Joe Rogan’s first episode with Brian Redban dives into chaotic live-streaming tech glitches, Hunter S. Thompson’s LSD-fueled 1960s counterculture, and Bruce Lee’s martial arts genius, linking consciousness-altering drugs to cultural shifts. He mocks conspiracy theories like chemtrails while defending Steven Seagal’s viral traffic-stop slang, then debates reality TV exploitation—Jersey Shore’s staged drama vs. Cheaters’ rare violence—before joking about ancient alien theories and Asian stereotypes. Rogan’s raw nostalgia for childhood karate clashes with his frustration over modern venue policies, while his plans to stream twice weekly and shoot guns reveal a mix of ambition and Second Amendment advocacy, all wrapped in unfiltered, conversational energy. [Automatically generated summary]
And you see right there, this, if you don't know, if you're from out of town, that Red Cross and the marijuana leaf, this is medical marijuana.
So this is totally legal in the state of California.
It's pretty trippy because you drive down the street, and I was driving down the street yesterday, and we were looking for places Where we could see how many places are near my house.
There's like fucking 20 places within a couple miles of my house that I can go.
And a lot of them, they just say collective on it.
They'll say West Hills Collective or fucking Dick Street Collective, whatever.
And they'll have a Red Cross.
And that's all you need to know.
And everybody knows that it's weed.
They have green letters.
Everybody uses green letters.
And they're everywhere.
And you go...
And if you have one of these right here, this is Brian's.
Let me see this.
This is a real, legitimate recommendation from a doctor.
And this, all you do is you go to a doctor and you say, marijuana helps me sleep, whatever.
And the doctor will give you one of these legitimate recommendations, a legal prescription in the state of California for marijuana.
And then you go to these places, and some of them you can pay with a fucking credit card.
It's the trippiest thing ever.
You buy weed with a credit card, and you're like...
What year is this?
It's 2009. But the rest of the country is still living in the dark ages.
Colorado is catching up.
Colorado has a bunch of places now.
Colorado actually is going to open up a medical marijuana restaurant.
And they're going to open up some 30,000 square foot weed superstore in Boulder.
If he was the sheriff of Aspen, that would have been fucking badass.
But one of the things that he wanted to have was that Any drug that you can take that is good enough to be taken should be legal.
And he's fucking totally right.
You know, if people want weed, people should trade things for weed.
You know what?
Fuck it.
You should be able to buy it if you want to.
But the problem with that is, you know, then you're going to get some really unscrupulous people that just want to sell pot.
You know, they just want to sell it.
And they want to make profit off of it.
And then it becomes like anything else.
They try to cut out the competition.
Like one of the weed stores that I go to, there's a guy right next door to him.
That opened up, like, I'm talking, like, right next door.
Like, there's maybe, like, one storefront between two weed stores.
And the guy's pissed off, and he's, fuck, this guy's a dick.
That's totally not in the spirit of, you know, what marijuana's supposed to be.
I mean, you're not supposed to be opening up right next door to a dude and killing his competition, but he shouldn't be like, fuck that dude, you know, what's that dude doing?
He's just another dude selling weed.
Yeah, he shouldn't be doing it right next to you.
Yes, correct, but don't be an asshole.
You're fucking selling weed, pal.
You know?
You ain't fixing the world.
Hunter S. Thompson is my hero, and I'm planting full sleeves of Ralph Steedman art.
Are you really?
Wow, that's a fucking good idea.
Stedman?
Stedman or Steedman?
I forget how you say his name.
Is it Steedman?
Fucking...
I love his art.
His art perfectly goes like...
What's the word I'm looking for?
Compliments.
Hunter S. Thompson's writing.
That guy just fucking nailed it.
From the very first time they worked together, when they did that, the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved, from that story all the way on to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that Ralph guy, he fucking nailed it.
He was hanging with Hunter.
He totally got the vibe that Hunter was writing.
He totally got where Hunter was seeing things.
You know, I just started getting into Hunter S. Thompson really recently.
I was, I guess, maybe a year and a half ago, I was staying in a hotel room in Seattle, and I ordered up Gonzo on the pay-per-view in the hotel.
