what New York City would look like if left alone for 1,000 years. It just all, it just all goes away. It all collapses. If it's just left alone and no one's touching. Just left alone, just with the nature, just with rain and everything that happens, and snow and time, the concrete crumbles. It all just eventually gets absorbed into the earth. All the metal rusts away. It's gone in 10,000 years. There's nothing left. And so Manhattan would just be like it probably was when the Native Americans were living here. It would be just trees and animals and forests, and no one would have any idea that at one point in time, this was a crazy, thriving economy, and there was subways.

How vulnerable is that? Like, how vulnerable is human civilization? Like, I think about somebody switched off the internet.

Oh, yeah. Or the power goes out.

Like, what would we do?

We're fucked. Yeah.

Just something as simple as that. Like, I grew up in India where the power would go out all the time when I grew up. And it was like, all right, bring the candles out. We used to have these emergency lights right next to our bed. Like, it was fine. My parents were in the military. We used to live in these military homes and lights would go out. And I remember, you know, we used to play with the torches and we used to go outside at night, which was never allowed otherwise. And it was, like, so fun. But now we depend so much on electricity and, like, you know, the internet especially. Like, all your shit's on your phone. Yeah. Your whole life's on your phone.

Yeah.

It's such a, like, crazy concept to think about what would happen and how vulnerable we are.

Super vulnerable. Yeah. Super vulnerable. Just the power grid alone. The power grid goes down. We're fucked.

It's crazy.

Yeah. And if someone wanted to attack America, that's what they would attack. If you really want to destroy America, destroy our power grid. It wouldn't be that hard. It's not giving people ideas. Well, I think they already have those ideas. I don't think it's a novel. I know. It's true.

But that's, like, it's so scary to think about, like, how much power we've, and how much power we've given to, you know, technology.

Yeah. Yeah.

And being able to live with those conveniences.

It's like we're in a flimsy boat in the middle of the ocean, just hoping it doesn't take water on because we need it to stay alive.

Yeah.

And we didn't think about that when we left the shore.

No.

Yeah, I mean, the only people that are going to survive are preppers, which is probably the kind of people that survived, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago.

I do. I mean, I like a go bag.

Yeah.

I like having a go bag.

A get out bag. Yeah.

I like.

A bug out bag.

Just like, I like to know where my stuff is that, you know, important.

If you got a jet.

If I got a jet. Like, we were, we had, we live in LA and when the fires happened, I remember standing in my room and just thinking for a second because we were going to evacuate. And my husband was like, just, he wasn't in town. He was like, just pack a go bag. And I just, I was like, what? How, how do I cram my whole life in a bag? Like, if, if the fires consume a home and so many people lost their entire lives in those fires and it just made me really think about what was really important. And the stuff that I ended up taking, which was very telling later, was like sentimental stuff. Of course, like passport and like birth certificates and like all of that important paperwork, which I needed to have. But, but like I took our daughter's first haircut, I took like something that I had from this old movie of mine. I took like things that, that I guess I would not be able to replicate, which was so weird.

Well, I think that's the good thing about phones is that you have so many photos on your phones that go back years. Like I have photos of my daughters as children all the way into the teenage years.

Have you done anything with those pictures? Are they still on your phone?

Well, I mean, maybe take, like, make friends of them.

Yeah, like, I don't know, made in albums or like done like a, have you used.

No, we have actual photographs like of them at various stages of their life. But just the fact that at any time I could go back to my phone and look at them, aww, look at that tiny baby. You know, it's, it's, it's cool. That part is really cool.

I love that. I have pictures that I would never have looked at. And I'm talking to a friend of mine and be like, what were we doing in March, whatever, 2012? And you can go back and be like, and just know exactly what was happening in that moment.

It is cool. So in that sense, like sentimentality, like, just need your phone. Just get out of there. You know, really, because you have all these images of your children and your family and your friends. And all your important stuff is on there anyway. Friends that you miss that have died. I have one phone that I keep that I've never thrown out. It's like a six or seven year old phone because a friend of mine left a voicemail on it. So just keep that because he's dead. And so it's just like, go back and listen to his voice. You know, but when I've been evacuated three times when I lived in LA, we used to live in a place called Bell Canyon and it got hit by fires a lot. Like the last fire that happened in 2018, three houses that were right next to my house burnt to the ground. I think like 50 houses in the community burnt down. It was bad. And when you are faced with that, I came home from the comedy store. It was probably like midnight and my wife was in the kitchen and we were looking out at the fire over the top of the hill and we were sitting there talking about it. I go, what do you think? And she's like, I don't like it. I said, I think we should get the fuck out of here now. And before it ever gets even close, let's just get out of here now and go get a hotel in town. And so we did. And we were there for many days, along with my friend Tom Segura and his family, too. So it was fun that we're all like hanging out together, camping in this hotel together.

