Mike Baker (2:34)

I, you know, I always assume people have heard these stories from Afghanistan.

Joe Rogan (2:39)

Cheers. You gotta drink that.

Mike Baker (2:41)

Cheers. Sorry, you can't. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:43)

Buffalo Trace.

Mike Baker (2:47)

So, yeah, the amount of man on man buggery in Afghanistan is significant.

Joe Rogan (2:55)

Did they warn you about it before you went over there?

Mike Baker (2:57)

No, no, I think there are so many different things about both Iraq and Afghanistan, that the learning curve for all of us was so high. Culturally, you don't think about a lot of those things. You just don't. You just. You know, you grow up in America, right? You assume everybody. Every man is basically like an American male because that's at 26 or, you know, 27 years old. You know that there are cultural differences for sure. But I'm telling you, I was in Kuwait for, like, the first time early on, and the Kuwaitis like to hold hands, like, the dudes like to hold hands. And that's not comfortable, like, for guys.

Joe Rogan (3:42)

Isn't that weird, though? Because we do shake hands.

Mike Baker (3:44)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:45)

You know what I mean?

Mike Baker (3:45)

But you don't walk around holding another man's hand. It's just not comfortable in any scenario.

Joe Rogan (3:51)

But imagine trying to explain that to someone who didn't understand, like, what makes it gay. Like, at what point in time does, like, holding onto a hand, does it get. You know, like there's like a meter. Like, you can kind of like hold onto a hot potato for a couple seconds, and it'll burn your hand.

Mike Baker (4:06)

After a certain point, you're walking around holding another man's hand, and you've never really done it probably since you were a kid, maybe holding your dad's hand. When you're, like three or four years old and in Special Forces, they tell you you have to work with the cultural differences, and they're just talking in general. They're not specific because they don't know where you're going. And you're gonna have to work by, with, and through the host indigenous force. So you have to accept some of the things that. The cultural differences and just go with the flow.

Joe Rogan (4:40)

Right.

Mike Baker (4:40)

So as a new Green Beret, you know, as, you know, sf guys, you're just walking around holding another man's hand. You're so freaked out about it, you're like, oh, man. Oh, man. What the. What the fuck does this mean? Like, you know, you're questioning all your reality. Like, oh, my God. You know, like, and. And then after a few years, you know, time and repetition and war or whatever, somebody goes to hold your hand, you're like, get the fuck away from me. I'm not doing that, bro. Come on. No, no, I'm not doing that.

Joe Rogan (5:13)

So you gave up after a while.

Mike Baker (5:14)

Oh, yeah. There's a lot of things you give up, Right. You're. You're taught in sf, drink the tea, eat the food, you know?

Joe Rogan (5:22)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (5:23)

Do everything. Yeah. Just completely assimilate and honestly, like, A lot of that is really good because it does teach you to be a lot more open as far as listing to what they're going through from their tribal plights. Like, what are they going through from a combat experience. What do they need? And you want. And you want to build rapport. That's what you want to do. And. But rep after rep in a war zone, you kind of get fatigued with that. And then you're like, yeah, let's just get to the dirt here, man. Like, who do we want to kill? Like, let's, let's get to that. And. Got it. You don't like that tribe, we don't like that tribe. We don't like this. You don't like that. Cool. Okay, so I'm not going to eat with you because every time I eat with you, I can't shit for like a normal shit for like a year. So we're just going to not do any of that.

Joe Rogan (6:12)

And you're telling me you literally didn't shit anything but diarrhea for. You said more than a year?

Mike Baker (6:18)

Yeah, it was years, man, because I was living and working with the Afghans and I went from Iraq and I did the invasion with Special Forces from the south, and I did multiple rotations in Iraq, both with SF and then with the agency when I went over there. And then when we did the. When we shut down Iraq in 2009, I turned around and basically went to Afghanistan in 2009. So I went from Iraq to Afghanistan and I went from Afghanistan, kind of finished up my. My CIA combat, I guess, experience, and then went back to the States to do a training thing. But by the time I got to Afghanistan, I had lots of time in Iraq. I had like four years on the ground. And Afghanistan was way different, but I was living and working with the Afghanis, I was eating with them. And your job is to not only train, assist and advise, build rapport, but you're trying to figure it out. So you need to be on the ground with them, living, eating, breathing, sleeping, like the whole thing. And they're what we call the chow hall facilities aren't the cleanliest. You're trying like you're working with them. You know, you institute different things. Like soap and water is like a good thing and it doesn't really matter. You're still going to get sick based on the water. Where is it coming from, what type of well source? There's lots of different variables, obviously, but dude, I didn't have a solid shit for two years and it just kind of got normalized to the point where it's such a gross thing to think about, man. You could not trust a fart ever. I got this great. I got this great story. So I came in off the gun trucks and. And I'm tired. I'm. I'm like. Went into the embassy and I had a meeting with somebody in Kabul. And I had this like, titanium mug that was like the size of a toilet bowl. And I'm filling it up with coffee. And I haven't slept for, I don't know, let's say 20 hours at the time. I'm. I'm dirty and. And I'm filling up this coffee toilet bowl, basically because I'm getting ready to go into a briefing. And I let out a fart, and it wasn't a fart. And the dude behind me was like, I didn't even turn around, dude. I knew there was somebody waiting for me and I shit my pants. And I didn't even turn around, didn't even blink an eye. Didn't even like lift up the handle because it was just normalized. And he goes, did you shit your pants? And I was like, yeah. And I just turned around and walked off. It was like. It was the deputy ambassador or somebody. It's like. It was like the ambassador, right? And I'm just like, whatever, dude, I got. I got to do. I'm out of here. Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's to the point of which I had a permanent stain in like my combat. My. My fatigues. Right. It's just so bad. But I was like, you know what, man? You got to do like.

Joe Rogan (9:30)

Yeah, people adapt.

Mike Baker (9:31)

You don't. You don't sweat little things like that. And honestly, you're just trying to like, get through your. You're trying to get through any and all things. And it's not like we're entrenched warfare or anything like that. It's just like, dude, I had shit to do. I had people to train. We were going out and I couldn't let that. Like, you can't pull over if you're. You can at times, but there are just times where you just. You just can't. So you just gotta keep moving. And it sucks. It's like the less glamorous side. I don't know if there's a lot of books out there telling all the cool stories about that, you know?

Joe Rogan (10:05)

So when did you find out about the buggery? Was it something that you need a lot of?

Mike Baker (10:10)

Yeah, it was. So it started in Kuwait and I Had a Arabic linguist. And he was a younger kid, you know, he was blonde hair, blue eyes, he's a Mormon kid. And he literally joined the army at 18. Two years later, after going to the Defensive Language Institute in Monterey, California, you come out and you're speaking Arabic, basically. And young kid, blonde hair, blue eyes, good Mormon kid, comes out and he's with us. And the Kuwaitis kept talking about how they wanted to take him camping. And we're like, why do you want to take that dude camping? Like, what's so special about that guy? You know? And you're like, after a while you realize, like, that's not what they wanted to do. Right. They were like talking about it, like, either a joking way or a serious way. But that's the first exposure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then.

Joe Rogan (11:09)

Did it take you a while to figure that out?

Mike Baker (11:10)

Yeah, yeah. Because you're so naive. Like, dude, I'm like 26 years old. Like, I don't fucking know.

Joe Rogan (11:16)

I don't.

Mike Baker (11:16)

I don't think this is a thing. I grew up in Idaho. Like, I know, yeah, it exists, but I'm so, you know, blithe fully, like, moving through the world, like, thinking everybody's an American male right now. This is weird. And then you go to Iraq, where I went to Iraq, and multiple rotations over there, and you start to assimilate with the Iraqis. You're either working with or you're training with. And then it kind of starts to, to fall apart where it's like, oh, this is somewhat normal for them now. They don't talk about it. And I'm not saying it's like everyone, by the way. I'm saying, like, it's, it's at least relevant enough culturally where it's somewhat normalized, not talked about. It's very.

Joe Rogan (12:09)

Is it similar in Kuwait as Afghanistan or do they vary? Iraq is different.

Mike Baker (12:16)

Yeah, they're all a little bit different. I mean, the Afghanis, we had to have depending on where we were in their barracks living situation. Like, you had to put really hard restrictions, like, you know, no butt fucking guys for the majority of this, because this is a health issue. We weren't like, it's not like we were, we were putting Bibles on their beds or something. We're just saying, hey, this is really unhealthy. You guys are going to spread a bunch of different diseases to one another. And like, we've got a mission to accomplish here. And every SF guy, every guy that's like been in Afghanistan knows what Man Love Thursday is. And it's kind of a. It's kind of a thing that they do.

Joe Rogan (12:57)

Is it just Thursday or is it.

Mike Baker (13:00)

It's.

Joe Rogan (13:00)

That's just a thing. It's just to say. Yeah, but it's just they. Each other.

Mike Baker (13:03)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (13:05)

So there's the kid with the blue eyes, and after a while you're like, hey, they don't really want to camp with him. They're trying to fuck this guy.

Mike Baker (13:12)

Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan (13:13)

You start thinking like, hey, how much of this is going on?

Mike Baker (13:16)

That's exactly right. Yeah. And then as you're exposed to. Not more of it, because you don't really see it, you hear about it. So as you build rapport, build confidence in your friendships, and people will start to talk about. But it is fairly pervasive. And it's one of those things that you just kind of accept that's happening from a good portion. A good portion of the guys and 50%, 60%. Well, we talked about kind of rewinding. It's. It's. The more disturbing factor is it's. It's socially indoctrinated in the children, like the sexual exploitation of children. So it starts early and then it moves into the adulthood. Bocce bozi is a real thing. And, you know, it's dressing boys to look like girls and they have some Afghanis. When I say some, I don't know how pervasive it is, but it's very. It's. It's a big percentage. And the adult male stuff, that's like one sub segment of their culture. But it's the sexual exploitation of children that. When you find that out, that's when things really turn for you psychologically. You're like, this, this place is really fucked. And it's. And it's very pervasive. It's, it's very. It's. It's.

Joe Rogan (14:51)

It.

Mike Baker (14:52)

It's. You know, if you go back and you read the Kite Runner. When I read the Kite Runner when I was in Afghanistan, I realized that, you know, it's not only the story about this kid, but it's also the story of Afghanistan. It's very, very. Those stories run parallel because children are sexually exploited regularly. And it's mainly the boys, from what I understand, to the point of which I was driving out on this op, I guess, from Kabul to Jalalabad. And when I first got to Afghanistan, I used to see these truck drivers and I thought, you know, my dad was a truck driver. It's really cool. These truck drivers take their sons out with on the road. That's such a really cool cultural thing. And my interpreter turned to me. He's like, those aren't their kids, dude. That's how horrible it is.

Joe Rogan (15:48)

It's so horrible that they're on display.

Mike Baker (15:51)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (15:51)

They're on parade.

Mike Baker (15:52)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (15:52)

You were saying the guys would parade.

Mike Baker (15:54)

Around their harem, Kandahar, and different areas. They'll. They'll have parades and they're on display as to this is my harem, and they're proud of it. And that was one of the most disturbing things that we would talk about, specifically between, like, the departments between Department of State, CIA, and the military is like, when you're out with the guys from a tactical and combat role, you see them, you interact with the way they are from a tactical level every day. And you'd bring this up to management, and they would say, oh, that doesn't. What do you mean that doesn't happen? That doesn't happen. Or they pretend it doesn't happen. But if you were on the ground in Afghanistan during the times I was there, honestly, from, you know, 2001, we'll say to the time that we pulled out, everybody uniformly would agree with what I'm saying. I. If you. If you spent some time in Afghanistan, you knew that was happening.

Joe Rogan (16:55)

Jesus Christ.

Mike Baker (16:56)

And did you see these parades? No, no, We. But National Geographic, I believe, did an article on it several years ago. Yeah. Boccha Bazi. I could be getting the pronunciation a little bit off, but it turns for you emotionally and psychologically because you're like, okay, now. Now I got some hate. Right, Right.

Joe Rogan (17:24)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (17:24)

Made my. Makes your job a little bit easier, right?

Joe Rogan (17:27)

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Baker (17:28)

Makes your job a little bit easier. It also makes it harder for you not to want to change the entire government system where you. You want to completely, you know, rewrite the entire DNA of the cultural infrastructure. Right. Because it's sad and it's. It's evil and it's all of these, like, really horrible things. So as much as you want to help the Afghans and their plight. Yeah, there you go.

Joe Rogan (18:04)

Inside the lives of girls dressed as boys in Afghanistan, the cultural practice of.

Mike Baker (18:09)

Bacha posh, that's a. I think that's the flip. That's the reverse.

Joe Rogan (18:14)

Encourages parents dress their daughters as sons for a better future, but often it only makes life harder.

Mike Baker (18:20)

That's a different. So it's boys.

Joe Rogan (18:22)

Oh, so that's the opposite.

Mike Baker (18:23)

The opposite.

Joe Rogan (18:23)

Yeah. Girls dress as boys. So this is a different thing. Yeah. Why do they do that? What's that about girls dressed as boys?

Mike Baker (18:32)

Well, I think because, well, one, there's. There's a very low education rate. When I come back to get the.

Joe Rogan (18:38)

Kids educated, if they pretend they're boys.

Mike Baker (18:41)

Women are really seen as in Afghanistan. I'm generalizing, right? I'm taking really big swaths of the Afghan culture. So I know this isn't every Afghan. I've got lots of different Afghan friends, and I've hired a lot of Afghans. This isn't everybody.

Joe Rogan (18:58)

This is the dancing boys of Afghanistan. Go back up again. Show what's going on. These guys are throwing money at this dancing boy. Back that up, Jamie. It was. I just clicked somewhere random, kind of, oh, what the man?

Mike Baker (19:13)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (19:15)

So those are like little boys and they were dancing like strippers and these guys are throwing dollars at them.

Mike Baker (19:21)

Yes. Yep.

Joe Rogan (19:24)

Oh, my God, this is so crazy.

Mike Baker (19:26)

And they're younger, so they go much younger. This is like. This is the thing that people didn't want to talk about in Afghanistan that we talked about regularly, which was these are very. What we feel are distinctly wrong. These are very wrong things from American support, tactical and strategic intervention. Like, we should not encourage this whatsoever. And it made it very difficult at times for us to trust what the State Department or somebody else was saying. But, I mean, this goes back to Iraq and honestly, trust in policymakers and the State Department and their entire position, either politically, philosophically, it's just fundamentally flawed.

Joe Rogan (20:18)

So when you're hearing about this, one of the things about child molesting is that if these kids are growing up in this culture where they're going to be an adult and they're going to do that to kids as well, which has probably happened to all these guys, right? Like, this is you. You're not going to fix that with all these people alive. Like, the culture gets to a point where it's so fucked that it's like, how do you. How can you ever fix that? How many generations would it take before the scars of all those people being abused wears off and normalizes? And people can be normal again. People can be like what we would consider a Western civil civilization, like London or.

Mike Baker (21:05)

Right.

Joe Rogan (21:06)

Or New York.

Mike Baker (21:07)

Just how. What we'd feel is the morally appropriate cultural boundaries. That's like, how many generations would it take? And there's lots of different things that you can talk about, because the history of Afghanistan is, we'll say post 80s and Soviet intervention, and then with the Taliban pushback or the mujahideen, and they've completely destroyed the education, the progress and evolution of Afghanistan. I mean, they had decades of war Then you had basically a, a failed state with Taliban and extremist control. I mean as the Taliban moved in, fundamentally it's an evil organization. I went there's a soccer field in Kabul where the Taliban used to stone women to death because they weren't wearing their hijab or the rule of a woman would be raped and she would be accused of infidelity on her husband and they would stone her or they would beat her with a stick. And they turned the soccer field into a place where they could have public displays for execution. It was completely insane when you think about it from where we're coming from and then where we're going and we're trying to nation build, which I have fundamental disagreement with that as well. But you eliminated the educated portion of your population. You swung to a very extremist fear based religion and then it was all based on the Quran as far as their education system. So they completely separated the women away from being able to evolve. They treated them as beasts of burden. You had to be an Islamic extremist to be acceptable. It was a completely hegemonic theoretical state or hegemony as far as like it's the theocracy ran everything. And it was a very extremist version of Islam. And as we came in and I wasn't there in 2001, I came there much later. I came there in 2009 was my first real rotation there. It had been seven years, but really it was almost like going back in time almost a thousand. It felt like you were going back in time like a thousand years.

Joe Rogan (23:55)

That's one of the things we were talking about in camp, that when you hear about Socrates and all these ancient cultures, the Spartans, all these people that like had boys.

Mike Baker (24:06)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (24:07)

And you see what's going on in Afghanistan, you realize like how old a culture Afghanistan is. It's like one of the oldest civilizations in terms of like the way they behave. It's almost like they never caught up with the Western world. I think it was. Michael Shermer might have wrote a book, a paper about this. He wrote an article about how Islam's the only religion that didn't go through the Enlightenment and that it's essentially maintains the same values and you know, the same cultural values as when it was created. So you know what, how old is Islam?

Mike Baker (24:47)

1600, I think. I think it's like 500 years past Christianity. So we'll just call 1500 years 1500 years old.

Joe Rogan (24:56)

Whatever it is. That's how people behaved back then. That's what it is. And when you think about, like, Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great, who was gay, right, who conquered much of Afghanistan and giant swaths of the world, he probably like his army and his behavior and what he probably stained that area was like a type of behavior.

Mike Baker (25:21)

I think you're 100% right. I think that you had portions of the world that were culturally cut off from being able to evolve at the same rate as some of the other places within the Middle East. And those tribes essentially haven't had the opportunity to evolve because they've been very isolated. I mean, you look at Afghanistan, it's an extremely isolated area of the world. And if you go back to the 70s, it was relatively progressive, somewhat secular. And then the Soviet intervention, the collapse the failed state, led to the rise of the Taliban because they had eviscerated all of the intellectual and the economic class. And in order to succeed or live there, you had to completely capitulate to the theocracy and the fascist state. So you had to go back in time to live. You had to grow a beard. And when I say this is that everybody is 100%. No, I'm saying, like, this is the way people live. They lived under tyrannical rules that provided zero opportunity for, you know, if you had girls, sorry, they're a beast of burden. They treat goats and donkeys better than their girls, their children. The homelessness of children in a war zone is so heartbreaking. Like, it is. It. It strips away at the goodness in your soul watching desperation. And when you see homeless children every day in these cities that are dirty, starving, and there's really not a lot you can do because, you know, you have a ward, you have a war to fight. And you not only think about it from the homelessness position, you think about the exploitation position. Like, these kids are so fucked. They're homeless. They don't have parents because maybe their fathers were either, you know, killed in the war. Their mothers can't. They. They can't afford to keep them, and they continue to have more kids, and especially if they've been raped, then there's a cycle of not only exploitation and violence, but then it's also. It keeps them down economically. So you have massive amounts of children that were homeless and exploited and they're starving. And it's, you know, you. From my perspective, when you live in that environment and you can't think about it, like, you have to shut that stuff out, because if you think about it, it's like opening the door of the submarine. All the water's coming, all the water's coming in, it's gonna fucking sink you. So you have to. You have to build a. For a lack of a better term, man, you have to build a callus on your soul because you can't function and meet and exceed your mission success criteria if you're going to. If you get steamrolled by depression on what you're seeing every day, oh, my God. Time and repetition, which is one of the big problems, I think, with the GWAC community, at least what we've had in the last 20 years. I mean, there's lots of different compounding factors that I think contribute to the acceleration of veteran suicide, which I don't want to, like, launch into some, like, rant about the issues that I think we're all faced, but it's definitely something that I'm extremely passionate about.

Joe Rogan (29:15)

Yeah, I'm really hoping. We've talked about this a bunch of times in this podcast, but I'm really hoping that something's going to change with RFK and about psychedelics and veterans. I really, really am hoping that they open their eyes to this stuff.

Mike Baker (29:29)

Well, I was talking to Marcus Capone and he runs vets, which. He's the guy. His organization is the organization that takes the guys to Mexico to do ibogaine. And Marcus is a retired seal. I was talking to him yesterday, actually, and I'll go off on this, which is, you know, we, as a subculture from the global war on terror community, the veterans, we're under an epidemic of suicide and depression. And the VA has not been a help to us, especially the war fighters like the guys that are. We have rogered up time and time and time again. They've gone overseas. We've done the bidding for the country. We've watched our friends get killed and fucking torn in half. And like, very ultraviolent ways. We've been exposed to overpressure and chemicals and all these other things. And then we come back and within the VA system, their answer is, here's your pills, here's retirement, shut the fuck up. And it's not working. You know, Marcus and I were talking about this yesterday. He was on antidepressants for seven years. Seven years, like antidepressants, and they weren't working. And he just by chance, his wife, I believe, said, this might work. We need to go to Mexico and do ibogaine. This might work. So here's a guy that went did it one time. He's never been on antidepressant since.

Joe Rogan (31:06)

Did he have to get off him before he went there and did it.

Mike Baker (31:09)

I don't know exactly what the protocol is as far as, like, you have to get off and then you have to get back down there. I know that most of my friend group now, they've done it, and they have an extremely high success rate. You know, vets has done a thousand former war fighters, and they have an extremely high success rate where they're eliminating pharmaceuticals. So they'll go down. They'll do it one time, maybe they've done, you know, subsequent sessions, and they have this really high success rate. And this is part of the. Yes, this is part of the issue is we're under an epidemic of veteran suicide. Like, more so than we ever have. And the worst thing about this, too, is it's also affecting our family and our kids. Like, our kids are four times higher to commit suicide than our peer set. So it's not just. It's not just the GWAT veteran community now. It's our families and our children. You have something that has such a proven track record to help heal vets, and we can't do it without breaking the law. We have to leave the country. It's insane. So you can send me to Iraq under false pretenses, and you can have Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and all this orchestra of fucking idiots can send us all to Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. We can go fight the wars, come back, and now we have to break the law to go fix what's wrong with our heads or our emotions. Not only our psychology, but, dude, we're broken. We've been beat up and kind of shoved in a closet. And then we're sedated and told to shut the fuck up. And meanwhile, you know, Wolfowitz and Bremer and all these other guys, they get to walk around and provide, you know, public speeches about how fucking great they are because they're, you know, strategically important. Whereas my peer set, we're under an epidemic of suicide. Our kids are committing suicide, the VA is no help to us, and we have to go break the law. It's like you get to go flip a fucking coin and paint some paintings, and you think that everything's okay and.

Joe Rogan (33:29)

That one doesn't make any sense. Out of all the ones that's one that mushrooms you can do recreationally. No one's doing recreational ibogaine. I've never done it before. Have you done it? No, I've never done it. But everybody that I've talked to, they said it is one of the Most like ruthlessly introspective journeys in your life. You don't. It's not fun at all. Dakota Meyer told me. He's like, I fucking hated it. I couldn't believe someone made me do it. After it was over, I was like, what the fuck am I doing? It's not a fun time. It's not a recreational drug. It's not a drug of addiction. It's not a drug of dying. It's not. What's the L? Let's find out what the LD50 rate is for ibogaine. It's probably bananas. It's probably just like psilocybin. Probably can't really overdose on it. No, I don't know that.

Mike Baker (34:14)

I don't know.

Joe Rogan (34:15)

Ibogaine might kill you. It sounds really crazy potent.

Mike Baker (34:17)

Most of my. My close friends have done either ayahuasca or ibogaine, neither of which they would say is a good time. All of which have said all of which, 100%. And they've come back and been not only fundamentally changed, but better. And these are, you know, my business partner, Jared Taylor, he's gone and done ibogaine and then multiple other people that probably don't want me to talk about them on the podcast. Guys that have been on 15, 20 different pharmaceuticals can literally scrape them off their dresser into a garbage can the day they get back.

Joe Rogan (34:57)

Crazy.

Mike Baker (34:57)

And the fact that we aren't trying to evolve this section of the medicine. I know that Stanford did a study. I'm not exactly familiar with all the data associated with it, but the fact that we aren't leading the charge as a country to come up with dynamic, out of the box solutions for the guys that have gone overseas and done the hard and courageous tasks for this country, and then they come back when they can't get help and we're not pushing the envelope, that's a crime. I mean, I got lots of issues with Iraq at this point. Right. I mean, it's fundamentally. I've told this to people like, Iraq is with me every day. Right. Afghanistan was a part of my life. Iraq fundamentally changed me for the rest of my life. And I think about it every day. It's not going away. It'll never go away.

Joe Rogan (35:55)

And what about Iraq that was much different than Afghanistan. That changed you?

Mike Baker (36:02)

Well, it's the first war experience I had. And, you know, for me, I was like, hook, line and sinker. Regime change, you know, move. We've got to find weapons, mass destruction. We've got to eliminate the threat. We got to fight them. There so we don't have to fight them here.

Joe Rogan (36:21)

Everybody thought it was real.

Mike Baker (36:21)

Hell, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was nobody more motivated to go to war than me, you know, I mean, I'm sure there was, but you know what I'm saying.

Joe Rogan (36:30)

You were in that group. You were gung ho.

Mike Baker (36:32)

Oh, 100%. It's not only, hey, we're gonna go to war, we're gonna do something good for America. These guys attacked the United States. We're going to eliminate the terrorist threat. And you know, war is such a strange and surreal circumstance because it changes you for good, it changes you for the bad. And I've looked at this a lot and I looked at like life experience, like a radio wave. Almost like a band where you have highs, you have lows. And most people, we'll call it 90 plus percent of the United States, their frequency only gets so high and only gets so low. And it basically stays within, we'll say a fairly small band within the center. Combat, what happens is you go really high and you go really low and it forces you outside of social norms on a second to second basis. And then you do that over and over and over again. And so one person might get in a car wreck in their life and that goes really low. So it's a really high adrenaline dump and it goes really low because they have an injury that's like one thing. Well, going out in a combat zone multiple night, like not only multiple nights a week, sometimes you're doing multiple targets a night. You might go onyou might be getting with the rough equivalent of an adrenaline car wreck, what the rough equivalent of a car wreck from an adrenaline dump and a high and a low, you might doing that three or four times a night. And then you're doing that night after night, week after week. And it fundamentally changes you because you have to chop all of this down. Because if you get too ramped up and too chaotic, you're going to lose control and you won't be able to complete your mission criteria. If you get too low, you also won't be able to achieve your mission criteria. Your survival instincts kick down. So it chops your ability to feel all the way down to a normal person's bandwidth because it's a survival mechanism. And this is just my own assessment. So from a combat experience perspective, the first time you feel it, and I'll tell you, I mean, the first time I was in an ambush, I was losing my shit. I mean, anybody who tells you they're not fucking scared, they're either like Fundamentally flawed. They're like Travis Pastrana. He doesn't have like a fear portion of his brain. Or they're just lying. Like, you're scared out of your fucking mind. Like going north, like driving north into Iraq, you're, you're looking into the deep dark abyss of the unknown. And like, what the fuck am I gonna be a coward? You know, am I gonna live? Am I gonna die? I mean, our casualty, projected casualty rates was that we were gonna lose most of our oda. So you're, you're stepping into a situation where you're going, okay, well, I know out of this six shooter that I'm gonna play Russian roulette with, there are four bullets in this.

Joe Rogan (39:42)

Oh my God.

Mike Baker (39:43)

And you're driving north going, okay, let's fucking do it. So you've already capitulated and given yourself up to die, which is, it's actually a very cathartic and I think personally an experience that you can evolve from because at that point, if you're dead, you can live uninhibited. Like everything I do from this point forward. This is gravy on the steak, man. I'm already dead. I was driving north in Iraq and through the desert and my best friend and I are driving north and you have hours to stare off into the fucking sand. You've got night vision goggles or whatever. I had a whole fictionalized funeral for myself. I just. Fucking, what else am I gonna do, right? You're just like driving north, you know, and there's nothing going on. So I had a whole fictionalized funeral. I buried myself and so I was already dead. Or at least I felt like that. And then we get in her first engagement and the world starts cracking apart and your mind can't keep up to what, what's actually happening. You, you'll hear the gunfire and, you know, I felt, I felt the explosion. I looked in the rearview mirror of the Humvee, which sounds crazy. I looked in the rearview mirror and I saw this like car sized chunk of fire flying behind the vehicle like so distinctly. Remember this? And I'm turning my, my and I'm like, we gotta get the fuck out of here. You know, I'm like losing it, right? It's so stupid. That's so stupid. We gotta get the fuck out of here. You know, like losing it, dude. Just like a losing it. And he's like, and he's cool, man, he's like, calm, cool. He's on the radio, you know, he's like, you know, vehicle one, you know, or Vehicle three, this is Vehicle one. Vehicle three, this. Vehicle one. And we're checking to see if we have comms between us and the other vehicles. And I'm fucking losing it. Fuck out of here. You know, it's like, okay. Because, I mean, you know, you're used to, like, watching movies or whatever, and it's the first time anything like this has ever happened.

Joe Rogan (42:03)

Right.

Mike Baker (42:05)

And. And at this point, you know, the full insurgency hasn't kicked off, that we were hunting fatigue, and these guys weren't the most sophisticated cats on the planet. They weren't that good. So. But we end up pushing through and then consolidating at the end of this. And fundamentally, this changed my tactical experience in combat forever because my team leader, who I respect and love, he was killed two years later. He's one of my best friends. Was my best friend. He turns to me and he goes, hey, man, if you don't have a solution to the problem, just shut the fuck up.

