Don't take in the opinion of the world

Lex Fridman opens the 300th episode of his podcast, recorded on the Fourth of July, by quoting Charles Bukowski's poem "Style." Bukowski wrote that style is the answer to everything: a fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing, and that doing a dangerous thing with style is what he called art. He listed bullfighting, boxing, loving, even opening a can of sardines. Rogan agrees, and then goes further. He calls the way people live their lives a form of art.

He had just written a foreword to his friend Cameron Hanes's book, at the time the number-one selling audiobook in the world. Hanes, Rogan said, practices an art few people appreciate: the maximized life. Full-time job, father, husband, the best bow hunter on earth, lifting weights, and, while training for 240-mile races, getting up at four in the morning to run a full marathon before work. "How does a person do this?" Rogan asks. Discipline, he and Fridman agree, is art too.

The same beauty, for him, lives in David Goggins maximizing the grind, and in people who stay kind no matter what the world throws at them. Bukowski also wrote that what matters most is how you walk through the fire. Rogan takes that as a choice. You can complain your way through, or you can handle it with grace, dignity, and discipline so that other people's troubles look smaller by comparison. He tries, even with people he does not like, to notice the best parts of how they live.

Fridman had watched Rogan walk through fire that January, privately and publicly. There was the N-word highlight reel, the pile-on over COVID guests, a mass of attacks that went past the public persona to the human being. How did he survive it, and with something that looked like grace? Rogan's first answer is mushrooms. Less than a gram a day, he says, plus a lot of very hard training.

He also frames difficulty as an opening: to grow, to show character under pressure, to see how you actually handle a bad situation. Podcasts are media — "the purest form," he says, with no executives or ratings meetings — and that January he got a close look at "the wiring under the machine" of how the rest of media would try to take him out. CNN looping the same clips was wild to watch. Wilder still: he gained two million subscribers, and the show had never been bigger than at the end of it.

If you have messed up, he says, the storm is a chance to discuss it, to apologize if you need to, and to let people see how you actually think. There is no more honesty than a person under extreme duress. It is horrible to call that a benefit, but it was one. Can it break a person? Yes. Fridman has felt smaller versions after talking about Russia and Ukraine, and does not always understand why the words cut. Rogan says part of the pain is that you are not in the room. They talk, you cannot rebut, and if you do, you invite the whole world in.

Online, people lean negative with strangers, especially on controversy. Even ten percent of thousands of posts is a lot of poison. Fridman, who calls himself self-critical, hears a shard of truth and that is why it hurts. Rogan answers that it is one aspect of you, boiled down as if it defined you totally. Thinking out loud in public is complex; most people never do it; hot takes and click-hunters are guaranteed. The number of those people, he adds, can be quite large.

So can it destroy someone? One hundred percent, Rogan says. His defense was simpler than a statement or a crisis firm: he kept doing stand-up, kept doing shows, and ignored everything. He knew it was there. He did not read it. His wife was aware; the rule was that she should never read him negative articles. A person's opinion, written down, does not gain relevance. They could have had it in silence, or at dinner. He does not know them, he is not in the room, and the piece is usually a narrative assembled to make him look awful — which they are allowed to do. He should not take it in.

"You're not supposed to be taking in the opinion of the world." You are supposed to take in a small group of people you actually encounter, so you learn how you make them feel — maybe too rude, too insensitive, something you can improve. That is how personalities and social skills form. Millions of strangers with a distorted story cannot keep you sane. During the height of the attempt to cancel him, he has no idea how many people were involved. False narratives still take hold, meetings stack on meetings, and the outrage arrives. Sometimes it destroys. In his case, he says, laughing, it did not work.

The lessons he draws are mushrooms and exercise, with exercise doing the real work. His routines are horrible on purpose. He creates his own misery so that everything else is easier: sauna, cold plunge, "torture sessions" that make enduring other things cheaper. You also have to understand the machine. A YouTube title in all caps announcing that Lex Fridman is canceled is not something a sane person absorbs. You know you. You generally know if you made a mistake, and if people are upset.

