Latest / The Joe Rogan Recap / Ehsan Ahmad (2026) - The Mothership, Deepfakes and Aztec Sacrifice

Transcript

Ehsan Ahmad (2026) - The Mothership, Deepfakes and Aztec Sacrifice · The Joe Rogan Recap

• 0:00
  Welcome to the Joe Rogan Recap and before we get going, please
• 0:04
  follow us right here on Spotify to make sure you get sight of
• 0:06
  our latest episodes in your feed.
• 0:08
  It really is the best way to keep up with these deep dives.
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  We appreciate you being here. So today we are looking at a
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  transcript that feels less like a typical interview and more
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  like a a tour through the modern American psyche.
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  Yeah. We're digging into the Joe Rogan
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  Experience episode hashtag 2442 with the comedian a son Ahmad,
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  and Tour might be putting it lightly.
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  It's more of a Kareem. A Kareem is exactly right.
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  You start with the mechanics of stand up comedy, which is
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  usually pretty inside baseball, but before you know it, you're
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  knee deep in immigration policy. And then it's 15th century
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  cryptograms and somehow a dinosaur fish.
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  It's a classic Rogan roller coaster.
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  A total roller coaster, but looking at the source material
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  there is a weirdly consistent thread tying all these random
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  topics together. He feels like everyone is
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  anxious about the same thing. The loss of a shared reality.
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  And I think that's the mission for this deep dive.
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  We're going to trace that anxiety from the literal walled
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  garden of a comedy club all the way to the digital echo chambers
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  that are making us question if the Internet is even real
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  anymore. Let's start at Ground Zero for
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  this discussion. Austin, TX.
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  Specifically Rogan's comedy club, the Mothership.
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  And in the transcript, Rogan brings up a critique from a
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  friend of his, a philosopher type who calls the club a walled
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  garden. It's a compelling metaphor.
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  The idea is that by creating this perfect supportive
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  environment for comedians, they've, you know, inadvertently
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  created a bubble. And that makes the people on the
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  outside, the comics back in LA or New York, feel excluded.
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  It breathes jealousy. It's the cool kids table effect,
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  but on a massive scale. Right.
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  The idea that because it's so comfortable inside the walls,
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  you lose touch with the grit outside.
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  But Isan Ahmad, he pushes back on this pretty hard.
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  He does. He argues that the wall isn't
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  about exclusion and it's about protection from a totally false
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  narrative. Because the online story is that
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  the mothership is this like alt right Maggie, a stronghold.
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  Which is the external perception.
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  But Aeson points out the reality on the ground.
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  He says if you walk into that green room, it's 80% progressive
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  or left-leaning comics. So the walled garden isn't an
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  ideological bunker. Not at all.
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  It's just a place where people with different politics can tell
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  jokes without trying to, you know, destroy each other.
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  He calls all that political branding.
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  Massive projection. And that disconnect between what
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  the Internet says and what is actually happening is, I think,
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  going to come up a lot today. Oh, for sure.
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  And it's not just about politics, it's about the craft.
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  The other big take away for me was this great analogy they used
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  running with ankle weights. I love that it refers to the
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  grueling conditions comedians put themselves through to get
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  better. Aeson talks about hosting these
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  marathon open mikes where the audience just stares at you.
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  Or doing the death squad shows that last for hours.
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  I mean, imagine being on stage at one of those.
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  It's one in the morning. The audience is tired.
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  Maybe they're drunk. Maybe they're hostile.
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  The energy is just weird. Yeah, those are the ankle
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  weights. Exactly.
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  So the logic is if you can kill in a room that hates you at 1
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  birdie. AMA normal Saturday night show
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  feels like a breeze, right? Precisely.
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  It's resistance training for charisma.
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  And to illustrate that, they brought up the late Brody
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  Stevens. Oh, the drumming story.
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  This was great. It's a perfect example of the
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  ankle weights coming off. They describe Brody walking into
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  a totally dead room at The Improv.
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  Vibe is gone. Most comics would just bomb.
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  Or just try to get through their set.