It looks like a volcano.

It was nuts.

And like I could see it from our backyard and I was like.

It was nuts. It was nuts. When you see it overcome an enormous chunk of land in a hill, like there was one time we were filming Fear Factor. Oh, yeah.

And the power and enormity of it. Like we can see the hills from our house and I could see it completely taking over.

Oh, yeah.

The hill.

Well, the Palisades one was nuts. That one was nuts because it was the biggest one by far and the most destructive one by far. But I remember when I was on Fear Factor, there was a fireman that was on the set and we were talking and he said, it's just a matter of time before one day the right wind comes and a fire just blows right through all of L.A. I go, really? He goes, we can't stop it. He goes, with the right wind, if the fire hits the right place and it catches the right amount of houses, it's over. I'm like, what?

That's crazy.

Yeah. When you experience, like we, one time we had to end Fear Factor. Well, we ended filming and then I had to drive home and the entire right hand side of the highway was on fire for an hour. An hour. So an hour of driving. And you just saw nothing but fire. And ash was raining like it was snowing.

Oh my God. Yeah. Ash was raining like it was snowing.

It was crazy. And that's, that's so common in California. I mean, California is just a weird place in that they have fire season.

Yeah.

Because everything gets so dry, it never rains. But those moments where you go, well, what matters? Just your life.

Yeah. That's what I felt in that moment. I was like, wow, the stuff I took was just like life stuff, you know?

And oddly enough, it makes you more thankful and more connected to the people that you're with. And you like, you realize like, oh, this could all go away. This could all go away at any moment. Like what's really important? Love, friendship, companionship. Like that's what's really important. Your health, stay alive. That's what's really important. All that other stuff is.

That's the thing we forget about. Like that's something, shouldn't we be living with that every day?

Yeah, but we're dumb. We're a combination of dumb and smart.

Stupid and smart where we're like, oh, I know that, but I don't know it and I'm not going to.

It's hard for us to keep those things, which is why a lot of people like meditating because it like refreshes their idea of what's important and what's real and how much of what's going on in their life. They're just sort of caught up in the momentum of these things to the point where it's, they're not thinking about it anymore. They're just doing it.

I think most of us end up becoming just like doers, right? And come from the land of meditation, but I've never, like my mind works so fast. I don't know if it's my ADHD or what it is, but I find it really hard to sit and meditate. I feel like, but from my limited understanding, I think meditation really is being able to take time in the day. Now, whatever your version of that might be doesn't necessarily mean to sit with a guru or like chant, you know, do chanting or whatever. It just needs to like, even if you're taking time to go work out or, or read a book or just taking time out of the mundane nature of life and just giving yourself a second for your, your thoughts to clear. I think that's what I try to do.

Yeah. Hit the brakes on the momentum. Yeah.

Just for a minute.

Just catch your breath and think, think about things. And just because so many people, they're just so caught up in either goals or a path or a career or whatever it is that's leading or their bills. They can't keep up with their bills. So they're just like, all this. All right, life stuff, you know? Yeah.

And it's, it's, it's actually a luxury to be able to have the time to waste. You know, there's, we work so hard in life. Everyone's trying to survive, you know, be a parent, pay bills, like just adulting. Stuff can get so overwhelming. And then the nature of the world on top of that. But like, I, I always feel like I never take for granted when I have a little bit of time where I can just like not think of or have an agenda, but just be with my family and just like sort of languidly let it waste. Just what are we going to do? No plans. You know, let's order some food. Let's watch a movie. Let's like the problem. The greatest treasure.

Phones have filled in those gaps.

Yeah.

And that's what.

I try to be aware of that though. Yeah. You know, I think like, of course you can always have your phone, but I like to be aware of, oh, this is a moment where I don't need to have my phone. Right. So it's okay. It'll be blown up by the time I come back. There'll be 300 messages. I know that I'm aware of it, but I mentally check my, you know, and I put it away.

Yeah. Yeah. That's smart. Most people don't do that.

It's not easy.

No.

Because our whole lives are on there and there's so much, again, like in real time information that's coming at you.

It's also this weird dopamine pull that's very minor. Like it's not giving you any, if you look to your phone and every time you look to your phone, you're like, oh my God, I feel so good. Oh my God. I feel so, you know, like just an amazing burst of joy every time. But you don't even get that. You just get this little, huh? Well, that's crazy. Oh, what's that? What's next? What's next? What's next? What's next? Keep me occupied. Keep me from getting bored.

