Best of the Week - February 16, 2020 - Joe Rogan Experience

What's your Ogun experience? No, I'm 34 this year. Yeah. Well, you look great. Thank you. When did you start training? I did my first Muay Thai class when I turned 24. Wow. Yeah. So I called it my... Maybe that's the thing, right? Like you don't have the wear and tear of like a lot of people start when they're 10 and you know, by the time they get to 24, they already got NCL fucked up and back a mess and next... And it probably stunts your growth too a little bit. I don't know. I feel like something happens. If you can't wait, it certainly does. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I didn't really do any sports after, I guess, middle school. And from middle school through high school to college and then after college, I didn't do shit. You didn't do anything? Nah, I was skinny fat, so I didn't have to. But you didn't work out or nothing? Nah, I didn't work out. That's crazy. Yeah. It's weird. Like right after college, I looked like this little skinny stick figure, just soft girl. It's really weird. So when people see me now, they're like, holy shit. From people from back then? Yeah, yeah. Well, they must be freaking out now. Like, she's a what? Yeah, yeah. She's in the fucking what? She's a UFC contender. I know. Get the fuck out of here. Angela? No, it's really funny. Yeah, exactly. And that was so different. Well, not different, but I was super quiet all my life, like in high school, especially in college. I was always just really shy and really soft spoken. That's surprising, because you're very funny on Twitter. Oh, thank you. On Twitter, you're hilarious. Well, I was always funny. You were always funny, just quiet. Nobody knew it, yeah. I kept it to myself. I crack myself up all day. But yeah, I'm just super shy, always awkward around new people, new settings. And I had my tight knit group of friends, but I was never the popular kid by any means. What brought you into Muay Thai class? A workout. You just needed something to do. Yeah, I was just fat. I just got married, and I also had an office job. I was working at an animation studio. And before that, I had been bartending. So I was moving around and doing stuff, and I never really felt inactive. Once I quit the bar job and was just doing that full time, I just felt fat and lazy and greasy and everything that happens from sitting down all day. You do all sorts of shit outside of this just to stay happy. The fear of death and the attitude of the finite life being insignificant, what is the point is existential angst that many of us struggle with. That's something that you touch upon really early on, that this thing that makes us unique is that we know that we're going to die. Yeah, that to me is the vital distinguishing feature of our species. We can reflect on the past. We can think about the future and recognize that we're not going to be here in the future, at least for some period of time. It's an idea and its powerful motivating influence is one that has been explored throughout the ages. Otto Ronck, who's one of the early disciples of Freud, who ultimately broke with Freud, developed this thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the driving factors in what we do. And then when I was, I don't know, I was in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. I don't know if you've ever heard of this book. It was big in the 70s and won actually the Pulitzer Prize in the 70s. And it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why we humans do what we do. And in many ways, in my own book, the one that's coming out actually today until the end of time, it's extending this notion that Becker developed in Denial of Death, but now seeing it in a cosmological setting because it's not just we that are going to die, it's every structure in the universe is going to disintegrate in time. Our best theory suggests to us that even protons, the very heart of matter, they're quantum processes that in the far future will ensure that every proton disintegrates, falls apart into its constituent particles. At that point, there's no complex matter around at all. What timeline are we talking about here? Well, pretty big long timeline. In fact, I'd like to use a metaphor to try to give you a feel for the times involved. I like to use the Empire State Building. And imagine that every floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration 10 times out of the previous floor. So like on the ground floor, it's like one year, first floor, 10 years, second floor, 100, and so forth. So you're going exponentially far in time as you climb up the Empire State Building. And in that scheme of things, everything from the Big Bang until today, you're about at the 10th floor, 10 to the 10 years, 10 billion years. And as you go forward, you are looking at things very far in the future. And to answer your question, we think, and I underscore think because we're now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas, protons will decay roughly in say by the 38th floor. So 10 to the 38 years. And I get a phone call via a buddy of mine from college connects me to this guy, this Icelandic guy. I've never met him before. His name is Fionn Paul. Don't know his story. I do now. He's an absolute legend. And he says, Hey, man, you were just in Antarctica, right? And I was like, Yeah. And he's like, I think we should go back to Antarctica. And I was like, All right, well, what do you think? And he's like, in a rowboat. I think we should row a boat from the southern tip of South America to the peninsula of Antarctica across Drake Passage. How far is that? About 700 miles. I see what that looks like on that. And I said, please delete my phone. 