Joe Rogan Experience #2095 - Moshe Kasher

Moshe Kasher and Joe Rogan range across an unusually wide set of subjects with little structure. They open on pool halls, hustlers and gambling, then move through genius-level outliers, vasectomies and birth control, hunting and animal intelligence, and a long stretch of medical horror stories about rogue doctors. The emotional core is Kasher's account of being a hearing 'gentile' inside the deaf community and the Hasidic world, and his detailed history of how sign language and American Sign Language were created. The back half drifts into disease (rabies, Spanish Flu, chronic wasting disease), the multiverse, Stephen Hawking, the Epstein island as an intelligence operation, and UFOs as interdimensional phenomena, closing on Kasher's book and audiobook.

• Joe explains UFC fighters are now banned from betting after a trainer allegedly tipped off bettors about fighter injuries.
  00:10:54
• Moshe reveals he got sober at 15, first went to rehab at 13, after a childhood steeped in drugs and rave culture.
  00:58:35
• Kasher tells the full origin story of sign language: a French priest seeing two deaf sisters sign and founding the first deaf school.
  01:03:44
• He explains the deaf community's deep distrust of hearing people stems from hearing educators trying to stamp out signing.
  01:13:29
• Kasher's mother got a cochlear implant that destroyed her balance, leaving her permanently wobbly and unable to get an MRI.
  01:18:39
• His mother only learned language because his grandmother happened to take her shoes to a deaf cobbler.
  01:33:51
• Joe recounts the first person to survive symptomatic rabies via an induced coma (the Milwaukee protocol).
  01:57:11
• Kasher floats a Fermi Paradox theory that every civilization self-destructs at the same point in its 200-year industrial arc.
  02:10:41

• The word 'pool' comes from pooling money together; the game is actually called pocket billiards.
  00:09:53
• Jews may have suffered less during the plague because ritual handwashing before bread predated germ theory.
  00:22:21
• Every falcon a falconer owns is captured wild, then tamed by sitting with it for days in a dark room with meat.
  00:30:31
• Fishermen kill caught octopuses by biting through the brain stem, after which the animal turns pink or white.
  00:33:07
• American Sign Language is its own complete language, not a translation of English, and differs from British sign language.
  01:06:48
• Laurent Clerc, brought from France, learned rudimentary English on the boat and co-founded the first American deaf school.
  01:08:20
• Martha's Vineyard once had a genetic anomaly where one in 25 people was deaf, so nearly everyone signed.
  01:08:50
• Stephen Hawking lived roughly 55 years with ALS though it usually kills within two years; by the end only his cheek muscles moved.
  01:24:55
• The Spanish Flu got its name because Spain, not under wartime media embargo, was first to report it openly.
  02:04:32
• A virus weakens over generations because not killing its host lets it spread to more people.
  02:05:34

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