Just because nothing else looked good, I said, fuck it, I'll just check this out, and I immediately became a Hunter S. Thompson fan.
I started reading his books and I'm reading the one I'm reading now.
This, behind me, this sign, is a point of controversy from the man show when I hosted it.
I know it was terrible.
Listen, we thought it was terrible too.
We got fucked.
When Doug Stanhope and I went to do that show, they lied to us.
They told us, you can do nudity, we'll blur it out, you can swear, we'll beep it out, we want you to go crazy, we want to get sued, it's going to be great publicity.
And then when we started doing it...
First of all, Janet Jackson pulled her nipple out and everybody went fucking crazy.
But what's more important is that you look at them and you say, that's like...
Those are...
That's like where food comes from.
It's not offensive.
But anyway, this thing behind us, Make Me Hard, this is how fucking stupid they were when we were doing this show.
There was an argument, and we came up with a game show called Make Me Hard.
And what it was is the guy would be strapped into a chair, and he would have this box on his dick, and a light would go off on the box.
And the light would indicate that he has a boner.
And so we'd have like midgets eating bananas and shit, and oh, he's getting hard.
You know, it was kind of corny.
But what we really, the reason why we did it is, one of the gags was we had this really hot chick, and she climbs all over him, the audience is going fucking crazy, they're going nuts, and this really hot chick, at the end of this, she pulls her tits out, he's sucking on her tits, whipped cream, the whole deal, and then she pulls her panties off and she's got a dick!
And the audience goes crazy.
She was a tranny.
And I mean, I've never heard a bigger wave of disappointment than when this tranny pulls out this dick.
And she was taking all kinds of hormones.
So it was like a dick that had been poisoned.
It looked like dead.
It was like dark.
It was dark and shriveled up like it burned.
Like chemically burned.
Like it was like a little dead monkey dick.
But it's smelling.
I don't know.
And she pulled it out, and she starts, like, swinging it around, and the fucking audience went crazy.
And the guy sitting in the chair just had this look in his face of horror.
Well, they approved all that, but what they wouldn't approve is the name of the show, Make Me Hard.
They said that we had to name the show, Make Me Stiff.
Like, this was, like, an argument.
Like, for real, like, there's a difference.
Like, they mean the same thing.
It's just Make Me Stiff doesn't sound...
It doesn't sound quite as funny.
It really doesn't matter.
I mean, what's the difference?
But the point was that they were willing to argue this.
It was a big deal for them.
And that shows you how these shows work.
The best shows, like stand-up comedians, like if you take a guy like Dave Chappelle or, you know, Cat Williams or anybody, any good comic that you like, they write all their own shit.
They write it.
They perform it.
They're saying shit that they think is funny.
They are the producer.
They are the performer.
They're the whole ball of wax.
They're the writer.
They're everything.
And that's why you get a pure product, because you get a product that's from this dude's mind.
Well, what happens is when you start working on a television show, these people that are working for the network, somebody has to work for the network, and you would assume that the people at the very top of the food chain are the perfect people for the job.
But that's not true.
They're just people that somehow or another got that fucking job.
And a lot of them, they like to think that they know what's good.
They like to think they have an eye for it, and they always want to put their footprint on it.
They want to put their handprint on it.
They want to change something.
I think the background should be blue.
We're going to ruin the whole show with this red background.
And they'll go crazy and they'll fucking fight over this.
Why?
Because they want to be the ones that say, well, it was me that decided for the blue background.
If they didn't go with that blue background, the show was shit, am I right?
And then the wife will agree with them and they all get fucking pilled up together.
This is what they argued over.
Make me hard.
So this is...
I got to keep this sign because it was useless.
Because we had to change the sign to make me stiff.
Like, it's okay to pull out your fucking dick.
It's okay to have a guy strapped to a chair thinking a chick is on top of him and this chick pulls out this wrinkled, poisoned, black dick.
That's okay, but you can't call it hard.
You have to call it stiff.
It's really that dumb.
It seems like I would be exaggerating, but that's why Dave Chappelle walked away from The Chappelle Show.
It's just because when you're a comic, having somebody else tell you what's good and what's bad.
There was one of the things we did in the Man Show where we wanted Joey Diaz.