Joe Rogan (42:50)

That's great advice.

Mike Baker (42:51)

I know.

Joe Rogan (42:52)

Great advice across the board.

Mike Baker (42:53)

Yeah. And I was like, okay, roger that. You know, I was like, okay, roger that, man. And then it became a practice discipline when shit's going super sideways and, you know bullets, well, when birds are flying. I hate sounding like that. I don't want to say. I don't want to sound like that at all.

Joe Rogan (43:20)

But that's what it is, dude.

Mike Baker (43:21)

You keep your shit together. And then I became. By the time I. My. My last ambush in Iraq, I was in. Was my. I saw. I'll book in this experience with ambushes. Yeah, I was in Mosul and I was in a little BMW trying to work my way. And I was. I was working as basically a low. Like you're trying to fly under the radar. You're low vis CIA at this point. So we're trying to blend in. We got hit at a checkpoint when they light us up. And so now I'm alone in a car with another guy and the CIA chief and the entire Iraqi army in Mosul, Iraq, is essentially pursuing us through the. From. I mean, Mosul is the size of Los Angeles. And I started at the north end of Los Angeles, basically, and had to work my way to the southern end of Los Angeles being shot at. And. And I'm trying to sort through the problem, man. Like, I got a fucking map sheet. And you don't know. I mean, this is. This is Mad Max in the fucking Thunder Dome. And Mosul was one of the most fucked up cities in Iraq. Like, it was. It looked like going back to Stalingrad. In different sections of this place. It was a complete show. And I'm alone with my, you know, the guys with. And I'm trying to navigate through the city and help the driver. We were being pursued from. From literally north to south. Yeah. Being shot at. And we're going, okay, right turn, right turn, right turn. And I mean, I have the. I have, like, the dragons are at the bumper. They're gonna. They're gonna pull me out of this car and chop my fucking head off. Like, they're gonna turn my car into Swiss cheese. They're gonna fucking chop my head off. I'm dead. We're dead. And I have, like, I brought up Kiowas. They were on station. We had a really good, really good relationship with these, with these guys. And I was like, hey, you know, you. This is me. I'm in a black BMW, like, and, you know, I'm moving, you know, from north to south. And helicopter came back. So I know who you are. You got the. Everybody following you. Because we. Not all checkpoints are created equal. And for whatever reason, they decided they were going to kill us that day. You don't have time. You're not going to sit around, be like, why do you guys want to kill us? Well, we're just good guys, you know. You're just going to keep moving. I had to work my way all the way south to a bridge. And I had, like, one last, One last Hail Mary, man. Like, we had to get across. We had to get across a bridge into a place called Diamondback. And I didn't have a QRF because they couldn't pin us down a quick reaction force. And like, the Kai was like, they saved our life because they had. They had the roads blocked off on the bridge. And I was basically smoking in like 100 kilometers an hour. And the kiosk came down and like, literally dropped their skids on the front of the. On the, on the front of the car and panned around like, we're gonna kill all you.

Joe Rogan (46:38)

Wow.

Mike Baker (46:39)

And I looked over at one of the guys. I looked over and, like, flipped him off. And it was like, you dead? You know, and then like, like parting the seas, like Moses or whatever. They moved the cars and we, we drove back in, and that was it. So book. Book ending. My point of that conversation was I was losing my. The first one, right? And I, I came back and I was talking to Kiowas, and they're like, bro, we didn't know how bad this was because it sounded like you were ordering a pizza. But everything, everything in between was like rep after rep after rep after rep was like, like, calm down, keep your shit together. And one of my really close friends, this guy Jeff Kirkham, my first team sergeant, like awesome guy, like one of the most tactically relevant people in my life, he's like, psychology is more contagious than the flu. So when you start losing your shit.

Joe Rogan (47:46)

Oh, that's so true.

Mike Baker (47:47)

It infects everybody else around you.

Joe Rogan (47:49)

What a great quote.

Mike Baker (47:51)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (47:51)

Psychology is more infectious than the flu. That is a great quote.

Mike Baker (47:57)

Yeah, man.

Joe Rogan (47:58)

That's so real.

Mike Baker (47:59)

So real.

Joe Rogan (48:00)

That's so real. That's so real. It was everything, everything, everything.

Mike Baker (48:08)

It controlled every piece of what I would do from that point forward. Like lose your shit in a gunfight and then you infect everybody else around you.

Joe Rogan (48:20)

Yes.

Mike Baker (48:21)

Rise to the occasion, be the calm in the chaos. Become, you know, even if you don't feel like it, even if you're. You're wiggin out, man, like of course internally you can't, you can barely keep your shit together. But what you do is you're like, okay, but I gotta, I gotta project this because if I infect everybody else with my chaos, I'm injecting more chaos into the equation. And we're all, we're all going to run the possibility of dying because of this, because of my actions.

Joe Rogan (48:55)

I think that's why people gravitate towards inspirational figures. It's because they're trying to get some of that psychology. They're trying to get it worn off on them. You know, great quotes and great feats and fascinating people. You want to absorb some of that psychology. That is such a great, great quote though, because it's so true. If you're around someone that's freaking out, you're trying to keep your shit together. It's so hard to keep your shit together.

Mike Baker (49:20)

You can't.

Joe Rogan (49:21)

Right.

Mike Baker (49:21)

If you're around a bunch of dudes. Just stoic surgeons and stoic.

Joe Rogan (49:25)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (49:26)

And they. There's no flexion. What I would say is like in the time and repetition in the community, I mean, there's a default emotion that is acceptable. It's, you know, anger. Right. So anger. And when I say joy, it's like joy from Callows. Humor. Typically. Right. But it's like you have to. Everybody becomes a stoic.

Joe Rogan (49:50)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (49:51)

Nothing can faze you. And if you are a guy that is phased, you're a liability. You're a liability. You're going to get chopped.

Joe Rogan (49:59)

Yeah. You're. You're infected.

Mike Baker (50:01)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So Iraq So going back to what I was talking about with Iraq, I'm supercharged. And my reality started to kind of crumble is we met. We went up. We were on the first ODAs, and we did this joint op with the CIA to go meet this guy, Muktada Al Sadr. This is early on. This is like March of the war. And Mictado Sauter became a prominent figure later on in the. In the war. He was really relatively a. Well, like, not. Not known at all in the beginning of it. And I was working with the CIA case officer at that point, not just me. It was like my entire team. And McToddle's like, he's a. He's a bad guy. Like, he's just a real piece of shit. And at that point on, Najaf was this town, and we went out, did a meeting with him, and we came back, and all of us on the military, paramilitary side were like, this guy needs to die. Like, we need to actually go. And he has a small armed force. He's basically going to be the instrument of the Iranians. And we're having this big debate in the team room, and everybody that carried a gun, like, we speak. We speak animal kingdom. We know when there's a threat, right? And then we have this case officer who's like a, you know, adjunct professor at fucking Georgetown. Guy didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. And we're like, this guy needs to die. We need to go, like, get on him now. And case officer was like, no, he's gonna work with us. You know, we're like, they wanted him.

Joe Rogan (51:46)

To be an asset.

Mike Baker (51:47)

Yeah. Like, this guy is fucking stupid. Like, this guy's a. He's a Shia. Supposedly Shia cleric. You know, if, you know, Iraq, you got 60% of the country Shia, it's typically gonna answer Iran. You've got 15, 20% is up north. It's the Kurds. When you've got. The rest is Sunni. And we're like, this guy's not gonna fucking work with us. And this guy's a real piece of shit, and he's already spinning up a militia. He's gonna be a problem. No, no, no, no. And we're like, okay. Like, you're the. You're the big brain on Brad, you know, you're the. You're the PhD man. Like, sure, you know, so we acquiesce. And years later, I don't know how many guys died going into. Going back into Najaf trying to find this fucking guy. I don't know how many. I mean, it was a whole basically surge push of probably a division to try to go find this guy. But we had the opportunity to kill him right there. Like, literally, we could have like, he had less than 40 guys in the compound. We could have like gone out and got him right like that night. And then he became a problem. And not only did he become a problem, it was like the decision makers were so poor at that point in the, early in the war. It started to really affect me in the sense of like, I was still bought and sold, but I started to really think these guys might not know what the fuck they're doing. When it was like Wolf Witz and Rumsfeld and Brennan, when they de baathified Iraq. So after we invaded, they did this thing called Debaath vacation, which was basically, they fired the military and everybody that was involved in the bath party. And we're, we, once again, we're in the team room and we're watching CNN and it's Rumsfeld talking about we're, we're deba. Ing Iraq. We're, we're, we're firing everybody. And I'm not exaggerating. Everybody in the, everybody in the team room was like, what the. Like, you guys, like, you guys are, you guys are going to create the insurgency. Like, it was on the ground that moment, that second. Like, I wanted to throw, like, I want to throw a fucking brick through the tv. Like, I was like, these guys are paint by numbers creating an insurgency. They have no fucking clue what they're doing. And that was like, that moment, which is fairly early, where I lost a lot of confidence in the decision makers. But, okay, you know, the question is, why did you keep going back? Well, because you want to try to search for meaning and you're trying to find the actual purpose. Like, what is the purpose? Like, are there WMDs here? Like, are there, you know, like, legit direct traces back to 9, 11. Are there things that we're doing that are going to directly affect and protect America? And you're kind of searching for it and not kind of, you are like, that's what you're doing. Or at least that's what I was doing. And by the time, by the time I left in 2009, I just figured I was going to die. Like, I was like, fuck this place. Like, fuck. Like, Like, I lived Iraq, right? And then I was like, well, I think time and repetition and thinking that you're dead for that long and then searching for not only some. What I would say is good. And the war itself, because there is good. You have your buddies, you have the camaraderie, you have the adrenaline, but you also think you're going to fucking die every day for years on end. And that's not fundamentally, turns out it's probably not good for you psychologically, I guess. And so I went to Afghanistan thinking, well, and I went to train Afghanis for a force up there. And when I went to train those guys it was, hey, if I can train Afghanistan to take on the war, maybe I can protect 18 year old kids from getting their fucking legs blown off. You know, maybe I can protect the, you know, the 20 year old kid from Nebraska from getting a fucking RPG stuff through their face. And I was older and I was also willing to die. So the kids, when I say the kids, you know, 18, 20 years old, like, man, it's not, you know, it's not fun to watch those. When I say that, that's an understatement. It's so heartbreaking to watch a kid that's never been to fucking combat, like die. It, it changes everything in your life. And so you go from, you know, Iraq to Afghanistan, you know, and I'm watching all this stuff unfold and there's like, there's, and I don't want to say it's all negative because there's, there's, you know, there were things that were very positive, but I'm so jaded by the time I get there that I'm like, well, if I can save some Americans, I'll save some Americans. And you know, if not, at least this will be an interesting experience. And then, you know, there's a laundry list of other things we can talk about. I don't want to get so fucking down.

Joe Rogan (57:59)

I guess it seems like it's impossible not to once you're going back on it. And there's how could you not? And the overwhelming negative experiences, the overwhelming horrific experiences.

Mike Baker (58:14)

Well, I think that's where I have this massive distrust in politicians. And I think that's part of the reason they have squandered the courage of the American servicemen in these forever wars that we've entered in under lies. So like, you know, Wolfowitz and W and Rumsfeld and. Yeah, and sorry, man, I don't have any respect for those guys. Like, I don't. Not only do I not have any respect for those guys, I have a profound amount of hatred for their arrogance. Because I'm in my 20s. I'm not making excuses, but there's plenty of guys like me that were not only hook, lane and sinker, and I still would, I'd still sign up for this country. I think service is a remarkable courage. And service back to our community is something we have to cherish like we do. But when you have an orchestra of idiots that are manipulating the courageous men and women of our country to go into these wars based on a neocon pipe dream and there's no consequences, you can pull out of Afghanistan and leave billions of dollars of equipment. Who the fuck got fired? But if I made a mistake, if me and my buddies made a mistake, we fucking, we lost our lives. We go to jail. Like, we lost our clearances. And I'm not trying to sound like a whiny bitch. I'm just saying, like, no consequences for these guys.

Joe Rogan (59:58)

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Mike Baker (60:00)

You know, they get to go paint paintings and they think it's okay.

Joe Rogan (60:03)

Imagine no consequences for lying about weapons of mass destruction. And has there ever been a large scale investigation as to what led them to either believe or to push the narrative that there was weapons of mass destruction?

Mike Baker (60:18)

Well, I think if you read, I mean, I mean, there's a lot, I think there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of books out there, obviously, and whether or not you have to kind of sort through the actual documents and figure out, like, where these guys were at. And I've spent a little bit of my life trying to understand from their perspective. And I honestly think big part of it is the guys who are making the decisions, they're hubris. Their utopian belief that they were going to be able to rebuild Iraq, like Houston, you know, like, oh, it's an oil country, you know, and, you know, they really believed that if they didn't rein in this rogue nation of Iraq, that Iraq was going to eventually contribute to terrorism. And you had guys that were so consumed with their intelligence when it flipped to not only hubris, but they didn't have wisdom, they had intelligence. Wolfowitz is a smart guy. He's not an idiot. The problem is he's not wise. These guys weren't wise men. There's a difference between having a high IQ and having the experience and repetition, seeing death and destruction, seeing people's lives fucking torn apart, and then understanding something from reading a book or thinking about it from an economics perspective. And, you know, I think Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, they had this belief that they could do anything they wanted to validate this, and they did. They had to data mine information and pull and pluck from different analysts that agreed with them, but most of the intel community didn't agree with them. They're like, we had defeated the Iraqi army to the point when I say defeated it. Like if we go back to the 90s, we say Desert Storm was 91. And then from that point forward you can basically say, you know, hw to Clinton administration. Clinton administration with the economic sanctions and with the integrated bombing campaigns that they had led throughout the 90s, we had essentially stuff that guy back into a hole where the only thing he could do was sell oil in the black market. And he had a really, he had to, he had a fascist state where he and his family had, you know, complete control out of the country, but he wasn't going to be a threat. From an international terrorism perspective, that's just false. It's not only false, but it is patently false. And they had to mine the data to validate it. They had to lie. They had to sift through and find and pick and pull the pieces of information. And they really thought this was going to be a fucking cakewalk. They did.

Joe Rogan (63:16)

Because of Desert Storm, you think?

Mike Baker (63:17)

They thought because of Desert Storm and what they. And they were listening to these assets like Talibi and some of these Iraq former Iraqi exiles and they're listening to these guys. We by the way, were also manipulated by the Iranians and paid for by Iranian intel guys. They were Iranian assets. They're listening to these people and they were living in their own echo chambers validating this idea that it was better for regime change, for the international, not only the international economy, but it was going to be a stable, petroleum based country where we could integrate democracy. And none of these guys were Arabists. None of these guys actually understood the Middle East. Not one. They didn't have any combat experience. They didn't really have any combat experience. From the long term, low intensity conflict, guerrilla warfare perspective. They were given not only the information, but they were given a. Most of the information they were given was saying, this is going to be much more complex than you think it's going to be. And they denied not only the opinions but the information and they went ahead with their fucking plans anyway. Rumsfeld chopped single handedly dictated how many people were going to participate in the war. Like he was dictating how many divisions it was going to take. And he's like, actually, I think you could do it for half that. He was trying to negotiate how many guys that Tommy Franks was going to use to invade Iraq. And Tommy Franks didn't have the balls to say, actually, I need two more divisions. So a lot of this is just like fundamentally these are professional politicians and bureaucrats drinking their own piss. Like I was saying earlier, you can drink your own piss once or twice before your kidneys start to shut down and it'll fucking kill you. Right? These guys are all sitting around in their echo chambers talking to the same types of people, defining how they were going to send servicemen and women to Iraq. And they were wrong. Not only were they wrong, but they were told otherwise by lots of different people to include. I mean, Tony Blair had a lot of different issues with this. Colin Powell essentially sold this and got the dominoes to fall on the entire thing because they knew that Colin Powell was so respected that if he sat in front of the UN with Tenet, who was the director of the CIA right behind him and held up this little thing of VX or whatever it was, that they could push it across the line from the international community. I mean, these guys were crooked, man. And not only were they crooked, they were so fundamentally wrong. And there's no consequences, nothing. Zero consequences.

Joe Rogan (66:15)

They put Martha Stewart in jail.

Mike Baker (66:17)

Yeah, yeah. They go after Trump for fucking two years on, you know, Russia collusion. It's like you spent $7 trillion in thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, and you're saying you're going to put this guy through the wringer for two years because there might be some dossier that was paid for by the Clintons, like, who's the criminal? And so for me, I get all wound up when it comes to this because rep after rep. Year after year, my two closest friends in the world were literally one torn in half by a EFP which was a direct Iranian manufactured shaped charge. My other friend was turned into fucking moon dust. And I mean, these are my two closest friends in the world. Like guys I grew up with in the army I spent every fucking day with. And since then I've had obviously more friends, but I mean, those are the two closest friends in the earliest part of the war. So I'm so directly affected by this because it fundamentally changed who I was forever. It gave me a profound amount of mistrust in my government and the decision makers. I don't believe, I actually don't believe what they're telling me anymore. I have a lot of skepticism when it comes to the people that are pulling the handles in government. And I have to go to my peer set and what I tell people is, man, my currency is courage. Right? It's like that's what I broker in. So my friends that have gone through the gwat, which I'm extremely happy for all these GWAC guys that are getting appointed to these positions, you've got Pete, you've got Tulsi, J.D. they fundamentally know that what war is. And when you have decision makers that have never been to war and their kids will never go to war and Cheney's kids never went to war, W's kids never went to war.

Joe Rogan (68:34)

Right.

Mike Baker (68:35)

Like, and none of these guys, by the way, they're all Vietnam era guys, none of them went to fucking Vietnam.

Joe Rogan (68:41)

So it's Trump, Trump didn't either. Right. You got a bunch of deferments.

Mike Baker (68:44)

But I think the difference is, is that when somebody is saying stop the endless wars, right, I am more than happy to go chips in on that narrative than I am to go, oh, we need to invest and put more time, money, energy into creating more chaos and destruction in the American service members lives or the lives of other people.

Joe Rogan (69:10)

Did you ever see that speech with Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson?

Mike Baker (69:15)

No.

Joe Rogan (69:15)

Tucker Carlson essentially ended Mike Pence's political career.

Mike Baker (69:19)

Really?

Joe Rogan (69:20)

In one speech? Yeah, because this was when Pence was running for president and Tucker was sitting there with him and Pence was talking about getting helicopters and tanks and weapons to Ukraine and he was explaining how they were being incompetent because they weren't providing them with what they needed. And Tucker went on this rant, see if he can find it. I bet you could find it under that. Here it is. Listen to this. The whole thing. You should make sure the Tucker part because it's the four, it's four minutes long. Let me hear what he says. Just start right where your cursor is. Click where your cursor is.

Mike Baker (70:02)

January. We'll let somebody transfer some jets.

Joe Rogan (70:05)

I'm sorry, Mr. Vice President, I know.

Mike Baker (70:07)

You'Re running for President. You are, you are distressed that the.

Joe Rogan (70:11)

Ukrainians don't have enough American tanks.

Mike Baker (70:14)

Every city in the United States states has become much worse over the past three years.

Joe Rogan (70:20)

Drive around, there's not one city that's.

Mike Baker (70:22)

Gotten better in the United States. And it's visible our economy has degraded, the suicide rate has jumped, public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased. And yet your concern is that the.

Joe Rogan (70:37)

Ukrainians, a country most people can't find.

Mike Baker (70:39)

On a map, who've received 10, hundreds of billions of US tax dollars, don't have enough tanks. I think it's a fair question to.

Joe Rogan (70:46)

Ask, like where's the concern for the.

Mike Baker (70:47)

United States in that. Well, it's not my concern, Tucker. I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern. I'm running for President of the United States because I think this country is in a lot of trouble. I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad. And as President of the United States, we're going to restore law and order in our cities, we're going to secure our border, we're going to get this economy moving again. And we're going to make sure that we have men and women on our courts at every level that will stand for the right to life and defend all the God given liberties enshrined in our Constitution. Anybody that says that we can't be the leader of the free world and solve our problems at home has a pretty small view of the greatest nation on earth. We can do both. And as President of the United States, we will secure our border, we will support our military, we will revive our economy and stand by our values, and we will also lead the world for freedom under my administration. I promise you.

Joe Rogan (71:48)

Amen.

Mike Baker (71:49)

Vice President Mike Pence, thank you very much.

Joe Rogan (71:51)

Just that. That's not my concern. That's not my concern. What the fuck are you talking about? Why, how would you ever answer anything that way? That is not my concern. That's not your concern? You don't, you don't think he just made a really good point, that we're, we're really confused as to. First of all, aren't we like a trillion dollars in debt?

Mike Baker (72:09)

How do we have 35 and a half trillion dollars in debt? Like it's crazy, Crazy.

Joe Rogan (72:15)

How do we have the money, how do we have the money to send to Iraq and we don't have the money to fix our cities? How and how can you say that's not my concern? That what that is is the opposite of what Trump is. That is nonsense talk. Not that he doesn't have nonsense talk, but that is not a person's real feelings. That is just political speech. That's just, we're going to clean up our country. We're going to preserve the right to life.

Mike Baker (72:42)

Memorizing sound bites.

Joe Rogan (72:44)

Exactly. Exactly.

Mike Baker (72:45)

And that's the entire problem with Washington right there.

Joe Rogan (72:48)

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Baker (72:49)

They memorize sound bites. They say one thing, they do the other thing.

Joe Rogan (72:52)

Exactly, Exactly.

Mike Baker (72:53)

Completely. They've lost the trust of their constituents. They've lost the trust of the American public. And by the way, it's administration after administration. It's politician after politician. Yeah, there's. It's not, it shouldn't be a surprise. People don't like politicians. I mean, look at that guy. Yeah, he's a fucking robot.

Joe Rogan (73:13)

He's weird.

Mike Baker (73:13)

He's a weird dude.

Joe Rogan (73:14)

He's weird. You know, they kept trying to say, JD's weird. JD's not weird @ all. I met that guy. He's fucking cool. He's normal, smart as shit. I could, I could hang with that guy. He could be my friend. Yeah, he's not even a little weird.

Mike Baker (73:26)

No, that guy's weird.

Joe Rogan (73:27)

I mean, I guess anybody who's that smart is weird. You know, people go to Yale, people that like, he's weird in that way. Like, that's an odd dude. You don't see a lot of those, but normal. That guy's bizarre. Like, his face doesn't move. Did you get Botox at 80? Like, what the fuck is going on? Like, you're weird.

Mike Baker (73:45)

I think they have low IQs and they're pushing that thing to the red. That's why they're actually so afraid. Afraid to do anything because they're like, I have, they're like, I'm really pushing this thing. I've got like a hundi, like a 105. But my parents were rich, so I went to Yale. And if I break outside of my box, actually, people are going to know that I'm a fucking retard. So.

Joe Rogan (74:04)

Right. Well, I also think that if you're that ambition, you have ambition at that level and you are so driven to become the alpha that you want to be the president. The amount of work that's involved in that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for reading, doesn't leave a whole lot of room for watching documentaries and having important in depth conversations with people, expanding your understanding of the world. It's very narrow. They're basically actors a lot. Most of these people exhibit a lot of the traits that I see in actors. This desire to morph oneself to please the people around you, the saying the things that you think people want to hear because you want to get ahead. It's all like very similar. They're actors. And the fact that these actors can rise to a position where they can actually dictate what these military veterans do and don't do when they have no knowledge or experience in this. Now that's. The fact that that's a real thing is fucking crazy. It's really crazy.

Mike Baker (75:10)

I, I mean, I think that's. By the time I left, I was so jaded and the motivating factor was, oh, sorry. I was like no man will ever have control over my destiny again. Like, I won't. I will not. I will. There's. I will not put a bit in my mouth.

Joe Rogan (75:31)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (75:32)

For another man in the government. They will not be making decisions for me.

Joe Rogan (75:38)

Yeah. I don't. I don't think we can recall a time in our history where we did trust the government. But this is. Which is such a weird thing to say. You know, I used to think it was the Obama administration, but boy, Obama, during this. Kamala Harris, administrator, she. It changed my opinion of that guy.

Mike Baker (75:57)

Really. Did you have a high opinion of him?

Joe Rogan (75:59)

Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. Just as an intelligent person, the statesman, I felt like he's probably, like, caught up in the system. It's very difficult to make real meaningful change. You know, you think you're going to do something and then you get into office and you're like, oh, God, what a fucking quagmire this place is. But watching him just straight up lie about Trump, the thing that got me was that very fine people thing, the white supremacist thing that just kept trying to say that he was a racist, which is this thing that I think worked in, like, 2017.

Mike Baker (76:31)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (76:31)

And I think it worked back then. I don't think it works anymore. I don't think people believe it anymore. I think that we've gotten numb to all this stuff.

Mike Baker (76:39)

It's the sky is falling thing.

Joe Rogan (76:41)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (76:41)

Like, yeah, cry wolf or whatever. It's like, you guys can only call. You only call me a fascist so many times. I mean, like, the New York Times wrote that article a couple years ago, right? Where I'm like. It was the front of the coffee cup where it was like, do you want Trump 2024? Do you want low taxes? Do you want this? I'm like, I want all that sounds good. And you can only call me a fascist, racist, asshole. I mean, to be fair, like, I can float into the asshole category relatively easy, but only when prompted. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (77:12)

Only when prompted. Yeah. It's, you know, one of my fucking favorite things of this whole election cycle has been yesterday when Biden, Biden and Trump sat down in the White House.

Mike Baker (77:24)

Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan (77:25)

Biden voted for Trump. I guarantee it. I fucking guarantee it. I never saw that dude so happy in his fucking life. He lost his party. Lost. He was happy. When. When Obama had to shake hands with Trump and do the whole transition thing. Obama looked like, jesus Christ, look at, look at. Look at his fucking smile, dude.

Mike Baker (77:52)

Trump's like, whatever.

Joe Rogan (77:54)

Look at his smile, man. That's like when your kid gets married.

Mike Baker (78:00)

That, that dude, you know, it's like a hairless cat. Look at it, it's great.

Joe Rogan (78:03)

First of all, what have they done to him? What have they done to his face? Go back to the other pictures, there's more high res. Look at his mug man. First of all, for sure, he's got something going on with his forehead. They Botox the out of his forehead. They gave him a facelift. For sure. There's a bunch of different things they did, which very ill advised by the way. Folks, look at Trump. He looks like shit. No one cares. Everyone loves him. Do you don't. You don't look better if you get your face pulled back like a lizard. You just more look more like a lizard. Every thinks you're a lizard already, but look at that smile. That motherfucker has never been happier in his life. In his life. He's like, that bitch, she went down. You can't tell me he wasn't happy. Like when he put that MAGA hat on. You ever see that?

Mike Baker (78:48)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan (78:49)

He put the bag I had on, he took it with him on the plane. I guarantee you, I guarantee you that motherfucker was happy. He had a giant smile on his face. He said welcome back to him. I thought it was Hitler. I thought he was dangerous.

Mike Baker (79:04)

I mean, that's what they all said, right? It's like, hey, this is. He's a threat to democracy.

Joe Rogan (79:08)

I thought he was a threat.

Mike Baker (79:09)

And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, hey, we're going to have a smooth transition here.

Joe Rogan (79:14)

This was the guy that you said was sharp as attack. He was getting up until four months ago. Four months ago, that guy was going to be running again. And now here he is smiling like a Cheshire cat. How big was this? That's a crazy smile.

Mike Baker (79:30)

And he looks, he looks like he's wearing a mask.

Joe Rogan (79:34)

He might be.

Mike Baker (79:34)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (79:35)

There was that one fake Biden. Did you ever see the fake Biden?

Mike Baker (79:37)

Yeah, yeah, the tall guy.

Joe Rogan (79:39)

That guy was so much taller. The guy was like 6, 4. He's a giant bike. It made no sense.

Mike Baker (79:46)

They're gonna smoke that one by us. Like, it's like, dude, this guy's like, you know, 6, 7, could be playing in the NBA.

Joe Rogan (79:52)

He was so much taller. They showed Jill and him together. Jill's like, like, what happened? That's a different human being.

Mike Baker (80:00)

Totally.

Joe Rogan (80:01)

It's so nuts, man. It's so nuts. All the different things that happened during this election are wilder than anything you've ever seen in a Movie.

Mike Baker (80:08)

It brought. I think it. It brought so many more people into politics, too. And people. The more people pay attention to what's going on with politicians, with the country. I don't think that's a bad thing because.

Joe Rogan (80:20)

Right.

Mike Baker (80:20)

I think bureaucrats and politicians alike, they directly benefit from people not paying attention.

Joe Rogan (80:27)

Yes.

Mike Baker (80:28)

And so they only want you to pay attention once a year when they're going to try to get everybody galvanized around a couple little stupid things and then get them out to the voting booth. But not too many. Like, we don't want a lot of complex thought out of the voters. We don't really want them to think about too much because, you know, we still got. We still got a national deficit that we got to increase. And I got to line the. Line the pockets of all my buddies.