700 miles rolling a boat. Yeah, so Drake Passage is known to be, you know, in seafaring, one of the most treacherous, if not the most treacherous kind of passageway in the world, you know, you've gotten the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Southern Ocean kind of all converging between the Antarctic Peninsula and the southern tip of South America. So you got 40 foot swells. You got, you know, crazy waves, icebergs as you get close to Antarctica. And the mission or the goal was to see if we could, there it is right there. That's it. That whole area? That whole area. From there to there? From there to there. All the way down, yeah, the main peninsula there, Antarctica. How long did this take? So ultimately, it took us just less than two weeks to do the entire row, but it was a long journey in the planning from that phone call all the way through to that year, but it was a two week or a 12 day crossing. So in the two weeks, you had to have two weeks worth of food, two weeks worth of drinking water, all the boat. Yeah, so, well, water actually, we have a desalinator. So off of solar panels, everything, you know, solar, there's no engine, no sail, nothing like that. It's just completely human powered rowing. Do we have a portable desalinator? Yeah. How big is it? It fits inside one of the tiny, so the boat's tiny. The boat's like 25 feet long, three guys rowing at a time, so six of us total and the team ultimately, you know, barely anywhere to sleep in this tiny little compartments, like the size of like, you know, sleeping in the back of a, you know, hatchback of a Honda Civic or something like that. But, but yeah, so you've got this desalinator that's basically kind of in one of the central compartments. So it's probably like, I don't know, maybe two feet by two feet square, something like that. And it doesn't, it doesn't make a water real fast. You can make 10 liters of water in like, you know, an hour or two, depending on how much hot the sun is. But it's pretty good. But I mean, it gets it done. Yeah, it gets it done. Like, whale dicks? What does the water taste like? It was weird as we got closer to Antarctica, I think it started messing up because it got real salty. Like it wasn't doing quite as good of a job. The water near Antarctica was like one degree Celsius, so 33 Fahrenheit, I mean, practically frozen cold water. And I think that was kind of starting to tweak out the system. They don't want my money. They don't want anything I have to offer them. I want what they have. That was sort of a game changer moment for me. I want to figure out how to be connected with nothing. What did these guys do all day? I don't know. They all did different stuff. I think everybody does. Every ashram has got their own thing. You know what I mean? Did you have chores that you had to do to earn your food? Yeah, everybody, you know, every ashram is going to be different and every spiritual path. It is Christian monks and monks from different traditions around the world. I'm sure they all got their thing, different things. But later I started doing my next band because the interesting thing about the Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavad Gita is, you're familiar with, it's one chapter of the biggest epic in the world, the Mahabharata. And it's the most studied and discussed and commented on by all the saints of ancient India. People even bring it into politics and stuff. But it's a real conversation between the spirit and divinity. It's a conversation about, it's just considered ancient wisdom for all people. So one of the ideas of the Gita is you don't give up what you're born to do. You do what you do, but in a spiritual way. You don't try to wipe out your desires. It's not going to happen. You take what you do and you do it in a way that is going to assist you in your liberation and is going to assist everybody else. So I'll say I love comedy, but I want comedy that uplifts me and not doesn't degrade me. I like entertainment, that when I walk away from it, I learn something. I feel like I'm growing. I feel connected. I don't want stuff that's going to just give me darker thoughts. Like the Joker? I've never seen it. You didn't see it? I want to say that I live on a farm. I live on a farm. I rarely watch anything except comedy. I love comedy because I think laughing is important. But I don't watch so much TV. So I'm pretty... If I do go to the movies, it's out of like with my wife. Let's just, we want to get away from the kids. We want to do something. But there's no plan on what to watch. But I'm open to good ideas. The Joker is a really good movie, but it's really dark. He's really dark. Like you walk out of there feeling really confused. Like, did I like that? I don't know if I liked that. I know it was awesome. I know it was really well done. But did I like that?