The conversation slides into the Trump years as another strange chapter of American division. Rogan thinks it will get weirder: Trump will run again, "against a dead man," a jab at Joe Biden shaking hands with people who are not there. He is not a Trump supporter "in any way, shape or form." He has had the chance to have Trump on the show more than once, and has said no every time. He does not want to help him.

Fridman says the night is still young. Rogan will have Putin on, and he is competitive as hell. The metric, Fridman thinks, is whether the conversation would be good, not the politics — Kanye West was an artist, and Kanye doing well does not change the country. Rogan worries you can rehabilitate someone in a way that is shocking. Look at Alex Jones, on the podcast several times: people who watched those episodes think he is hilarious, that he badly messed up Sandy Hook, that he is right more than wrong, and that he is not evil so much as a man with psychotic breaks, alcoholism, and substance abuse that produced some very poor thinking.

Rogan has known Jones more than twenty years. Jones was telling him about Jeffrey Epstein's island a decade ago, a place where elites were compromised with underage girls on film, and Rogan thought it was nonsense. "Not only is it true, but people keep getting murdered for it," he says, citing a Clinton advisor found hanged with an extension cord and shot in the chest, ruled a suicide. Elon Musk has been asking for the client list. Fridman pushes: if those conversations revealed Jones as a human being, wouldn't Trump be the same exercise? Rogan says that is the problem. He is not sure Trump would genuinely be there, as opposed to putting on a performance.

He would need more than thirty minutes, one-on-one, no chaos guest. He also cannot get Trump high the way he can Jones. He does not feel well versed enough politically to parse what was real in the Russia investigations, which organizations talked to Moscow before 2016, the Clinton campaign, Trump's people, Hunter Biden's dealings in Ukraine. Doing that objectively and then broadcasting it would be a long research project he does not have time for. Fridman notes he did have that kind of time for Bob Lazar. Rogan does not argue. Lazar is different. He wanted to sit with the man and see if he could smell bullshit.

He did not smell it. He went through Lazar's interviews — not many, spread over more than thirty years — and found the consistency alarming. The story is wacky: back-engineering alien craft at a government site carved into a mountain to hide from satellites. Lazar really did work at Los Alamos; he really is a propulsion expert and a scientist. Did he actually reverse-engineer UFOs? Rogan does not know. The motion Lazar described matches what some pilots have captured on video.

Whether or not Lazar is full of it, he forced people to take the subject seriously, or at least to try to debunk it and then fall down the rabbit hole. The Fermi paradox sits behind all of it: where are they? Neil deGrasse Tyson has told Rogan that infinity is so large that not only is there life out there, there is you, an infinite number of times, the same cellular interactions in the same order. Fridman slows him down. That is possible, not certain — the sort of thing Sean Carroll would tie to some interpretations of quantum mechanics. The practical question is local: this galaxy, neighboring galaxies, what would they look like.

One picture is panspermia: a much larger "daddy civilization" rolling by and planting seeds, Prometheus-style, so the neighbors we meet are only a few million years apart and roughly as dumb as we are. Another is vast civilizations expanding near the speed of light, which means the empty sky could fill overnight because the light we see is old. Rogan is fascinated by wormholes and Type III tricks. He had Michio Kaku on recently, a man who can boil hard ideas down and is not shy about wild claims that still sit on possible physics. Kaku has now moved the burden: these objects defy known propulsion, so conventional explanations have to do the work.