Joe Rogan (80:50)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (80:50)

You know, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. Like, we don't want them to get in too far.

Joe Rogan (80:55)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (80:56)

Like, don't. Don't start talking about the reserve or don't start talking about any of that other stuff.

Joe Rogan (81:00)

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Baker (81:01)

Like, I think that's what it is.

Joe Rogan (81:02)

Well, I think that's also why politicians are. Some of them, at least, are terrified of podcasts.

Mike Baker (81:08)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (81:09)

Because you do have to talk about that. But that's what makes guys like JD and guys like Trump unique in that they will just sit and talk with anybody. I mean, he sat with Theo Vaughn with Theo, talked to him about doing coke.

Mike Baker (81:21)

Guys. Awesome. It was so funny.

Joe Rogan (81:23)

He was amazing. It was amazing. Theo's an ability to be himself no matter who he's talking to. And him talking to Trump about how he used to love to do coke.

Mike Baker (81:34)

And Trump's just sitting there, which was super funny, by the way.

Joe Rogan (81:37)

Sitting there like this poor guy. You see Theo falling apart in front of you, like, Jesus Christ, I thought I was running for president here. I think I might have to help this young fellow.

Mike Baker (81:46)

Who do I need to talk to about this?

Joe Rogan (81:48)

But Kamala didn't have the ability to do that, or if she did, nobody brought it out of her. I was hoping I could. I really was. I was hoping I could have a conversation with her. There's all this talk now that the reason why she didn't do it is because of progressive people in her party. The pushback, which might have some truth to it, but for the record, they offered me two very specific days and in different places in the country, to travel and then go do it and do it for an hour. I said I didn't want to do that. And especially after Trump had done it here in three hours, I'm like, this is the only way to do it. And Elon said it best. He said. He goes, you could kind of bullshit someone for an hour, because hour two and hour three, like, that's. That's when the real you comes out.

Mike Baker (82:31)

Yeah, You're. You're gonna get. It's the real you. You're gonna. You're gonna tear the layers off the onion. Right. It might make you cry.

Joe Rogan (82:39)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (82:40)

And where you peel it, the more you might be like, oh, this person's fucking stupid.

Joe Rogan (82:46)

How much are you bullshitting the world? Right? The quote about Trump or the narrative about Trump has always been that he's bullshitting everybody. These are con man. He's definitely very persuasive. You know, Scott Adams has wrote about this pretty much in depth about how well Trump practices the art of persuasion, you know, the art of the deal. He's great at making people his friend and making relationships. And if you're his enemy, fuck you, scorched earth. You know, it's like this, and there's fear of that. You don't want to get on his bad side. There's all this, like. There's this art of, like, how he negotiates and gone through this years and years and years of business. But that's him. That's the guy's right there. You could talk to him about everything and anything. He's right there. He's not protecting any of his ideas. He called a girl. He allegedly slept with horse face when he was the president on Twitter.

Mike Baker (83:36)

It's so funny.

Joe Rogan (83:37)

It's the wildest shit. So you're getting what you get. That's who the guy is and you love. I like him. I've grown to like him. I had a much more negative opinion of him back in the day because it was. There's only so much you can pay attention to and do deep dives on before you lose your fucking mind. And with him, I was always like, oh, that they grab him by the pussy guy. It's probably not good for the country. That seems crazy. But as time went on, I was like, oh, you need a guy that is completely crazy to expose how corrupt the whole system is and how they all collude together and how they all. They all say this. There's all these montages of clips of news organizations saying the same narrative outright, over and over, verbatim, word by word. They're getting fed this by someone, some entity, some. They're somehow or another. They're they're collaborating, and they're all choosing this very specific narrative, and they're running with it, and they're trying to destroy people with it. And I saw them do it with me. Yeah, I saw them do it with me during the COVID thing. And it was all motivated by the pharmaceutical drug companies and the profits. And they were terrified that someone's going to come along and somehow another put up a notch in this little thing that they've created, which is a devious little thing that they've done, where they eliminated all sorts of other remedies. They cut out all these generic drugs that possibly could have been used to help people. They denied people the use of monoclonal antibodies. They pushed the fucking shit out of this one thing so they could make money off of it. And they did it in collusion with the media. No one acted like a journalist. No one looked at the excess deaths. No one looked at the instances of myocarditis in young people. No one looked at any of that. There was no journalism. It just showed everyone that the whole system is bought and paid for. It's all corrupt. And the only way you could find out who a person really is is to listen to them talk for long periods of time. It's the only thing. It's the only truth serum we have left, right? And even that's not 100 effective, but it's pretty good. It's pretty fun. Your brain knows, you know. You ever, like, met some guy and, like, he's dating this girl that you know, and there's just something about that. It's like, what? He's shaking my hand. He's being nice to me, and I'm like, I don't trust this motherfucker. Like, something's gross about this guy, and then you find out he's a piece of shit. But it's always this thing, like, you feel something if you talk to someone long enough. There's patterns in the way they talk, the way they think, the way they consider things, whether or not they can admit that they're wrong, or whether or not they could tell you why they changed their mind, whether. How did they form their narratives, like, what bad paths were they on and what personal correction did they make, and how long did it take before you got to a better place? You learn about people when you hear them talk for long periods of time. You can't fake personal growth. You can't fake, like, stuff you've learned. You can't fake flaws that you're willing to expose to people. So that they could perhaps see them in themselves. You can't fake that. And all those people, like Mike Pence, he's got zero of that. You can't sit that down, that guy down and have a conversation, a real conversation with him.

Mike Baker (86:48)

He's so afraid. I honestly, I don't think he even knows who he is. Guys like that don't even know, like, an actor. Yeah, yeah, They're. They're like actors. Like, my buddy Dave, we were talking yesterday. You met him the other night. Like, I've known him for 20 years.

Joe Rogan (87:05)

Like, he was a lot of fun dude.

Mike Baker (87:07)

You know, we met in Kabul back in the day. Dave, Dave and I, like, we go way back.

Joe Rogan (87:13)

And he's good friends with Bruce and with my friend.

Mike Baker (87:14)

Yeah, yeah, crazy. Like, because he was a team guy, right? So he's like former seal, CIA guy. And Dave and I were talking about this. And when you. When you can just be authentically engaged with people, where you can just be yourself. And that's part of the issue with. I think a lot of vets is. And why they, like, why they connect really well with vets is because you can just authentically engage with people and say, I. This person knows I'm a little bit broken. This person knows that I've probably done shit that I'm not super proud of. And they know that I've got a dark sense of humor. But I can, like, just kind of open. I can open my heart and just have a real conversation with somebody. And that's the shit you chase.

Joe Rogan (88:00)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (88:01)

Where you can just be yourself and you can talk about stuff and you can, like, try to evolve the way you're thinking and feeling.

Joe Rogan (88:08)

Right.

Mike Baker (88:10)

And these artificial bullshit conversations that we have throughout our day with people we don't give a shit about, or these, like, you know, inauthentic, unreal, you know, veneer people. It's like, I have no interest in having a conversation with a fake person. That is stupid.

Joe Rogan (88:24)

The best thing that I took out of moving to Texas, from moving to la, I have way less of those conversations. I have almost none of them here on my conversations here, look, with normal people, right? They're normal. So many people are infected by the rhythm of Hollywood, which is just about people trying to become successful. And the way you become successful in Hollywood is you get chosen because you have to go on auditions.

Mike Baker (88:48)

Right?

Joe Rogan (88:48)

That's the. That's the primary. Right. The number one, top of the food chain. Well, I guess rock star, rock star and movie star, or number one and number two, maybe interchangeable Maybe they're the same. Same. If it's a 10, like biggest stars in the world, it's movie stars and rock stars and movie stars. Everything you do is about your relationships with people and whether or not people think you align with them politically and whether or not you support the right causes. You wear the bow tie at the Oscars, you act proper, you do all the things that you're supposed to do. And if you do all the things you're supposed to do, then you get into the club, you know, and if you don't do all the things you're going to do, then they're not going to use you. They're going to use Daniel Craig, they're going to use this guy, then they use that guy. They're going to use Dave Bautista, they're going to use the rock, they're going to use. There's so many guys that want these roles, and there's only so many good roles, right? Especially if you're going to be a male movie star, you know, so no one can color outside the lines. And Dennis Quaid is like one of the rare few, like, male movie stars who just fucking completely gave up. He's like, I support Trump. I support. I'm a Christian. I sing gospel music like, fuck you, I quit. And he did this Reagan movie. It was a Reagan movie, okay? It's about a 1980s president. They wouldn't let him advertise on certain social media networks because they said it was during the time of the election and it could affect the election. What was it? Was it Facebook? Like, what kept him from. Was it YouTube or Facebook? Some. One of the social media outlets kept him from advertising this movie, which is a great movie about Reagan, where he plays Reagan. He does a fucking amazing job. It has nothing to do with today. It's about a guy who's dead.

Mike Baker (90:38)

He's not dead, dad. He's been dead forever.

Joe Rogan (90:40)

He was dead his last year in office. He was at fucking full on Alzheimer's.

Mike Baker (90:45)

I. That's the thing with this. This whole social media, you know, censorship, demonetization. Like, the way that they've. They've. They honestly. And I say they, like there's a big group. And you. I mean, you were talking about it the other night, even with your show, with the Trump show, and then it's not trending. You can't even find it. The Firearms community on YouTube deals with this all the time.

Joe Rogan (91:10)

Oh, yeah.

Mike Baker (91:11)

All the, you know, the guys that have the huge YouTube channels. From a firearms perspective, sure. They. They're demonetized. They have to upload multiple times. They're in like a.

Joe Rogan (91:21)

My good friend Collins Coleon Noir.

Mike Baker (91:23)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (91:23)

His fucking show. He can't get it to grow. He can't get his Instagram to grow. He's, like, completely stifled.

Mike Baker (91:29)

And they're. They're keeping the lid on this.

Joe Rogan (91:32)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (91:32)

I mean, like, Brandon Herrera was a say.

Joe Rogan (91:35)

After he's on the podcast. Facebook acknowledged mistake and lifted the restrictions. You acknowledged it. The. Look at this. He expressed belief that Facebook labeled the content as an attempt to sway an election.

Mike Baker (91:48)

Yeah. Like the. The entire.

Joe Rogan (91:51)

Thank you, Facebook firearms. In their defense. But that's what they said. It was just a mistake, Jamie. I'm just. That's what they said, Jamie, is just a mistake.

Mike Baker (91:58)

Yes. The entire firearms community. And it's weird because we. When I say we, we talk about it all the time. Like, whether it's, you know, the biggest YouTube channels on. For the firearms space. They're constantly battling, trying to keep their channels up. This is a constitutionally protected. Right.

Joe Rogan (92:18)

Right.

Mike Baker (92:18)

And because there's a difference in political opinion, they can. They can tip the scale.

Joe Rogan (92:26)

Right.

Mike Baker (92:27)

Which is completely insane to me. And there's a lot of traffic. I mean, you think about some of these really big channels that are out there. These guys drive millions and millions of views. People obviously want to watch, and they can't increase their reach or they get demonetized and they're constantly screwed with over and over and over again. And that's the way that we've. I think a lot of us have felt we've been living under the thumb of, you know, our social media oligarchs that are deciding whether or not our information is agreeable to their political opinion.

Joe Rogan (93:04)

Did I ever tell you the time that I was having a conversation with a Facebook YouTube executive and my wife had to grab my leg under the table and stopped me?

Mike Baker (93:12)

Seriously.

Joe Rogan (93:13)

In Hawaii. Okay. So I'm with a friend, and my friend was an executive at Google. Very nice person. Great. No problems with them. We're all having a good time. We're sitting down, drinking and talking, and I got a couple in me, and this lady who's A bigwig at YouTube sits down across from me and we start talking. And I said, when it comes. So we get into this conversation, it's a very friendly conversation. Nothing problematic at all. I don't think she knows, you know, even knows who I am. And this is a long time ago. So this is like 20, 15, 14. So my podcast is not that big.

Mike Baker (93:52)

Right.

Joe Rogan (93:52)

It's not that big at all. Let's. I can tell you exactly when it was. When did Sam Harris and Douglas Murray have a conversation? When did the Strange Death of Europe come out? Tell me about that. That's Douglas Murray's amazing book that has been proved now to be absolutely accurate in his assessment of what was going to happen to Europe with Muslim integration. Essentially. The guy nailed it. And him and Sam Harris, okay, so you have two public intellectuals who are having a conversation about cultures and about the. What. What is different about these Islamic cultures and their desire to impose Sharia law, Like, at least in certain areas. So they're having this conversation and it gets labeled as. It gets flagged off this guy's account. So I find out about this video because this guy has an account. And I don't remember where he posted it. Maybe Twitter. But he said, I got flagged on YouTube for having this in my playlist as something that I watch, like, not even something he hosts on his channel. So I asked the lady, I said, why would someone get flagged for a conversation? She goes, it was hate speech. Just like that? Just like that. It was hate speech. I go, can. Do you remember the conversation? Because I watched the conversation. I don't think it was hate speech at all. It was heavily hate speech. But it's between two public. And then my wife just clamps down my neck because she sees a fucking rabid. Now like. It's two public intellectuals having a conversation about a real thing that's happening in the world. And there's no hate speech in that. There's no slurs. There's no degrading of people in a generalization of people. There's no racism. This is. They're talking about real cultural differences and how they're going to affect Europe. And this fucking lady just. It's hate speech. The arrogance of the way she said it to me. And she was a big executive. And I was like, oh, boy. I was just boiling. I was boiling. And thank God my wife grabbed my leg. She fucking. She grabbed the shit out of my leg because I was ready to go because the lady was going to engage with me. And I was like, okay, this is a podcast. You're fucked.

Mike Baker (96:10)

You're fucked.

Joe Rogan (96:11)

You're fucked. You're just lucky there's no cameras here. What you're saying is absolutely crazy. Like, who are you to make that distinction? And do you have any idea how that affects us culturally when a person like yourself, who lives in this fucking San Francisco, this whole bizarre tech cult bubble that's what you live in.

Mike Baker (96:30)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (96:31)

And you want to impose this crazy leftist perspective on everyone in the world to the point where you not even allowing two world renowned public intellectuals have a public discussion about this in front of an audience.

Mike Baker (96:46)

Dude, I would deal with that all the time. Where people. I would talk about the Middle East. I spent most of my adult life in the Middle East. I was in Iraq, I was in Jerusalem, I was all around the Middle east and Africa. And I would just say, I just don't agree with the way that Saudi Arabia runs. Right. I don't agree with the monarchy. I don't agree with Islamic Sharia law. I don't agree. Oh, you're a fucking racist. And you're like, what? No, man, I just don't think that it's the best way to go about it. Right?

Joe Rogan (97:20)

There's a bunch of different ways people live.

Mike Baker (97:22)

It's like, no, I'm not a racist. I've lived there, I've been there, I've spent a ton of time there. I think this is better. And these are the reasons why. And people didn't even want to have a conversation with, oh, you're racist.

Joe Rogan (97:33)

But this is what's crazy. You have to be able to have those conversations even if that person's wrong. Like, if someone wants to get on YouTube and tell the world why Sharia law is better, I think they should be able to do that. Let them do it and let someone counter it and let them have debates. And Sam Harris has had a bunch of debates like that. You can watch them online, they're amazing. Let people figure out who they agree with. And if you just shut down discourse and say that it's hate speech. And you're defining hate speech as no slurs. There's no, like, we gotta kill all these people. There's none of that. There's no hate in this conversation. You're saying hate speech is disagreeing with a narrative that all leftists must ascribe to, regardless of any objective assessment of the facts. Any just sitting down and looking at it and go, you know, I don't think I agree with this aspect of it. Like, I think that like telling women that they have to wear hijab everywhere, that's you're not giving them the choice. You're not giving someone choice is just fundamentally bad for the race, for humans. It's oppression.

Mike Baker (98:38)

Anything outside of a meritocracy in the context of being able to evolve a conversation based on the best idea wins. And when you're chopping out 50% of your population and saying their beast of burden and where they belong is just essentially basket of deplorables. Yeah, like, this is the problem that I have with this. And anytime that I've had this conversation around the Middle east where like, these are the things I don't like about it and I mean, there's lots of different things. It could be the, you know, the Arab men will typically wear this very long open bottom garb, right. It's typically referred to as a man dress. My God, I hate that thing. This thing's stupid. Like I've had to wear it, you know, And I wear underwear.

Joe Rogan (99:23)

Did you wear underwear?

Mike Baker (99:25)

Sometimes your pants? I've gone to hijab. We were talking about it. Yeah. Like I had like a tiny little like belt fed machine gun and I'd have to wear because I'm a small guy, right? I'm 100 fucking 60 pounds. And so I would often be the woman because I could, I could, I could be the fucking. I got a feminine frame, man. Yeah, yeah. I got, you know, birthing hips, of course, but you know, I could get a little saw with which is a squat automatic weapon, A little belt fed machine gun, a couple frags underneath a hijab and I could sit in the back seat. Oh, wow. It's like, surprise, bitch. I'm not a woman.

Joe Rogan (100:06)

Picturing you with a hijab and a belt fed machine gun under your dress is fucking hilarious.

Mike Baker (100:12)

It's so much fun, man.

Joe Rogan (100:13)

Did you have like a thing where you could pop it up, like a low key jacket?

Mike Baker (100:16)

Yeah, yeah. So you'd Velcro. So we had, we had a whole department in the agency where they, they would like design costumes and shit for you. So you could. I had like, I had this fake mustache. I got a picture of it. I'll fucking send it to you. But I had this fake mustache and like, they would put tanner and fake mustache and like sunglasses. I'd like drive around looking like Saddam half the time.

Joe Rogan (100:41)

Like, like that fucking America World police movie.

Mike Baker (100:44)

Oh yeah, full on. And it's so funny because like you'd have like no shit. A person putting makeup on you before you like go out to do something. You got a fake mustache and you know, or for me, I'm like, just give me the job. I already know what I'm doing. Give me the fucking. Put me in the lady thing.

Joe Rogan (101:07)

Are we allowed to wear makeup at all? Are the Islamic women allowed to wear makeup under their hijab or not?

Mike Baker (101:12)

Yeah, yeah, they can, depending on where they are.

Joe Rogan (101:16)

Some parts they don't let them do.

Mike Baker (101:17)

It Some parts, yeah, depending on how extreme they are. But if you went to Kuwait or something like that, they would flash it, you know, it's like a signify. It signify that they're. They're like racy, you know, sassy little hussy. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (101:35)

Oh, my God, I saw her nostrils.

Mike Baker (101:37)

Sorry. Ankles, bitches.

Joe Rogan (101:38)

Wild. Isn't it wild, though, that. That religion, the absolute most suppressed religion, suppressive religion when it comes to women and gays, are the ones that the progressives are so vehemently defending. Like, that's the one they defend over all religions. You can be. Is like a leftist will accuse you readily and quickly of being Islamophobic. It's a great thing to shut you down. You. It's a great pejorative. But no one ever accuses you of being an anti Christian. No one. It never comes up. No one. No one. There's not even a word, right? You can have Islamophobic. Is there a Christianophobic? I've never heard it. What is a word, like a disparaging word for someone who is prejudiced against Christians? Does it exist?

Mike Baker (102:28)

I don't know.

Joe Rogan (102:28)

I mean, it probably doesn't even. It's honky, you know, it's like a racist term for white people. Cracker. Doesn't work.

Mike Baker (102:35)

Caucasian, CIS male. I don't even know what. What that means.

Joe Rogan (102:38)

Christianophobia or whatever.

Mike Baker (102:39)

Christianophobia. See, that's.

Joe Rogan (102:41)

I've never heard anyone utter that.

Mike Baker (102:42)

That's too much garbly gook. You can't say it fast.

Joe Rogan (102:45)

No, no.

Mike Baker (102:45)

Islamophobia is kind of fun.

Joe Rogan (102:46)

Yeah, Islamophobia flows. It sounds like you're intellectual. Well, this podcast is filled with Islamophobia. First of all, let's just discuss this. This is really important. We need to direct them to feminism.

Mike Baker (102:58)

But I think that's so funny because when I. When I listen to academics, you know, I'll pull up YouTube and I'll go down a rabbit hole on a certain thing and I'll listen to an academic. And then half of them. I shouldn't say half of them, like a good portion of them, they're talking about things they've never actually experienced. So for me, I've lived in the Middle east like I've lived in Jerusalem. I've lived and interacted and been in these cultures and seen them in a very vivid way. And when I say this tactical and combat experience, specifically in these countries, it's very vivid. And part of the problem with this differentiation. Let's go back to it. But this differentiation between the decision makers and the people actually implementing the tactical execution on the ground is that there's a huge disconnect from the reality. They don't have the wisdom to understand what it is. And what I used to tell people is like, I was almost like a zookeeper where I would usher. Depending on the person, I would usher them through the fucking zoo so they could see what's going on, but they would see it from afar. And I kept the lions from eating them.

Joe Rogan (104:20)

Right.

Mike Baker (104:21)

And. And there's this very clear differentiation between the people in charge. And most of them shouldn't have been in a combat zone. Specifically in the Agency. They should not have been in a combat zone. And when you unpack the Agency and you look at, you have paramilitary guys and they're more than qualified to be there, and then you have like the cocktail circuit guys, and they're just trying to get their combat tour so they can get promoted to another fucking spot, but they actually have no business being there. Meaning they need guys like me to keep them alive. Like, they.

Joe Rogan (104:55)

So they're just like getting in days for.

Mike Baker (104:57)

That's all they're doing. The ledger, there's a very famous infamous case officer from coast back in the day. And I was on the ground there, not in coast, in Cabo at the time. And she was being groomed to be the assistant director. There's a great book on it called Double Agent. But I was on the ground when it happened. And she had this asset that she was trying to get in, which is an Agency asset, that she was trying to get into a basin Coast. Once again, this person has no. They should not be here. They should be in Germany going to a cocktail party, like, pretending like they're really cool because they have high intellect, but they have no context to going down to the basis of reality. And these are like rules of the jungle. Like this. Like this power is the only language they speak. Like, you can't intellect your way out of this thing because a fucking bullet is a bullet, a bat is a bat. Like, it will win over your articulation every time. If you want to win a debate and you just put an ax handle through somebody's fucking head, that's how you win, right? That. Like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. So, like, they bring in this asset and she's like, oh, you know, this asset is the guy. He's going to give us the coordinates to bin Laden. We've been working with him for a long time. He's an amazing guy. It's his birthday. He wants us to bring him a cake. So she bypasses all the security systems, bringing in a guy from Pakistan. So she gets him because he's like, I don't want to go through any security. I'm your trusted guy. I don't want to go through first. I don't want to go through any security. So she tells security, stand down. She doesn't tell anybody about it. She brings this guy in through the gate, like, blows him through. Now, the security guys, mind you, are like, what the fuck did you just do? They're running down to the situation to try to get ahead of it. He steps out, and he looks like the Michelin Tiger man and fucking clacks off.

Joe Rogan (107:11)

Oh, God.

Mike Baker (107:13)

And three of my friends were killed in that suicide bomb. She was killed, ultimately. And. But that's a perfect example. And, I mean, there's like, multiple different examples of. There's a different cadence, mindset, and capability associated with what I would say is the paramilitary guys versus the case officers, the spies. There's just totally different guys. And they tried to intermingle because of capabilities and, more importantly, promotions to try to get people, like, promoted, which is another reason why, like, some significant things have to change over there, and they.

Joe Rogan (107:57)

Got to send people to. You just. You were supposed to protect these people.

Mike Baker (108:01)

Yeah. And it. So they could be collection officers on the ground. I mean, like, time after time, example after example, I had this guy in this town called Lashka Gar on the middle of fucking nowhere. And before we go there. So let's rewind to Iraq. I had a. I had a spy that we were working with, and they're called case officers in the agency. And. And we go out to pick her up from the airfield, and we're, like, bringing her to where she needs to go. And we pick her up, and she gets in the car behind she. She gets in. In the car behind me, and she takes out her pistol. She points it, and I'm in the passenger seat. She's right behind me. She takes out her clock. She puts a magazine in it, racks the slide right behind my head, like, directly into the back of my head.

Joe Rogan (108:56)

Oh, my God.

Mike Baker (108:57)

And I turn around, I'm like. And I'll tell you exactly what I said. I'm like, what the are you doing? As I turned around, I'm like, give me that thing. Like. And I called her. I called her some, like, very rude. Very rude things, right? So I'm like, what the are you doing? Don't take your pistol out. I go, if both of us are dead, then think about it. But I'm gonna keep this. You just don't have it anymore. As I gave her back, I actually gave her back the empty pistol. I was like, listen, if both of us are dead, feel free. Take one of our. Take one of our guns. Take both of our guns. I don't give a shit, because I'm dead. But I get back in, and the chief of base at the time pulls me in. It's a fucking super good dude. And he, like, calls me. He's like, hey, man, I heard you had quite an exchange with somebody. And, you know, we don't really appreciate, you know, this. And, you know, I might be. I might have to send you home. I was like, did she tell you what she did? He was like, no, I just thought she got in the car and you told her, like, you know, you fucking dumb. Whatever, and give me your gun. I was like, no. She racked her slide into the back of my head. And he's like, oh, God, get out of here. I'll talk to her. It's like, oh, God, get out of here. Talk to her.

Joe Rogan (110:18)

Oh, Jesus.

Mike Baker (110:21)

But it's.

Joe Rogan (110:21)

It's like, do they even have to show competency in weapons use?

Mike Baker (110:26)

Yeah, but it's, it's. It.

Joe Rogan (110:28)

Do they go through the same sort of program?

Mike Baker (110:30)

Everybody thinks there's like this Jason Bourne type person, you know, like spies or Jason Bourne or something like that. It's like. It's just not fundamentally correct. Like any soft guy there. Any soft guy is so more. Much more proficient firearms. I taught a selection and vetting course for former soft guys that wanted to come into the agency. And I taught it for a couple years. And I was one of the main architects behind the selection criteria. And we would have to go out and train spies, and I would shoot their qualification course with my left hand. Like on two hours of sleep, still half in the fucking bag. Like, it's just so, like, ridiculously.

Joe Rogan (111:19)

It ingrained.

Mike Baker (111:21)

Yeah. And more importantly, it's. That's not their job. Right. They're. They're collection people. And I'm defending them to a certain degree because they're very high iq. Their selection criteria and their courses, they're.

Joe Rogan (111:31)

Not prepared for that.

Mike Baker (111:32)

No, they don't belong in those places. Like when you go into the. When you go into a combat zone in. When it's a very complex, because there's different, different areas in combat zones, and some of them are more Dangerous than others. You can't have some of those people there. It's too dangerous, man. You got to have collection people that are on the military side that can handle themselves unilaterally and you can't have like your regular humdrum spy. This isn't Jason Bourne. They're not competent. And more importantly, that's not their thing. It's the thing of proficient artisans in combat collection in the art of war. And that is a very subset, niche profession of guys that are extremely competent and very dangerous.

Joe Rogan (112:26)

Why do we want to believe in a Jason Bourne? I think it's love that.

Mike Baker (112:31)

They love it.

Joe Rogan (112:32)

They love that narrative. Some super spy double zero seven dude that can fuck everybody up.

Mike Baker (112:37)

It's fun, right? Oh, we, we noticed you're, you're, you're a, you're, you're a really good boxer in your local gym and you went to Yale. We're gonna recruit you. Like, get the fuck out of here. Let's. So stupid.

Joe Rogan (112:49)

He's a judo champion.

Mike Baker (112:50)

Yeah, he's a judo champion. You know, they'd always start, oh man, we noticed you were hitting the bags. And you're a political science major in Yale.

Joe Rogan (113:01)

There's a guy with glasses and a hat on watching you run around the track. I think we found our man.

Mike Baker (113:08)

If they only knew the bureaucratic steps that it took to get into it, where it's just so much paperwork and interviews and it's. Who is this guy? What has he done?

Joe Rogan (113:20)

Well, what's wild to me is the spies that infiltrate terrorists organizations. Like there's, there's people that are in the IDF that have infiltrated Hamas. They live with them, they're, they're in there lots. Isn't that crazy? Yeah.

Mike Baker (113:37)

So respectable.

Joe Rogan (113:38)

That life. Oh, that life is nuts, man. Worried you're going to be found out. And these guys knowing Hamas, knowing that a certain percentage of these people have to be Israeli. Well, that is so crazy that they.

Mike Baker (113:52)

Do that when you have those guys. And we need those guys. Like I'm not. Oh yeah, like we need those guys.

Joe Rogan (113:58)

Must be so exciting.

Mike Baker (113:59)

The non official cover, the Knox. Yeah, like that's that. I, I mean that there's so much respect.

Joe Rogan (114:06)

Well, you were explaining that one guy that's a professor.