If you don't know who Joey Diaz is, his Twitter is madflavor, one word, @madflavor, and Joey Diaz is one of the funniest dudes I've ever met in my life.
He's like one of the funniest human beings to ever live.
And Joey weighs like 350 pounds.
He's down to 300. But back then he was like 350. And he would always get naked.
We get naked all the time.
Get naked on stage.
And his balls literally look like grapefruit in an old lady's panty-o.
I mean they're fucking ridiculous.
And he doesn't shave them, but they have no hair on them.
Like he has no hair on his arms, no hair on his chest.
And he's fat as fuck.
And we wanted to have him introduce us at the beginning of every show.
He kicks open this door and comes out yelling, let's get this party started!
And his balls are jingling.
And it's fucking hilarious.
First of all, it's hilarious because Joey's hilarious.
Doug Stanhope said Joey Diaz could read the phone book and it'd be funnier than most of the shit you see on late night TV. And that's totally true.
But they were like, that's not funny.
What's funny about this?
This is not funny.
No one's going to laugh.
It was like a big argument.
And I said, listen, let's do two openings.
We'll do one regular opening, and then we'll do one opening with Joey.
Well, we did the opening with Joey, and they went fucking crazy.
Of course.
Everybody was screaming and laughing and yelling.
And it set the tone.
The tone that we wanted to have.
Like, this is, we're just trying to have fun.
We're not, you know, we're not trying to be relevant.
We're just trying to have something that people enjoy.
Let's have fun.
Let's have a fucking good time.
But it was almost impossible to try to have that good time when you have other people that aren't necessarily funny at all.
And they're putting their input into what should be in this comedy show.
So Doug and I got fucked.
But the most important thing is that we had a good time and we came.
Well, we were always good friends, but we became great friends doing that.
He used to have the fastest internet back when internet was, you know, 28K, 56K. He used to have ISDN? No, I asked the ISDN first, then I got a T1 line installed in my house.
We got America that's freaking out because an ugly rich guy is getting a lot of pussy.
He's cheating on his wife.
He's cheating on his wife.
He's a black athlete.
Is that really a big shot?
It's ugly.
It's amazing that a guy like that, all he has to do is be good at something and acquire a bunch of numbers and he can fuck all these girls.
He's not even paying these girls.
It's incredible.
Because one of the girls was asking for money and he was like, I can't help you.
Like, he's not even paying them.
So he's this, like, billionaire dude, and he's banging these cocktail waitresses, and they're struggling with their bills, and he won't even fork over any cash.
unidentified
Like, how hard would it be for Tiger Woods to just slip her ten grand?
If it was a murder case, then of course he would want an autopsy, right?
The only way you die of natural causes when you're 32 years old is if you have a serious health condition or if you take something that kills you, which is pretty natural.
unidentified
I've read that a lot of her close friends stopped hanging out with her when she got married to that guy because of him.
I know a lot of functioning alcoholics and I know a lot of people that are just...
You know, just flat out drunks.
Especially comics.
You know, I've known a lot of comics that have had real alcohol problems.
Because they get free booze and they're out in clubs every night.
And, you know, alcohol gives you a liquid courage.
And if you're performing every night, you might be drinking every night.
If you're drinking every night, you're going to have a fucking problem.
Eventually that shit's going to grab you.
Conspiracy theories are only theories until proven fact.
There are real conspiracies.
Most conspiracy theories are stupid because people want to find the mystery shit.
They want to find Bigfoot.
Meanwhile, there's a bunch of real live animals that are way more interesting than Bigfoot.
If we found Bigfoot...
Bigfoot would be in a fucking cage right next to the monkeys at the zoo if we found them.
If we really caught them, they would be like, look, there's a big ape.
You know, we got the short ape, there's a big 10-foot tall ape.
Nobody would give a shit.
But, like, killer whales, if killer whales didn't exist and there was some animal that people talked about in legend that was as smart as people, lived in the ocean, but breathed air...
And had to come up for air and doesn't eat human beings, saves human beings, but kills everything else, including great white sharks.
A super intelligent being that's gigantic and murderous and runs the ocean.
People would say, fuck that.
That's crazy.
That's not real.
That can't be real.
But it is real.
We just know it's real.