Fridman asks whether secret programs could already have gravity-harnessing, space-time-distorting travel. Rogan thinks it is not only possible but likely that such things would be kept secret. Stealth fighters stayed hidden until they were needed, and even then became public by being detected, not by press conference. Contractors like Lockheed Martin and the Department of Defense run on black boxes: propulsion, AI surveillance, stealth drones, cyber weapons. What made Rogan skeptical lately is that the government, the Pentagon, and NASA keep talking. He no longer thinks the objects are aliens. He thinks the more likely story is a smokescreen for advanced drones they want the world to believe do not exist. Otherwise, why tell us about "off world crafts not made from this Earth"? Unless they are prepping the public for an invasion — and he does not think they would. He thinks the government has contempt for citizens' intelligence and for the idea that it works for them. So the smokescreen, to him, is the better bet.

Fridman has been reading about the KGB and the FSB ahead of a trip to Ukraine and Moscow, including Jack Barsky's book. The scale of surveillance and manipulation is large; so is the incompetence and bureaucracy. The line those services will not cross, for intelligence and control, is not obvious. He has never been officially contacted, but he has started to wonder whether someone he knows is doing that work. Rogan: you probably do. Has he asked himself? For sure. Guests on the podcast? One hundred percent. He has suspicions. Does he care? It depends. If there is deception, an attempt to use the show to plant a narrative and trick people, yes. That is also exactly what those agencies do. If you have the number one podcast in the world, he imagines they have had meetings about large platforms and how to get a message on them.

The cancellation fight, he says, showed there is no objective analysis in mainstream media, only narratives — to promote ideas or to diminish mavericks who are not attached to a system you can compromise. The danger is the largest reach plus real independence. Fridman notes that a mind can still be manipulated. Rogan agrees everyone can, including himself. He spends time thinking about what he thinks. He was all-in on UFOs for a while; now something smells fishy. Here is his problem: he wants it to be real so badly. "I'm such a sucker." He is aware of it, so he stops and asks why he wants the truth exposed. Because it is fun. That is it.

People with Defense Department connections, Fridman says, draw lines between who is full of shit and who is not; the ones who are not are often very quiet. That is part of why Lazar is interesting: he tried to stay quiet, hid his identity in the first George Knapp videos, then went public to protect his life, in his telling. Rogan calls it a great, juicy story, which is exactly when he gets nervous. How do you know who to trust when you are Joe Rogan? He is friends with Mike Baker, a former CIA officer who has been on many times. Former, in air quotes. He does not believe Baker is fully former. He also thinks Baker is a good guy, and has learned from him how "the elves work under the machine."

Friends are mostly old friends. Time is the filter; going through things together. Comics, the good ones, he trusts. He would be stunned if there were a thousand real professionals on earth who headline clubs, theaters, and arenas. At twenty years in, there is a shared honesty. Becoming a great comic is humbling the way jiu-jitsu is: you have eaten so much shit that underneath the chaos there is, hopefully, a good human — surface bullshitter, trustworthy on important things. The ones who are not become what he calls islands: successful, one opener they have used forever, no comedy friends, miserable because they cannot relate. Fame isolates; people want things; the relationship goes unbalanced. The podcast he loves most for that reason is Protect Our Parks, with Ari Shaffir, Shane Gillis, and Mark Normand, getting obliterated and talking shit, sometimes cutting a Shane tangent after the fact. Martial-arts friends work the same way. They know who has been through the gauntlet.

Fridman asks for the greatest comic of all time. Rogan does not think there is one. Norm Macdonald was one of the greats. Fridman, who thinks a lot about death, calls it genius to release a special after you are dead. Rogan has not seen it. Fridman has: *Nothing Special*, a name that sounds like Norm, the comic on a Zoom-like screen doing jokes with no laugh track. Given the dry, dark style, it works as a joke on the hole everyone was stuck in, and it also proves how much audience energy matters. Norm, like Mitch Hedberg or Steven Wright, was an island in the form.

They were not close; they just were not around each other often. Rogan loved him. Twice, at random, they sat next to each other on planes. Once Norm talked about quitting smoking because it was terrible for you. They landed, and he sprinted to a shop, bought cigarettes, and lit one on the way out the door. All that talking about smoking, he said, made him want one. Impulsive, a gambler, living in a non sequitur. There was nothing artificial about him. His brilliance was his essence.