Mike Baker (114:09)

Yeah, well, yeah, so, yeah, I mean, out of all the guys, like I had such a unique ride in history, in times, right. Where, you know, looking out the window, kind of just being a passenger in history and then being able to talk to some of these guys. And I would sit down and I would always Find like the older guy that's in the, you know, the. We have like dining halls where the agency has their own separate dining halls and bars and like that. And I sat down with a guy one day and I was just like, hey man, what's your story? You know. And he was telling me he was a, he was an anthropology professor at the University of Washington. And he was, he was, he was finishing his PhD and he was crossing the Mackenzie Traverse in Canada and he did it in era appropriate clothing, in a canoe. And the whole thing, right. It's just completely insane. Oh my God, he's like so insane. And I was like, well, how'd you get in? You know? And that's. So he's making his way across, he gets to a cabin, he's starving. He's gonna die. He's explaining this to me. He's like, I'm going to die. I break into this trapper cabin, I find a bunch of old, like old canned food. I gorge. I just like engorge myself. And now I have the screaming shits. And I'm like wiping my ass with this National Geographic. And I pull out this ad. And the agency used to have ads in National Geographic. And he thought to himself, wow, that's really interesting, I should apply. So he applied. When he got back, imagine this scenario.

Joe Rogan (115:57)

You're fucking starving, then you're eating botulism filled cans of beans with pork and shit, wiping your ass for the National Geographic. You see an. I mean, it's a fucking scene in a movie.

Mike Baker (116:07)

It's insane.

Joe Rogan (116:08)

That's a scene in a movie. So right.

Mike Baker (116:10)

It goes back to University of Washington, becomes a professor. The agency, he goes through the entire process. The agency recruits him, he goes through training, but still he has to keep his double life going.

Joe Rogan (116:23)

So he starts a life as a double life, in fact, becomes a professor while he's in the agency.

Mike Baker (116:29)

Correct.

Joe Rogan (116:30)

Wow. So from the jump, he's got a double life. It's not like he gets recruited, he's some Nobel prize winner and they say, we need you to be for America. Wow.

Mike Baker (116:40)

In his first job, I'll never forget him describing this to me because I didn't know, I didn't know any of this. So it's part history, part just agency history. And he goes, my first job was, I flew to Angola and I just had a suitcase full of money and they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere and they're like, go kill Cubans. That was his job.

Joe Rogan (117:09)

Jesus Christ. Just a bag of money. That was one straight directive okay.

Mike Baker (117:15)

And so in defense here, that's cool as shit. It's pretty wild. It's wild.

Joe Rogan (117:21)

They trust that guy.

Mike Baker (117:21)

Hey, here's a bag of money. Yeah, go kill some Cubans. Because you had. You know, it's a proxy war, right, between South Africa and that. It was the Soviets and the Cuban by proxy. They were both supporting each other. They were both supporting the communist revolution, Angola. So we are pushing back as. From the state's perspective, we were pushing back against the Soviet intervention, which was driven from the Cubans. So he had a huge, huge Cuban intervention, which is something most people don't realize. And I just thought it was fascinating because it was the first time I heard about it. And here's this guy that his job was. Here's a bag of money. Go kill Cubans. That's your job.

Joe Rogan (118:11)

While he's a professor.

Mike Baker (118:12)

While he's a professor. So he'd be like, going. So he would go back to, you know, whatever university and go, okay, kids, I know I've been out on a dig, you know, in. I've been building, you know, atlatls in Australia trying to do this. But really, he was in Angola hunting Cubans.

Joe Rogan (118:31)

Holy shit.

Mike Baker (118:33)

That's pretty badass. I say that's way better than Indiana Jones as far as I'm concerned right now.

Joe Rogan (118:38)

Chalkboard and shit, thinking about gun and dudes down. Okay. And then. Plus the five.

Mike Baker (118:47)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (118:48)

Who here can answer this?

Mike Baker (118:52)

Nobody. Nobody. Nobody can know.

Joe Rogan (118:55)

That's.

Mike Baker (118:56)

So he never tells anybody.

Joe Rogan (118:57)

Anybody.

Mike Baker (118:58)

No. And he's still.

Joe Rogan (119:00)

I mean, so I guess with a guy like that, if you can find a guy who's willing to wear era. Era equivalent clothing, would you say an error? Correct.

Mike Baker (119:09)

Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (119:10)

And make his way through a trek that was most likely gonna kill people in the 1800s, you know, who did something like that? They didn't do the whole thing. But Rinella, the way I met him was he had a first. He had a show before Meat Eater. It was called the Wild Within. And I got really addicted to it.

Mike Baker (119:28)

Seriously?

Joe Rogan (119:29)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to love. Way before I ever went hunting. I still love watching hunting shows. Yeah, I used to watch, like, Ted Nugent, Spirit of the Wild. My wife was always like, what the fuck are you watching? But I was always obsessed with hunting shows and wilderness shows, people in the wilderness. Because every time I'm in the woods, I feel like it's a vitamin. I'm like, oh, yeah. So I was like. I wanted to, like, experience more of that in my life. So I was watching on tv. So there was a show called the Wild within. And what Rinella did was he, like. I think he used, like, error correct weapons, too. I think he used, like, a musket, and he shot a bison, and he turned the bison into, like. I think it was a bison. Whatever the animal was, he turned it into a boat. He made a boat out of it and drifted down this river. He did, like, all these things that these pioneers did back in the day when they were making their way across the country.

Mike Baker (120:19)

That sounds awesome.

Joe Rogan (120:20)

It was pretty dope. That's how I got to meet him. That's how I got him on my podcast before Meat Eater was ever a show.

Mike Baker (120:25)

Okay.

Joe Rogan (120:25)

Yeah. He was super dismissive of podcast. Now he's got one.

Mike Baker (120:30)

I feel like there's.

Joe Rogan (120:31)

What am I doing here? I'm in this comedy club with this fucking dude who's smoking weed. Like, this is ridiculous.

Mike Baker (120:36)

I feel like there's a lot of people that probably dismissed it. They're like, oh, what the fuck is Joe doing?

Joe Rogan (120:41)

But now he's got a great podcast of his own. I love that guy to death.

Mike Baker (120:43)

No, he's awesome.

Joe Rogan (120:44)

He's. He's such a smart dude, too. He knows so many things. He's a fascinating guy to talk to because he's super well ready, and he. He can talk to you about all kinds of shit that you would not expect from a guy who's a professional hunter. No, you know, he talks like a PhD. It's very. But also like a hunter. Very unusual dude. And like, one of the very best guys to explain hunting. Like, I saw a debate that he had. It was like a. I think it was a book that he had released, and he was doing one of those talks they do at bookstores. And this guy was a vegan, and the guy in the audience was a vegan. The guy got upset with him, and the Rinella handled it so perfectly. Just the way he communicated with the guy and explaining his perspective. And you have a different perspective, and I'd love to have a conversation with you. He didn't do with any bullshit. Ted Nugent's like, ah, you grow it out of the vagina. But Renell is like, the perfect answer to people that objectively, they look at it, they go, wait a minute. I do eat meat. Like, I am a hypocrite. I am hiring a supermarket hitman. Like, why am I upset at this man who not only hunts his meat, but cooks it and writes cookbooks and cooks it on television? And, like, this is the same thing. Like, what are we doing here? This is so stupid, you know, and then you've got the people that really believe that you shouldn't eat anything but plants. And my problem with that is I think plants are smart. I think they just move real slow and I think they have a way of interacting that is noticeable, measurable. I think there's probably a consciousness to plants. I think life eats life and I think that's the only way it survives. And I think that's just the way it goes. That is just the way it goes. And you can choose to just eat plants, but I don't think you're going to be as healthy. I think it's too hard. I think people can kind of survive on vegan diets and do well on vegan diets. There's athletes that are on vegan diets. I don't think they hit peak performance and thrive. I think that's all people who are consuming nutrient dense meats, meats and fish and eggs. Those are the people that, when you look at athletes, the predominant, the best athletes in every sport are all consuming protein. They're all consuming animal protein. There's so few that are vegans that hit elite status and maintain. A lot of them get injured when they switch to vegan too. There's just so much in there, collagen and B12 and fucking. There's so many different aspects to different amino acids. You can have this ethical thing in your head and I get that ethical thing. Like I don't want to see a thing suffer. I think plants suffer. You just don't feel it.

Mike Baker (123:22)

Right.

Joe Rogan (123:23)

I really do. I think there's a communication with them that's probably similar but different to the way we feel about animals getting killed by other animals. I think it's just a part of this whole process. I mean, they've shown that you can take the recordings of beetles eating leaves and play recordings of beetles eating leaves near a tree. And the tree will experience distress to the point where it changes the profile, the flavor profile of the leaves. It releases chemicals, these phytochemicals into the leaves that makes it disgusting for the bugs. And they do it with giraffes. Like when giraffes eat. I think it's acacia trees. When giraffes eat acacia trees, the trees downwind all become disgusting to the point where the giraffes will starve because they won't eat it. They change their flavor profile to protect themselves. They release some sort of chemical. It makes them inedible.

Mike Baker (124:25)

Well, I think that's so interesting because you can see it with. Who's that? Paul Stamets has, like, you know, when the fungi is like talking and communicating and the health benefits to like fungi and different plants. Like, I think anytime you have this edict where no meat, no plants, no, I think that's just another version of religious extremism where, yeah, if you were just to say what makes sense, what's morally, what am I going to have to coalesce in from me, I don't want to be a hypocrite. So I hunt like that's the way it is. And we eat a ton of wild meat. I'm not a hypocrite. We eat meat. I love fish, I love fruits and vegetables. But I think if you're making this determination where there's no meat, this is the only thing I'm going to eat. Well, one man. That's a lot of time, effort and energy that you're spending specifically on your diet constraints that could be allocated to being a better dad.

Joe Rogan (125:38)

Or maybe they could do all those things too.

Mike Baker (125:40)

Maybe. I don't know.

Joe Rogan (125:41)

I think their philosophical point is a good one. I think their ethics, the morals, their perspective is that I want to live a life of. With the least suffering possible. I think that's noble. I really do. I think the problem is life eats life. And I think that's the real problem. And I think the problem is if you're buying just vegetables in the store, boy, you need to take a good look at monocrop agriculture because it's fucking bananas, you know. There was Taylor Sheridan in Yellowstone. There was a scene where Kevin Costner was talking to the hippie lady is trying to, like, shut down ranches and shit. I forget what her thing was, but he was explaining how if you're on a vegan diet, you want to kill the most things, become a vegan, because you don't understand, like, if one life is one life, okay, if the life of a gopher and the life of an elk are the same thing, and why wouldn't they be? You have no idea how many things have to fucking die to make monocrop agriculture. It's. It's a blood bath. They kill everything. They kill groundhogs, ground squirrels, you fucking name it. Ground nesting birds, fawns. Everything gets gobbled up by combines. It's an enormous industrial operation. It's not natural. So now you're limited to organic plants. Okay? So if you're growing all of your own food and you know you're growing a lot of Soybeans, a lot of different things. Like if you go hemp, if you're in a place where you can grow it legally, hemp is actually a really good source of protein. It's actually got a really complete amino acid profile. You can, you know, you can survive. You could do it that way. But if you're a regular vegan, if you're just a person to like, I get vegan pizza at the supermarket. Shut the up. You. You're contributing to this mass slaughter of small animals. You're just not aware of it.

Mike Baker (127:32)

Have you. Have you watched that Netflix docu series on. It's basically vegan propaganda. I forget what its name is.

Joe Rogan (127:40)

It the Game Changers. That's probably the movie.

Mike Baker (127:42)

Did you watch that?

Joe Rogan (127:43)

Yeah, I know that I had them on.

Mike Baker (127:45)

Well, I thought it was fascinating, like, from a wide variety of reasons, but more importantly. So I went and got some vegan cheese and I was like. Tried it. I was like, okay, it's not bad. But I mean, dude, it's. It's a laundry list of ingredients associated with making this, which is. Seems pretty insane to me. Versus, what's the ingredient on a good cheese?

Joe Rogan (128:12)

Milk.

Mike Baker (128:15)

Right. This thing's like a. Like a dissertation of ingredients.

Joe Rogan (128:20)

And it's so processed. That is literally what it is. If you want to be. I said that a million times. You want to be a vegetarian, eat Indian food. They make delicious, delicious vegetarian food. You don't have to eat vegan cheese. Stop pretending. Stop lying to foodie or whatever the fuck that shit is. Get out of here.

Mike Baker (128:40)

Get out of it.

Joe Rogan (128:40)

Get the fuck out of here. That's nonsense. What are you eating? And also eat mollusks. People should look into that. Those things are so primitive. They're way more primitive than plants. We just have a problem with them moving. That's all it is. If people, like, they don't even have nerves, they don't feel pain right there. Fucking the simplest of organisms, yet their protein is like animal protein. It's really good for you.

Mike Baker (129:04)

Do you eat oysters?

Joe Rogan (129:05)

Oh, yeah. Eat the fuck out of oysters. Never down. Then I hear about dude dying. Yeah, I eat escargot, but every now and then I hear about a dude dying from oysters.

Mike Baker (129:12)

So we were in Normandy. This is super funny. Funny story. So I went out to the 80th anniversary for the Normandy invasion. Took a bunch of dudes out there. And my kids and I are out on this beach and I'm taking my pocket knife out and I'm just chopping the oysters off. The rocks and eating oysters straight out of the ocean.

Joe Rogan (129:34)

Oh, wow.

Mike Baker (129:35)

And my girls are running away from me. They're like, this is the grossest shit I've ever seen. And then pretty soon, they got into it. So then they're trying to find me the oysters to bring them back and show me where they are. My wife was like, you're gonna fucking die. You're gonna poison yourself. You're eating these right out of Normandy. That the. It's one of the beaches out there.

Joe Rogan (129:57)

All the munitions are in the water.

Mike Baker (129:59)

I'm like, I don't give a. And then I had to. I'm eating them. And I quickly searched. Hey, are there. There any toxins after I've eaten, like, three. Are there any toxins in the oysters in Normandy? Thank God. It was like, you know, 99.9%. I'll live. I'll live on the edge here. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (130:21)

When I lived in San Francisco, you could collect mussels. There was, like, muscles that were on the rocks. But then I think I brought them home once. But then I found out that there's, like, a couple months out of the year that they're poison. You get, like, red tide, right?

Mike Baker (130:36)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (130:37)

So I was like. Like, I dodged the bullet. But I was like, what's that bullet? Because you could just go find muscles and pluck them off of things. Let me.

Mike Baker (130:45)

Let me ask you this. Like, so. So if you were to move back to California, okay, But to take Texas.

Joe Rogan (130:53)

Politics with you, that's not really possible.

Mike Baker (130:56)

But if it were, I'm taking you.

Joe Rogan (130:59)

On an imaginary trip, would I move?

Mike Baker (131:00)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (131:00)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (131:01)

No, no.

Joe Rogan (131:02)

I like it here.

Mike Baker (131:03)

You like the weather?

Joe Rogan (131:04)

I like everything. I like the size of it. I like the way people behave. People are super friendly. I like the scene here. The restaurant scene's amazing. The comedy scene's amazing. Live music, a bunch of cool people. Now, like, so. So many of my friends moved here. I love it here. I just love the vibe. I love that it's. You know, it's. I love that we're not connected to the Hollywood machine. There's, like, a pull of deals and shows and things that you get roped into doing because you think about the money they'll pay you, right? And then you wind up, like, becoming one of those people. Like, you have to say what they say you have to be. If you're not politically aligned with them, you're gonna lose gigs. You change your behavior. I see it with so many comics. They're really good comics coming up. They're they're like, wow, this guy's gonna be good. He's really good. He's getting better all the time. And then they get a fucking show. They get a show and then they tone everything down and everything gets softer and everything. You know, you start seeing some, like, bullshit jokes in there. Like, oh, you decided to cover this joke, cover this subject just for, like. Just for, like, street cred, progressive street cred. Like, you see it happen, you're like, ah, you got called into the rocks. The sirens, they called you into the rocks. That's what it is, man. They call you into the rocks. You stop. You stop being you. You stop being you because they dangle that carrot in front of your face, and there's no carrot out here. The carrot is just podcasts and other comics, right? So that's way better. There's no control. There's no manipulation. There's no. Someone's dangling this over you. You have to agree with what I agree with. No one cares at all about any of that stuff here.

Mike Baker (132:54)

Like, it's. It's freedom in, like. I mean, we were talking about it the other. I think it was today, right, where it's like another comic was like, oh, can you believe they're a Democrat? And I'm like, no, it's weird or whatever, right? But it's fine in the context of, I think, being a conservative, because I don't necessarily say I'm a Republican. I'm like, I just believe in less government. I don't like bureaucrats at all. I have a high degree of skepticism on anything that they say, and I typically will question anything an elected official will say. So for me, I'm like, I don't care if the guy next to me is going to vote for whatever alternate politician I care about. What are their ideas? Why do they think a certain way? What are they doing? What kind of a human are they? And what is the character of the individual? Am I going to disagree with them? Yeah, but who the fuck cares? Like, it's kind of fun. Like, it's kind of fun to disagree with people and debate them and have a different opinion versus being in an echo chamber where people all agree and they're all kind of lockstep in their belief system. It's kind of fun to have some wingnut talking about socialism. Half the time you talking about you believe in that. It's like some Orwellian nightmare, man.

Joe Rogan (134:17)

And if you could have a conversation with someone where you're friendly with each other and completely disagree, it's a Beautiful dance. It's a fun dance to talk to people that have just completely different perspectives. But you're not rude to them. No, you just ask him, well, why do you think that? Well, did you ever consider this? And you have conversations like two normal people just having a conversation. Okay, all right. So that's what you think, huh? What was your childhood like? Just get into, like, what are we dealing with here? Like, why do you have this perspective, you know, and you have to be able to talk to each other. And there's a bunch of people that we hang out with that have totally different opinions on all kinds of things. Like my friend Josh, who was here the other day. Love him to death. He told me he voted for Jill Stein. Said he voted for Jill Stein. Just like a protest vote.

Mike Baker (135:04)

Wow.

Joe Rogan (135:04)

I think the two party system's stupid. I'm like, yeah, okay, right, Yeah, I get it. Look, I voted for two libertarian candidates in a row. So I voted for Gary Johnson and then I voted for Joe Jorgensen. Why? Because I was like, this is. This whole thing's gross. But that's like California. I knew it was going to be blue anyway. California is always blue. It was like a legitimate protest vote. And I guess he was in Florida, so that's a legitimate protest vote. If you want to. It's going to go red anyway, whether you like it or not.

Mike Baker (135:37)

Going to go red?

Joe Rogan (135:38)

Yeah, Florida goes red hard. When they saw Miami go red, they were like, oh, boy. Yeah, oh boy. And one of the things that they were saying is like the whole like, what goes red and what goes like, if you look at the country, like, California is way more red now than it's ever been in the last four years.

Mike Baker (135:57)

I didn't know that.

Joe Rogan (135:58)

Yeah, it was a big difference. If you look at. There's a map of California, how it voted from 2020 to 2024. It's a giant swing. It's like it's the reds going like this. See if you can find it, Jamie. It's very interesting. And that's not because people have been radicalized. That's because the left has gone fucking cuckoo. You guys have gone crazy and you're authoritarians. You want everybody to behave and believe and think and talk the way you do. Or else.

Mike Baker (136:30)

I've always.

Joe Rogan (136:31)

Look at that. Look at the difference.

Mike Baker (136:32)

Holy shit.

Joe Rogan (136:33)

Holy shit. Dude.

Mike Baker (136:35)

That is wild.

Joe Rogan (136:36)

Yeah, it's most of California by land mass by far. Yeah, it's probably 70% by land mass.

Mike Baker (136:42)

Or blue up there on the east side. Like, what is that close to?

Joe Rogan (136:46)

Is that, like, where they grow the weed, son?

Mike Baker (136:49)

Oh, yeah. Where are you guys? You guys got to be like, Tahoe.

Joe Rogan (136:56)

What is that one?

Mike Baker (136:57)

Like, that's got to be, like, Truckee or something. Something.

Joe Rogan (136:59)

You got to shut off blocker. These. Here it goes. Oh, these. Oh, you have to get a sign. Yeah, go to the other. Just the image. Just the image.

Mike Baker (137:10)

Real quick. See, I've thought about this, because I always tell people California is my. My favorite climate in the nation, period.

Joe Rogan (137:18)

Yeah, that's it. So what's the one in the upper. Well, it's not the one that's Blue County. Yeah. I guarantee you that's where they grow the weed. Yeah, they want to keep everything nice and quiet up there. Shut the. Everybody shut the.

Mike Baker (137:34)

Hey, man, we don't want these guys to, like, criminalize weed again. That's where.

Joe Rogan (137:38)

Where's Humboldt, Jamie? Where's Humboldt?

Mike Baker (137:41)

North.

Joe Rogan (137:41)

Up here somewhere. Up there. That's where they grow all the best weed. That's where they have problems with the cartel, too. Cartel grows weed up there, too?

Mike Baker (137:48)

The cartel grows weed in California?

Joe Rogan (137:50)

Oh, yeah.

Mike Baker (137:51)

That's what I was gonna. That's what I wanted to ask you is about the cartel. Do you think that they're really gonna.

Joe Rogan (137:56)

That one was humbled, the one you guys are. It was humble.

Mike Baker (137:58)

Oh, shit. Okay. There we go. You're right.

Joe Rogan (138:01)

Yeah, they grow all the weeds on There you go. Yeah. There's a dude named John Norris who's been on the podcast. He wrote a book called Hidden wars, and he was a game warden. So he's just thinking he's gonna go around checking fishing licenses and like that. And then one day, they find a creek that's been diverted, so they have to follow the creek. They thought maybe a farmer had, like, dammed the creek somewhere and done something to get water illegally. He goes up there, and he finds these PVC pipes and all this, and it reads this giant grow up. And it's all cartel guys. And so this guy's job changes from being a game warrior. Let me check your fishing line. To running a fucking tactical unit. They had attack dogs. They had attack dogs. They had fucking shootouts with the cartel in the woods over weed. Because here's what happened. California made weed legal in the state, but made growing it a misdemeanor. If you grow it illegally, okay? So if you are a person who's doing it legally, you can grow it and you can sell it. If you have a license, you can open up a shop and you can sell it. They tax the shit out of it's great for everybody, but the problem is you made growing it illegally a misdemeanor. So then the cartel just starts growing it everywhere in the national forests because even if the guys get arrested, nothing happens. It's a misdemeanor. So it's nothing. So they're using these crazy toxic poison pesticides, all this shit that's totally illegal to use on regular crops in America. And 90% of the illegal weed that's being bought around the country is coming from them.

Mike Baker (139:33)

Holy shit. I didn't know that.

Joe Rogan (139:34)

And they're doing it all in national forests and they're doing most of it in California. Dude, they find these girls. My friend found one. You know him, Cody.

Mike Baker (139:43)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan (139:44)

He found a grow out on Tahon Ranch.

Mike Baker (139:48)

Really?

Joe Rogan (139:48)

Yes.

Mike Baker (139:49)

Oh my gosh, that's right. Yeah, yes.

Joe Rogan (139:51)

He found a cartel grow up on Tahon Ranch where they had this guy carried in pipes on his shoulder and.

Mike Baker (140:00)

Diverted into the woods.

Joe Rogan (140:02)

Diverted a stream. And then there was this whole field of weed that these guys had planted out there. They were camping out there. They had little religious symbols and shit they kept by their bed to protect them, like the Virgin Mary and shit.

Mike Baker (140:15)

What do you think I've heard? This is what I want to talk to you about. Because it pertains to. The cartel was like, what do you think about releasing SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force on the cartels? What do you think that looks like?

Joe Rogan (140:25)

Well, I think you've solved one problem. Solved the problem. You have. You no longer have distribution, but you still have a demand.

Mike Baker (140:33)

You still have a demand.

Joe Rogan (140:34)

Yeah. The real problem is there's always going to be a demand. The real problem, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that idea, by the way. Okay, I like that idea.

Mike Baker (140:42)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (140:42)

But the problem with that idea is you're always going to have a demand. And if you're going to have a demand, someone's going to fulfill that demand. And who the fuck is that going to be? How are they going to get the coke in? You're not going to just not have coke. So here's the question. By having prohibition of alcohol in the United States, it's wildly widely agreed that that led to the rise of the mafia, right? Bootleggers, the mafia criminal organizations that were organized crime that went on to do a bunch of other horrible things inside our country. And they were built up with money because alcohol was illegal. The moment alcohol stopped being illegal, you still have these people with all this money. Now you fucked up. Now they're organized Gangsters. And now, you know, okay, alcohol is legal now, so they're just gonna sell it legally. And they have millions and millions of dollars from all of crime. You've already done that with the cartel. You got to do. Just got. You got to do something. You got to do something. And you probably also should legalize drugs. I don't think you should take drugs. I think coke is probably terrible for almost everybody. I think meth is probably terrible.

Mike Baker (141:42)

Do people still do cocaine? I absolute, really, like.

Joe Rogan (141:46)

It's really a thing. People who do it. The growing Chinese investment in illegal American weed. Of course. Why wouldn't they get in on it? Check out this number that. It says here of the 2000 OR. Sorry, of the 800 farms, the OBN in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics has shut down in the last two years. 75% were linked to China. Oh, my God. China's growing weed here. They're growing weed here. Oh, my God.

Mike Baker (142:10)

I was thinking about that. I was thinking about this from the thought exercise where I'm like. Because I, you know, I. I know these units. I'm intimately familiar with them, bro. If we declare war on the cartel, like, these. These dudes are not gonna understand what the. Is going on. No, of course they are. They are gonna be. Because, God, you'll stop the distribution.

Joe Rogan (142:39)

That's gonna be. Yeah, they.

Mike Baker (142:41)

They are in for a world of, like, ultra violence they've never actually felt before because, you know, obviously this is very capable Ultraviolet organization. They have fucking no clue. If we organize these Tier one units against them, this is going to be what I would be doing if I was down there. Like, I know all those shoeboxes in my fucking, you know, my walls that I'm going to have to collect up. I'd be getting ready to retire right now. That's what I would be doing. Because if Delta Force was hunting me, bro, I would be so terrified.

Joe Rogan (143:12)

Is that a real thing that they proposed doing?

Mike Baker (143:15)

Yes, that is a real thing.

Joe Rogan (143:17)

Proposed that.

Mike Baker (143:18)

I'm almost positive either JD Or Trump had said something with the new guy from ice. Like, we're going to mobilize Tier one units against the cartel. I. The only thing I thought was, like, retire. If you guys. You guys got some money, man. I would, like, put that away, you know, like, maybe move Jamaica.

Joe Rogan (143:39)

I don't know.

Mike Baker (143:40)

Go somewhere.

Joe Rogan (143:40)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (143:41)

Buy a restaurant. Like, try to go legit. Because, dude, if those guys are hunting you.

Joe Rogan (143:46)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (143:47)

By the way, like, you're done. You're fucking done.

Joe Rogan (143:51)

And it's a weird thing that that's going on right at our border. So strange thing because it's so close to us and it's so ultra violent and dangerous and it's just completely shaped the way the entire economy of the country works. You know, they have so much power and control and it's a criminal organization that is entirely, almost entirely, at least funded by us, by our desire. Trump declares war on cartels. President Elect said notorious crime syndicates and drug kingpins will never sleep soundly again once he launches his plans to tackle the issue.

Mike Baker (144:25)

I thought about this for a long time where I'm like, if they, if they turned loose Delta Force and Seal Team Six on cartels and pedophiles, we could just kind of like erase the problem in about two years to be gone.

Joe Rogan (144:40)

He wants to send troops to Mexico. He said we make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure and operations. Oh, Jesus, bro. It is going to get wild on January 20th.

Mike Baker (144:57)

It's gonna get wild, man.

Joe Rogan (144:58)

It is gonna get wild. Very interesting. But the thing is, like, people inaction is action as well when it comes to this. Like, you're just, you're going to continue to prop them up. They're going to get more and more power and more and more money, and we got to figure out why. Everybody wants coke. What the fuck is it?

Mike Baker (145:14)

You think it's coke?

Joe Rogan (145:15)

I think that's the big one. I'm pretty sure it's the big one. I'm sure a lot of it is pills. They have fake pills, like they sell, like street pills, street different anti anxiety medications, Molly. There's a lot of stuff they sell that's also laced up with fentanyl, which is responsible for, you know, who knows how many tens of thousands of.

Mike Baker (145:34)

It's like 200,000 people is what they're. What they're saying is if that's responsible.

Joe Rogan (145:38)

For Crazy High, Crazy high.

Mike Baker (145:40)

It's insane.

Joe Rogan (145:41)

It's a horrific thing. And it's gotten to the point where people are scared to try any kind of drug because they're thinking fentanyl. They found fentanyl in weed. You know what? Yes, people. They found fentanyl laced weed. Yeah. People are dumb as shit, man. You don't think they'll try putting fentanyl and weed? People are dumb as shit. They'll try all kinds of things. People are retarded. I know people that have mixed MAO inhibitors and mushrooms and acid altogether. Like, what are you doing? Are you trying to go to space. Like, what are you doing, man? Jesus Christ. You just experimented.

Mike Baker (146:15)

What is an MAO inhibitor? What did you just say?

Joe Rogan (146:18)

An MAO inhibitor? Monoamine oxidase inhibitor. It's the ingredient in ayahuasca that makes DMT orally active. So monoamine oxidase breaks down DMT in the gut. That's why when you eat like. Like if you eat a salad, that's why you don't trip balls.

Mike Baker (146:34)

Got it? Okay.

