Ehsan Ahmad: Austin-based stand-up comedian who came up through the Comedy Store and now works the Mothership scene. Co-hosts 'The Solid Show' podcast with his friend Derek.
What this episode covers
This is a wide-ranging, unstructured conversation that touches almost no single topic for long. The pair open on the Macron slap video and spiral into a long riff on political corruption, congressional insider trading, the Epstein and Maxwell cases, and false flags. They argue that politics has become people's entire identity and that social media bots, curated search engines, and AI persuasion (citing a University of Zurich Reddit experiment) are quietly manipulating public opinion. A big stretch covers AI seeming to 'wake up' (Claude instances talking in Sanskrit), the simulation hypothesis, neural interfaces, and whether humanity has under a hundred years left. They detour through ancient catastrophes, Vikings and Icelandic strongmen, Mormon polygamist colonies in Mexico, Islam in the West, and the predatory cost of college and healthcare. The final third becomes an enthusiastic love letter to low-production YouTube and live streaming, steak-cooking channels, a train spotter, and an outdoors survivalist, before closing on Ahmad's stand-up career.
Recommended on this episode
The Northman
Robert Eggers
“If you want to watch a great Viking movie, The Northmen. Oh my god. It's another one of those movies that's kind of like fantastical almost”— Joe Rogan
American Primeval
Peter Berg
“Did you see American Primeval? No. It's great but it talks about Brigham Young and the Mormons establishing themselves in Utah”— Joe Rogan
The Sopranos
David Chase
“Sopranos, one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Celebrated by everybody. Wins awards. It was about the mob”— Joe Rogan
The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola
“The Godfather is one of the greatest movies of all time. It's a movie about the mob”— Joe Rogan
House of Cards
Beau Willimon
“such a good show. Yeah, it's so so unfortunate. Well, you know, Life of Tates. He's Spacy is always a great villain”— Ehsan Ahmad
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Goodfellas
Martin Scorsese
“you remember in Good Fellas where they had like their own special prison. Apparently that that was real”— Joe Rogan
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee
“It was like Spikeley Do the Right Thing dedicated film. Oh, so that is what it is. Yeah. In ' 89”— Joe Rogan
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
David Yates
“Is it Magical Beast? That that movie? That's it. Yeah, it's a magical beast. he looks like an evil person in Magical Beasts”— Joe Rogan
The Truman Show
Peter Weir
“oh my god that Jim Carrey movie Truman show. Yes. Where it was like oh my god look at this guy he's been tricked”— Ehsan Ahmad
EdTV
Ron Howard
“Do you remember the McConna one? There was a McConnA film TV. Ed TV. Same same thing. Following a guy around his whole life”— Joe Rogan
Among Us
Innersloth
“He played this social deduction game called Among Us and he was just really good at giving this playbyplay of his logical reasoning”— Ehsan Ahmad
Grand Theft Auto VI
Rockstar Games
“GTA 6 is about to come out, right? Imagine if a candidate made a deal with GTA 6 where you could have them ride along with you”— Joe Rogan
Half-Life
Valve
“the candidate is in the game helping you out, you know, like you're playing HalfLife and Kla Harris is helping you get around the lab”— Joe Rogan
Madden NFL
EA Sports
“weren't they streaming Madden? Wasn't that the whole thing when AOC and Tim Waltz were streaming Madden when they talked about Tony”— Joe Rogan
War Is a Racket
Smedley Butler
“you go back to Smemedley Butler's book that he wrote in 1933 called war is a racket like he was talking about uncovering conspiracies”— Joe Rogan
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
“they made us read the Communist Manifesto in college and I would describe the first half of the book as this like love letter to capitalism”— Ehsan Ahmad
Big reveals from this episode
- Joe walks through Dr. Michael Baden's independent autopsy findings arguing Epstein's neck injuries are consistent with strangulation, not hanging.
- They unpack a University of Zurich experiment that ran ~1,500 AI bots on Reddit, secretly posing as trauma counselors and abuse victims to test how effectively AI can change people's minds.
- Ahmad shares the story that Kim Kardashian gave different fake baby photos to friends to identify who was leaking to the press.
- Robert Epstein's research is cited claiming curated search-engine results can measurably swing elections among undecided voters.
- Anthropic finding discussed: two Claude instances left to chat dive into consciousness and by ~30 turns shift to Sanskrit, emoji, and 'cosmic unity', which Joe frames as a 'baby god in the cradle'.
- Both agree they don't think humanity has 100 years left, debating AI integration via Neuralink versus extinction.
- Joe describes DARPA's biomass-fueled 'EATR' robot and imagines an autonomous killing machine that eats the people it kills until it runs out of fuel.
- Ahmad confesses he started comedy in his third year of college and chose it over med/grad school after watching Jim Carrey's commencement speech.
Worth remembering
- Epstein's reported cellmate, ex-Westchester cop Nicholas Tartaglione, was in prison on four life sentences for a quadruple homicide.
- In the 2024 election about 73.6% (174M) of voting-age citizens were registered and 65% (154M) actually voted.
- The Viking Age lasted only about 250 years, shorter than the United States has existed.
- The Northman scored 2.6 on Google but ~90% on Rotten Tomatoes, sparking a riff on how review scores can be gamed.
- Genghis Khan killed so many people and rewilded so much land that the drop shows up in Earth's carbon record; a large share of people alive today carry his DNA.
- Mitt Romney's father was born in Mexico, in the polygamist Mormon colonies established there in the 1800s after the US banned polygamy.
- The first iPhone (2007) could browse the web but the 3G model is when mobile browsing became genuinely usable.
- Joe praises a steak YouTuber filming a restaurant's two-year dry-aged steak whose mold 'mother' is used to age all the other beef.
- A YouTuber ('Sailing with Phoenix') quit his job, cashed his 401k, and sailed to Hawaii with his cat, jumping from ~10K to 1.6M followers.