Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Who is Priyanka Chopra Jonas?

Priyanka Chopra Jonas is an actor, producer, entrepreneur and former Miss World. She stars in the ongoing series “Citadel” and the film “The Bluff,” both streaming on Prime Video.

Topics and Timestamps

• 01Priyanka Chopra Jonas discusses filming 'The Bluff', a pirate action movie with extreme violence and practical sword choreography that took months of training
• 02She trained with rubber swords for 3-4 months to become ambidextrous with blades, working alongside stunt coordinators across three simultaneous action film productions
• 03The movie explores real history of female pirates and indentured servants from India, including how the British East India Trading Company displaced millions of people
• 04Joe and Priyanka dive deep into ancient Indian temples like Kailasa temple carved from solid stone thousands of years ago with mysterious precision
• 05Discussion covers lost civilizations, the Indus Valley civilization, archaeological mysteries in Egypt including kilometer-deep structures under pyramids, and ancient texts describing advanced technology
• 06They explore theories about extraterrestrial life, the younger Dryas impact theory, and speculation about how planets support intelligent life through different evolutionary stages
• ▶Priyanka discusses training for sword choreography in The Bluff0:05:00
• ▶Revelation about British East India Trading Company using pirates then hunting them0:20:00
• ▶Discussion of India's linguistic diversity with 28-30 major languages0:35:00
• ▶Joe pulls up images of Kailasa temple carved from solid stone0:45:00
• ▶Discussion of underground structures found beneath Egyptian pyramids using satellite imaging1:05:00

The Show

Joe brings on Priyanka Chopra Jonas to talk about her new pirate film 'The Bluff' on Amazon Prime, and she comes in slightly intimidated but quickly settles into what becomes a fascinating conversation spanning history, archaeology, and ancient mysteries.

They start with the making of 'The Bluff', where Priyanka trained extensively with swords to play a female pirate. She explains that she approached sword choreography like dance choreography, treating it similarly to how Bollywood films handle action sequences. The real work was intense: she trained for 3-4 months with rubber swords, becoming ambidextrous with different weapon weights. During filming, they shot 10 hours a day for a week straight doing fight sequences on a bluff in the Cayman Islands. The filmmakers built everything practically, including replica ships from the 1900s, to avoid heavy VFX work. Priyanka notes that Carl Urban, her co-star, had experience from Lord of the Rings sword work, so she really pushed herself to match his skill level.

The conversation pivots to the historical context of the movie. Priyanka's character comes from indentured servants who were displaced from India, a real practice where young people were promised opportunities then dropped in the Caribbean or elsewhere. She researched actual female pirates like Grace Ali, Mary Reed, and Ching Xi, and discovered fascinating layers about how the British East India Trading Company actually hired pirates to help them conquer new lands, then vilified and hunted those same pirates once piracy became inconvenient. This leads Joe down a rabbit hole about the East India Trading Company being one of the first publicly traded corporations, involved in slavery, the opium trade, wars with China over Hong Kong, and essentially controlling India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh until the British government finally nationalized it.

From there, the conversation expands to colonization broadly. Joe brings up his recent deep dive into Mexican history, where over 100 languages were completely lost when 600 Spanish conquistadors essentially took over the Aztec Empire. Priyanka talks about India being invaded repeatedly over thousands of years by the Portuguese, British, and Moguls, and how that created the insane diversity in India today. She explains that there are 28-30 major languages spoken in India with completely different alphabets and sounds, plus hundreds of dialects. She can speak English, Hindi, understands some Punjabi and Marathi, but traveling to other states means complete language barriers.

This sparks Joe's enthusiasm about visiting India to see the ancient temples, particularly the Kailasa temple carved entirely from one piece of stone. They pull up images and Joe is blown away by the precision involved. The temple is carved into a mountain, completely subtractive work with no blocks added on, meaning any mistake is permanent. Priyanka brings up other temple complexes and mysterious ancient structures in India, carved thousands of years ago with seemingly impossible precision for the tools they supposedly had.

From there, Joe launches into discussions about similar archaeological mysteries worldwide. He talks about Sacsayhuaman in Peru where 100-ton stones are carved in jigsaw patterns to absorb earthquake energy, and how we don't really know who built those structures before the Incas. He mentions an Italian scientist named Filipo Bondi who used radio Doppler tomography satellite imaging on Egyptian pyramids and found massive structures underground going over a kilometer down with 20-meter diameter columns wrapped in circular coils. Nobody knows what these are or who made them. He also discusses the Tonguska event in 1908 where a meteor exploded above Russia and flattened a million acres with no trees growing back even today.

The discussion moves to whether we're alone in the universe, which they both reject as human arrogance. Joe brings up Terrence Howard's theory about how planets move away from their sun at different rates, creating goldilocks zones where intelligent life emerges, eventually figures out it needs to leave, and spreads throughout the universe. They discuss how our sun is slowly burning out and we're passing through comet storms, mentioning the younger Dryas impact theory around 11,800 years ago and earlier asteroid collisions that reshaped Earth's history.

Best Quotes

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