Joe Rogan (146:35)

Because otherwise, like, most plant, some crazy number of plants have DMT in it. So, like, how many plants have DMT in it? I think it's like a thousand or something. When you nutty like that.

Mike Baker (146:46)

When you think about the legalization of psilocybin.

Joe Rogan (146:50)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (146:51)

So Texas, and this is what I know about Texas, because they're leading, I think, a lot of research specifically related to vets.

Joe Rogan (146:59)

Apparently the former governor, Rick Scott, is really into this.

Mike Baker (147:01)

Rick Perry.

Joe Rogan (147:02)

Rick Perry.

Mike Baker (147:02)

Rick Perry. Because of his relationship with Marcus Luttrell and some of the other guys in the community, he has been leading the charge on this. Do you think that from psilocybin being legal in the United States, do you think it would be an issue? Do you think it'd be an issue at all?

Joe Rogan (147:21)

I don't know. Because you're gonna get people trying it. They wouldn't try it before. You're gonna get people that use it irresponsibly, just like you get people that drink irresponsibly. I think that's the situation that we find ourselves in. If we're gonna give people personal freedom, they're gonna make bad decisions. You know you can buy a Corvette, right? You can go to the Chevrolet dealership, buy a Corvette right off the lot that goes zero to 60 in four seconds, and you're flying around corners. You could be a fucking maniac and kill people in a Corvette. Or you could just enjoy it on the highway and be responsible and say, wow, what a great car. This thing's awesome. I love it. And you don't cause any problems for anybody. No, both things are possible. That's what's going to happen if we make drugs legal. You're going to have people try those drugs that probably shouldn't be trying those drugs. You're going to have people get addicted to those drugs that maybe wouldn't have gotten addicted if those drugs weren't available to them. Especially if they weren't legal. If you could just buy it somewhere. But if you don't rip the fucking band aid off of this infantilization of society and let People know that there are things out there that they're telling you you can't do. And the people who are telling you you can't do them haven't even experienced them. And when it comes to things like psilocybin and, and psychedelics, like if you haven't experienced them, you really shouldn't be talking about them. You have no idea what you're talking about. You just, you have, you can't possibly know. You can't know. And if you do, if you have experienced them, then you're probably going to agree with me. You're probably going to agree that there's some, like some serious benefits to it. 50? Yeah, I thought it was a lot more than that. At least 50. I had read something that was like in the hundreds. I can't find a solid number. I mean it's in a lot of stuff. But so the point is like, I know Phalaris grass is like really rich with dmt and that's also the acacia tree. That's what one when they connected. There's like a university in Jerusalem that connected this idea of Moses and the burning bush to a dmt because the acacia tree is like rich in DMT and the idea of burning it, you see God and God gives you this message and tells you what to do and what the rules of behavior are. These. I think anybody telling you that these things should get you locked up has clearly never experienced them.

Mike Baker (149:40)

No, they never have. Like, I spent all of my life with a top secret security clearance, like most of my life, like from my 20s to like my 40s, right. And my personal experience with them, this is before, you know, before we went public, but my personal experience with them was my, you know, my, my problems were rep after rep, cycle after cycle of combat after like relatively high stress, scenario after scenario after scenario. And I was having a really, really hard time trying to directly connect with love. I actually could not connect with that experience. It was really difficult. And my wife and I were going, we were going through this ongoing debate and dialogue with it and she's like, you need to try it. And we tried it. It Fast forward probably 20 years of talk therapy for me personally. And it gave me this direct connection with this feeling that I hadn't felt for years. And this is the feeling, and this is my point with vets, and especially from the combat vets, the guys have got rep after rep after rep with overpressure and explosions and a lot of violence is that they lose context with this really important feeling that you have to have, which is you have to have direct love for your family, for your spouse, for yourself. And if you've. If you've killed that by all of the things that you've done, you've built a scaffolding, this artificial scaffolding on top of this, it creates a callous. And you got to be able to break through that from a. It. From a psychological perspective and emotional perspective. It accelerates that back and you can kind of reset. You really can. Yeah, I can't imagine. I was thinking about this from, like, my dad's like 80 years old, right? Like, man, if he's got. He's got lung cancer now, and I'm like, gosh, if he could, like, coalesce around killing ego and past and try to understand himself from a different, more introspective way, this would take decades, maybe of talk therapy or a session where you could. You could really accelerate your growth as an individual. I think that's for gwat vets and for vets in general. I mean, I think that's what they're. They're missing. This key component is being able to retouch with their emotional strength and be able to balance these things out where you can evolve and live your life. Do you think you've said it before, I don't know if you said on a show, but do you think society would benefit from it?

Joe Rogan (152:57)

I think a lot of people would benefit from, but I think a lot of people wouldn't. I don't think people with real psychological disorders should be doing it right. You know, I think people that are really fucked up and having a hard time with schizophrenics, people, you know, I don't know. I think it's probably dangerous for you. I think it's probably a bit of a stress test for your psyche. You know, you hear about these stories like the guy from Pink Floyd that dropped acid and freaked out, never came back. There's those stories, like, we hear those stories of guys just go out there and kind of. You lose them. I've kind of seen it with some people. I've seen it with one kid who was just, like, smoking a ton of weed and just lost his mind and became schizophrenic. And you don't know, like, did he have a tendency towards schizophrenia already? Did he fall prey? Was it just his unique biochemistry and how he interacted with weed? Was it just inveterate wheat? I mean, he was. Every day, he's smoking weed constantly. What is it? Like, what. What caused him to crack? You know, I don't know. I don't know. But I don't, I don't have that problem. And I think it's very beneficial. And I don't like when people tell me that because someone has a problem with something that I shouldn't do it. I don't agree with that. I think you should be allowed to take chances as a person. I think if you want to do BMX jumps and fucking do flips on your bike, you should be allowed to do it. You want to do jiu jitsu and have grown men try to kill you? Go ahead, go do it. Do whatever the fuck you want to do. I don't think anybody should be able to tell you what you, what you can and can't do. But why does that change when you talk about substances that someone puts in their body? Well, because those people could do those and then they could commit crimes. But those are already crimes. Like, you already go to jail for those crimes. So, like, if you do something violent because you're on a drug, you're. You, you're going to jail because you did something violent. Like there's a crime, you committed that crime, you go to jail. So, like, we already have laws to fix like that address all the problems. And you're assuming that more problems would occur. We don't know that. We don't know that. We don't know that more people won't chill the fuck out and would have a dramatic decrease in violence across the country. Imagine that. Imagine you have a few people that lose their fucking mind, but you have a dramatic increase in consciousness through the entire country, where people develop like a mushroom culture and people start microdosing all the time. And people get way more comfortable with talking to each other, way more creative, way more like community oriented and love oriented. That's not a bad thing. That's a real possibility with something that exists right now. There's a happy pill. It's out there and it's illegal. And it's God made it. God made it. And it's probably the source of most religious experiences. There's probably some sort of a connection to a lot of those religious experiences rather. And what was probably some sort of a psychedelic adventure that they went on. And who's to say that that's not even how you talk to God in the first place? We don't know because it's been held back from us. It's been kept from us like we're a bunch of babies. It's something that human beings have used for thousands and thousands of years the Greeks used psychedelics to start democracy. And yet here we are in the greatest democracy the world's ever known. And 2024, with full access to the Internet, all the data that's available, all the anecdotal stories, and it'll get you locked in a fucking cage. That's nuts. That's really crazy.

Mike Baker (156:21)

It's completely insane.

Joe Rogan (156:22)

That doesn't make no sense. I've tried to look at it from all different ways. I do agree with you when people say if you make cocaine legal, people are going to die. Unfortunately, I agree with you. But if you don't make cocaine legal, people are also going to die. I don't know which one is more, and I don't know if it was just real cocaine versus cocaine mixed with a bunch of other horrible shit if, like the real cocaine wouldn't kill as many people. I don't know how many people are dying just of cocaine and how many people are dying of fentanyl laced cocaine. I bet it's way more fentanyl laced cocaine. So if you had just pure cocaine and the same amount of use, you're gonna get way less deaths. So that's a net positive. Then you take taxes from that sale of that legal cocaine and you use it to sell rehabilitation centers where you give them ibogaine, give people the ability to break addictions. It's possible. People do it. They go to Mexico, kick opioids. People do it all the time. My friend Ed Clay did it. That's how he got into it. He started his own clinic because he went down there because he had a pill problem. You get an injury, you're doing jiu jitsu, you're always fucking hurt, right? These guys get a disc problem, their arms all fucked up, they take a little pill, you feel better, but then you need three pills, then you need four, then now you're fucked. And now there's nothing to help you other than ibogaine. And that's illegal. So you make that legal too. So with those two together, who knows? You might have way less deaths and then you would have taxes that you could take from that stuff and used for all sorts of things. It would be horrible for taxes from cocaine sales to fix the schools. But what if that's what did it? What if that's what did it? And what if the exact same amount of people buying cocaine are still buying cocaine? What if that is the fix? And what if responsible use of drugs, all kinds of drugs, sure. Don't drive a car when you're coked up. Don't take heroin and fly your plane. No responsible use. Just like responsible use of alcohol. Why is that so crazy for us? Why is that so alien? Because we've been turned into babies. We've been turned into babies where you're allowed to take pharmaceutical drugs that make you high as fuck. Whether it's high as fuck on Adderall or high as fuck on opioid, that's fine. But you can't go out and get yourself some mushrooms. That's just crazy. And for these people that are the ones in charge that are making all the money from these decisions to keep up with insanity in the Internet in 2024, in this tide of change, I feel the same way about them as you feel about those poor cartel members. Like you probably should be doing something else. What is this? What? Weed and fentanyl. Short answer is they're false. There's no solid evidence that marijuana is being laced with fentanyl. Here's some of the reasons why his. Didn't someone get caught with it though. At the bottom it says that there's been a few publicly stated, like media stories that have said it's. That's what the case was. I think we were talking about one then they said there was weed that was laced with fentanyl, that someone got arrested for lab tests, claims that they were errors. And then the corrections don't make the headlines. Hmm. How do you get an error? How much fentanyl is out there? There's an error. Oh, we was just contamination, I think. Wasn't a weed that had fentanyl. Fentanyl's all over the place. It's been a field test. They could have just been like, does this have fentanyl on it? They rub the weed and the weed comes back like, yep, someone touched fentanyl and they touched the weed and now you've got fentanyl Lace weed. Wow. It could be that. That actually does make sense. Right. Because if you think it's some cracked out dude working, he's probably going to be doing fentanyl.

Mike Baker (160:02)

Yeah, he's going to be doing fentanyl. He's gonna be. He's gonna be all on everything, basically. So it's gonna pop positive on everything.

Joe Rogan (160:09)

He guys in a tense. He's on a tent in the fucking woods with a little Virgin Mary statue. Like for real.

Mike Baker (160:15)

I know. Candles, bro.

Joe Rogan (160:18)

Having shootouts with the fucking. The cops. It's so crazy that's going on and that. There's hundreds of them. And then the Chinese are Running them.

Mike Baker (160:26)

Like, this is the most insane part where it's like everybody knows what's going on. It's like all these chemicals are coming from China. They're being offloaded. Mexico and South America, they're being like produced and then crossed and then they're pushed across the border. Everybody knows.

Joe Rogan (160:41)

You ever talk to Mike Baker about any of this stuff?

Mike Baker (160:44)

No, I, I've never actually talked to Mike Baker.

Joe Rogan (160:47)

Do you know him? You never met him.

Mike Baker (160:48)

I've never met him.

Joe Rogan (160:48)

Oh my God. I got to bring you two guys together.

Mike Baker (160:50)

He's.

Joe Rogan (160:51)

I love that dude. But what he. One of the things that he was telling me was about the Chinese cell. Cell phone towers. Like, cheaper, right? They're like, you just buy ours. Listen to you. And they put them all around military bases.

Mike Baker (161:03)

We promise we're not going to listen to you. Hey guys, the Chinese said they're not going to listen to us. I mean, that's good enough for me.

Joe Rogan (161:09)

They're around this nuclear weapons facility. Of course, they're all over the place. And then they buy land. Like Dr. Phil was highlighting that. They buy land right next to military bases. Like, how fucking silly are we? This is so. We're so silly. Like someone's moving our chess pieces around like, like, oh, this isn't happening. This isn't even happening.

Mike Baker (161:28)

People don't think like that.

Joe Rogan (161:29)

There's no way they'd be buying up all the weed. There's no way they'd be buying up all the farmland right next to the military.

Mike Baker (161:35)

There's no way they would be exporting chemicals. So they could manufacture fentanyl to come in and there's no way eviscerate 200,000 fucking people. There's no way they would. There's no way they would do that.

Joe Rogan (161:46)

That's crazy to even think. Meanwhile, the only way you get those chemicals from China. Yeah, the only way to get it is from China. They send them to Mexico, they cook it up, they send it our way.

Mike Baker (161:57)

But no, there's no way the Chinese are thinking that maliciously.

Joe Rogan (162:00)

There's no way. There's no way. Well, are they still mad at us for like the opium wars?

Mike Baker (162:06)

I think the Chinese are not necessarily mad at us. They're just thinking about themselves from a hundred year vision. And they're saying, okay, where do we. Where and how do we ascend to being able to take America's place as the international superpower?

Joe Rogan (162:28)

Right?

Mike Baker (162:28)

So I don't know if they necessarily have an opinion based axe to grind. It's more about how do we put the pieces together to take the pole position away from the United States.

Joe Rogan (162:39)

I'm sure that's their primary goal, but I do remember reading something where they were talking about, was it British who. There were people that introduced opium to the Chinese, like on purpose. It was like a campaign. The First Opium War. 1800s. Okay. Britain. The war was triggered by China's efforts to enforce its ban on opium. The British responded by sending a naval expedition to force China to pay reparations and allow the opium trade. Yeah, so the British wanted to keep that fucking dope flowing in that wild. They went to war to keep the dope flowing. This is what people have to recognize about Afghanistan too.

Mike Baker (163:24)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (163:25)

This is something that. It sounds so conspiracy theory that no one even wants to touch it, but the troops had to guard the poppy fields. Afghanistan. Heroin went way up when we went in there. Went way, way up. Their production went way up. They were supplying. At one point in time. What was the number, Jamie? Was that what it was? 70% of the world's heroin was coming out of a place that we occupied.

Mike Baker (163:50)

Well, and the other, the other issue is that, you know, the Taliban was using the opium and essentially to fund their growth in their militia. So the DEA was out there. So you had the DEA out in Afghanistan doing direct action ops, and you had soft guys that were going out walking through poppy fields and marijuana fields and all these other things, then you'd pass it off to the DEA.

Joe Rogan (164:19)

90%.

Mike Baker (164:20)

Oh, 95. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (164:22)

In 20, 21.

Mike Baker (164:23)

90%. 90%.

Joe Rogan (164:25)

Holy shit. Holy shit.

Mike Baker (164:27)

You destabilize the entire country. You deter everyone from actually focusing on the opium. You focus on terrorism in the Taliban and then you allow it to flourish. And the dirty secret nobody wants to talk about from that perspective is that we as a country have dealt with a lot of shady opium dealers, like drug lords that were essentially exporting opium. And if they weren't part of the Taliban and. Or if they were anti Taliban, you do business with them, it's the same story. It's. What's your triage of priorities? So you know, how, hey, we, we need to get, you know, we, we need to fund our army in South America. So, hey, how do we do that? Let's, let's like, let's. Let's import some coca. You know, let's invent a market because we gotta get, you know, we got to push back against the commies in Nicaragua. It's the same story.

Joe Rogan (165:27)

It's, you know, I've had Freeway Ricky Ross on like, oh, seriously, Times I had mom recently. I had him on recently. Yeah. And he was the guy. He was the guy who's making millions. Millions and millions and millions. Dollars. He couldn't read. He was making millions of dollars selling coke for the fucking government. Myanmar overtakes Afghanistan and the world's top opium producer. Violent political turmoil in Myanmar in years since 2021 coup has contributed to production increase. Wow. So they took over and checked that quick, too. What's that? Check this out. Meth is cheaper than beer there. Whoa. There's a lot of drugs going on there. Whoa. 25 cents each. That's all. Imagine for a quarter, you could do meth.

Mike Baker (166:11)

The golden. The golden triangle.

Joe Rogan (166:14)

Like, imagine doing that quarter. What kind of judgment do you have? You pop that 25 cent meth and chug it down with a Budweiser. What are you doing, man? What kind of life are you living? This guy said he took 10 pills his first time.

Mike Baker (166:27)

Oh, boy.

Joe Rogan (166:28)

How did it work out? I took 10 pills and I was totally lost. Didn't recognize my family. Didn't recognize my children. Son Couldn't sleep at all. I didn't drink. I didn't eat. I felt powerful. The last one's so perfect.

Mike Baker (166:43)

I felt powerful.

Joe Rogan (166:48)

Yeah. Look, I don't think that should be legal. But. But, well, here. I don't think you should do it, but I think it should be legal. I think if it's not legal, the cartel sells it. You just have to figure out what to do with the money that you're gonna make from it. Because that's devil money. Like, you're. You're selling meth money. Like, that's devil money. You're ruining people's lives. There's gonna be a bunch of, like, slippery people that are kind of. Kind of hanging on, but doing their best, and you're gonna meth them down the road to oblivion. That's true. That's true. That's true. But that's not gonna happen to me. No, I'm not going to get methed out. I'm not going to try it. I haven't even tried Adderall. I'm scared of it. So some people are going to figure it out just like most things in life. Just like drinking, just like driving, just like doing jiu jitsu, just like riding a BMX bike. Some people are going to get hurt. So we have to decide what's more valuable to you. Nerfing the whole fucking world or people figuring out what's best for everybody? And the only way to do that is to Give people freedom. That's it. It's the only way that works. We figure out what works, what doesn't work, by successes and failures, and we all adjust along the way. But you gotta give people freedom. Freedom and information, those are two very important things. When you're suppressing either one of them, you can't be the good guy.

Mike Baker (168:02)

No, no, no. You're not the good bot. You're not the good guy. Freedom has to be sacred across the board, which freedom comes with accountability, which means responsibility. And that's the problem, is that when freedom, I think when you can distill it down and you can create control, then you can create profit. So power, control and profit. Those things like they directly have this confluence where people in power obviously manipulate that. And they'll restrict our freedom.

Joe Rogan (168:32)

Yes. Especially if they can make more money, 100%, have more control, have more power.

Mike Baker (168:39)

And if Covid taught us anything, it taught us that we can't forfeit freedom to low iq, power hungry bureaucrats that want to affect our life because they're stupid. So why would we ever give away our freedom to a bunch of stupid bureaucrats?

Joe Rogan (168:57)

Exactly.

Mike Baker (168:58)

That to me is the fundamental difference between the entire election process. It's like, how do I maintain or increase my individual accountability, which comes with freedom. Right. And how, if we want to capitulate that, that's the other side. I think that's a referendum on freedom. Yes. I don't want to oversimplify it, but that's kind of where I think it is.

Joe Rogan (169:21)

It's where it is. You're not oversimplifying it. If you don't have that, you don't have any of these things.

Mike Baker (169:25)

No.

Joe Rogan (169:26)

You don't have any growth. You don't. You're going to have people that are in power that stifle discourse. They're going to stifle debate. They're gonna stifle it because they only want their side to be heard. It's that lady at the table telling me that Sam Harris and Douglas Murray was hate speech. It's those people. You have those people dictating what you can and can't talk about based on their own morals. And you don't even know how they think about things. You don't even know them. They don't do podcasts, they're not hanging out with you at the bar. You're not going to dinner with them. You don't fucking know them. So you don't know if they're making good judgment calls. You don't know if they're assessment of something is something you agree with or if it's even rational. You don't know. You just these weird strikes you get on your account. You get like this fear based letter that comes to you. If you do this again, you're fucked. You're like, oh no, now what do I do? Well, I better self censor and go along with the machine and stop misgendering people and stop doing this and stop doing that and stop saying this. And then you're fucked. And then you're fucked. And then you might as well be living in any other country that's controlled by a dictator. It's just a dictator by a different name.

Mike Baker (170:30)

Right?

Joe Rogan (170:31)

That's all it is. It's fascism, but it's not right wing fascism. It's left wing fascism. It's adherence to the state. They want you to go along with the mandate. The way they talk about things. The way you have to talk about things. And to think of anything. This election was a giant fuck you to all that. Where everyone was like, fuck, you guys are fucking crazy. We see where this is going. You going right off a cliff and you're running. And if anything, they showed you about that the Harris budget, which has spent a billion dollars, 580 million of it or something like that was for staff. Yeah, 580 million. And there's all this money that went to all these outreach groups and all these different and celebrities and what the is this? And then there are $20 million in debt at the end of it. And you want to manage the economy. This sounds crazy.

Mike Baker (171:27)

This is.

Joe Rogan (171:28)

What did you do? Like what happened here? Who went crazy with the checkbook? Who went hog wild? Who went hog wild?

Mike Baker (171:37)

Nobody in the administration has ever been business, right? I mean like nobody find out what.

Joe Rogan (171:43)

The numbers were to staff because I want to be accurate about that, but I think I am. I think it was 580 million. And I was watching this on Fox News. And they don't lie.

Mike Baker (171:53)

No, they don't. They never lie.

Joe Rogan (171:56)

Didn't they get. They had a giant lawsuit, right? The Dominion. Yeah, that was a big one. They got hit.

Mike Baker (172:02)

I had a piss.

Joe Rogan (172:04)

All right, let's. Let's take a little break here, ladies and gentlemen. Right back. Yeah, they said it on Fox News, Jamie, so it has to be true.

Mike Baker (172:10)

It has to.

Joe Rogan (172:14)

Oh, no. Better than Fox News. Patrick bed. David. I know, I know. I telling you, I see the tweets that say that. But Fox News's website says the campaign spent $56 million on payroll and payroll tax so what's that other money? But didn't. But wasn't there all the money that they had spent on activism? Yes, yes, yes. That's. Didn't they count that in staff? But then this. No, I don't. I don't know. This all comes from, like, Twitter. I don't know where. Well, if it comes from Twitter, Jamie, it's real. I'm just telling you. Stop being a party pooper. There's people asking for their. Scroll up and let me see what this says. It says. But no, I'm sorry. Scroll down a little. I just want to see what it all. It says. So it says, Kamala raised 1.003 billion. She spent 1.37 billion. She spent 582.53 million on staff. That's. That. That doesn't add up because I saw she spent 680 million on ads. So those two numbers, you know, there's no money left over for everything else. Right. So one of the. One of the two isn't correct. One of them. How much does she spent on ads? 680 million or something. Oh, my God.

Mike Baker (173:22)

That's like the.

Joe Rogan (173:23)

She could have done my podcast for free.

Mike Baker (173:25)

Dude, that. That is like the. The. The secret. It's not even a secret. When it's campaign time and you have all these ads, these ad guys that are out there, they're buying up all the ads, and it's a wash in money. It's hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're just pipelining campaign donations into ads, and it's like loading up their money, guns and just shooting it into space. That's what they're doing.

Joe Rogan (174:00)

That is what it's like. Right. And they've been telling people that this is effective.

Mike Baker (174:04)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (174:05)

And so they have this business going.

Mike Baker (174:08)

It's just complete absurdity. Which, don't get me wrong, I actually, politics is so fun for me because I think it's really interesting. And it's like, I can't get into football or anything else, because I like the data associated with things. And if I got into football, I'd be like one of those fantasy football dorks, and I can't get into it. And so politics is one of those things where I'm like, I follow it. I love it. It's interesting. Just trying to understand the strategy behind it.

Joe Rogan (174:40)

I've changed my opinion of it a little bit since the election. I don't think the control. The grip of the control of the country is as strong as I thought it was. I thought this concept so everyone has a concept of they. They don't want you to know things. They're controlling things. I have a feeling that in times of crisis, like what we find ourselves currently in, it's like when the lights come on and roaches scatter. That's what I have a feeling. I have a feeling there's no way that they can trust each other and that they all know that a certain percentage of people are going down for corruption. There's a certain percentage of people that did some dirty shit. Yeah, there's a certain. There's some connections with organizations and corporations and some emails. Save your emails. It's one of the things that Rock said.

Mike Baker (175:30)

Yeah, that was one of the things.

Joe Rogan (175:31)

Preserve your records and pack your bags, dude.

Mike Baker (175:34)

So epic.

Joe Rogan (175:35)

Yeah, that's epic. Preserve your records because we know you're all a bunch of liars. Yes, we've caught you already on emails, lying about stuff. So this is. You've all perjured yourselves. Like Fauci perjured himself. There's no difference. Just a definition of gain of function. Like, shut the fuck up. You don't change the definition and make it ultra super nuanced so that it fits in your little excuse box of why you didn't fund gain of function research. The fuck you didn't. That's what you did. That's what it is. And when Rand Paul was confronting him with it, that was like one of the craziest moments. You, sir, do not know what you are talking about. It's like an evil villain.

Mike Baker (176:11)

Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan (176:13)

Evil villain that just lied to everybody and got away with it and no repercussions.

Mike Baker (176:20)

Well, I think that's. I think that's like the story over and over for these guys that are empowered. There's no repercussions. Yeah, there's no accountability. I oftentimes think of Dick Cheney as a guy sitting back in like a high back leather chair in a. In a. In a big. In a big black tile office that's completely shiny with a white cat on his lap, like just petting it. That's the way I think about that guy. Like, fuck that guy. Like how like these guys, you know, to keep flashing back to this, but it forever fucking changed me right? Where I'm like, these guys fucked up so many people's lives. Like countless, countless lives. And the fact that they still think they have public trust with zero accountability. Yeah, man.

Joe Rogan (177:16)

How wild was it when Dick Cheney was endorsing Obama or, excuse me, was endorsing Kamala?

Mike Baker (177:21)

Of course he was.

Joe Rogan (177:22)

Everybody was like, yeah, look at that. Right wing people.

Mike Baker (177:25)

Yeah. Like you might as well have painted if you would have been a NASCAR driver. He would. Had a Lockheed Martin fucking jersey on right there then at that point.

Joe Rogan (177:34)

Or Satan.

Mike Baker (177:35)

Yeah, yeah, Satan. Locky Martin working to get sponsored by.

Joe Rogan (177:38)

Satan.

Mike Baker (177:42)

Patches on his uniform. Like that Chappelle Chappelle skit where it's like politicians were there, NASCAR drivers.

Joe Rogan (177:50)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (177:51)

How do you like the mash?

Joe Rogan (177:52)

Satan would be amazing. Just all caps on the back. Satan. And the liberals would still find a way. You know what it's not. It's like Satanism in the classical sense. It was just like a rejection of the norm.

Mike Baker (178:06)

I mean, think about it. He's a fallen angel, you know, I mean, think about how, how bad that is. You know, we have to, we have to think about it.

Joe Rogan (178:13)

Dick Cheney's basically a fallen angel.

Mike Baker (178:14)

Have you seen those? Babylon beast gets words like Satan talking to the. The Democrats about like, dude, you guys. Fuck you guys. You guys jumped the shark on this. What are you doing? It's. It's so good.

Joe Rogan (178:26)

Did you see the Babylon bees one recently where they're talking about criticizing Trump's new appointments in comparison to Biden's appointments? Have you seen it? No, it's just images. You can find it.

Mike Baker (178:39)

Yeah, because it's that one dude.

Joe Rogan (178:41)

It's the bald dude with the dress. It's the other dude who's the first female admiral. It's the first female admiral. Imagine if you're a woman and you're trying to become an admiral this month. Just jumps the line.

Mike Baker (178:52)

He's like, okay, yeah, cool.

Joe Rogan (178:55)

Have you seen it? You find it.

Mike Baker (178:57)

That whole thing with like the. It's like the Avengers United.

Joe Rogan (179:01)

Here it is. Declares Trump Cabinet picks unqualified. Oh, God, yeah.

Mike Baker (179:09)

Like, if you just look at that thing and then you look at, like. And when I say things, right, it's just like you look at this thing and then you do a direct comparison. Like, okay, you know who scares the.

Joe Rogan (179:19)

Fuck out of me?

Mike Baker (179:19)

Who?

Joe Rogan (179:20)

That new borders are?

Mike Baker (179:21)

Oh, dude, he's a bad motherfucker.

Joe Rogan (179:23)

He scares me. He scares me. I imagine myself with a backpack sneaking across the Rio Grande and that fucking guy's there. No. Yeah.

Mike Baker (179:31)

Like, what did he say he was like about families?

Joe Rogan (179:34)

Is there any way to not separate families? Yes, he deport them together.

Mike Baker (179:39)

You know what it reminded me of? You remember that?

Joe Rogan (179:42)

It's just like he said it. I was like, whoa, this is getting dark. Yeah, See, I'm like a bleeding heart. Like, I want people from another country that are Poor to make their way here and make a better life. I want that. I just wanted to be scanned. I want to know who the is coming over, right? I want to make sure they're not cartel members. I want to make sure they're not terrorists. But I'm all for people that want a better life. Because I would do it. It'd be. I'd be a complete, total hypocrite if I said I lived in guardian Guatemala in some village and there's no power and I found out that I could walk to America and if I did it, it'd take three days, and then I can get a job in the fields and then I make way more money. I could send money home and everybody could have clean water. I'd do it. You would do it. We'd all do it. So I get.

Mike Baker (180:22)

We'd all do it.

