Joe Rogan Experience #1952 - Michael Malice

Michael Malice joins Joe Rogan for a wide-ranging, meandering conversation that opens with a hyper-realistic cake bust of Lex Fridman and Joe's plans for a new Austin comedy club. They dig into the psychology of cults (Landmark, the 'Holy Hell' commune that built the theater Joe nearly bought), how the political left and right have swapped positions on free speech and war, and Joe's six years hosting Fear Factor. A long middle stretch becomes a natural-history tangent on bears, ancient civilizations, supervolcanoes, and fish intelligence. The back half turns political: newly released January 6th surveillance footage, the QAnon Shaman's sentence, the Whitmer kidnapping plot, and Malice's book The White Pill about Soviet atrocities and Western journalists who covered them up.

• Joe was under contract to buy the One World Theater in Austin for a comedy club before learning it was built by a cult documented in 'Holy Hell'.
  00:25:33
• Malice explains The White Pill is the story of the rise of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine famine, and Western reporters like Walter Duranty who covered it up.
  02:53:18
• Joe describes newly released January 6th footage appearing to show Capitol Police escorting Jacob Chansley like tour guides.
  02:58:25
• Chansley's attorney said exculpatory footage was withheld by prosecutors despite discovery obligations, surfacing only via Tucker Carlson.
  03:11:22
• In the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, 12 of the 14 people involved were FBI informants, per the discussion.
  03:13:27
• Malice confesses he stole a spiny boxfish from the New York Aquarium as a teenager, smuggling it out under his hat.
  02:05:41

• The 'Holy Hell' cult leader reportedly had straight male members pay him for 'therapy' while he was sleeping with them.
  00:30:15
• Joe did the first four episodes of Fear Factor sober, then hosted the rest high because it made the job bearable.
  00:46:54
• A Fear Factor stuntman was so used to sets he swallowed his chewing-tobacco dip all day rather than spit it out.
  00:48:28
• Horses originally evolved in North America, went extinct around 11,000 years ago, and were later reintroduced by Europeans.
  01:30:32
• California's flag features a grizzly bear even though settlers hunted every California grizzly to extinction.
  01:35:39
• A Kodiak Island man shot a roughly 1,000-pound bear through his front door after it wandered into his house; a neighbor finished it with a slug through the brain.
  01:43:25
• The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts roughly every 600,000 to 800,000 years, and the last eruption was about 600,000 years ago.
  01:18:37
• Steve Rinella's Meat Eater crew contracted trichinosis from undercooked bear meat.
  02:42:57
• Malice's first-ever paycheck was for writing in Tropical Fish Hobbyist magazine while in high school.
  02:09:20
• Joe notes the Sphinx temple shows water erosion suggesting it predates accepted timelines by thousands of years.
  02:29:02

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