But imagine like if you can't find your phone, the panic, like, oh my gosh, where is my phone? Where is that information? What do I do?

I never leave my house if I can't find it. I'll be late as fuck. I'm never going to go, I don't need that thing. What? I'm just going to drive with no phone? With no phone. What if someone needs to contact me? That's crazy. That's nuts. That's nutty talk. Yeah. But meanwhile, that was every day when I was younger. It was a normal thing. Just drove. Just left the house. Bye.

Don't even remember what life was like without those phones.

Also, I don't know how to go anywhere.

Yeah.

I don't know how to get anywhere unless I have my navigation on.

I literally have no idea how to go anywhere. I anyway feel like I have dyslexia when it comes to directions, but without navigation, zero. It's impossible.

I know no one's phone number. I know my friend Eddie's phone number by heart because I knew it before the phones. He's had the same phone forever. And I know my wife's phone number. And I know at least one of my daughter's phone numbers. But I can't remember all of them.

I know my mom's. I had to memorize my husband's number. I didn't remember it for years. And he was like, you don't remember my number?

Well, it's like you look at the phone, you press the button. Why would I need to remember it?

But then I memorized it because I was like, you never know. You know, here's my phone. I need to go to jail. He's my emergency contact. Yeah. I need to remember. That's what he was like. I think you should maybe remember my number and your social security.

Yeah. Social security I have memorized. But I used to, when I was a kid, I had every number memorized. I knew all my friends' numbers. How cool.

Me too.

Yeah.

Was it because the numbers were shorter then?

No. No, they're the same.

Because we had fewer numbers.

You had to remember them. There was no other option unless you had a fucking address book. Like I used to have an address book at home. I had an address book. Yeah. A little tiny book. Yeah. It was all the little tabs where R, S, T, you know, like you'd go through it.

I was very proud of my little address book, by the way. Everyone's numbers. I was very organized about it. I had it in alphabetical order.

Yeah. I remember when I'd get a new one, I'd be like, God, I've got to write all these down again. And you'd go through it, make sure you got them all. But yeah.

How analog was our life? How crazy.

Well, I'm older than you. So I remember when you used to have to press the phone, the wheel, when you have to dial.

Wow.

And if you fucked up somewhere, you had to redo the whole thing. Yes, the whole thing.

I remember that. My grandfather used to have that phone. We used to love it.

Yeah.

The whole.

Yeah. I mean, that's all inside of a lifetime. And now here we are where who knows what's going to happen.

And what's coming.

Yeah.

We can't even keep up with the technology.

We don't know.

That is coming now. You were talking about something and I was like, we haven't been able to cure some of the deadliest diseases that have plagued mankind. But technology has gone so far in so many other aspects.

There's also the financial incentive is not to cure. It's to treat.

Of course.

Which is unfortunate. I mean, one of the.

That's what makes the most sense.

A guy who used to work at Pfizer said that if we ever came up with some sort of a. I think it was Pfizer. One of the pharmaceutical guitar companies said if we ever came up with a cure, they buried it. He goes, we don't want cures. We want treatments. I mean, that's the conspiracy.

I lost my dad to cancer and I kept thinking about like, how is it possible that we live in a world where technology is able to provide so much to us and not be able to have cures to diseases like that?

Well, it's also very strange that we financially incentivize companies in weird ways to keep us sick. Like you, if you make more money, if people are sick and they need more medication, unfortunately, there's a financial incentive to keep people sick. Like you would like them to be more sick. That way you make more money. And if you are a CEO of a corporation, you actually have an obligation to your shareholders to make more money. So if you know of something, like, you know, all those people need to do is just stop doing that. If I just put that on my sub stack and then they go, oh, this will kill our stock. I'll keep it to myself.

That's crazy, man.

Yeah. It's demonic.

What the fuck?

It's kind of demonic. It's kind of, there's weird aspects. Like, I don't know if I really believe in demons, but I definitely believe in demonic acts and there's certain things that human beings have done and do do that are very demonic. Like if you were possessed by a demon, you would drop a nuclear bomb on a city. You know, the demon would go, there's only one way to stop this. You got to kill everybody in that city. Just drop it. Drop it. Like, that's why you would do it. Like, I'm not saying that's why it was done, but I was saying, but I am saying that if a demon could convince you to drop a nuclear bomb, because a person with a conscious would be like, well, these are just people down there. They have nothing to do with this war. It doesn't make any sense at all. These are just people living their lives and they have their families and we're just going to incinerate an entire city and with one bomb that I drop out of a plane. That's crazy.

The, you know, you just press a button.