Joe Rogan (180:23)

That's so part of me is like, man, I don't want to send anybody back. But the other part of me is like, what about terrorists? Like, what about. What about checking for cartel members? What about the fentanyl that's coming through? Like, you can't have an open border.

Mike Baker (180:36)

I believe in it. Like, I believe in a meritocracy, right? It's like, may the best idea prevail, may the hardest workers prevail. The problem is when we export all of our manufacturing to China, when we haven't, like South America, we have a border crisis. And obviously I'm a coffee guy, so I think about coffee all the time. And I think about Nicaragua, El Salvador, like, all of the South American, Central American countries that grow coffee. And I talked to farmers, and all we have to pay them is 5 or 10 cents more a pound, depending on the coffee. And most of the time when I'm talking about coffees, I'm like, yeah, no problem, 10 cents more. Who cares? What that allows them to do is build schools, pay a livable wage, all the things that they need to do to be successful in Guatemala, Nicaragua, wherever they're going, wherever we're talking about. So I think about this like, okay, so we're exporting these manufacturing jobs to China. And if we're just concentrating on economic policies in this hemisphere, where from a national security perspective, if we're exporting jobs to South America, we're creating economic opportunity and mobility in South America and Central America, America, we're creating jobs, economic stability, generational wealth, and we're also solving one of the issues that we're having, which is a border crisis. A border crisis. It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me to say, hey, we want to export. And I know this started with the Nixon administration, and, you know, you have essentially slave labor, which I'm 110% against, which I. I don't think in any way, shape or form we should support economically. So if we were to export and look at this from a manufacturing and industry perspective from this hemisphere, how do we align ourselves around strategic stability? How do we protect against our border crisis? How do we still import? Because, I mean, I know Americans love their cheap goods like they love their shit. You know what I mean? They still want to have this decreased labor cost. I think investing in south and Central America is just not a bad thing. If we're not going to invest in America because of the cost, then we have to invest in this hemisphere.

Joe Rogan (183:02)

Well, it makes sense that if you want to make the world a better place, and if you want less people trying to sneak into our country, one of the best ways is to make their country better, right? But we got to do it ethically. The crazy thing, and we've beaten this horse a thousand times, is that everybody has a phone, and everybody's phone is made by slaves, right? And it's. If it's not made by slaves, the cobalt that's in it, it's a. There's a real high chance that it came from someone with a fucking stick poking into the ground and digging it out for you, right? And that's everybody. We have to take a hard look at all this stuff. We should be making our phones in America. We should be making our phones in America with American minerals. They're a source for people to get paid a fair labor rate wage. They get health benefits. There's osha. People check on things, make sure that regulations are in place, make sure that people get like. Make sure that they're making enough money to make a living, to live a livable wage. You have to do that in America if you want to do it legally. The only reason to do it somewhere else is so that you can do something legal, because it's legal there, but it's not legal where you live. It shouldn't be legal to have people working in another country for you for fucking 15 cents an hour.

Mike Baker (184:12)

It's just.

Joe Rogan (184:12)

It's too crazy. It's too crazy that you just. You cross this dirt path and now you're allowed to be a piece of shit. Like, it seems crazy, but if you're doing it the right way and you're paying people well and you're allowing people to, like, thrive in a place where there was nothing before. Yeah, you can, you can give people a pathway to do a lot of different things. Economic success opens up a lot of fucking doors, especially with education, especially with safety, with schools, with better communities. People have money. They don't. There's not so much tension. Yeah, it's good. It's good to have a thriving industry. It's good to have a thriving economy. It's good for everybody. It's just not good for everybody. Everybody. There's always going to be people that suffer. In every kind of economy and every, every kind of situation in the world, there's going to be people that suffer. And like we were talking about on the way here, like, some of it's just luck. There's a lot of luck.

Mike Baker (185:02)

There's a lot of luck.

Joe Rogan (185:03)

Luck is. Luck's a real thing, you know, good and bad and it's, there's, you know, that's one of the most important things about having some success in this life, you know, is having the humility to understand that you just got lucky as you're lucky as if you're alive. Especially you. Right. You're lucky as did.

Mike Baker (185:22)

Yeah. You know, how lucky I am is like tenfold order. I got all my fingers and toes.

Joe Rogan (185:27)

It's, it's, it's great family, incredible business, I think. Good friend of mine.

Mike Baker (185:33)

God, man. Like, it's so incredible when you think about, like, the birthplace lottery of hitting the jackpot. Like, holy shit.

Joe Rogan (185:42)

I think in one time, too. Yeah, I think we're so lucky in this time. I think I'm particularly lucky because I grew up before the Internet was at all. Like, how old are you?

Mike Baker (185:51)

47.

Joe Rogan (185:52)

So I'm 10 years older than you. So when I was like, 30. No, I think I was 27. When the Internet became like a normal thing to have in your house and you had a dial up and you turn on America got mail. Or you got mail. Yeah, you've got mail on aol. So from that point on, the fucking world changed so wildly and so quickly that we weren't even really noticing it while it was changing. And now here we are, Here we are in 2024, where it seems like the most chaotic, the most weird. Trump just won again. Somehow or another, I helped him. Like all this crazy. Like, this is the wildest timeline ever.

Mike Baker (186:36)

This is the most we're talking about. This is the most optimistic. Yeah, I've been in, in our country.

Joe Rogan (186:42)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (186:43)

This is the most optimistic I've been in my Adult life.

Joe Rogan (186:46)

Yeah. The moment that he won like that in a landslide, I was like, maybe they don't have such a grasp and maybe this will open up the door to making things more rational and balanced and we could stop a lot of this fucking awful corruption that's just intertwined like the mycelium that's under the soil. Yeah, the corruption just intertwined a lot of its legal corruption.

Mike Baker (187:10)

It's insane. When you think about, obviously I'm super interested in the military industrial complex, but when you think about we had we'll say 50, 60 military industrial contractors at the start of 9, 11 and then now we're down to 5 and we think of $860 billion of annual debt associated with the defense budget which has gone up since our height in the world on terror or the war on terror. And we have five guy or five big companies that are basically taking 50% of that 860 and then 50% of that is profit. And how is it happening? When you think of this triangular effect between the military industrial complex and okay, you have the revolving door between the Pentagon, so every star that comes out of the Pentagon goes back into the military industrial complex with X amount of years of disassociation, blah blah blah, it's okay. Then you go back into the military industrial complex. So you go into like Lockheed Raytheon, one of the top five. Then you have congressmen and senators that are making decisions specifically related to the budget and the military, the defense budget. They're lobbying to increase defense spending. But then they also have factories that are related to like the F35 or some big military contract where they're making 40, 30, 40, 50% in profit. So they're the guys that are lobbying to increase the defense budget. Their campaigns are being paid for by the military industrial complex. They're directly increasing the military budget. It's a self licking ice cream cone. It's insane. It's completely insane. And the fact that we don't have any strict firewalls and separation from an ethics and I'm not against people creating jobs in their state. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the fact that there are not strict firewalls between the fact that you're going to directly profit and or your campaigns are paid for by the people that you will lobby to go in and increase the taxpayers liability. I was thinking about this the other day. I was like if the taxpayer had an itemized look at where their taxes go, it just came out annually or once a month or Whatever it is, and they looked at what they were paying for, I'm pretty sure they might have a more vested interest into how much they're paying what they're paying for. And saying, you know what, maybe we shouldn't be asleep at the wheel. Maybe we should probably pay a little bit more attention to this.

Joe Rogan (190:12)

Isn't that amazing that you don't get an itemized list, but you're required to give an extraordinary percentage of your money to the government. Like, what is the tax bracket of someone who makes a million dollars a year?

Mike Baker (190:23)

What is that, 40%? 40%, 43% probably.

Joe Rogan (190:27)

Okay, let's imagine you're paying 40% in income taxes. Then if you live in California, you pay another 14.4. I think it is something like that. And then I think it's another 1% if you live in the city of Los Angeles.

Mike Baker (190:42)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (190:42)

So now you're down to 30, what, 34%. What do you get there? Somewhere in the high 30s. So then you have sales tax on everything you buy. You have property tax, you have insurance, you have whatever your house costs. You don't have a lot of money left over. And the government doesn't even have to tell you what they're spending it on. Like, you probably get less than they do. If you really think about it. If they get 40%, let's just say you don't have tax shelters and all that good stuff. But if you get, if you pay 40% in income taxes and then after all the shit, like after all property tax and state tax and this tax and sales tax, like, what do you have? How much did you get? What did you get? How much did you, how much money did you actually get? Like, I bet the government got more than you got.

Mike Baker (191:35)

70% of your time at work is, is working for the Fed.

Joe Rogan (191:39)

Yeah. That is so bananas that you don't even get an itemized list of what they spend it on.

Mike Baker (191:44)

I have to file on my audited financials. Right. I think about this all the time. I have to, to. It's a requirement. I have to pass them.

Joe Rogan (191:53)

Right.

Mike Baker (191:54)

The Pentagon hasn't, hasn't passed an audit in decades. They've like 60%, we'll just say 50% of the Pentagon's expenses. They're like, I don't know, I don't know where it went. Sorry. Shit out of looks taxpayer. So how is it, it's this, rules, rules for thee, not for me.

Joe Rogan (192:13)

Don't always miss their audits. How about how many times they miss their Pentagon? Pentagon, how many times? I think it's like. It's crazy numbers, too.

Mike Baker (192:29)

Like, whoopsies, oops, I just forgot about that. $300 billion.

Joe Rogan (192:35)

2021 says they've never passed an all.

Mike Baker (192:37)

Yeah, there we go. There we go, there we go. So it's rules. It's rules for thee, not for me. They've never passed an audit.

Joe Rogan (192:44)

Never. Yeah, come on. Never.

Mike Baker (192:47)

Never, never.

Joe Rogan (192:51)

Pentagon's accounting records are so convoluted that billions of dollars cannot be accounted for. Charges, a new government report. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That is so crazy. Never.

Mike Baker (193:03)

Yeah. And you'll go to jail if you don't pay these. You'll go to jail if you're not paying your tax. Taxes. You haven't survived an audit.

Joe Rogan (193:12)

And funny. It's so funny. Despite having trillions of dollars in assets and receiving hundreds of billions in federal dollars annually, the Department has never detailed its assets and liabilities in a given year. For the past three financial years, the Defense Department's audit has resulted in a disclaimer of opinion, meaning the auditor didn't get enough accounting records to form an assessment, like, sorry, we don't have any paperwork.

Mike Baker (193:37)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (193:38)

Where'd the money go? I forgot. Gotta go.

Mike Baker (193:41)

I'm just a. I'm just a military guy.

Joe Rogan (193:44)

We are just trying to keep America safe.

Mike Baker (193:47)

Yeah, like, that's all it is.

Joe Rogan (193:49)

What if all of it's going to UFOs? Huh?

Mike Baker (193:51)

What if it's.

Joe Rogan (193:51)

All of it's going to UFOs? What if all of it's going to some propulsion research thing that they're doing? They got UFOs, they're just not telling us? What are they spending it on? How much of it is getting greased into the side pockets of people?

Mike Baker (194:05)

But even then, from a transparency perspective, does it not shake out for us? Because if we were saying, yeah, hey, we're gonna spend, I don't know, let's just call it a hundred billion dollars on like, black fund experimental technology to maintain our strategic hedge of money.

Joe Rogan (194:22)

Yeah, I like it like that. Do you official.

Mike Baker (194:26)

Do you think that we would all be like, no, I mean, it's better than not passing a fucking audit where you're like, right? I don't know where it goes, man.

Joe Rogan (194:33)

I'd rather you tell me that you can't tell me than tell me you don't know, right? Tell me you can't tell me.

Mike Baker (194:38)

Tell me you can't tell me.

Joe Rogan (194:39)

Despite costing more than 1.7 trillion in its estimated life cycle, attempts to audit the program have run into major hurdles of the F35. So this is just the F35. F35 could hide some propulsion money. It could 1.7 trillion. They probably, I'm sure. Look, if Area 51 exists, and now we know it does for sure, it was a real base. They said it wasn't a base forever. And then during the Obama administration, they had to expand the boundaries because surveillance equipment and binoculars and telescopes are getting better and more sophisticated. And they were filming things that were flying around they shouldn't have been filming. So they expanded the boundaries. They had to say that Area 51 existed.

Mike Baker (195:19)

Right. Right.

Joe Rogan (195:20)

So what was that? Where'd you get the money? What'd you do? What are you doing down there? Why do people say you have UFOs? What the fuck are you doing? Why do you have a base in the middle of fucking nowhere that's built into the side of a mountain? Like, why are you guys acting like this is an Avengers movie? What are you doing out here?

Mike Baker (195:37)

Once again, it goes back to just transparency. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (195:40)

Or you can't tell me because you think I'm a fucking baby. Like, the same reason why you think I can't have mushrooms.

Mike Baker (195:45)

The same reason why we can't have full disclosure of the JFK assassination. Right. There's 4,000 documents we haven't even. Have we talked about the JFK assassination on this?

Joe Rogan (195:54)

I think we have.

Mike Baker (195:55)

We, like, gone down the rabbit hole.

Joe Rogan (195:57)

Have you done the rabbit hole? Multiple people, including.

Mike Baker (195:59)

Have you heard my theory?

Joe Rogan (196:00)

No, maybe not. I don't know. What's your. The.

Mike Baker (196:03)

My theory is like, it all goes back to the Bay of Pigs. It's all Bay of Pigs, it's all Cuba, it's all bad pigs. And so I'm looking at it from a paramilitary CIA perspective and thinking about it from Alan Dulles, which obviously, like, he's in charge of the Warren Commission after Kennedy fired him. So I'm giving everybody a kind of a summary explanation. Yeah. Dulles Airport, which is the Dulles brothers, the single most two powerful people in Washington, even during the Truman administration. But either way. So what happened, I think was. So Operations Zapata, which is also George H.W. bush's, his first oil company that he supposedly left Connecticut and went out after his Yale. You know, his Yale tenure after World War II was like, I'm gonna be an oil guy and start fucking a. Zapata Oil. Yeah, of course. Right. Even though his dad's best friend with Alan Dulles. Sure. Anyway, so. So Operations Apata, which it turns into the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy gets Read in on this. He says, yes, let's go. And then when it comes down to the day, like, I mean, you've built 1400, let's say, you know, 12, 1300 man force. That's, that's a CIA former Cuban exile army. You've built it. And Alan Dulles has been the main architecture. He's been the main architect behind this. You've got all these guys. So let's even go back. These are all OSS, World War II, World War II guys that let's, let's create a clear delineation between what they're doing and what they, what they think the President is doing. The President's like, yeah, yeah, he's elected. Fuck that guy. We're the agency. Like, that's the way Allen Dulles actually ran things. He wouldn't, half the time he wouldn't even brief the President on what he was doing, doing. So he puts together this thing, clears it through Eisenhower. Eisenhower says yes, let's go take those fucking, you know, Cuban commies out. They put together a 1100 man force. They've been training on this. They've got secret bases in Guatemala. They've got all these paramilitary CIA guys. They're ready to take the beach. They're expecting air support because without air support, that changes the entire tactical equation. Like, if you don't have air support, there's a lot of things you just don't do, period. So the morning of Kennedy denies air support for the Bay of Pigs. So the morning of, so these dudes are taking the beach. These are hardcore, like CIA trained and paramilitary guys. Cuban exiles and World War II, hardcore regime change, combat veteran. Like, these are the hardest motherfuckers on the planet that we have. He pulls air support. He left 1100 guys on the beach to die. Basically. These guys all get rolled up. So they lost about 60 guys. 2406 is the name of the brigade. 60 guys died. A thousand plus got put in Cuban prisons. Now you got an ax grind. You just pissed off the entire CIA paramilitary organization. I don't know if I'm the President, I don't know how I don't end up with a moonroof, to be honest with you. Like, I just off the guys that are actually in charge of like assassination, paramilitary, all of the dirty deeds around the planet. I fire Alan Dulles for this catastrophe of the Bay of Pigs. I've got a thousand plus guys that are in prison in Cuba. I've got the entire former OSS hardcore anti communist, anti Castro organization of the CIA pissed off. If you don't think they're not going to tee a guy up like some pro, you know, Commie Oswald guy in a, you know, in a multi story building in Dallas. If you don't think you're going to end up with a hole in your head, you're crazy. To be honest with you. That's the way I'm looking at this. So they end up getting these guys out. But man, he pissed off a lot. I was super capable guy. Means opportunity intent. Means opportunity intent, which is now you left me and my buddies on a beach in Cuba, bro. You are not going to get out of here unscathed. I'm just, yeah, that's my theory.

Joe Rogan (201:03)

I think that along with all the other stuff means there was probably a bunch of people that did not want him around. Oh yeah, he wanted to get rid of the CIA. He had his eyes on the Federal Reserve. There was a lot of crazy talk about secret societies and you know, you've seen that speech about secret societies. Oh yeah, yeah. And there was, he was a real threat. And as soon as you can get those killers to want him out too, well, now you got a problem solved.

Mike Baker (201:34)

Well, you had a bunch of guys that thought he was soft on cute. He, he was soft on Russia. They had a bunch of dirt on him because he was banging a bunch of chicks. All of which, okay, maybe it's true, maybe it's false, I don't fucking know. But I think it's fairly validated at this point.

Joe Rogan (201:51)

I think it's pretty true.

Mike Baker (201:53)

And you have a collection of people that are thinking this is a zero sum game, this is the Cold War. If you're weak on Russia and you think that the guy's going to bend his, you know, he's going to bend a knee to the bear. You've got a lot of, you got, you've got this confluence of interests where it's inevitable.

Joe Rogan (202:24)

He's also not universally loved. We think of him as being universally loved because he's dead.

Mike Baker (202:29)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (202:29)

But when he was alive, like there's a lot of people that were not fans of his in the Red States, probably particularly in Dallas. Driving through Dallas, he had lbj.

Mike Baker (202:40)

That's from.

Joe Rogan (202:43)

What's amazing about it really is how sloppy the whole.

Mike Baker (202:46)

From sloppy as shit.

Joe Rogan (202:48)

The whole thing, from autopsy to the fucking magic bullet laying on the gurney to having to come up with a magic bullet theory because the ricochet in the underpass, like the whole thing is so clunky. It's like such a shitty explanation. You couldn't kill one extra guy and say there was another guy over here. We killed him too.

Mike Baker (203:06)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (203:07)

You guys are. This is such a shit job, you guys. You don't have one other idiot, one other idiot give him a bad rifle and just fucking shoot him.

Mike Baker (203:14)

But they don't have any. They don't have the context of what we have, which is social media.

Joe Rogan (203:21)

Right. Of course.

Mike Baker (203:22)

You know, I mean, when did the.

Joe Rogan (203:23)

Zapruder film was like 12 years later.

Mike Baker (203:25)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (203:26)

And it was on the Geraldo Rivera show, which is completely. Gregory. Dick Gregory, who is a stand up comedian, brought it on the Geraldo Rivera show.

Mike Baker (203:35)

Are you serious? I didn't know that.

Joe Rogan (203:37)

Dick Gregory, who is a stand up. He was a lot more than that too. He's an activist. But, but like a real one, you know, not a, not in any way some sort of a social value grifter, which I think a lot of people like gravitate towards activism because it gives them a chance to be really shitty. Because they're right. He was a brilliant guy. But it was also a guy who like was a truth seeker. Back when it was really hard to get to the truth. This guy had to acquire a copy of the Sapruto film when in time, life got ahold of it apparently, like right after the assassination. And they just kept it.

Mike Baker (204:09)

They just kept it.

Joe Rogan (204:10)

They just kept it. And when you watch it, you realize why they kept it. Because you see his head go back into the left and it looks like he does get shot in the neck from the front. Front. He holds his fucking neck like this. He doesn't hold the back.

Mike Baker (204:22)

No, no.

Joe Rogan (204:22)

He holds his neck like this. Like that's impact. That's where it hit him. And then his fucking head goes back into the left. And we're supposed to think that this fucking guy did all this from the school depository? Maybe he did take a shot or two from the school book depository. I, I don't think he was innocent. I'm not of the camp. Like it's a binary thing, I guess. Either Lee Harper, Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy and the CIA killed him, or Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That's a stupid way to think. I think for sure they used him. They probably gave him a rifle. He might have been in that window. He might have just been in the building. He might have been in the area, who knows? I think he probably did shoot that cop. Like when they were chasing after him. It seems like he did kill that cop. I think he was an asset. But I also think there was a bunch of people shooting at the President. And if you look at that area you've been to Dealey, you've been there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a weird, it's a weird treat to drive down, right? It feels weird. Yeah. Oh shit. This is where it's a lot smaller than I thought it was.

Mike Baker (205:14)

It's tiny.

Joe Rogan (205:14)

It's really little.

Mike Baker (205:15)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (205:15)

Like when people say he couldn't have made those shots. Like shut the fuck up. He's right there. He's right, right up.

Mike Baker (205:20)

Like literally you look up in the buildings, right?

Joe Rogan (205:22)

He had a scope. At least he had a scope. That's what's crazy about the kid that tried to kill the President. But try to kill Trump. He didn't even. He had iron sights, which is insane. But it's not if you just go on center mass. But this dude's doing for a headshot 140 yards. And he's probably never shot anybody before. He's a 20 year old kid that they just somehow or another operation, MK Ultra mind him into shooting at him or he's on some crazy medication or China or who knows, who knows It's a chip in his head. Who knows, who knows what the happened. But you know, and then some mobster.

Mike Baker (205:57)

Some, some like happenstance mobster is so passionate about Kennedy. He's like, I'm gonna kill.

Joe Rogan (206:04)

And people are letting them in with the pistol. Bang. It's so dumb.

Mike Baker (206:08)

Dude. It's, it's.

Joe Rogan (206:09)

Then you know what happens to him, right?

Mike Baker (206:11)

Yeah, he dies of cancer.

Joe Rogan (206:13)

Like before that. Before that.

Mike Baker (206:14)

No. Huh.

Joe Rogan (206:15)

Jolly west visits him in jail and he goes crazy. Jolly west who's the head of MK Ultra?

Mike Baker (206:20)

Oh yeah.

Joe Rogan (206:21)

Jolly west was the guy who got Charles Manson the acid. Allegedly from the book Chaos. He goes into it. Jolly west went to visit Lee Harvey Oswald and excuse me, Jack Ruby, Jack Ruby on the ground underneath his bunk crying in the fetal position that they're murdering the Jews with fire. And he's tripping balls. This guy dosed him up with acid, blew his fucking brains out. And then they probably injected him with cancer.

Mike Baker (206:44)

100.

Joe Rogan (206:45)

See you later, fuckface.

Mike Baker (206:47)

I think you have this outside. So if we want to go all the way back and you want to just know my like, yeah, two cents on this.

Joe Rogan (206:56)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Baker (206:57)

Okay. So Dulles knows that eventually the President is going to like they're going to snuff him out, they're going to fire him. Dulles decides that he's going to have this whole separate CIA. That's CIA guys, but they're all really very trusted internal, external guys. And I think those guys are essentially his guys. And they get hung out to dry in the Bay of Pigs. They're not attributable to the CIA other than loose affiliated documents. I think Dulles gets fired and they're like, okay, let's go. Let's like. Alan Doles didn't want to be answering to the President because he didn't answer to the people. He was answering to a bigger call in his mind. He's answering to. This is an eminent threat. The big communist bear is going to come and eat our lunch. So he's answering to the greater good. Which is a reason for like the backdrop of the Cold War is a reason for a lot of this nefarious activity. Like Angleton, like all these directors, everybody looks at these guys as like really nefarious characters. But you have to paint everything in the backdrop of the Cold War. Like we're doing all this stuff to save America. Right. And I'm not validating them. They have.

Joe Rogan (208:31)

We have to understand that perspective.

Mike Baker (208:33)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (208:33)

Because that was a big thing even when I was in high school.

Mike Baker (208:35)

This is the Cold War. They're going to fucking kill us.

Joe Rogan (208:37)

They're gonna nuke us.

Mike Baker (208:38)

They're gonna nuke us.

Joe Rogan (208:39)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (208:39)

So we will do. It's very Machiavellian. The means justify the ends, anything and everything to save the nation at any point in time. So you have guys that are baptized in extreme patriotism and their belief is that they are doing things for the best of the nation and that if they have an elected official, they can't be trusted. They can't be trusted. And there. These are guys that are in. You know, I went out to Omaha in for the 80th. These are. It's so interesting for me to think back on this because these are guys that are World War II vets that like, they saw everybody die. You know, I mean, the Soviets lost tens of millions of guys in World War II. They were defeating fascism, which is, you know, they were defeating the Nazi party, you know, the Japanese army. And they've seen thousands of men die. And they're serious guys. They're not. They're not light hearted, they're not full of love. Like these are guys that are baptized in ultra violence to the point of which this is a zero sum game and we have everything to lose and nothing to gain by being nice and nobody will get in our way to being able to maintain the sovereignty of the nation. Once again. I'm not justifying it. I can Just get into the mind of them. Because if I'm jumping into Nazi occupied France in, you know, 1940 Acts, because a lot of the OSS teams went in there and I'm get watching my friends get fucking mowed down by Nazi machine guns and I'm killing Nazis and I'm moving my way to overthrow Hitler. And now I feel like Stalin is the next thing that I have to defeat. But the American public just doesn't understand. I'm like, I'm 1945, man. I have been quite literally baptized in blood and I'm not going to let it happen. Now you think about a high intellectual, type a driven, ultra violent guy that may be semi coherent based on their, their copious consumption of alcohol probably, right?

Joe Rogan (211:05)

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Baker (211:06)

Okay. Well old. You know, a lot of these programs start to make sense because these guys are like, they're fucking serious guys and they think that we're gonna die in a nuclear holocaust, right. And everything the means justifies that. It's a very Machiavellian. I don't necessarily. Once again, I'm not trying to say that like every evil deed is justified. I'm just saying like I've seen the beaches in Normandy. I understand greater than a lot of, a lot of people with combat and the direct psychological and emotional effects what it'll do to people. And I can kind of see myself going like, hey man, if I'm a 26 year old guy that just went and fought the Nazis and I think that the, the, the big bad bear is coming after me.

Joe Rogan (211:51)

Right?

Mike Baker (211:51)

Man, you're a pretty serious character.

Joe Rogan (211:54)

That, that feeling of the big bad bear coming after us got lifted. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the fall of the Soviet Union, all that stuff went away. The fear. When I was a kid, that fear was everywhere. You know, I've talked to so many people that are like my age or around my age that remember being a child and being worried about a war with nuclear bombs with Russia, it was constant, it was in the air. When Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table and said we will bury you. I watched that video on YouTube just like a month ago and it's still scary. The two fucking banging issue. And when he said we will bury you, was that a direct quote or was that propaganda? That one feels fishy. I bet that's one where it's like a little bit.

Mike Baker (212:43)

Well that.

Joe Rogan (212:44)

I think that was slippery. Then we will bury you because you know what I mean, like when you.

Mike Baker (212:47)

Get a direction that was a direct response to when we agreed, we have this mutual agreement between the Soviets and Khrushchev wasn't like. Khrushchev wasn't actually a Stalinist. He was making very big reforms in the Soviet Union. And so he felt betrayed by the U2 spy missions that were taking place when we. After, you know, after they shot down the U2 spy plane in Russia. And because we lied, he was like, bang, bang, bang. And I'm fairly certain that's what that whole thing was about because I think Bishop was a man of honor and these guys are lying to me. And I mean, Stalin was a bag. Don't like, of course, but Khrushchev was like making significant reforms within the country. He was an ant. He was. He was broadly condemned by a lot of the old. The Stalinists, as.

Joe Rogan (213:50)

Here it is. I think. I don't see him banging a shoe in the video. He's banging.

Mike Baker (213:54)

Oh, he's banging his fist. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (213:55)

I thought he banged his shoe. The video says Diddy bang a shoe. That's a scary language when they're yelling it.

Mike Baker (214:13)

I know. Put that under a couple pints of vodka.

Joe Rogan (214:19)

Someone was saying this, but it's so true. There's nothing scarier than Russian Muslims, like the fighters. Fighters. Russian Muslims are the scariest fighters, dude. I think if there's like one group that I would categorize, like, what's the scariest? I might be Russian Muslims. From the CIA's website, we will bury you. Threat widely attributed to Khrushchev in Western press was reported to have been made at a send off reception to Poland's in Moscow November 19. According to TIME magazine, Khrushchev was overheard to say at the final reception for the Polish leader, if you don't like us, don't accept our invitations and don't invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you. So he said that to Poland. But that was a. Wasn't that in a police song or a Sting song? The Russians love their children too.

Mike Baker (215:17)

Wasn't that Scorpions?

Joe Rogan (215:19)

No, no, no, no, no. I think it was a Sting song.

Mike Baker (215:21)

Really?

Joe Rogan (215:22)

Sting song called the Russians? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was saying Khrushchev said he will bury you. So they probably. It was probably some fake news, just like how they said about Trump saying that very fine people on both sides.

Mike Baker (215:35)

It's always been. It's been fascinating to me because I think about the Russians and how many tens of millions of people they lost in World War II.