The godfather of it all, for Rogan, is Lenny Bruce. He has concert posters at home; Whitney Cummings gave him a photo from one of the arrests for obscene jokes. Before Bruce, comics hosted shows and told two-guys-walk-into-a-bar jokes. Bruce talked about social issues, life, language, laws. He was the first modern stand-up. Watch him today and it does not work, because society evolved. Pop-culture art is a window and a time machine: you have to put yourself in 1963. The taboos are now normal, so they are not shocking, and not that funny.

Fridman offers D.H. Lawrence's *Lady Chatterley's Lover* and *The Gulag Archipelago*: the risk is what made them matter, when the book could be banned or you could go to prison. No one took that risk more than Bruce, Rogan says. Arrested many times, he died on a bathroom floor shooting heroin, trying to cope with lawsuits. Late footage shows him on stage reading legal papers. The comedy had deteriorated horribly. After him came Richard Pryor. At fifteen, Rogan's parents took him to *Live at the Sunset Strip*. He remembers the room falling out of their chairs, and the thought: this man is doing this just by talking. Nothing he had seen in movies was as funny. That planted the seed — television, then open mics, then the stage.

Fridman has been sitting in open mics, not performing, and finds it inspiring: people putting it all out, night after night, eating shit, sometimes five people in the room and nothing landing. Rogan still remembers those days. Dane Cook was the first person he heard say publicly that if he had to start from scratch, he is not sure he could endure the path from open mic to success. The ratio of people who try and fail to people who try and succeed is off the charts. He does not know another art form with a success rate that low. It is psychological torture, and you cannot teach it. Someone can teach you the chords to "All Along the Watchtower." No one can teach you comedy.

Can you start unfunny and become funny? Yes, Rogan says. It is not easy. You eat a lot of shit, examine why you are not funny, sit with uncomfortable thoughts. Maybe you need psychedelics and a new interface with reality; maybe a broken heart; maybe more life. He started at twenty-one as a moron: impressions and sex, no philosophy, no unique perspective. Every bomb forced introspection, which is how a philosophy actually develops. You learn through doing. The same, he says, is true of podcasting.

Fridman wants five minutes at an open mic because he is terrified of it. Rogan suggests Kill Tony. How hard is five minutes? It depends how long you have been thinking about it, how you look at things, and your style. The hardest style, he thinks, is Steven Wright's: pure non sequiturs, no flow, brutal to memorize into an hour. The upside is that the joke carries the weight, not the dance with the room. Without Wright or Hedberg-level material, it is all delivery, and you either kill or bomb. In a sense that is random, because you are a different person every day — tired, heartbroken, nourished. You go on in the neighborhood of who you are.

Kill Tony is taped. Eating shit lives forever. That is why Rogan calls it the most important show in comedy. For people just starting, it establishes that the job is to be funny. Insecurity makes people pretend the message matters more, that comedy must be socially aware and promote positive things. "The people that say that, they're all bad, they're all bad at comedy." There is not a person on earth, he says, who ever changed their life because of a joke. They came for jokes. Shane Gillis, one of the best up-and-coming comics, just tries to be as funny as possible; Rogan cannot imagine him pivoting to a virtue-signaling agenda. One minute, live, Tony ready to shit on you: nobody cares if you are gay, straight, Asian, Black, trans, non-binary, eighty or twenty. Are you funny? If you are, you are in. Wisdom can leak out — Tim Dillon weaves real points through jokes — but that is not the primary goal.