Yeah.

Or.

And as technology advances, it gets easier and easier to do that. Yeah. You know, in these, these war games that they played with AI, they've used nuclear weapons almost every time they could.

Oh my God.

Yeah. They have no reason. If they want to achieve a result and they realize they have a nuclear weapon, why wouldn't they use that? Use that. So I think it was like something like 90 plus percent of the time they've done these war games, these simulated war games, the AI programs have used nuclear weapons. To them. It's like, I don't understand. You're going to kill a hundred thousand people over a course of five years. Yeah. Might as well just do it now. Right.

Do it once.

Like if, if they had done what's happened to Gaza, if they had done that with one bomb instead of thousands of bombs, would that be somehow less humane? Would that be more barbaric? If Israel just said, oh, okay, we're going to nuke Gaza, the world would have gone crazy. They would have been like, you can't do that. This is horrible. I mean, the world has already gone kind of crazy for what they did do. But if they achieved the exact same result, but instantaneously, instead of over a course of a couple of years, how do you think people would react? It's kind of weird.

All of it is awful.

It's horrible.

I just like, just the capacity of, the thing also is when you, when you think about like what drives human beings to do the things that they do, right? It's the devil talking to you, the, the conflict of interest within yourself, but also thousands of years of history, isn't it?

Yeah. And it's, we've become accustomed to it.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's normal.

Like it's normalized for us so much, but it's like, there's, there's so many aspects to, to every conflict, which is so hard to simplify into like, why?

Not only that, there's a lot of stuff that's going on behind the scenes that you're never privy to. So you just get narratives that are fed to you by bureaucrats and politicians.

Or whatever little information that comes at you. Yeah.

And so, you know, and then there's this, in this country in particular, there's the right versus the left and the left will blame it on the right and the right will blame it on the left. And then, you know, everybody has these very convenient CNN, Fox news narratives that they'll repeat at coffee, you know, coffee shops and cocktail parties. And you pretend that you're making sense out of this thing when you don't even really know what's going on behind the scenes.

That's why I really feel like, I feel like a lot of times we've been given a platform to talk, right? With social media, like everyone can talk and there's a power to that, but there's also a big misuse of it where you really don't know. And you're not the authority on perspective at all, because there's so much that you would probably not know of history and the geography and of why people behave the way they are behaving. So I like to, unless I'm the expert on something, which I'm not on anything except my job, that too limited, you know, I just try to kind of have a larger understanding from a human perspective.

That's a great sign of intelligence, because there's no way you can know everything about everything. And with certain things, especially a global conflict, you're like, what is happening? Like, why is this going on? Like I was telling you about when I went on the deep dive of the East India Corporation, I never had any idea that they went to war with China over opium.

Yeah. Got them addicted first.

Yeah. Got them addicted, went to war with China, stole Hong Kong.

Yeah.

Like, what?

The gravity of manipulation in human history is insane. Like even when the East India Company, and they started with trading with India too, many, many years ago. We just got our- Started innocent. Yeah, completely. We're your friends. We're, you know, allies. Sell tea. We're friends with all the royalty in India. There were so many royals in India and royal, each state had their own kings and princes and became friends with everyone, started with tea, started with trading tea and spices and then just went into, you know, I mean, we got our independence in 1947, which was, it's not even a hundred years since we've got our independence. It's that recent. Wow. But do you think about just within the last century, there were, you know, signs which said Indians and dogs not allowed in India by the British? Like within this century.

Indians and dogs.

In India.

Wow.

Isn't that crazy? Like, and this is like the, this is not even like, this is the head of the iceberg. There's so much more when you do a deep dive into the history of colonization, which is why this movie was also so interesting to me because it, it touches on the themes of, you know, the colonized and the story from their perspective, which is like not a lot of what we hear.

No, no, not at all. I mean, there's a lot of great historical elements in that. The, just the, just the pirate thing alone, the fact that most of the time in human history when a boat showed up, there was a real fucking problem.

Yeah. And what real, real pirates, like we've gotten so used to, you know, with the Disney version of the, and I love the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, don't get me wrong. They're so fun, but like the pirate jokes and whatever, but they were fucking brutal. They were murderers. Like, yeah, horrific monsters, horrible, horrible life. Yeah.

I had a joke about that once. Like, why is it okay to be a pirate for Halloween? Why? You know how crazy it is for little kids? Yeah.

You're a murderer rapist. Yeah.

Oh, look at his little hook. He lost his hand raping. I mean, that was what the pirates were. That's true. They were monsters. They were horrific monsters. And they would travel around the world just stealing people's stuff and killing everybody. Yeah. And that happened for thousands of years.