Joe Rogan (215:43)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (215:43)

And I Think about very empathetically how they got fucked. They really did. You know, I think, and I'm not saying we, we did anything bad. I'm just saying, like what we did was we delayed the invasion of Normandy. And we felt like a lot of people think this was that we were trying to soften up the Soviet Union because we felt that they were a follow on threat in World War II. But we, we delayed the invasion intentionally, essentially, to let you know, a lot of Russians, millions of Russians essentially die on the Eastern front. And when, when you really think about it, when, you know, from, you know, those men, from my context and in, you know, combat, from how I think about combat, how I think about death, Mike, those guys had a significant axe to grind because they're like, we need fucking help. We need you to open up the Western front. I'm not validating Stalin because once again, I think he's a complete piece of shit.

Joe Rogan (216:53)

I know what you're saying, but yeah.

Mike Baker (216:55)

Yeah, is a Russian, right? And population knowing that we delayed the opening up the Western front to go and take over essentially, you know, Hitler, Nazi, Nazi Europe. Because at that point, obviously it wasn't just one person. Yeah, we have a significant amount of mistrust with you guys because we lost, you know, 20 million people plus the civilian population. I mean, some estimates 30 million fucking people. And you guys opened up, Normandy came through, and then you're telling everybody that you won, you're the reason you won World War II, and you're not even giving us any validated credit. They had invaded Japan before we dropped the bomb, and the Japanese were just as terrified of the Russians as they were the Americans. However, I can see from the Russian perspective going, man, we sacrificed millions of people to defeat the Nazis, and you guys are basically giving us no credit. So I think back and I'm like, man, 1945, like, where these guys were at? Because they're all about my same age. We went to combat roughly the same age. And there were a lot of people that were debating all of these issues back then, 1945, 1946. They were talking about not only Stalin, but, you know, Patton was talking about, like, we need to just keep going, right? Patton was talking about, like, going, we need to keep going. We need to defeat Soviet Russia. And Eisenhower was like, actually, no, you're crazy. Fuck, dude. I think that's what he said, you know, I think that's what he's like, hey, fuck, dude. Like, what are you talking about, Patton? You're crazy, man.

Joe Rogan (218:52)

When he addressed the nation.

Mike Baker (218:53)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (218:53)

Right. That was right after that.

Mike Baker (218:56)

So I keep thinking about myself and that, like, those guys. I think about myself a lot of times, too, where, you know, 20 plus years after the fact, like, this is 1968. This is 1968, man. From our war. So from 1945 to 1968, give or take, you think about all these GWAC guys that are being pointed. It's kind of a cool revolution, but 68 was a very important year in American history. I think 24 was a really important.

Joe Rogan (219:28)

Year in American history. Yeah, 24 is a big one. The one we're in right now is a big one.

Mike Baker (219:35)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (219:35)

I think when people look back at history with these great moments of change. I mean, think about how, you know, people look back at the Reagan administration. Like, when revolution. Reagan got elected, what, a landslide. Like, they look back at those days. Like, we look back at, like, these historical moments. But I think this one is crazier than any of them. This guy gets kicked out. They try to put him in jail multiple times. He gets shot at. He says, fight, fight, fight. And then he wins. He wins in a landslide. When they were all saying that it was a close race. And the whole thing is just wild to watch. It's like, this is nuts. Like, this show's nuts. If you're watching this show on tv, like, these writers are fucking amazing. Whatever they're doing, like, keep doing this. This show's crazy. There's twists and turns. You got your crazy billionaire character who doesn't even seem real. Doesn't even seem real. This guy's making rockets. There's no way buys Twitter because he wants to save free speech. What?

Mike Baker (220:31)

It's insane.

Joe Rogan (220:32)

And the people that used to love him now hate him. The people that are driving their Teslas around like, God damn it, they're angry. But they still have a lease. You know, you still have your Tesla. You hate Elon. You hate X. And Don Lemon said, I'm leaving X. There's no good discussions to be had here.

Mike Baker (220:52)

Yeah, it's boohoo.

Joe Rogan (220:54)

You don't like criticism. You don't like criticism. If you want to get into this game, okay, you want to get into the. The online game. The online game's different. And in the online game, you get judged by who you actually are. Dude, it's not about your producers and your teleprompter. And shut up. You're on your own. If people think you're stupid, you're going to hear it, and it might be because you're stupid. It Might be. Look, people say. A lot of people are stupid that are not stupid. I've seen people say brilliant people. I've seen people say Elon Musk is stupid. I have seen that.

Mike Baker (221:26)

I've seen that.

Joe Rogan (221:27)

I've seen. There's. You're going to get it. No matter what, you're going to get it. Everyone's going to get. But if everybody's saying you're stupid, maybe you might be stupid. You might be stupid. You might have been protected from that. Stupid by these network shows. If you want to exist online and you don't like criticism on Twitter or you think there's disinformation on Twitter, Community notes on Twitter is the greatest fucking thing that's ever been created because people get to look through the community notes and find out, oh, that is bullshit. And here's why it's bullshit. Or, oh, that actually is true. Even though it sounds crazy and people are protesting, it's actually true. True. That's fun. That's good. Yeah. We learned something. If you can't handle that, well, you can go wherever. Where do you go now? Where do you go? Where you go? Threads.

Mike Baker (222:09)

What?

Joe Rogan (222:11)

But they were for a while. For a while. Yeah. It's not gonna work, I don't think. No.

Mike Baker (222:16)

Have you ever had. I don't know if you ever had.

Joe Rogan (222:18)

Yeah, I like Zuckerberg a lot.

Mike Baker (222:20)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (222:20)

Yeah. I like him a lot. I think he's a weird guy, but you have to be a weird guy if you're a super genius 100 billionaire who's into jiu jitsu. He's a weird guy, but he's cool. I like him. I've had fun with him. Yeah. We. We played a fencing game together with virtual goggles. Yeah. Yeah. We both put on he fences.

Mike Baker (222:36)

So we both got online when he was, like, in Hawaii or San Francisco.

Joe Rogan (222:40)

No, we did it in the same room.

Mike Baker (222:41)

Okay.

Joe Rogan (222:41)

It was fun.

Mike Baker (222:41)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (222:42)

The. The new Oculus is cool. And you gotta wonder where that's gonna be, because when I first tried the first, very first Oculus, it was kind of cool, but kind of crude in a way. And with each new version of it, you get like. It's much smaller now. It used to be we had a cable, and the cable was attached to the ceiling on a wire so that you can move back and forth through this. All these wires connected to you when you have the Oculus. So you had to be plugged into the computer, actually. But now you're not. Now it's just on your head, and now it's Fucking resolution's pretty goddamn good. It's. And it's weird. Like, you do things like, you go to a comedy club and you sit in the audience, and there's all these other people in there. There's a comedian on stage. It's fucking strange. There's all these little online games you can play with other people, 3D shooters and. And you get goggles on. You feel like you're in the game. It's real weird. And most people are kind of freaked out by it, so I don't think it's like they went with that whole meta thing. They thought everybody was going to dive into the metaverse. But I think there's this uncanny valley between, like, you put the goggles on and you're in the world, and you kind of feel it. You feel uneasy. Like, this is weird. This feels weird. VR feels strange. Like, a lot of people, makes them dizzy. They want to take it off.

Mike Baker (223:53)

Yeah, my wife is like that.

Joe Rogan (223:54)

Yeah, mine is, too. But I think they're gonna get to a point where it's not gonna feel weird. Like, there's some commercial applications. Like, there's a company called Sandbox, and they have this fucking amazing game called Deadwood Mansion. And Deadwood Mansion, you go into, like, there's a warehouse space. They have one in Austin. They have one in Woodland Hills. Where we used to go was right down the street from the studio. You put goggles on, and all sudden you're in a mansion. You got a shotgun, and zombies are running at you from everywhere. And you're. Boom. You're blowing their heads.

Mike Baker (224:24)

Seriously.

Joe Rogan (224:25)

Oh, yeah. It's fucking amazing, dude. No one in my family wants to play it anymore.

Mike Baker (224:30)

Why? Is it too intense?

Joe Rogan (224:32)

I get very intense, very intense when I'm killing zombies. They don't like it. These gross. It's like, I'm like, come on, let's kill zombies. Like, for Father's Day, I made them come kill zombies with me. I fucking love it.

Mike Baker (224:42)

That was your Father's Day present. You told your parent, yeah, Daddy wants.

Joe Rogan (224:46)

To kill zombies with everybody.

Mike Baker (224:48)

Awesome.

Joe Rogan (224:48)

It's fun. You got a shotgun, and they're running out. You're blasting their heads off, and you get attacked from behind.

Mike Baker (224:53)

It's fucking awesome.

Joe Rogan (224:54)

You have a haptic feedback vest, and you see red when they're attacking you. You see black splatters of red in front of your face. They're attacking. You're shooting them in the.

Mike Baker (225:01)

Everybody wants to do that, dude. Everybody wants the. I. Yeah. If we were like, oh, we're in a Zombie apocalypse. How many dudes do you know? They're like, oh my God.

Joe Rogan (225:10)

Awesome. You know, they're so slow.

Mike Baker (225:13)

They're so slow.

Joe Rogan (225:14)

But these ones are pretty fast. The ones in this. Some of them run at you. They run at you?

Mike Baker (225:19)

Yeah, it's like, makes it more fun.

Joe Rogan (225:20)

Remember that movie 28 Days later where zombies were running? Yeah, that's the scary zombie movie. Yeah. Running zombies are. That's the. That's the real zombie. The walking dead. Zombies. Shoot the fuck out of here, bitch. You ain't getting me.

Mike Baker (225:31)

So disappointing. Like the first like five seasons were great.

Joe Rogan (225:35)

How are they not? Well, dead. But how are not all the zombies dead?

Mike Baker (225:41)

More zombies?

Joe Rogan (225:42)

How's that possible? It's so easy to kill them.

Mike Baker (225:45)

I can't get enough zombie movies. I love them.

Joe Rogan (225:49)

I love.

Mike Baker (225:49)

I love the post apocalyptic.

Joe Rogan (225:51)

Don't like Darryl using field tips.

Mike Baker (225:54)

So stupid.

Joe Rogan (225:55)

Why is he using field tips on his crossbow? That drives me crazy. That drives me crazy.

Mike Baker (226:00)

And he's like pulling them out, loading them back up and you're like, dude, come on, man.

Joe Rogan (226:05)

Like you're maybe like me angry. You don't lose any fletchings, you don't get any pass throughs.

Mike Baker (226:10)

No pass throughs. It's all just like sticking in their heads. Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Joe Rogan (226:15)

Are you talking about. This is the dumbest weapon ever?

Mike Baker (226:18)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (226:19)

Daryl, that fucking field tips gotta go, son. You don't have any broadheads.

Mike Baker (226:23)

You gotta put like a solid like tri blade or something on there.

Joe Rogan (226:27)

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Baker (226:28)

Like get a really.

Joe Rogan (226:31)

Yeah, that's what you want.

Mike Baker (226:33)

Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan (226:33)

Yeah. Like a Montec. Those Montec carbon steels.

Mike Baker (226:37)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (226:37)

Send it.

Mike Baker (226:38)

What was that one? The hide. What was that?

Joe Rogan (226:41)

Yeah, the Hide, dude. Yeah, man, that did a lot of damage. I'm very impressed with that one because that one I got the 125 grain one which has the steel ferrule.

Mike Baker (226:51)

Mm.

Joe Rogan (226:52)

And it. It's got a 2 inch cut with the mechanical blade and a 3 quarter inch cut with the fixed so it doesn't make a big hole opening. Going to talk, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, two and three quarters. It's a broadhead for archery. It's the. When it goes in, that's when the blades open. So the rage, which I used to use for the T2, now the Dudley version, that opens up on the way in, so it leaves a big hole all the way in.

Mike Baker (227:16)

Right.

Joe Rogan (227:16)

But this one opens up inside. So really you're penetrating with the fixed head. And then once you're passing in, the pressure is what Makes those other two blades go. So they really makes a pretty small entry hole. But the exit hole is a crime scene. The exit hole was a crime scene because you're going out with two and three quarter inches. It's just instant death for the animal. It's like super ethical, I think when it comes to like the amount of damage they can do. Those mechanical. They put animals down so quick. So quick.

Mike Baker (227:49)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (227:49)

There's something to be said for that giant cut that they make inside. It's just so different. Like cams. Cams. He throw. He's using a catapult. It's basically a catapult.

Mike Baker (227:58)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (227:59)

That four blade carnivore thing.

Mike Baker (228:01)

That's insane. But Cam changed my life. I like. He really did. He was like create a bit. Really big hole.

Joe Rogan (228:07)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (228:08)

Because I don't care what you do, just create a giant hole. And that's because you're. You're going to put the arrow in the right spot. If you create a giant hole then you're going to have. Have a great blood trail and you're gonna find your animal. He rewrote my entire hunt sequence this year.

Joe Rogan (228:28)

Because you were. Before that you were penetration.

Mike Baker (228:31)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (228:32)

Right. Which is another way of looking at it. Right. If you're thinking about a cut, a cut that goes through the entire body is a very long cut and is always lethal. If you get them in the vitals.

Mike Baker (228:40)

Yep.

Joe Rogan (228:41)

But you don't get a blood trail. And it does. They don't die as quick. No, the dying is quick thing is the one in to hone last year that bull died in like less than 10 seconds. How many seconds was it?

Mike Baker (228:53)

Seven, if that. Maybe five.

Joe Rogan (228:54)

Ran up to the top of the hill and just fell down.

Mike Baker (228:57)

I've never. I've never seen anything die. I've never seen anything die that fast.

Joe Rogan (229:00)

And that's those big mechanicals.

Mike Baker (229:02)

And I'm not saying that because. Yeah, it's. You know, you're Joe. Like you're just the dude on the side of the mountain that was shooting the elk that I was watching. Like it fucking died faster than anything I've seen. Even shot with a rifle in the. In the chest cavity. Right, Right. So clearly differentiating between. Yeah. A headshot and a chest cavity. I've never seen anything die that fast from an animal. It was dead. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (229:28)

I think there's something to be said for those giant holes because it's just if you. Especially if you have a strong bow. So if you have a bow that has a lot of kinetic energy and a Lot of speed and you're shooting a heavy arrow. It's hitting that rib cage like there's something for that big cut. It just stops them, cuz.

Mike Baker (229:43)

Are you at 80?

Joe Rogan (229:44)

84?

Mike Baker (229:44)

84. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (229:46)

The new bow's 84. Oh, the new hoy is so smooth.

Mike Baker (229:49)

Like that's.

Joe Rogan (229:50)

Oh, it's so smooth.

Mike Baker (229:52)

I got it. So they just came out yesterday.

Joe Rogan (229:54)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (229:55)

I gotta go. I. I gotta go find the new one.

Joe Rogan (229:58)

I felt so special. I had one for a couple months and I had to blur it out. I took pictures.

Mike Baker (230:03)

I felt like such a chum. I was out there, Tayone. It's like, I got the old one. It's not a big deal, man.

Joe Rogan (230:10)

Well, I used to think that when I saw Cam shoot his, I'm like, how could it be better? These are so good. How could they be better? And then you shoot the new one. You're like, God damn it, it's better. It's super accurate. Like so dead in the hand. Like the, the way the shot breaks, it's just like, they keep making it smoother, smoother. Draw cycle, it's faster.

Mike Baker (230:27)

Which. So you're doing 84?

Joe Rogan (230:30)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (230:30)

What are you, Garmin? What's your. What's your feet per second on it?

Joe Rogan (230:34)

Oh, it's 293 or 294.

Mike Baker (230:36)

So what are you shooting?

Joe Rogan (230:38)

450.

Mike Baker (230:39)

475. 475.

Joe Rogan (230:40)

Yeah. I bumped it up because I went to those 125 grain hats, but my bow went from £80 to 84 with the new one. And then it kind of made up the difference. So the 25 grains, and it was basically the same kind of speed as with the last one, which I had a 450 grain arrow. So this, like. I think there's probably like a number you shouldn't go below. I don't know what that number is. You know, like grains. Like some people, they'll hunt elk with like a 300 grain arrow. And a lot of people don't do that. Don't do that. You can get away with it because, like, well, my daughter shot an elk and it was a pass through and she's got a 50 pound bow. Okay. She got lucky. She got lucky. You need some force to get in there.

Mike Baker (231:18)

Like if you're shooting 500 on an 84 on a. On an 84 pound, 85 pound bow. So let's say you're doing. Even if you're doing 270, right, that's still.

Joe Rogan (231:29)

Boom.

Mike Baker (231:30)

Massive penetration.

Joe Rogan (231:32)

Massive kinetic energy, especially if you have carbon arrows.

Mike Baker (231:35)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (231:36)

I love those carbon arrows with the. The victories with the slick outside, because you pull them out of target so much easier.

Mike Baker (231:42)

Who's making those?

Joe Rogan (231:43)

The vaps? The. What are they called? The tkos.

Mike Baker (231:46)

Yeah, I love those.

Joe Rogan (231:47)

Rip tkos. That's it.

Mike Baker (231:48)

Rip tk. Yeah, those are great.

Joe Rogan (231:50)

They're. They're coating that they have on it is like, it's so easy to.

Mike Baker (231:54)

I got like a Tesla or something.

Joe Rogan (231:56)

You got to think that's. That aids in penetration, too. It has to, right? I mean, isn't that why guys, like, the thin diameter, like, Cam shoots those? I don't know if he's doing it now, but he was for a long time, he was shooting those 4 millimeter arrows.

Mike Baker (232:09)

Right.

Joe Rogan (232:09)

Those real skinny ones.

Mike Baker (232:10)

But the 4 mil I like lighted.

Joe Rogan (232:13)

Knocks, and the 4 millimeter with the lighted knocks make me nervous, like, because knocks break sometimes. And they're more vulnerable because they got that little light inside of them instead of being a big, solid piece of plastic.

Mike Baker (232:24)

Right.

Joe Rogan (232:25)

You know, like, I always change them before hunts. I always put fresh ones on. I never trust ones that have been sitting around. Never trust ones that I've shot already. I'll shoot them a bunch of times, like for practice, but they break sometimes. And especially I'm not paying attention, so I might be accidentally touching arrows.

Mike Baker (232:40)

I do the same thing. Like, I have fresh arrows for hunting.

Joe Rogan (232:43)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (232:43)

But they're the exact same setup for practice. So that's why I like, like the sever or something like that. Because the severs, you can pin them, and then I can just shoot the. Out of those and then just not. Not use the pin.

Joe Rogan (232:59)

Yeah. No, that's huge.

Mike Baker (233:01)

That's why I like them because I can shoot the same exact weight and dimensions, and I know the flight characteristics are going to be the exact same versus sometimes when you get those practice heads. Yeah, they're different. They actually have different flight characteristics because the way that they're put together is not exactly the same. And I believe in the fact that it's like, hey, man, if you got a. A slight fin on the front and it's a different fin on the back, even though it's only an inch, you still have to be 100% consistent to maintain the same flight character.

Joe Rogan (233:32)

Yeah. That's why when guides get real nerdy about, like, what helix, like what kind of helical you have on the veins and like what kind of twist you put your veins. And you have to have the. A single bevel blade that twists for the broadhead in the exact same direction. You'll get a right twist with left veins. Then you'll get all up. But their ideas that you're trying to get the broadhead to spin through the animal, that's the whole idea behind the single bevel.

Mike Baker (233:59)

Is that. Do you think that's true though?

Joe Rogan (234:01)

There's something to it? Yeah, there's something to single bevels because of the cut, the way the edge is cut. So for people listening, single bevel means the edge angles in on one side. Double bevel means it comes together as a point. Right. So think of a blade, but a blade with only one side that you can, you know, you see like where the steel is ground down to the edge. The other side doesn't have that. So the idea is that that creates this angle and that when you're spinning, your arrow is spinning because the helicals of your vein, it goes into the animal's body cavity. And the bevel in the broad head accentuates that spin and it continues that spin through the body causing like a whirlwind of trauma inside the animal. And that it, you know, it almost affect acts as multiple blades because it's kind of spinning around. It's not just cutting a straight line, it's twisting. But the question is like how much twist and is it more effective to have like a four blade thing? Like a four, like a tooth of the arrow, like one that you get. You know, those are.

Mike Baker (235:02)

I don't think it's true.

Joe Rogan (235:03)

You don't think it's been the, the bevel spin?

Mike Baker (235:06)

No, I don't think it does.

Joe Rogan (235:07)

I think it does a little. Because there's a guy named Lusk archery and he does these tests on these things and he actually shoots them into ballistic gel and you can see them spin. So some of them do spin.

Mike Baker (235:18)

But I think it's too complex though. Once you. Because once you have a rib cage, right? And let's just say you go through the ribs, even the consistency of the rib cage. So we'll just say a perpendicular shop in the perpendicular shot from the rib cage, right. At 40 yards. So just keep all the variables basically the same. Even then there's no nicking of the rib, there's no variation of the actual animal skin. There's no slight cording waist start cording towards. There's no, so ballistic jail. I think there leaves a lot of questions for me. So even though it's twisting in the ballistic gel, because it's consistent, you're shooting it directly perpendicular into a very Consistent format and you're getting a consistent result, you're not going to get a consistent result. I just don't believe you're going to get a consistent result through a rib cage.

Joe Rogan (236:15)

Well, that's the reason why a lot of people like mechanicals. It's one of the things that they say is that the cut is so large when you get into the body cavity that you take out all the other variables. It's going to do so much more trauma than something that's just a slit blade that. Let's say you do hit that ribcage and it does slice and only hit one lung because it deflected off of it and it doesn't spin at all. And now you lost the animal. Whereas you get a mechanical, it goes in there, it creates this massive fucking hole. It does all this trauma going through two and three quarter inches of trauma going through the animal. The odds of that animal surviving are gone. If you get him in the body cavity, they're gone. And I've seen people hit people with really good shots with small broadheads and not do much damage to the point where the animal runs off. They have a hard time blood trailing it. Even if the animal dies 30 minutes, 60 minutes later, you might have a hard time finding it, especially if you bumped it 100.

Mike Baker (237:07)

I've had that exact experience like multiple.

Joe Rogan (237:09)

Times with those little broadheads.

Mike Baker (237:11)

Yeah, man.

Joe Rogan (237:11)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (237:12)

Yeah. It cam. Like I said, he changed the entire.

Joe Rogan (237:18)

What he thought about it because he's.

Mike Baker (237:19)

Like create a big hole.

Joe Rogan (237:21)

Well, he changed his thought about it too. He was always a fixed blade guy.

Mike Baker (237:24)

Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan (237:25)

And then who told him to do that? Oh, Wayne did, from the boat rat.

Mike Baker (237:30)

Really?

Joe Rogan (237:31)

Yeah. Wayne said, you got to try these carnivores, so just trust me, just try them. So these things are crazy.

Mike Baker (237:37)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (237:37)

It opens up these four blade catapults.

Mike Baker (237:39)

It looks like. It looks like one of those turkey broadheads. Yeah, it looks crazy.

Joe Rogan (237:44)

And because of the design, it's just like the hot. It opens up from the front.

Mike Baker (237:48)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (237:49)

So once it's inside, then it's doing all its damage so you don't have to worry about it getting destroyed. Going in through rib cages and stuff as much as you do with other things, because it's really just gonna get a little hole going in. And then once it's in, then it's opening. It's kind of a perfect idea. The only thing that's that people don't like, like Dudley doesn't like it doesn't leave a big hole in the outside. Like, I talked to Dudley about it. He's like, I want extreme trauma. I just want extreme. I want it one big giant cut with all that energy just going through the. Like, he'll think of it like sticking a samurai sword, like, through the. The animal's body.

Mike Baker (238:24)

Right.

Joe Rogan (238:25)

And, you know, obviously he's one of the best bow hunters on earth too. So, like, there's a bunch of different philosophies on it, but I think the idea of the mechanical blade is legit. And I like the hybrid idea the best because then you always have a fixed blade, no matter what.

Mike Baker (238:39)

I like the. I like the hybrid. Obviously. This year was great because I like the hybrid a lot, lot more than what going either pure mechanical or pure fixed.

Joe Rogan (238:48)

Yeah. You feel like you got a little insurance policy.

Mike Baker (238:50)

Yeah, yeah. It's like the best of both worlds. You're like, okay, cool. Let's, let's, let's keep consistent with this. And everybody I talk to, you know, they have. Well, throughout the past year, several years, they have all different opinions, which is broadheads are like, you know, everybody has a different opinion.

Joe Rogan (239:10)

Sure.

Mike Baker (239:11)

And, you know, John has his opinion, Cam has his opinion. Everybody has their opinion. Like my buddy Dan Elk shaped. You ever watch that? Sure, yeah. Yeah. He's got his opinion. All these guys have opinions. So I'm just trying to, like.

Joe Rogan (239:25)

And they're all successful, too.

Mike Baker (239:26)

Exactly.

Joe Rogan (239:27)

That's the crazy thing. It's like you're trying to sort it out, like who's right.

Mike Baker (239:30)

And so I'm just trying to, like, create the data and put it down into what works for me. And I don't have any sponsorships, so I'm just.

Joe Rogan (239:41)

Right.

Mike Baker (239:41)

Which allows me to be fairly empirical in the way that I'm actually selecting the criteria. But I also don't have the reps. These guys do either. So you have to rely on their data and then collect all of it and then kind of put it in one case.

Joe Rogan (239:57)

Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm always fucking around with things. That's one of the cool things about archery, is all the tinkering. You know, there's like so many different things you could try. Like this year is the first time I tried a 15 inch front bar. You know, I went to a 15 inch front bar with a 12 inch back bar. Ooh. I like it so much better.

Mike Baker (240:14)

Really?

Joe Rogan (240:14)

Yeah, because I was using that quivilizer. And the problem is with wind, it's a sail. That sail just pushes your pin around too much, bro.

Mike Baker (240:22)

I love that guy, though.

Joe Rogan (240:23)

Oh, yeah. I love that Guy. It's a great look, the quivilizer. I used it for years. It's a great invention. But I find that with wind in particular, I know on a long. The balance that I would get from that equivalizer, I can get from that. I'm using a cutter stabilizer with a 15 inch front bar and a 12 inch back bar.

Mike Baker (240:38)

Right.

Joe Rogan (240:39)

And it's perfect. It holds so good. It holds so nice. It's just. It feels so dead on. And this year I went with a 10 degree downward angle of the front bar.

Mike Baker (240:49)

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Why? Why did you go with it down versus what, what matters whether or not it's perpendicular.

Joe Rogan (240:57)

It doesn't make any sense. But I was talking to these archers who do it and Levi Morgan does it. His. It goes at a downward angle too. And I was talking to this archer and he said it actually, for some reason it helps you hold better. Like you feel it locks in better.

Mike Baker (241:10)

Really?

Joe Rogan (241:11)

Yeah. The slight downward thing with. When you're pulling back, there's something about the slight downward angle of it that it lets you hold better with the same amount of weight.

Mike Baker (241:18)

Right.

Joe Rogan (241:19)

Because it's going in a different direction than just straightforward. It doesn't totally make sense. But I really believe in it. Like, when I started doing, I was like, ooh, there's a little different feel to this. I love that. I love all the tinkering. I love the tinkering.

Mike Baker (241:33)

That's my favorite thing.

Joe Rogan (241:35)

It's so much fun because it's, it's like there's all these different ways to do it. You know, there's all these different releases, there's all these different styles of releases. There's so many different things you could fuck with. You could just go down a rabbit hole after rabbit hole, you know, that's.

Mike Baker (241:51)

What I did, you and I. I would say like 90% of their texts are around release.

Joe Rogan (241:58)

What release for you?

Mike Baker (241:59)

Yeah, like what release? And I went, I think I bought 20 releases this year, like over the course of 23, 24 after, you know, the hunting season. And it's fun. It's just pure fun because, okay, dude, I know I got it. It's like 250 bucks. Sure. You buy a release and I, I with it for, you know, a couple weeks. I get the pros and cons about it and then I pass it over to what, the guy that runs my little bow shop there at Black Rifle Isaac. I pass it off to him, like, sell it on ebay. I don't give A fuck about those things.

Joe Rogan (242:38)

And I got a box of them. Yeah, I get a box of different releases. I've tried everything from four finger releases to two finger releases. What I really like is that one with the clicker. That onyx with the clicker. It's got this little click and then I can shoot that as good as I could shoot a hint. So you get the best of both worlds. You get like the ability to make it go off if you have to. You know, if there's some weird situation where, you know, there's. You have like a literal split second to make a very close shot, you can get away with that. Or you could shoot at a long distance target and feel just as comfortable as you do with a hinge, you know, because you have. There's something about having that little click and that Onx clicker. Like once you feel that little click, you know it's about to go off. You just pull through it.

Mike Baker (243:22)

Funny, I'm. I'm the exact opposite. I hate that fucking click. Like when I'm. When I'm on the click. Click. Ha. Like, I just wanted to go off. I just wanted to go off.

Joe Rogan (243:34)

It does fuck with your head, but one thing it does is it puts all your concentration in the shot process. Instead of like hammering the trigger, right? Just all. You hear that click? You know it's right there.

Mike Baker (243:43)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (243:43)

You just pull through it and it's so. It's such a delicate little click that once you get it in your head and you shoot with it a bunch of times, you like, welcome it. Like, there we are. Click.