Fridman asks about childhood. Rogan's parents split when he was five. At the time his father was a hero, the protector, the coolest guy in the world — what every kid thinks. He and a cousin got into an actual fight over who was tougher, King Kong or Godzilla. Rogan was on Kong's side, which he now says was wrong, and he punched his cousin in the face. He thought he was in real trouble; his cousin's mother called him a monster. His father got him alone, asked what happened, then: did you cry? No. "Good, don't ever cry." Rogan remembers thinking he should start punching people, because dad clearly thought that was fine as long as you did not cry. This was 1972. A different world.

Fridman brings up Jung's shadow: what irritates you in others can be unexamined in yourself. Has Rogan still got unexamined wreckage in the unconscious? He does not think so. He has looked, the way you look when someone says they left something at your house. The positive side, for him, was his mother's later marriage to a hippie stepfather, a good man, very different, and a childhood of moving. The bad: he did not develop long-term friends. The good: he was forced to form his own opinions instead of inheriting the neighborhood's. Combined with losing his hero early, it left a very independent streak.

Without martial arts and then comedy, he says, he would have been in trouble. Too independent for normal jobs, for school, too feral to sit still or take orders. With the wrong parents, especially today, he most certainly would have been medicated. This timeline, he says, is as good as it gets for someone like him. Advice for kids in a hard situation: find a thing you really enjoy. For him it was drawing, comic-book illustration, then martial arts — the vehicle out of anxiety, trauma, insecurity. Getting good at something you love tells a young person they are not a loser. Every young person in his kind of situation thinks they are. He did not know he wasn't until he started winning.

Martial arts taught him he could get better, that he was not a loser, just someone in a messed-up situation. People started to admire him. He went from insecure failure to success at a dangerous thing other people were scared of, which gave him confidence and a clean view of the correlation between hard work and results. You also cannot listen to people. His parents did not want him fighting or doing stand-up. You have to know who you are, push through other people's lack of faith, and then you can apply that to critics and to social media.

What about people in their fifties, who have done a lot and could settle down? Imagine ninety-year-old Rogan in Texas talking to today. If you are David Goggins, he says, you have to be David Goggins; there is no other path left. Will Goggins still be screaming into a camera at seventy? One hundred percent. If they are both alive, Goggins will call and tell him to stay hard. Lean into what you are if you are enjoying it; if you are not, rethink why. Is a shift still possible in your fifties? "If you're alive, you can get better." No matter what. If you are ninety with a month to live, you can still apologize and reshape how the people around you will feel about you after you are gone.

He likes watching people in their seventies get back into dating, a woman in her sixties starting powerlifting, white belts at seventy in the jiu-jitsu gym. People are not happy without puzzles and complex tasks — an art project, a new craft, stand-up. Doing difficult things is nourishment for the mind the way food is for the body. You need something puzzling enough that you have to find your potential inside the difficulty. For him that has been a constant: he is a very happy person, and he has never had a moment when he was not doing difficult things. Fridman jokes that he just keeps starting fires. Rogan corrects him. Fires are out of control. Give yourself a task, arduous, mental and physical.

People who think physical challenges are just grunt work have never really been challenged physically. It is emotional intelligence: understanding the desire to quit, conquering what he calls your inner weakness, a mental strength you can spend on intellectual work. There is arrogance, he thinks, in people who only do intellectual exercises and treat the physical as base and unnecessary. Stephen Hawking had no opportunity; his physical dilemma was keeping his heart beating. For most people, physical struggle pays in a mental way that academics overlook while making excuses for being fat, lazy, or scrawny. Fridman tells him about Russ Tedrake, an MIT roboticist who studies legged locomotion and runs barefoot seven to ten miles each way to campus, all surfaces, then changes into ordinary clothes. He had been significantly overweight; a mentor's suicide made him face mortality. He is not preachy. He just does it. Rogan loves pulling sleds outside in Austin's hundred-degree heat. Same idea.