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  Yeah, Brody walks in shirtless, swinging a shirt around like a
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  lasso, and just starts drumming on the chairs with actual
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  drumsticks. Pure chaos.
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  Controlled chaos. He didn't win them over with a
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  clever premise. He won them over by being this
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  undeniable force of energy. He forced them to wake up.
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  It really highlights the mental toll of the job.
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  And Speaking of physical tolls and history, Rogan mentioned a
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  detail about the Comedy Store in LA that was kind of gross, but
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  also really poetic. The grease outlines.
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  Yes, he said. If you go in and look at the
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  wall behind the bucket seats you can see these head shaped grease
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  stains from decades of comedians just sitting there.
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  Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks.
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  It's like the Shroud of Turin, but for stand up.
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  It's this visceral reminder, the history.
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  It is, but the conversation didn't stay in the past for
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  long. It pivoted sharply to current
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  events, and specifically the the real hot potato of immigration.
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  And we need to be clear here because this is a charged topic.
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  We are just reporting the data and arguments they discussed in
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  the transcript. Right they were.
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  We're using perplexity AI during the show to pull up ICE data in
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  real time, trying to get to the bottom of the criminality rates
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  among undocumented immigrants. And the data they found
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  suggested that around 8% of ICE arrests involved individuals
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  with violent criminal convictions.
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  Now to some 8% sounds low. It implies 92% are nonviolent.
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  But Rogan flipped that statistic with this medical analogy that I
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  thought was pretty striking. What was it again?
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  He said. If 8% of your body has cancer,
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  you're in trouble. Right, It's a rhetorical
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  reframing. He's arguing that when you're
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  dealing with millions of people, 8% represents a massive absolute
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  number of dangerous individuals. It just highlights why the
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  debate is so difficult. One side sees the percentage and
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  thinks mostly safe, and the other sees the raw number and
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  thinks imminent threat. And then they got into a
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  structural mechanism that I don't think many people fully
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  grasp, the census. This is so important for
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  understanding the political incentives.
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  The US Constitution mandates a count of all persons residing in
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  the country, not just citizens. So your congressional seats and
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  your Electoral College votes are allocated based on that total
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  population count. So let's break that down.
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  If a state has a high population of undocumented immigrants, they
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  get more seats in Congress. That's the argument, yeah.
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  The discussion in the source material highlighted a claim
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  that California might lose one or two House seats if
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  undocumented immigrants weren't counted.
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  So the argument is that you can essentially import political
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  power by moving bodies into specific districts.
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  Even if those people can't vote because they count toward the
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  representation of that district. It's a heavy accusation, but
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  mechanically the math checks out.
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  But then Eason threw in a curveball about voting patterns
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  that sort of complicates this. He noted that minority groups,
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  including recent immigrants, seem to be shifting to the
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  right. His theory on this was cultural.
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  He called it the hustle mindset. He argued that people who move
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  countries to work are inherently ambitious.
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  And they reject the victimhood narrative that he argues the
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  modern left relies on. He's basically saying I crossed
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  a continent to get here, don't talk to me like I'm helpless.
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  It's a fascinating realignment. It really is now, from domestic
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  politics to, well, whatever's happening in Venezuela, this
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  segment got a little Tom Clancy. It really did.
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  They were talking about the contested elections with Maduro,
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  but then they drifted into these rumors about a potential US
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  extraction mission. And they were talking about tech
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  that sounded like sci-fi. Drones, helicopters.
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  And Sonic weapons. Sonic weapons part was wild.
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  The idea was that they could use sound waves to bubble your
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  organs and incapacitate everyone so they could grab Maduro
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  without firing a shot. Bubble your organs.
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  That is a terrifying phrase. It is.
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  It was treated strictly as a what if or a rumor, but it
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  speaks to this fear of unknown military technology.
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  If that exists, sovereignty changes completely.
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  Speaking of people acting above the law, we have to talk about
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  the Epstein segment and, and honestly, the Dennis Hastert.
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  The Hastert discussion was crucial because it moved the
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  conversation from conspiracy theory to documented history.