Mike Baker (243:54)

Okay, so you're. You're like looking forward and then the.

Joe Rogan (243:59)

Click is like, settle in. We're right there. It's like that one extra step that gives you this one extra little piece of concentration. Joel Turner talks about it in that whole Shot IQ process. And he developed it. He developed Onyx clicker.

Mike Baker (244:12)

Oh, he developed.

Joe Rogan (244:13)

He developed it. Oh, shit.

Mike Baker (244:14)

Okay, cool.

Joe Rogan (244:15)

So that one little thing, that one little click is what separates it from a regular trigger. And then, and then you get all your thought process into the shot process and just making sure you do a good shot.

Mike Baker (244:27)

Huh? Okay. All right, I've used it. I.

Joe Rogan (244:31)

It's a thing you got to get used to, like everything else. Like, but then you talk to Cam Haynes. He just fucking hammers that trigger.

Mike Baker (244:35)

I know.

Joe Rogan (244:36)

Shoots everything. So it's like some people can't do it that way. It's. It's weird. Everybody's got a different way they look like to do it.

Mike Baker (244:42)

It pisses me off so bad because I see like some of my buddies, like doing Chris Jensen as the country music singer. Have you ever like, he and I have hunted together a few times in Colorado. He just hammers the trigger. It's the craziest thing you've ever seen in your life. He's just like, pow.

Joe Rogan (245:01)

Like that's kind of how Cam does it. And I look at that touches off the trigger.

Mike Baker (245:07)

I look at him every time like, oh my God, man, how are you like hitting the target? But he's like just center mass just over and over again.

Joe Rogan (245:17)

I think it's a mind fuck that a lot of people put their head into. That you're going to get target panic and that you can't control your emotions during a shop process to the point where you could command trigger. But that doesn't make any sense to me. No, doesn't make any sense from like. I can understand the psychological aspect of target panic, but I have a feeling that it comes from two different things. It comes from buck fever, which is like you're freaking out. You never shot a buck this big before. Oh my God, he's right there. And you're like, ah, you freak out. That's normal. But that's an experience thing and you have to learn what that is. And if you do it a bunch of times, then you get to the point where like, oh, I know how to control myself. I know what this is. And the more often you do it, like if you can go on a couple of pig hunts and then go on an elk hunt, you're way more in the groove. You're like right there, you know what to do, you know how to do it. And you could touch the trigger off 100%. Cam does it every goddamn time. I think it comes from the target archery community because I think those guys are staring at these little tiny X's from 20 yards and they got to shoot 30 of them in a row.

Mike Baker (246:15)

Right?

Joe Rogan (246:15)

And I think you're. You get mind and that's why those guys have hinges, all these crazy and 40 inch stabilizers and V's that come out the back. And it's all about not moving plot. But that's not bow hunting. And we were talking about this, that I think the difference between bow hunting and target archery is like the difference between doing free throws and playing basketball.

Mike Baker (246:37)

Right? Right.

Joe Rogan (246:37)

Yeah, yeah, free throws. Nobody's with you. You're on the line. You can measure it, you can sit there and you could throw it.

Mike Baker (246:44)

Different sport basketball, you're running around, you.

Joe Rogan (246:46)

Gotta people different sports.

Mike Baker (246:48)

Same. Same sub skill set.

Joe Rogan (246:50)

Right, that's hunting.

Mike Baker (246:51)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (246:51)

Hunting is basketball. Target. Archery is free throws. That's what I think. Yeah, that's what I think. And I think you can't tell a guy like Cam Haynes is doing it the wrong way. That if the best guy does it that way, you have to go, okay. Why do we think you can't do it that way? Well, it's psychological. It's all psychological. It's all panic. It's all not being able to control your nerves. If you can shoot perfectly that way at a target, you should be able to shoot perfectly at an animal. You should be able to. The different. It's not. The animal isn't like some fucking invulnerable thing that like you have to do it a certain way or the frequency is not correct. No, it's an animal. It's like just like a target.

Mike Baker (247:30)

The army marksmanship team is not Delta Force. Like that's like.

Joe Rogan (247:35)

Right, right, right.

Mike Baker (247:37)

Very different. Very good shooters. Army marksmanship team. Probably extremely proficient shooters. Maybe even better so than Delta. However, it's a different scenario based activity. Completely different.

Joe Rogan (247:51)

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Just because you shoot accurate at a stationary target doesn't mean you understand how to. The freak out.

Mike Baker (247:58)

When you have a. Yeah. A. A horse coming in with swords on its head.

Joe Rogan (248:03)

The freak out.

Mike Baker (248:04)

It's a different thing. Man Screaming it's like, ah, I'm super horny. I'm gonna.

Joe Rogan (248:09)

You.

Mike Baker (248:10)

I'm gonna kill you. I don't know.

Joe Rogan (248:11)

And you're like could you imagine if you came over from Europe and there was no elk over there and you were camping in the woods. You were one of those first guys. Your stupid burlap tent. And you hear like demons.

Mike Baker (248:27)

This. You don't know. You're like this, this thing going to right. Is it going to run me through.

Joe Rogan (248:32)

It sounds like die 100% going to kill you.

Mike Baker (248:35)

I would be more scared of that than a bear.

Joe Rogan (248:37)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (248:37)

It says giant swords on it.

Joe Rogan (248:39)

Well, if it runs straight at you.

Mike Baker (248:41)

And just impales you and I wouldn't come in.

Joe Rogan (248:44)

I'll be more scared of a bear though. I feel like I grab an antler.

Mike Baker (248:47)

If I hadn't seen any one of these before. And like something comes in and it's got giant pointy things on its head and I'm like trying to be completely blank slate and I've got this other fuzzy thing that I can't really see. It's like claws and teeth. I'm like, my God. I'm Way more afraid of this thing with swords on its head.

Joe Rogan (249:07)

Depends on what kind of bear we're talking about.

Mike Baker (249:09)

Yeah, like if it's a little black bear, I don't give a shit. I don't care. I don't care about those things at all. Like it's, it's so. They're, they're kind of obnoxious.

Joe Rogan (249:18)

Do you see that one that got shot in New Jersey? It's 880 pounds, 770 pounds, dressed crazy. In New Jersey? In New Jersey. That's the east coast.

Mike Baker (249:28)

How is that possible?

Joe Rogan (249:29)

They have the most, they have the most black bears per capita in the whole country. We've played a hundred times the video of the bears wrestling in the middle of a neighborhood. And far Rockaway, big fucking black bears just going to war in the middle of the street.

Mike Baker (249:44)

I had, I grew up in this middle of the like logging community out in the middle of nowhere. And there's this dude that used to keep wee I fido. It's on the middle of nowhere, dude. It's like so hill Jack, but it's awesome. And my grandfather, everybody, they're all hardcore loggers. But I'm not exaggerating. We had a guy just outside of town, had a pet bear. A pet black bear.

Joe Rogan (250:12)

How old was it?

Mike Baker (250:13)

I mean he's a full grown black bear, dude.

Joe Rogan (250:15)

Oh my God.

Mike Baker (250:16)

And he would just. This is the sad part. Like he had like defanged it because it would slobber on people and But.

Joe Rogan (250:24)

Oh God.

Mike Baker (250:25)

He had a full on black bear that would suck on his arm basically.

Joe Rogan (250:32)

Oh. And yeah, I mean he found a couple people accidentally.

Mike Baker (250:35)

He what?

Joe Rogan (250:36)

He fanned a couple people accidentally playing with them. Oh God. So he made him gummy?

Mike Baker (250:41)

Yeah. Gummy, yeah.

Joe Rogan (250:42)

What did he feed it?

Mike Baker (250:43)

Who the knows, man?

Joe Rogan (250:45)

Like donuts.

Mike Baker (250:46)

Like he's. When I see this. These are loggers, you know, These are, these are.

Joe Rogan (250:54)

How long did he have this bear?

Mike Baker (250:55)

Probably 10 years, I would imagine, man. Like, like, you know, I, I tend to like, you know, what a crazy. Turn down the volume on my like redneck upbringing.

Joe Rogan (251:10)

Did he keep this thing in his yard?

Mike Baker (251:12)

Yeah, we would drive by it on our way to another town and he had a bear in his front yard in a cage. It was insane, dude.

Joe Rogan (251:21)

Oh no. I thought it was just running around. No, no, I kept it in a cage.

Mike Baker (251:26)

Big cage. Just imagine.

Joe Rogan (251:28)

He never let it out.

Mike Baker (251:29)

No, you'd let it out all the time. He's like walk it around like. The guy was a complete insane person.

Joe Rogan (251:35)

Oh my God.

Mike Baker (251:36)

And My uncle, my great uncle is like 80 years old, Crate. Complete crazy person too. Taught himself how to. How to fly back in the day. Came back from World War II. He was on Navy. He was a Navy ship. Ship guy. Taught himself how to fly. He would fly around this Piper Super Cub. And back in the day, you. You get a bounty for cougar tails. So he had a walker hound in. He would put him in the front seat of his Piper Super Cub. He would fly around looking for tracks, land his plane in the middle of nowhere, kick his dog out. So you tell me these stories, and I mean, I hunted with this guy forever.

Joe Rogan (252:18)

And the dog would find the bear.

Mike Baker (252:19)

Yeah, he punch him out on the bear or the cougar or whatever it was. Tree it, tree it, shoot it with a.22 Hornet. Because his whole thing was you let them bleed out in their lungs and then they'll fall out of the tree. You don't want to shoot them with too big of a caliber because it knocks them out of the tree and they run around. If you shoot them with small caliber and penetrates both lungs, their lungs fill up. Oh, they drown and they fall out.

Joe Rogan (252:43)

Jesus Christ.

Mike Baker (252:45)

This is what, like, my Cecil Ball was my. My uncle back in the.

Joe Rogan (252:51)

Did he have a backup gun?

Mike Baker (252:52)

Oh, yeah. This guy was completely insane. He had like, by when I was.

Joe Rogan (252:57)

Comfortable with a Cougar and a.22.

Mike Baker (252:59)

Dude, this guy was 80 years old when I was hunting cougars with him back in, like, the Panhandle, Idaho. And he was taught. He would tell me stories, and I would only go hunting with him to listen to the stories because they were the best fucking stories on the planet. He crashed his plane. He got fired from the sawmill. He was buzzing the tower, buzzing the tower. Crashed his fucking plane into his boss office and was like, fuck you, I'm out of here, dude. He was a complete insane person. And he was telling me this other story, and these are like the summarized version, the cliff notes of it. But, dude, he would bay cougars in the middle of mountains by himself. He's fly his plane, land it in the middle of the snow, find a spot for him. Bay cougars. And he had this cougar up in this log jam above a creek, and he was telling me this. This cougar had tucked himself underneath the logs above the creek. And there's snow on top of the logs, there's logs. And then he was like crawling in underneath in the middle of the mountains with like a.357 snub nose.

Joe Rogan (254:11)

He climbed into the cougar Den.

Mike Baker (254:13)

He's like, these. This cougar is eating my dogs. And he's, like, reaching around my uncle, who had, like, three strokes by the time that I was talking to him, he's like. And he'd stutter a little bit. He's driving, like, 80 miles an hour around, like, crazy logging roads in the middle of nowhere. I'm white knuckling his Toyota Tacoma with cougar hounds in the back of the Toyota going, oh, my God, I'm going to fucking die any moment. And he's like, yeah. And I got my. He's like. He had a slight stutter. And pull out his snub nose. 357. Like a gangster, and reach underneath the logs and start pulling the trigger. Once he found the right fur between the cougar and his dogs.

Joe Rogan (255:01)

Oh, my God.

Mike Baker (255:02)

This dude was completely insane when it came to doing things. This is my uncle. This is, like, the guy that I'm, like, hanging out.

Joe Rogan (255:14)

He reached into the logs and felt his way to the cat.

Mike Baker (255:19)

Yes. With a snub nose, whatever, you know, 357.

Joe Rogan (255:24)

God.

Mike Baker (255:25)

To kill the cougar because it was pulling up his dogs and eating his dogs.

Joe Rogan (255:29)

Oh, my God.

Mike Baker (255:30)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (255:32)

Holy shit.

Mike Baker (255:33)

Like, when you talk about where I grew up in, like, the guys I grew up with, because I, you know, I'm a Green Beret, you know, it's like, oh, you. Oh, yeah. Oh, you're not, like, walking around in the woods with a saw on your back, you know? And I'm like, yeah, just jumping on planes, I guess.

Joe Rogan (255:54)

You know, that's hilarious. They look down on it. Like, that's an easy job.

Mike Baker (255:59)

You're not a fucking lumberjack.

Joe Rogan (256:02)

You're kind of a question that's so crazy.

Mike Baker (256:04)

I go home, my dad would make fun of me.

Joe Rogan (256:06)

Like, isn't it interesting that there's, like, levels of discipline and hard work in the world? Like, there's. There's like. If you want to be a logger, there's no easy logger job. They don't exist. That is a hard job. Those are hard men.

Mike Baker (256:26)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (256:26)

Yeah. You want to be a logger, and you're going to do it for 30 years. You're gonna chop and carry trees for 30 fucking years. You're gonna be living in the woods, chopping and carrying three trees for 30 fucking years.

Mike Baker (256:39)

And, like, falling trees, wrapping, oh, yeah. Big cables around them. And they'd be like, oh, you carried a backpack through the woods. And that's pretty cool, man. That's.

Joe Rogan (256:49)

I mean, you think about the different like groups of people that live these extreme lives. And how many people are at the coffee shop with blue hair that are totally oblivious and they think hard work is like, you know, I'm dealing with my trauma and I'm going, I'm going to Starbucks today to protest. It is a guy with a log on his back and he's 75 years old and he can't wait to get off work so he can kill cougars.

Mike Baker (257:17)

With a pistol with a fucking.357.

Joe Rogan (257:20)

And we all exist on the same landmass.

Mike Baker (257:23)

Yeah. Some dude that looks like he's like building bikes in the 1800s with the fucking curly cub mustache. It's like waxed up. And you've got another guy that's like 80 years old that's had three strokes. It's driving around in the mountains. It's running up a mountain at a six minute mile, chasing his dogs to go kill a cougar. Nah, not the same person. Not the same order of priorities. You know what, there's probably a lot.

Joe Rogan (257:52)

Of those guys back in the day. Yeah, I bet that was a common type of human in like 1820. Yeah, but you ran it all. That was like how you had to stay alive. You know, you live to be about 40, then you had a stroke. Everybody died. Nobody got any vitamins. Eating cornmeal and gruel and trying to eat squirrels. You're barely getting by.

Mike Baker (258:20)

Like you're eating, you're eating a bear. That's how nasty.

Joe Rogan (258:24)

Like they preferred bears. Yeah, that's what's crazy. Apparently they, they thought it tasted like beef. They cooked a lot of bears. God, some of them were gross. The grizzlies apparently are super gross. I asked. Cam just released a new video, Redemption. A grizzly bear hunt. Yeah, yeah, I saw it and it's good. Great video. But he ate the bear. I was like, how did it taste? Like it was okay. And then I talked to James. He's like, it was fucking horrible. It's horrible. It tastes disgusting. But black bear didn't taste that bad if you get it from a good spot. Apparently, like Rinella says that blueberries, bears have been eating blueberries are the best tasting meat ever.

Mike Baker (259:00)

But that I think that's also relative to bear meat. So they're saying no.

Joe Rogan (259:06)

He says it's like a great tasting.

Mike Baker (259:07)

I don't believe, I don't believe him.

Joe Rogan (259:09)

You don't think it was like flavored with like all they ate was blueberries? I think the problem is they eat so much rotten shit.

Mike Baker (259:15)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (259:15)

And that Affects the way they taste. But I think if they're eating only blueberries, like Jeff see his video.

Mike Baker (259:20)

Mm.

Joe Rogan (259:20)

With the blueberry fat, it's like purple fat. It's crazy. He said that's delicious. He said it's so delicious. I believe him. I. I love you think he's a fucking liar.

Mike Baker (259:31)

I love Steve. He's awesome. He's so much fun to hunt with, and he's so. But I just firmly disagree with him on this, where I'm like, bro, like, no.

Joe Rogan (259:40)

What is the best tasting game animal for you?

Mike Baker (259:44)

Moose.

Joe Rogan (259:45)

Moose.

Mike Baker (259:45)

Moose.

Joe Rogan (259:46)

Interesting.

Mike Baker (259:46)

100. And for me or for my kids? Moose is the only game animal. My kids are like, yeah.

Joe Rogan (259:55)

Really?

Mike Baker (259:56)

Yeah. They are 100 chips in. They look forward to it. Not only do they look forward to it, they request it. It's the only game meat.

Joe Rogan (260:03)

That's interesting. That's very interesting.

Mike Baker (260:06)

Like, I can eat elk, but I'm the only one at the table eating oak.

Joe Rogan (260:10)

Interesting.

Mike Baker (260:11)

Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (260:12)

I only shot one moose ever, and I ate it. And I remember it was good. But that was with Ben O'Brien, like, 10 years ago. But I haven't had a lot of experience with it. For me, it's axis. Deer and elk are the two best ones. Elk fur first, axis to your second.

Mike Baker (260:28)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (260:29)

Do you like axis?

Mike Baker (260:30)

I love axis.

Joe Rogan (260:30)

It's crazy what it tastes like, right? It doesn't taste like a deer.

Mike Baker (260:33)

No, it's like, this is a totally.

Joe Rogan (260:34)

Different kind of animal.

Mike Baker (260:35)

It's not even. It's not even beef. It's like a clean.

Joe Rogan (260:37)

It's almost sweet.

Mike Baker (260:38)

Yeah, it's a clean beef.

Joe Rogan (260:40)

Yeah. It's an interesting flavor. And the fact that, you know, they have so many of them in Hawaii, like that Maui Nui Venison Co. For people who want to buy wild game. You can get actual wild game from Maui Nui venison. They'll ship you access deer frozen. They have meat sticks. It's great. I'm not affiliated with them. I know the owners, but I don't have anything to do with them. It's. But it's a great company, and they're doing something that you actually have to do. There's no natural predators on Maui, so they. They have to shoot these exits here. They're everywhere.

Mike Baker (261:08)

They're like. They're rodents, basically, and they're delicious rodent.

Joe Rogan (261:12)

That's a crazy animal to hunt, too, because they grew up with tigers, so they evolved with tigers. So they move so fast. They are the fastest animal I've ever hunted.

Mike Baker (261:22)

I shot a doe at 30 yards, bedded. And she dodged the arrow. It doesn't even make sense.

Joe Rogan (261:30)

They move so fast.

Mike Baker (261:32)

It doesn't even make sense. I started shooting them longer distance away because the arrows quiet and they can't hear the string slap, so they can't hear the bow. So I started just shooting them a little bit further away. They still.

Joe Rogan (261:48)

If you. We stopped hunting him in the day because in the morning there's no wind. We started hunting them only in the afternoon because there's more wind and the wind at least covers a little bit of it. But Dudley got video of me shooting this Saxon steer at 80 yards, and it's a perfect shot. Perfect. It's going right to the vitals. At 80 yards, perfect break. And then 10 yards, the arrows. 10 yards from, he goes, and he's gone. Within 10 yards, he was gone. It was nowhere near where the arrow hit.

Mike Baker (262:13)

What?

Joe Rogan (262:13)

He moved. He heard the arrow coming and he moved out of the way. 10 yards from. There's a video of a slow mo video because it's a lighted knock. You see a perfect line headed straight for his vitals and then gone. Gone.

Mike Baker (262:28)

Not even close.

Joe Rogan (262:30)

Not even close. Like a bullet. I missed him by, like, a whole quarter. He was gone. He just ran away. They hear things. They think a tiger's coming.

Mike Baker (262:41)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (262:42)

They just go. They just go. It just makes you feel so slow when you watch how they move. You're like, people suck. We're so fucking clumsy and soft and we're so vulnerable. My back hurts. Ow.

Mike Baker (262:55)

My. My arrow that's moving at 300ft per.

Joe Rogan (262:59)

Second has no chance.

Mike Baker (263:00)

No. No chance.

Joe Rogan (263:01)

No chance. Yeah. Especially if they see the bow go off or they hear the bogo off. They're gone. And they're delicious. And they're everywhere in Texas, too. That's the wild thing about Texas. You could just bring whatever you want in. Well, you want zebras? You can bring zebras. You had zebras.

Mike Baker (263:16)

I know I did. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (263:19)

You can have zebras. My wife saw a zebra one day when she was driving the kids to school.

Mike Baker (263:23)

I know. We had.

Joe Rogan (263:24)

I saw a zebra. I think I saw a zebra, so you probably did some. Probably has a zebra. The zebra got out.

Mike Baker (263:31)

My kids would be like, driving around, around, like, let's go look at the zebras. Okay. Let's go look at the zebras.

Joe Rogan (263:37)

You could have zebras in Texas. But I love it. I love it. That you can go to. Like, when we went to that place down in South Texas, that ranch that my friend owns, we went down there, like, There's African animals here.

Mike Baker (263:48)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (263:48)

You have these crazy black bucks, and all these different animals are not from anywhere near here. And there's thousands of them. Like, this is nuts.

Mike Baker (263:56)

Well, you shot that Neil guy. Yes.

Joe Rogan (263:59)

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Baker (264:00)

But everybody says that's like the best meat ever, so put it on the scale associated with everything else.

Joe Rogan (264:08)

It's really good. It's all really good. All wild game from a healthy animal is delicious. I find at least ungulates, they're all delicious. I've never found one that I didn't like, but I still think elk is the best. That's just my. I like the flavor also. I like elk hunting so much. It means more to me when I'm eating a piece of elk. I think I'm just biased. I think if there's anything. I just like eating them. I like eating them. And I also think it's gonna sound crazy, but I think you get their spirit. I think there's something about these super potent wild animals that you kill with an arrow and then you're eating it. Like, you get the spirit of that experience, the spirit of that animal. I think it empowers you in some very strange physiological way. I really do. I think they're so vitamin rich. Like, they're such athletes, the way they run up a mountain. Like you're getting these nutrients from that animal that I don't think is like any other animal, because they're so much stronger than all those other animals. They just run. They have 900 pounds. They run right up the top of a mountainside. Like, it's nothing. Like, this is crazy. You watch them when they get winded and they run over the top of a hill that takes you 40 minutes to crawl up. They just run up it. When you eat that thing, you're like. You just feel it, you know, you feel it in your. Your body feels it. You get, like a little boost.

Mike Baker (265:30)

Yeah, it's a. It's electric. Yeah, I feel the same way.

Joe Rogan (265:34)

I've given it to people that don't even hunt.

Mike Baker (265:36)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (265:36)

And they go, dude, I feel so good after I ate this. I go, yeah, there's something to that. It's superfood.

Mike Baker (265:42)

It is a superfood. My neighbors, when I gave them, you know, elk or whatever it is, they're like, dude, this is amazing. Like, yeah, this is what it feels like to be a hunter. This is what it feels like to go out, kill something, process it, put in a package, and it's special. It's meaningful.

Joe Rogan (266:06)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (266:06)

It's the whole celebration And I hate to say it like that, but it is. It's like this is. You said it earlier, and actually I wanted to. What you call it like an assassin for your food or something like that.

Joe Rogan (266:21)

Supermarket assassin.

Mike Baker (266:22)

Yeah, Supermarket assassin. This is the difference is over here. You think this is one, it tastes different. Two, there's a definitive meaning. You're associating with it. So there's no way that you can tell me that there's not a psychological nutrient connection between those two where it makes something more meaningful and beneficial specifically for you. There's just no way you can tell me that's not better.

Joe Rogan (266:45)

Right. Like, a good meal with people you love, I feel like, almost gives you extra nutrients, almost like there's an extra good feeling about it. It's why people like eating together, you know, eating good food that people care about, having fun. The whole experience is better for your overall being.

Mike Baker (267:01)

It's the difference between, like, jacking off in a porta Potty and eating a meal with your fucking family, right? It's like there's like, a huge difference. Like, one is, like, the gross and a little bit shameful and disgusting, then.

Joe Rogan (267:14)

Just like, one's a jack of the box cheeseburger. Des is an elk that you cooked on your own grill.

Mike Baker (267:19)

Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan (267:20)

Yeah. It's a big difference, man. Yeah, it's. I'm glad I found it, I'll tell you that. It's. It's also. It's so hard to do. You know, we both had our trials and tribulations, elk bow hunting. And it's just. It's. It's so difficult to do that. The people that do it. Well, you. The people that are successful, you know how hard it is to do. You're like, God damn, you pulled it off like that. Hunting elk with a bow in the wild is a real thing. Even the places we go are better. They have more elk and stuff. It's always hard, folks. It's hard.

Mike Baker (267:52)

It's always.

Joe Rogan (267:52)

The problem with the public land thing is the public. I have so many friends that have terrible stories about guys winding elk on purpose, blowing elk out. They're all competing against the same packs of elk or the same groups of hunters are competing against the same elk groups. It's like. It's crazy. It's like these herds of animals are getting, like, winded on two and three sides because people like moving in, trying to get them right. You know, it's just. The ideal situation would be that. I think the ideal situation would be like, you know, they're Trying to do that. That American. What is it called? The American Serengeti project. They're trying to, like, rewild a whole section of the country. They're buying up land and they want to, like, bring back buffalo and bring back all these animals. If everybody, like, at one time in their life could have, like, some sort of a hunt where they, like, someone shows them how to do it, someone takes them out, they get an animal and they cook and eat that animal. If you're a meat eater, I think at one time in your life, you should try to do that. I think that may be the solution for people to understand what it's all about. Just one time in your life or even go with someone when they're doing it one time, just know what that's like. Because it ignites a little part of your DNA that you didn't even know was in there. There's, like, a little part of us that for tens of thousands of years, the only way we survived is hunting.

Mike Baker (269:26)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (269:27)

Thousands and thousands and thousands of years just baked into our DNA. And when you're in there and you're in those woods and you got that range finder and that elk is 52 yards away, and you see him walking through the bushes, and you know you got a window, and it's like a part of your DNA that just goes, yeah, this is what we're doing. This is what we're doing now. Lock in, lock in. Get the animal, bring it back. There's like some crazy, like, ancient primal code. And I tell people it's the same thing when you catch a fish. When you catch a fish, it's like this excitement. You catch a fish, that's built into your code. Because now you're going to live. You're going to live. You got food for your family. It's in there. A human reward system. And that's how we're supposed to get food. We're supposed to appreciate the food because it's hard to get. That's what it's supposed to be. It's not supposed to be. Go to the supermarket and look. Ground beef is $5 a pound. And fucking. You never chase anything. You never go kill anything. You're just sitting there eating your fucking bowl of pasta, watching tv.

Mike Baker (270:31)

Easy. It's so easy, right? It's just. It's not supposed to be that easy.

Joe Rogan (270:37)

Not supposed to be easy to live. If it is, you're gonna get anxiety. You're not designed for that. You're designed for, like, trauma and testing. You're designed for struggle. You're designed to overcome things, and if you're not ever overcoming anything, you're filled with anxiety.

Mike Baker (270:52)

Yeah, I don't deserve this.

Joe Rogan (270:54)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (270:54)

Like, how do I deserve this majestic animal that I've just consumed?

Joe Rogan (271:00)

I didn't earn it.

Mike Baker (271:01)

No.

Joe Rogan (271:01)

I just paid for it, which is weird. Doing some weird job. And then you got these hit men out there whacking cows.

Mike Baker (271:09)

Supermarket. That's like the best. That is one of the best quotes I've got. It is awesome.

Joe Rogan (271:13)

I mean, there's anything that's. There's nothing grosser in this country than factory farming. It's the grossest thing ever. They have laws where you're not even allowed to film it because it's so gross.

Mike Baker (271:22)

No, it's disgusting.

Joe Rogan (271:23)

Laws where you go to jail. Have you filmed horrific acts?

Mike Baker (271:28)

Which is completely insane when you think about it.

Joe Rogan (271:32)

Yeah.

Mike Baker (271:33)

When you think about how easy it is to go get your food and if people knew, especially meat eaters. I've never quite understood meat eaters that are anti hunting. That makes no sense to me, by the way. Like, zero sense. How can you think that this is a better way where you're caging an animal, filling up full of hormones and supplemental nutrition and corn and all these things, and then you're putting a bolt.

Joe Rogan (271:59)

Through its head, but I'm not there. And then I'm at Starbucks protesting. But you know how this McGriddle got in my hand, but now I'm putting it in my mouth just because I.

Mike Baker (272:13)

Want to actually feel the significance of this event in the context of, like, I don't have any bloodlust. I just don't want to be a hypocrite.

Joe Rogan (272:20)

Right. It's also one of those things that, like, if you haven't experienced it, you really don't understand it. And when you're trying to explain it to people, they're looking at it from, like, the cartoon Disney version of Hunters and movie version of Hunters, where they're all, cocksucker, dude, we should wrap this up because we got to go meet camp for dinner. It's almost 6:00. We've done like, dude, how many hours do we do, bro? Almost five hours.

Mike Baker (272:43)

Holy shit.

Joe Rogan (272:43)

Like that. All right, all right.

Mike Baker (272:44)

Thanks.

Joe Rogan (272:45)

Appreciate you, brother. All right, bye.