What COVID Tells Us About the Future

Like I have a Tesla and I love my Tesla. I love it to death. It's probably the best car that I have. But there's something that I miss. And what I miss is the... I want to... I want to feel the gear. I want to feel the... I push the left pedal down, the clutch engages. I push the gear shift into third gear. I let the clutch out. I push down the gas. There's this interaction with this thing that lets me... I'm engaged. I'm feeling it. There's something about those kind of old cars and mechanical watches and there's a lot of other things that... Those things excite me. It's like a dance. Tactile. It's like a dance. Yeah, I like cooking over fire. You know what I'm saying? Like there's things that I still like that are older things. I like running on dirt. I like those things. I like chopping wood. There's things, there's tactile experiences. You know? I know those are dying. I know they're dying. The manual gearbox is dying. My car's still a stick. I talked about it last time I was here. The Mazda 3. It's a stick shift. People are kissing with masks on. Do you understand what's happening? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. People are making out with masks on. No, one mask. Just to be safe. They're dangerous. Dangerous people. But you know what I'm saying? Like, I feel like mask kissing is like... It's a step in the wrong direction. We're going to become aliens. We're going to become the greys with the big black eyes, the giant heads. We're not going to kiss at all anymore. No. We're going to do it all through our brains. That'll be a relic of the past. Yeah, it's going to be like... The difference between a Tesla and a manual 1970 Chevelle is going to be the difference between real fucking and people just plugging into some fucking... Some computer and just letting it all happen inside some virtual reality experience where you don't have to worry about cooties. That's what I'm worried about, man. I'm worried about tactile human experiences. And I'm not really worried. I'm recognizing that the same way if you wanted to look back on primates and early primates and go... Like if you brought a chimp into the future and said, hey, this is what it's going to be like. You're going to fly in planes and you're going to eat off plates. Like, fuck that. I like swinging from trees and I like throwing my own shit at my enemies. I can't give that up. I'm not giving up throwing shit. I like shitting in my hand and giving him a good toss. And I fucking get together with my other chimp buddies and we fuck up some dude across our imaginary line. We kill him. You know, there's parts of that that for sure... Life is better today. But I'm not a future human. I'm a current human. In my current state, there's tactile experiences that I enjoy. I like kissing. I like holding hands. I like shaking a person's hand when I meet them. I like drinking whiskey. I like driving cars. I like shifting my own gears. I like opening doors for myself. Whenever there's one of those things where you step towards it and the door opens up, I never use those fucking things. I grab that handle. I open that bitch up. I like opening doors. I like... I want to experience things. I want to interact with the world. I like interacting. Yeah. I think there will always be a place for that. No? Well, COVID has put a wrench into that. COVID is a... It's basically showing us what the future holds in store for us. The future holds in store for us is the elimination of biological threats. And there's a lot of biological threats that we take for granted, like emotions, hormones, the desire to breed, conquering, the natural primate instincts to dominate environments and to expand our boundaries and our kingdoms. All those things are dangerous. They're not good. But they also create art and romance and controversy. And they provide people with enthusiasm and motivation. There's always things about being a human that creates art and makes things like wine. It makes things worth living. Whiskey, cigars. I do miss the kinetic nature of life pre-COVID. You know what I mean? Like bumping into someone, going to something, just serendipitously meeting someone. That doesn't happen anymore, really. Now everything is just so... It happens in Texas. I'm two days in, so I'm learning. But... I'm going to take you around. Yeah. We're going to be fine. Yeah. The people that don't want it to go back are the people that are most fearful. The people that are like, my grandmother died. I understand. I get it. Yeah. It's a terrifying tragedy that anybody has to die from a disease. But we have to recognize that we're all going to die. And you can't stop all life because a disease comes along and kills some of us. We have to recognize what can we do to mitigate the dangers of this disease. Plus, what can we do to mitigate the dangers of dissolving our lives? Our culture. We haven't done that. Instead, we've only concentrated on mitigating the dangers of spreading something. So stay home. Wear three masks. Touch no one. Wear gloves while you're driving. Like fuck, man. This is not life. This is not life. And most of these people, they're three mask people. They don't know goddamn anything about vitamins and quercetin and saunas and all the different methods that you can use to stimulate your immune system. It's like we don't want people to be able to take their own chances and make their own risks. And the more liberal you are and the more left-wing you are, the more likely you are to appeal to authoritarianism. And this is one of the most discouraging aspects of our culture in 2021 is that all these people that are supposed to be left-wing people. When I was a kid, I thought of, I've always been left-wing. I've always been, my family's like, my stepdad's a hippie. He was a hippie. My mom, they were very open-minded left-wing people. It was all about free expression. It was all about letting people be who they are and living whatever life you wanted to be and accepting people for who they are. This is not what's happening now. This is all this fear-based, weird appeal to authoritarianism. There's too much disinformation on the internet. We have to have a czar of truth. There's people calling for a czar of truth. Do you know this? This is the new thing. They're asking for the government to create a czar of truth, the fucking government, to decide what's real and what's not, to dispel disinformation. See if you can pull this up. Czar of truth. This is something that CNN has talked about. A lot of these fucking weirdo networks have talked about. Do you understand, these fucking people understand what happens when you start censoring people and we start saying things like, we need the government to step in. The government's never been good at anything. They've never been good at anything. Not one fucking thing of them being great at. Even during this whole COVID crisis, businesses are suffering. If you're a business, you're fucked, but especially in LA. It sucks. 75% of all LA restaurants are gone. There's no contingency plan in place. And then also they're like, stay home. But then how do you make money? Yeah. So you can't have it both ways. You have to have like a safety net in place. The people that are making these distinctions and making these decisions, they don't lose a paycheck. That's the problem. All these mayors and governors and health board advisors, they don't miss a fucking paycheck. They can shut down everything and they do it for optics. Well, yeah, I think there's a way to be smart about this. Obviously this is a real thing and it does affect people. But there's a- Yeah, but listen, man, you got through it. I got through it. Yeah, sure. But like I'm younger and I know there are cases where people are hit really hard by this, but I think sometimes there's bureaucracy attached to it where you're not even using logic. Like the comedy story, you know, they were allowed before this, like, look, it's in purple tier right now, whatever it is. They've opened- Purple tier? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And if you put a comedian doing jokes outdoor, that was suddenly- Communism! Against the rules. But like nothing has changed other than instead of a TV that their focus is on, they are watching a comedian. But for some reason, the city deemed that not allowable. Because the city is filled, the city government is filled with people so fucking stupid, they Yes, it just makes on the ground floor in your mouth. All right. Thank you. It makes it makes no sense Just to anyone doesn't have to make sense and it was frustrating because Before the shutdown when everything was like super locked down. I was doing a lot of outdoor shows in LA and I was doing all these alt shows just like in backyards and on the top of hotels and stuff But the comedy store wasn't allowed to do shows because it was called the comedy store. There's too much attention on it Is that what is? Yeah, I think it's just a bunch of fools. That's all it is It's just a bunch of fools working in government. It doesn't have to make any sense They just have to keep their jobs and they have to give off They have to give off the perception that they're doing something that is helping and it's not true Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for free only on Spotify watch back catalogue 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