Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1824 - Lex Fridman
Uploaded: 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1824 - Lex Fridman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-05-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1824 - Lex Fridman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-05-26. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1824 - Lex Fridman

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hey, fella.
Hey, buddy.
What's going on?
Good to see you.
It's been a while.
It has been a while.
You've been nose to the grindstone.
Yeah, I disappeared for a bit.
I've been hiding from the world.
Is this because of Ukraine?
Is it personal?
Well, no, actually, it's because I proposed to Tim Dillon, and he said yes.
Nice.
This happened in February.
You want to get in shape for the wedding?
Yeah, I want to get in shape for the wedding, and I've been focusing on that.
Also, I'm having second thoughts.
Because when you sign the paper, you realize this is a real commitment,
and you're going to have to live with this man for the rest of your life.
Not only that, they're going to write fake stories about you like they do about
him.
The New York Post wrote a fake story about him today.
About his real estate holdings.
They're inaccurate about the amount, and also even about the locations in which
he owns homes.
In cyberspace, right?
No, no real homes.
Actual homes.
Yeah, they're like ratting them out about his real houses.
Community slaps down $4 million for Hampton Spread.
Fake news, kids.
Sorry.
But the thing is, it's like real estate people, there's a lot of dirty business
in real estate when a famous person buys a house.
They sell the data.
They, you know, someone does it.
Whether it's someone who works in the office or what have you, they'll be weasley
with it.
Yeah, is that data public?
Like all the houses you get?
Depends.
Like, you know, a lot of times famous folks will put a house in under an LLC so
that they hide it.
But then when it gets leaked, you know someone from, generally speaking, it's
someone from the real estate office leaked it.
Because they can get paid.
Like there's websites that will pay you.
So say if, you know, Elon buys a house.
And he tries to keep it all hush-hush and under the table.
Like there was a time where they were trying to say that he's living in someone's
house and he's lying about living in this tiny house.
It's not true.
Right?
You and I know it's not true.
But they were trying to pretend that he was staying in this opulent house on
Lake Austin just because he had been there before.
He actually lives at my house now.
Oh, congratulations.
With Tim Dillon?
With Tim Dillon.
Nice.
That's a great Odd Couple show.
I probably shouldn't mention this because it's-
Ta-da, ta-da.
That would be a wonderful sitcom.
You, Tim Dillon, and Elon Musk in the house.
Guys, what are we doing?
We're getting eggs and pancakes?
What did he say?
He said he was comparing like a Saudi prince with Elon Musk and like there's
trade-offs between the positives and the negatives.
He was saying something positive about Elon, that he's working on rockets, but
the negative is that he likes Austin.
And then comparing to the Saudi prince, I think like jet skis or something like
that, that's a positive.
But then it's corrupt, that's the negative.
Tim Dillon is one of my favorite people.
I'm so happy he's around.
I'm so happy.
He's just like, that guy makes me laugh so hard.
It's just his take on stuff.
He just rants with Ben when they're just sitting there next to each other and
he's just talking shit.
And I love it when he wears the cop glasses, like the aviators.
It's almost like he's on a drug when he has those on.
Like he's in a fog.
He's like, I don't even see you.
Yeah, he's channeling something else.
It's like Conor S. Thompson type thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, but in reality, the Tim Dillon thing was real.
It was April 1st.
But yeah, I think my world, my family's world, and I think the world in general
was somehow fundamentally changed down February 24th this year when Russia
invaded Ukraine.
I think, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about it.
I've been talking to a lot of people about it.
I have family in both countries.
I come from both countries.
And first and foremost, it made me realize that a global hot war is within a
possibility for this century.
That we're not so far from a World War III outbreak.
No.
And the reason I realized this is because of the behavior of the United States
in response to this humanitarian crisis, this invasion, and the response of
China that's currently quietly watching, but for the most part, supporting
Putin and Russia.
India, for the most part, is supporting Putin and Russia.
And so you have this division in the world.
You just look at the population, the large economies, large military forces,
nuclear powers are just watching this conflict, watching this humanitarian
crisis, and nobody seems to be shy about escalation.
Nobody seems to be shy about mentioning, you know, the word nuclear.
And it just feels like what I've been, I've reread recently as a kind of
therapy, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shire.
He's a journalist that was there for the rise of the Nazi party and the World
War II and everything like that.
And you just have to put yourself, let's say 100 years back, 1922, nobody would
predict World War II.
In fact, everybody would be sure that World War II would never happen.
Surely there will never be another world war when you're sitting there in the
1920s.
And at the same time, you have Hitler, young Hitler, what is it, 1919 maybe, he's
employing number seven of the Nazi party.
So he's the seventh person to join the National Socialist German Workers Party
that ended up being one of the most consequential parties ever, political
parties ever.
So from a party of seven people, 20 years later, you have a party that's
threatening the existence of human civilization.
If they had nuclear weapons, that would be the case.
So in a span of 20 years, that can happen.
So now we're sitting here in 2022, the possibility of nuclear war seems to be
not as distant as at least I, with my innocence, had imagined.
And the possibility of hot war is not that distant.
And there's escalation, there's warmongering going on.
And at the same time, just the humanitarian crisis.
I mean, on a personal level, it's the biggest humanitarian crisis, six, seven
million people, refugees, eight million people inside Ukraine displaced, the
biggest one since, in Europe at least, since World War II.
So that's one perspective that there's this authoritarian who invaded a
sovereign land and laid claim on it.
I recently talked to two folks that have this different perspective.
One is Stephen Cotkin, who's a historian of Stalin.
I highly recommend people read his biography of Stalin.
And then the other is Oliver Stone, who you talked to mostly about JFK.
But he also interviewed Putin.
So Oliver Stone's perspective is, look, first of all, America throughout its
history has blood in its hands.
NATO is pressuring through its expansion, pressuring Putin, pressuring the
other non-NATO regimes.
And so they bear some responsibility for this.
And, you know, you look at post-9-11 wars.
The, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, the number of refugees there, the
number of people displaced from their homes is close to 40 million people, 40
million people.
And the number of dead is over a million people.
And those are wars either started or catalyzed or propped up by the United
States.
That's the Oliver Stone perspective.
So, you know, this idea that the United States is the good guys is a
complicated one.
And so he has been, starting from the Vietnam War, a critic of the military-industrial
complex and this kind of imperial imperative of the United States.
That's that perspective.
Then you have Stephen Cotkin, you have just the Western perspective, is like,
no.
Yeah, America has blood on its hands, but you can't do this moral, there's no
moral equivalence here.
There is good guys and bad guys in the world.
The good guys are flawed, yes.
But the reality is Putin's Russia is an authoritarian regime, no respect for
freedoms of all kinds, including freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
There's a lot of basic violation of human rights, and there's just a straight-up
invasion of a sovereign land.
And that's a war crime, and Putin is a war criminal, and I'm much closer to
that perspective, but it's not factual, it's more emotional, because I just see
how much pain there is in that place.
You know, I've been listening to a lot of people crying, angry, afraid.
Yeah, for me, there's been just so much personal emotion, because this idea
that we're all one people, we're all one humanity, has been challenged for me
personally.
I know there's a lot of suffering in the world, I know there's a lot of atrocities
in the world, but for me, it's just because I know directly the people.
It's like, you know, there's been recently a couple of shootings, there's been
a shooting yesterday in the United States.
It's different when you have nothing to do with the people, when then you
directly know the people.
Yeah, the shooting is an hour and a half away.
Yeah, in Texas.
And that's, I don't know, 20 children or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's an atrocity, but it's closer to us, and that's why we, as Americans,
we feel it intimately.
Just imagine that on another side of the world, where you can feel it intimately,
because you know the people.
Well, I mean, I guess we think of it as differently, because what Putin is
trying to do is command resources and control a country that used to be a part
of the Soviet Union.
And what happened yesterday is just beyond explanation, right?
It's just a completely fucked up situation where a sick person got a hold of a
bunch of guns and decided to go kill kids.
And it happens in this country, like every, you know, every now and then.
It's like, how do you stop that?
No one knows how to stop that.
What is the answer?
Is the answer take everyone's guns?
Well, they're not going to give their guns up.
So it's going to, you're going to have, only criminals are going to have guns.
So it's not going to be a good situation.
And is the answer make schools these armored compounds where you have armed
guards outside of every school dressed like it's a military?
Boy, that's not something we want either.
But what do you do to protect the children?
And how many, how many dollars is that going to cost?
Like, do we even have the money to do that?
Like, but the Oliver Stone perspective, when you're talking about the
difference between the way we look at the rest of the world versus the way we
look at our own actions,
when you start bringing up Yemen, Yemen is one that I've had Dave Smith on the
podcast multiple times where he talks about it.
Dave is very, very well read about Yemen.
And it's, it's a horrific scenario because no one cares.
And it seems to me like, not only no one cares, I mean, in the United States,
this is not something that gets mainstream media attention on a daily basis.
But the bombings are ongoing.
Like we, we put up a chart once where they talked about the bombings that are
happening in Ukraine versus the bombings that are currently happening in Yemen
and bombings that the United States is.
And it's, it's wild because it's like swept under the rug and we don't think
about it and we don't even understand why we're doing it.
Like if you, I guarantee you, if you just pulled a random 1,000 people and say,
what are we doing in Yemen?
No one would have any idea.
You'd have to have someone who really gets into this sort of esoteric, the
details, the, like, what is going on politically?
What is going on economically?
Someone like Dave Smith even might struggle with the full explanation of what
our motivation, not our, the military's motivation is to do this, but it's
happening.
And because it's not getting any attention, it's allowed to happen without
scrutiny.
It's allowed to happen without real mainstream criticism.
I, if you comb, you know, the, the, the television news sources cable left and
right, you're, you're not going to find discussions of Yemen on a daily basis.
But that is the one, if, if there's an area where we can't have that m