Fridman asks for relationship advice. Rogan says it may not apply, but: be someone a person would want to be in a relationship with. Why would they? Maybe you bicker, lie, get jealous, are cruel, have no sense of humor, are not kind. Whatever makes people avoid you, fix that. You also have to find the right person. A lot of people settle for sexy. You can get hot and nice; do not get hot and mean. "Then you get Amber Heard." Do not pick someone who does not share your values, who makes excuses, who is lazy or spiteful. His wife is smart, hardworking, dedicated, and, what he loves most, really nice, always smiling, a happy person to be around. Those people exist, as friends and as partners, and they make life better. A good tribe is one of the most valuable things he has: people like Hanes and Goggins, generous, curious, honest, who make you want to do better.

If Fridman interviews Vladimir Putin, what should he ask? Rogan's first question: how's the cancer? The narrative is terrifying — a dictator with the world's largest nuclear arsenal, possibly dying, who has just invaded a sovereign country, a man with nothing to lose. Rogan does not buy it. Putin's face looks bloated, the body not much bigger; a friend with sarcoidosis on prednisone got a swollen, watery face that looks the same. Fridman is more worried that "Putin is sick" is a sticky piece of propaganda, the way health narratives stuck to Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Trump. On Biden, Rogan says the mainstream treats him with kid gloves he has never seen, while the cognitive decline is obvious. Fridman wants a serious conversation without mockery: are you aware, who is around you, what happens if you stop seeing clearly. Rogan says Fridman would be transparent, which is why he would never be a politician. He is too honest.

The real questions, Fridman thinks, are about democracy versus what Russia has. Elections, as set up, are a joke — though Putin would push back: he is still very popular. Critics say that is because serious opposition is pushed out, arrested, murdered. What fascinates Rogan about the United States is that every four years, or eight, the hardest job in the world can go to someone completely inexperienced. After eight years you have the wisdom to keep going; the problem is that power gets to your head. Fridman thinks Putin genuinely wants the best for Russia, as Stalin, in his view, wanted the best for the Soviet Union until the end. Hitler, he thinks, lost his mind during the war. Putin believes he is the best person to bring the country out. The democratic case is that refreshing the leader is the point, because every leader thinks they know best.

Rogan does not think there is a clear-cut right way. A perfect benevolent civil servant for twelve or twenty years would be amazing. The American system is not that. It is dirty, corrupted by money and influence. Outside Washington, D.C., one of the richest areas in the country is where the lobbyists live. Special interests shape who gets elected and what they do. This country is an experiment in self-government. If he could do it over, the most important law would keep money out of politics and make it a heinous crime to buy policy for profit. That corruption, he says, has just been accepted.

Fridman is leaving in a couple of days for Ukraine and Russia, and hopes to come back in one piece and drink whiskey again. Rogan is nervous; journalists have been killed. Fridman: they don't know jiu-jitsu. He does not think in clear objectives. Something in him says he needs to go. He remembers the land from years ago, generations of family in Ukraine and Russia, the soul of the people, the culture. He wants to see what the war has made, anger and love, and to hear people out, mostly without recording. He has connections to some political leaders; everyone has said yes; whether it happens is another matter.

You have to go to a place to understand it. He has never been in a war zone, never stood on land wiped by weapons, and he wants to feel that. He remembers when things were flourishing — corruption and struggle, but people were happy. Now there is hate in the air on all sides. Sometimes a place pulls you. It does not have to make sense. He has no real plan, and hopes to be back in a month. He is not someone who seeks risk. Rogan is terrified of bears and sharks; that does not mean you never go in the ocean. A little risk, to discover something about himself, is what it boils down to.

To be a good American, he says, he needs to understand who he was and where he came from. America stitches cultures together; everyone came from somewhere else. Nothing reveals the spirit of a people better than war. It cuts the nonsense. This is who we are. He wants to see it, understand it, and come back. Rogan hopes he does, and that he comes back with the insight he is after. Fridman thanks him for the conversation, the support, the kindness. After they sign off, Fridman leaves listeners with a Miyamoto Musashi line both of them like: "Once you know the way broadly, you'll see it in everything."