And because of the fact that we know it's real, it's not as interesting to people.
People love mysteries.
We love discovering new shit.
Like the Loch Ness Monster.
Loch Ness Monster doesn't do shit.
It doesn't kill anybody.
It doesn't do anything.
Every now and then it pokes its head out of the water.
And everybody's like, whoa, I saw it!
And everybody gets crazy.
You know, meanwhile, there's fucking crocodiles that are real.
They're alive.
They're gigantic.
They're like fucking 30 feet long.
They can hold their breath underwater for like hours at a time.
They don't have to eat for a year.
I mean, crocodiles are fucking crazy.
They're literally dinosaurs that are still alive today.
They were exactly the same way as they are now hundreds of millions of years ago.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Everybody's looking for the Loch Ness Monster.
There's something that people really, really get into when it comes to conspiracies.
And I've been guilty of it myself.
I used to really be into UFOs and all kinds of stuff like that until I kind of realized what I'm into is the unknown.
What I'm into is somehow or another is if there's something that's unknown and I figure it out and I find it and I know it's proven and true, then somehow or another you gain something from that.
I guess you do to a certain extent if you can really prove it, but mostly what it is is this weird desire that human beings have for things to prove things.
So it's a very weird thing.
Conspiracy theories.
Everybody's always looking for all sorts of conspiracies that aren't real.
I know this also from working where I've had people like...
Like working with the UFC, people are always talking about the UFC wants this and Joe Rogan said that because the UFC told them to say it.
The UFC never tells me to say shit.
They literally never tell me what to say.
My job's the craziest job ever.
I'm literally the guy who speaks for this multi-hundred million dollar sports company and nobody tells me what to do.
I show up and they tell me what the fights are and I just do it.
I try to be professional as possible.
I try not to swear.
Occasionally, you know, I'll slip up.
With that, but I'm trying not to swear.
But all I'm trying to do is do commentary on the fights.
The only thing they've ever told me what to do is when they were trying to buy Pride, Pride fucked them over and there's this big thing going on back and forth.
They said, please don't mention Pride by name.
You can mention all the fighters, but don't mention Pride by name because they didn't want to give advertisement to that organization.
Which is totally legitimate.
Totally makes sense to me.
But they don't tell me, hype this guy up.
Talk about that guy.
Don't mention this guy's name.
And make sure you tell everybody, this guy, this is the guy we want to win.
There's none of that.
There's none of that.
Zero.
So I know that's a conspiracy that people think is real.
That's not real.
I know there's a lot of other ones that people think it's real, but there's ones that are real.
Yeah, there's a lot of people that would look at those things in the sky and go, what is that?
What are they doing?
Well, I talked to a pilot, and I asked a pilot about it, and he gave me a very simple explanation about how water going through those jets, those jet engines at a certain altitude with certain You know, weather conditions, certain moisture.
There's legitimate concerns about that HAARP program, where they're fucking doing things to the ionosphere.
For sure they're experimenting with weather, because we know that China has successfully created rain.
You know, they've done successful weather operations.
So there are absolutely real conspiracies, but there's a lot of goofy ones, man.
And the problem is, it's very difficult for people to, once they made a decision about something, like JFK, you know, Oswald acted alone, and people just get that in their head, Oswald acted alone.
It's very difficult for them to look at contrary evidence and take it into consideration.
It's almost like there's a competition going on.
They want their side to be right.
And people have a real hard time...
And our friend that we were talking about with the chemtrails didn't want to...
We were having an argument with him.
I was saying, listen man, you don't know...
The research that I've done, I'm like, you're watching YouTube clips?
Is that what constitutes research these days?
And he was convinced that chemtrails are real.
And I'm like, they make no sense.
And the other thing the pilot had that was a good point was he's a pilot.
He's like...
Believe me, man.
Pilots would be talking about it.
It wouldn't be something that's that easy.
You could just hire a guy to fucking spray every city in the world every day of the week, and they're going to keep their mouth shut.
Not to say that there haven't been some experiments where they've sprayed certain bacteria or certain colds over an area to see if they can get people sick.
Why not?
We know there's a thing called Operation Midnight Climax that in the 1950s the CIA ran fucking brothels.