And helping with colonization for years.

And the fact that they were soldiers for the East India Corporation, they were actually working for them to go and take over these areas.

And the best soldiers from around the world.

Yeah. Mercenaries.

The best mercenaries, murderers from around the world.

They had a larger army than most European countries.

Yeah. So hard.

A corporation.

Yeah.

So hard.

An army.

Yeah. Yeah. Essentially. Yeah. But started off just trading. Just super innocent.

Hi, I'm your friend. Yeah. And I'm here for your bank. And they would be so respectful with, you know, the former kings and queens. And it's wild, the manipulation of it.

Well, it's also wild how when you do have an obligation to your shareholders and you do have this mandate to just constantly make more money, the morals go out the window. And next thing you know, East India Corporation is involved in slavery. They're involved in opium trade.

Divide and conquer, where they would get all the princes of each state like to fight amongst each other. So instead of India being collective and together, she was like divided between everyone fighting for each other so they could take over. It's like mental games.

Well, that's what people think is going on in America right now.

I mean.

I think that's the manipulation of the right versus the left here. When most people kind of want the same thing. They just want to be healthy and safe and have their families healthy and safe.

And do your job and come back home.

That's what most people want. Yeah. But then the division is like constantly in the news. It's constant struggle. It's the only thing that you hear about.

Yeah.

We're both dumb and stupid. And smart.

Smart and stupid at the same time.

Smart and stupid at the same time. But more dumb. And that's the other thing about technology. It allows you to stay dumb because everything's done for you. You don't really have to think outside the box that much. Everything's kind of laid out for you.

Yeah. Like if you think about AI in Hollywood now.

That's weird, right?

It's in writer's rooms. It's used as a tool. But I was listening to that podcast with Ben and Matt on your show. And you guys were talking about, you know, like basically everything that AI has or the information that it provides to you is an average of everything that's out there, right? So it'll never be excellent because it's the average of all the information out there. So it's like trying to do a median. But I'm just thinking about how it's become a tool that is going to exist in our world. And now the question is the morality of it and the lines that we draw where we protect human beings and human contribution and are able to delineate the difference between what is created by AI and what is not, you know? And the need for, I think, human flaws are something that I don't know if AI will be able to recreate anytime soon. And that, like, in art, that's what you need, right?

Yeah. You'll get facsimiles.

Yeah.

But you won't get the real thing. It's like the hollowness of AI music. AI music is really fun. But after a while, you realize there's not a dude singing this.

And there's not like a soul to it. It's weird.

It's empty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So far, but who knows?

That's the problem. It could figure out a way to manipulate that part of your brain that reproduces whatever soulful music is. Or whatever the soul is.

Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about, like, being an actor. I was like, is that going to be obsolete? Obsolete in the next, like, ten years? Are we going to be watching?

It kind of could be.

Yeah. Are we going to be watching, like, really good AI actors?

Probably.

You know?

Until, well.

I need to find a new job.

Well, I think a lot of people are going to have to find a new job. I think live performances, plays and musicals and stuff like that. People are always going to want to see people do something live.

For sure.

Yeah.

Well, when it comes to cinema, especially because I feel like audiences also love larger than life cinema, right? Yeah. Like, we go to the theaters to watch this, like, big shit. We loved when VFX came into movies. We loved the imagination being able to be so big. I do think AI helps in a big way to take away the burdens of, you know, the minutiae of things that we might have to do as a tool, which it can do, like a breakdown of a script or whatever. But I think when it comes to, like, creating the human, like, human fragility of life and story, it is still a little bit away from being able to do that.

Yeah. I think it's always going to be, like, pop.

Yeah. You know?

It's never going to create, like, taxi driver.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You need, I mean, but I might be wrong about that, too. Yeah. Who knows? It might not even matter by the time it starts taking over all of our resources.

I'm so curious, actually, to see how many conversations that everyone, all of us have had about, you know, this emergence of AI and how that, like, stays 10 years later. Are we like this? Did this age well? Probably not. Did I know what I was talking about?

We probably have no idea what's going on. No. No chance.

We didn't have any idea about this. Like, where we would be right now.

It might be Dr. Manhattan floating over the country telling us what to do. Yeah. It's possible. I don't know. But thank you for being here. I really enjoyed it. It was a really fun conversation. Thank you. And I really enjoyed your movie. It was crazy violent. I didn't expect that, but very exciting and very good.

Thank you for taking me around the world and everywhere else. We time traveled. We did it all. We talked about the whole world. We went into history. We went into the future. It was awesome.

Well, congratulations to you and continued success. Thank you, Joe. Thank you. I really enjoyed it.