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  This was specific. I think a lot of people have
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  forgotten who Dennis Hastert was.
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  He was the Speaker of the House from 1999 to 2007, third in line
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  to the presidency. The most powerful man in
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  Congress. And as the transcript details,
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  he was a predator. This wasn't just, you know,
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  financial corruption. It went way back to his time as
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  a wrestling coach. And the thing that enraged them
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  is what he actually got in trouble for.
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  He didn't go to prison for the abuse.
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  No, he was convicted of structuring, which is a banking
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  violation where you withdraw cash in amounts just under
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  $10,000 to avoid triggering a federal report.
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  He was doing it to pay hush money.
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  So the FBI gets him on a banking technicality.
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  And what was the sentence? He served 15 months for being a
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  serial predator who ran the House of Representatives.
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  And that's the point they were making about the Epstein client
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  list. Rogan used a drug bust analogy.
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  If you catch a massive drug distributor, you don't just
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  charge the dealer. You go after the buyers, the
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  whole network. But with Epstein, we have a sex
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  trafficking conviction with no clients named.
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  Who was he trafficking to is the question.
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  It defies logic. Unless, as Hastert shows, the
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  system is designed to protect its own.
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  But if that wasn't dark enough, they pivoted to a story that is
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  just. It's pure nightmare fuel.
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  Carl Tansler. This is a pivot from
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  institutional evil to just individual insanity.
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  For anyone who doesn't know and just prepare yourself, Tansler
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  was a radiology tech in the 1930s.
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  He became obsessed with a patient who died, and he didn't.
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  Let a little thing like death stop him.
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  He stole her body from the mausoleum and lived with it for
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  seven years. The details are gruesome.
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  They went into how he used piano wire to hold the bones together
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  because they were falling apart. He used silk soaked and waxed to
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  replace her skin as a decomposed.
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  And gallons of perfume. I mean he was sleeping next to
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  this Corse every night. It's horrific, but in the
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  context of this deep dive, it fits the theme.
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  Tansler refused to accept reality, so he constructed a
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  fake reality, literally rebuilding her to live in.
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  It's the ultimate twisted version of a walled garden.
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  That is a disturbing but accurate transition to the next
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  part, the collapse of shared reality, because now we're all
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  kind of doing a digital version of what Tanzler did.
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  This is the dead Internet theory.
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  They brought up a video of Finn Wolfhard, the kid from Stranger
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  Things. Right, Mike Wheeler.
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  There's a video of him snapping his fingers and the entire room
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  changes and it looks 100% real. The lighting, the texture, the
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  movement. But it's AI.
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  And the implication is, if you cannot trust your own eyes, if
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  video evidence is no longer proof of anything, what happens
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  to society? Rogan's take was that we
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  retreat. We retreat into algorithms that
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  feed us what we want to be true, because verifying what is true
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  is just too hard. And that retreat leads to
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  dehumanization. Decided to tweet from ACEO about
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  the death of a political figure, Charlie Kirk, the CEO wrote.
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  Rest in piss. Just absolutely 0 empathy.
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  Right. And the point wasn't about the
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  politics, it was about the humanity.
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  When you're in a digital bubble, the other side stops being
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  human. They're just pixels you can
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  hate. And we are becoming physically
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  isolated too. They brought up this concept of
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  third spaces. Can you define that for us?
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  Sure, it's a sociological concept.
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  Your first space is home, second is work.
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  The third space is where community happens.
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  The bowling alley, the mall, the cheap diner.
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  Places where you interact with people you didn't choose to
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  interact with. And those are disappearing,
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  they're too expensive, or they're being replaced by
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  digital Hangouts like Discord. The guest links this directly to
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  the stats on loneliness. They mentioned the male
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  virginity crisis, the plummeting fertility rates in the West that
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  we're dropping below replacement level.
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  Yeah, that's a heavy stat. It means we are a civilization
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  that is slowly, well, turning itself off.
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  We're isolating ourselves in these digital walled gardens and
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  the result is a slow motion demographic collapse.
