John Cena Apologizing to China Signifies Cultural Shift

Welcome to episode 1,666. There can be only one. Why? I don't know. That's the rules. That was the rules. That's a terrible rule. That's like the worst rule. But for episode 1,666, there was only one option. That was you. Oh, thank you. I'm honored by that. Thank you so much, Joe. It's so nice to be here. Dude, it's so nice to see you. It's your turn. It's so nice to be here. Dude, it's so nice to see you. You're such a good friend that every time I see you, I'm transported. There's no time lost. You know what I'm saying? Yep. When you're so tight with someone that when you see them again, you're transported. You're immediately back to where I last saw you again. There's no like, hey, God, haven't seen you in a while. How are you? What's going on? It's like, ah! Yeah. Yeah. It's like a friendship. I mean, that's it. If it's not that, what is it? I'm super concerned about this wig catching fire. We're surrounded by candles, and I believe this wig is flammable. Yeah, that wig is from China. I don't know what it is. That could be some bizarre synthetic. That could be anything. This is the hair of a billionaire who said the wrong shit. No shit. They just kept him. They probably made him grow his hair first. They probably kept him in a tunnel somewhere and made him eat rats, whatever rats he could catch. And just gave him hair vitamins. Did you? And then when his hair was long enough to make a wig out of it, they let him go. That's a lot of work to get some hair. Yeah, and now all he does is coach John Cena. His job is to coach John Cena, I want to say. Dude, that was weird. That was really weird. That was one of the weirdest things. I'm not a fan of, or not a fan of John Cena. No John Cena opinion. But that was just an odd. It was scary. I guess it's just a lot of money, man. The Chinese dollars. Here's how much money it is. Ready for this? That movie made $160 million to opening weekend. I believe $134 million of it was from China. Oh God. Oh God. We've got to get in. Let's do our apologies to China. I need to learn Mandarin and start talking shit. Mandarin. Just say yes. Start doing my acting, Mandarin. It sounds cool. It sounds great. Well, amazing. The most impressive thing about that video was not just that China got John Cena to cook, but also that John Cena speaks perfect Mandarin. Yeah. How long does that take? It's a mystery. I don't know, man. It was just strange. That's like, that's some really, really the most. It's again, like, you know, when we're watching that fight. Oh my God. Reflexes, bro. When we're watching that fight last night and you're just watching it and you're trying to make sense of the new reality, you know, because it's like you got to accept it, but he's wearing a Pikachu medallion fighting like the best boxer alive today. But you have to watch it from the perspective of like, well, this is what is happening now. Because otherwise you get this weird spinning vertigo. Like what the fuck universe am I in? Same thing when you're like watching John Cena do some weird apology in Mandarin. It's a sense of like, what? This is a malfunction. This is a breakdown. I don't get this. When in the history of the United States, like imagine like some old video of like John Wayne doing some apology in another language. It's just weird. It is weird, but it's a warning to everybody, right? The people that don't, they're not taking this sort of cultural shift seriously. When you see an enormous alpha male in John Cena, John Cena's arms are so big, it looks like they're supposed to be a foot longer, but someone saw them off and put like a fist here. It's like if my forearm went down only to here and then the fist was there, his wrists are enormous. He's like, he's such a gorilla, right? And to see that guy saying it in Chinese and you read what he actually said, it's hard to say, right? Because one thing I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was like, what did he actually say? Because I don't speak Mandarin. I wish someone maybe that spoke Mandarin could translate it and tell me whether or not that was accurate. I'm assuming it was accurate because I haven't heard anything. People who speak Mandarin must have gotten a hold of it since then. But it was just weird to see an apology for just saying that a country exists. That's essentially what it was, right? He said, Taiwan is a country. And he said that, I mean, that's all he said wrong. Taiwan was going to be the first country to see the movie. Yeah, that's right. You can't say that, which is bullshit. Also that thing that just popped up, they said it was a mistake, but Bing apparently made it so that if you image search, the Tiananmen Square guy holding the suitcase didn't show up on the day of, on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. And so everybody's like, what the fuck? Just like, are you owned by China now? That is a really strange form of invasion, isn't it? It's not the normal kind of invasion where we're thinking about invasions from old historical versions of invasions, but that's not how it works anymore. Now it's, you know, if you get your technology into another country, if you become the supplier of a lot of their pharmaceuticals, if you, all these things, then you don't really need to invade. You know what I mean? If you've bought up a lot of their property. You don't need to fly in with jets. You don't need, because you're buying it. That's like, to me, that's where countries like the United States, what makes them so amazing is also this huge, terrible weakness, which is they have a permeable membrane, she can get in there easier than other places, you know? And like, especially now with the ability to like just have a thousand AI bots running various Twitter accounts expressing kind of similar sentiment regarding whatever the fuck it is you want to promote. Yeah. Whoo! That's crazy. You could just warp people's minds any way you want. I mean, you know, we have no, I'm not just talking state agencies either. I mean, just cobbles of like anarchists who feel like just fucking around with the zeitgeist could theoretically just put out a shit ton of bots or phone banks of people, putting weird ideas into the culture that, you know, you hear it enough times, you start thinking, like, I guess that is true. Right. That must be true. I don't know if you've ever had the thing happen where you're just scanning Twitter and you see some completely wrong, like deeply wrong fact in physics, but you didn't, you were just shitting or something. So you're like, well, that's interesting. Then later you repeat it without looking it up to see if it's true. And then you go back to see it. This happened. I mean, you realize like three tweets above that tweet. It's like the guy's like, I'm the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. I mean, like, oh fuck, I repeated some fact I heard from a guy who thinks he's the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe literally at dinner. Yeah. You know, that's what I'm saying is it leaks out. And so it's just trippy. You know, it's just weird. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on Spotify. You can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience.