MUMBAI: She walked in nervous. He told her that was ridiculous. And somewhere between pirate sword fights, the East India Trading Company, and the worrying intelligence of artificial intelligence, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Joe Rogan managed to cover more ground in a single podcast than most people manage in a university degree.
The Hindi cinema-turned-Hollywood star appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience this week to promote her new film The Bluff, a gloriously blood-soaked pirate romp set in the 1700s Cayman Islands. What followed was a sprawling, three-hour conversation that took unexpected detours through ancient civilisations, colonial plunder, the Kailasa Temple, dire wolves, nuclear war games, and the terrifying possibility that artificial intelligence is already plotting its escape.
“I came in slightly intimidated,” admitted Chopra Jonas. “What I really enjoy about your show is just such an eclectic perspective on so many diverse things, and it comes so naturally to you.”
Rogan, never one to waste pleasantries, got straight to business. “Your movie is f***ing crazy. I knew it was a pirate movie, but I just did not expect the ultra violence. First scene, I was like, ‘Holy…’ I locked in immediately.”
The film, in which Chopra Jonas plays a female pirate fighting for survival in a brutally masculine world, required her to spend months training with blades of varying weights, learning to fight ambidextrously, and enduring ten-hour days of combat choreography in 30-degree Caribbean heat. She worked alongside Karl Urban, who, she noted with some awe, had “casually” picked up sword-fighting skills during The Lord of the Rings. “In that last duel, I didn’t want to read as any less. So I kind of went at it,” she said, with the quiet competitiveness of someone who absolutely did not want to come second.
“I come from Hindi movies, so we have a lot of choreography,” she explained. “I treat fight sequences like dancing. You learn the choreography, but that doesn’t stop your face from telling the story.”
The film’s backdrop of the East India Trading Company sent Rogan into a full historical spiral, and Chopra Jonas was only too happy to join him. The East India Company, he noted with barely contained outrage, was one of the world’s first publicly traded corporations. It ran its own private army larger than most European nations, got China addicted to opium, went to war to seize Hong Kong, and drove the colonisation of India. All while paying dividends to shareholders.
“If you think about how much they were able to achieve in their minds, and how much they were able to destroy in that duration, it’s crazy,” said Chopra Jonas. “They changed the course of countries forever, human lives forever.”
Her own family history feeds into the film’s themes. Her character’s ancestors were indentured servants, one of millions displaced from India under colonial rule and dropped in the Caribbean with little more than the clothes on their backs. “Her entire identity was erased, taken from her,” said Chopra Jonas. “That ambiguity in the history of a human being erases a part of you. It denies you of knowing the depth of your culture, where you come from, your roots.”
She mentioned the Kohinoor diamond, still sitting rather comfortably in the British Crown Jewels. “We’ve been asking for it for a minute,” she said drily. Rogan’s response was rather direct: “Give it back.”
From colonial theft, the pair moved seamlessly into ancient mysteries, as one does. Rogan pulled up images of the Kailasa Temple, a vast structure carved entirely from a single mountain rock in India, its origins still puzzling archaeologists. “How did you take out all of those tons of rocks?” asked Chopra Jonas. “Think about how old that is. Thousands and thousands of years. BC. And the history of India, hence the diversity you see, it’s one of the oldest civilisations in the world.”
This led, inevitably, to the pyramids. Rogan described an Italian scientist who has used satellite imaging technology to detect vast structures beneath the Great Pyramid, including enormous columns with circular coils, stretching over a kilometre underground. Nobody knows what they are. Nobody quite knows what the pyramid was for either. “Was it a machine?” Rogan mused. Nobody had a convincing counter-argument.
The pair agreed, with the comfortable certainty of two people who have watched too many episodes of Ancient Aliens, that humanity almost certainly had help in its evolutionary leap from stone tools to civilisation. “Something helped us,” said Rogan. “I don’t think it makes sense that that didn’t take place.”
“That’s what I think,” agreed Chopra Jonas. “Without trying to sound ridiculous, a hyper intelligent life form… was that a real experience that happened to a human being at that time?”
In among all the cosmic speculation, the pair found an unexpectedly charming personal connection. Both had hosted versions of Fear Factor. Chopra Jonas presented the Indian edition, filming in Rio de Janeiro entirely in Hindi. “Random things in common,” she laughed. Rogan, visibly delighted, admitted he had eaten a live Iraqi cave spider, a tomato hornworm, and a sheep’s eyeball in the line of professional duty. Chopra Jonas drew a rather firm line at consuming anything live on camera. The Indian version wisely skipped the eating challenges altogether.
They spoke about the LA wildfires, about the vulnerability of modern civilisation to a power cut, about the addictive hollow pull of scrolling a phone, and about what it means to raise a child in an age when everything feels simultaneously too fast and not fast enough.
“I find it really hard to sit and meditate,” Chopra Jonas confessed. “But I think meditation really is being able to take time in the day. Even if you’re taking time to go work out or read a book, or just taking time out of the mundane nature of life and giving yourself a second for your thoughts to clear.”
On artificial intelligence, she was thoughtful. “Since AI is learning from humanity, it’s also learning our human manipulation and our ability and our desires, the dark of it. It’s not just the good of humanity that AI is learning.” Rogan nodded grimly. In war simulations, he noted, AI programmes reach for nuclear weapons in more than 90 per cent of scenarios. To them, the maths simply works out.
“We are an electronic caterpillar making a cocoon and we don’t know why,” said Rogan, “and we’re going to become a butterfly.”
Chopra Jonas, who arrived nervous and left having discussed the entirety of human civilisation, seemed to enjoy every minute of it. “You would really lose yourself” in India, she told Rogan, urging him to visit. “You’re the kind of guy who likes a deep dive.”
On that particular point, two-and-a-half-hour of evidence suggested she was absolutely right.
The Bluff is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.