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  Which makes the next segment even more poignant, because if
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  our civilization is stalling, they spent a lot of time talking
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  about civilizations that were completely wiped out.
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  The lost history segment. This was fascinating.
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  They started with the Aztecs. The scale of the sacrifice they
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  discussed is just mind boggling. They were talking about 20,000
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  to 80,000 people sacrificed in four days.
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  It's industrial scale and it totally reframes the Spanish
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  conquest. We hear about Cortez and his
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  superior technology, but the guests made the point that
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  Cortez won because all the neighboring tribes hated the
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  Aztecs. Because the Aztecs were
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  capturing them and eating them. Exactly.
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  They were tired of being the supply chain for the sacrifices.
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  So when these guys in metal armor showed up, they said, you
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  know what, we're with them. But when the Spanish one, they
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  burned the books, we lost so much knowledge.
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  And it's not just the Aztecs. They brought up the Rongarongo
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  script on Easter Island. This is a tragedy of timing.
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  I. Hadn't heard this.
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  Story So Easter Island had a written language, a unique
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  script, but then Peruvian slavers came in and abducted or
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  killed almost the entire population, specifically
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  targeting the Literate class. The kings and the priests, the
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  people who knew how to read the tablets.
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  They died and now the tablets are just wood with scratches on
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  them. The software to read it is gone
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  forever. It shows how fragile human
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  knowledge really is. They also mentioned the Voynich
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  Manuscript, that book from the 1400s written in a code that
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  even modern AI can't crack. It's just sitting there mocking
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  us. It really challenges our
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  arrogance. We think everything is backed up
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  to the cloud, but history shows entire operating systems of
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  human thought can just be deleted.
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  That sometimes things come back. We have to end the history
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  segment with the. The Kroykemp.
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  I love this story. Scientists were convinced this
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  fish went extinct 66,000,000 years ago.
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  Gone and. Then, in 1938, a fisherman off
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  South Africa hauls one up. It's the casual Saturday fishing
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  trip and he catches a ghost. 188 lbs armored scales.
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  It hadn't changed in millions of years.
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  It was swimming around while T Rex was walking the earth.
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  Rogan of course loves this. He's like if 188 LB monster fish
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  can hide for 66,000,000 years. Maybe Dragons are real.
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  It's a fairpoint about the ocean.
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  It is the ultimate walled garden.
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  We have no idea what is swimming down there.
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  So we've covered political corruption, corpse brides, the
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  end of civilization, and dinosaur fish.
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  Feel like we need a palate cleanser?
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  Let's talk about food. Specifically, the tragedy of
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  late night food in Austin. They were lamenting that for all
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  of Austin's growth, you can't get a good meal after a comedy
• 14:14
  show. They compared it to the Jewish
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  delis in LA and New York. Cantor's in LA versus Cats is in
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  New York and they went deep on the Cats ticket system.
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  It's iconic. You walk in, a bouncer hands you
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  a ticket, they write your order on it, and if you lose that
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  ticket? If fine, it doesn't matter what
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  you ate. Lost ticket equals 50 bucks.
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  It's accountability with your sandwich.
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  Exactly. So taking a step back from the
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  pastrami, what is the take away from this deep dive?
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  We bounce from comedy to conspiracy to history.
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  I think it comes back to that anxiety we started with.
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  We discussed lost civilizations, lost languages, and this fear of
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  losing our current reality to AI.
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  It paints a picture of a world that feels really fragile.
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  But then right in the middle of it, you have comedy, you have
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  the ankle weights. You have the struggle to find
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  the truth, or at least a laugh, in the middle of all the chaos.
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  That's a great synthesis and I want to leave the listener with
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  a thought based on that walled garden concept we started with.
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  We worry about being trapped in bubbles, a comedy club, a
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  political party and algorithm. But if deep fakes and AI are
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  breaking our shared reality, are we all just destined to live in
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  a walled garden of 1? And what happens when reality
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  finally climbs over the wall? That is the question to keep you
• 15:28
  up at night. Thanks for listening to the deep
• 15:30
  dive. We'll catch you on the next one.
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  Take care.