They ran whorehouses in New York and San Francisco and they ran these things and what they did was they ran the whorehouse so they can do LSD experiments on people.
And so they unknowingly gave these Johns acid.
So these poor guys would go in there just to try to give their, you know, their hard-earned money.
You know, they probably, you know, didn't even have much.
Paid just whatever they had to get their dick sucked.
And they're getting dosed with acid.
Freaking the fuck out.
Probably already feeling super guilty.
Probably half of them were married and they're just cheating on their wives and they felt guilty about that.
And then they're dosed up with acid and dealing with the reality of the situation.
I mean, we know the CIA did that.
This is information that was released in the Freedom of Information Act.
You look it up.
Google it.
It's pretty interesting.
It's called Operation Midnight Climax.
And it's just one of many experiments that the CIA did unknowingly on American citizens.
Taxpayers.
And they've done it forever.
And that's how they do business.
And guaranteed that if they did this back in 1950, they're doing something like it now.
It's not like they changed.
It's not like...
All these conspiracies, all these things that the government's done, like Operation Northwoods, Operation Northwoods was a thing that they proposed in the 1960s, 1962, and this was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then vetoed by Kennedy.
What it was was they were trying to get people enthusiastic about a war against Cuba.
So they were planning on blowing up American ships, like real ships.
They were going to have mock plane crashes where they were going to blow up drones in the air and they were going to blame it on the Cubans.
We're going to say that all these people died and they were going to take the passengers and put them under false aliases and have pilots under false aliases.
And that pilot was going to give maydays and say he got shot down.
Look that up too.
It's really interesting.
It's called Operation Northwoods.
And this was a real plan that they had drafted in the 1960s.
That the Department of Defense drafted up and the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed and Kennedy vetoed it.
And Kennedy was like, "You guys are fucking crazy.
Like, what are you doing?
Like, you're gonna fake attacks in order to get people to want to go to war with Cuba?" And that's probably one of the reasons why they killed Kennedy.
You know, who knows?
But these are real conspiracies.
They're real.
We know that things are conspired on.
The real problem with conspiracies is nobody wants to look stupid.
And when you say that you believe something, like you believe in alien abduction, or you believe the government killed Kennedy, or you believe anything nutty.
We didn't land on the moon.
When you say you don't believe nutty things, people just automatically label you a kook.
Instead of looking at it and going, okay, what has the government done?
They really have dosed people with LSD without their knowledge?
I love that feeling where the truth just hits you.
You know, Anders Thompson was a fucking genius.
He was one of the very few dudes that really captured the angst of the 60s and the 70s, the Nixon era, and, you know, he was a part of the acid culture of the 60s.
He was a part of the culture, like, the San Francisco-Hate Ashbery movement, where it's like, everybody was doing acid.
All these people were, like, and good acid.
So all these people were, like, really coming together and they were really, like, releasing...
Their egos and their identity and kind of like losing themselves in a movement, in this hippie movement of the 60s.
Which seems like really stupid now.
We look at it and it's like, God, look at these idiots with their long hair and their stupid clothes.
But what they were doing was they were radically departing from the previous culture.
I mean, the difference between the 50s and the 60s is fucking gigantic.
The difference between like Buddy Holly and Jimi Hendrix...
I mean, that's another world.
I mean, that's not like a 10-year evolution.
That's an evolution that would have taken hundreds or maybe not even gotten there at all.
It's almost like they needed the drugs.
They needed acid and mushrooms and pot and peyote.
They needed all that shit and heroin to launch themselves from one...
One frequency to the next one.
And the 60s were a totally different frequency when it came to music, when it came to culture, and that set the stage for what happened in the 70s and the 80s and where the really crappy music that came from the 80s and Some of it in the 70s, but definitely the 80s.
What that is, is this consciousness, this incredible music where these people were really tuning into the art of it in the 60s.
More 60s music is classic fucking shit that you hear today and you go, God damn, that's a good song!
It's like they really figured out how to tap into the real shit, you know, the real energy that makes art interesting, that makes art resonate.
And I think they did it with drugs.
And I think that the decline in the 70s and certainly in the 80s was because there was like a void left where this...
Tuning in, this connection to the real pure source was gone.
It's like whatever they had hit, whatever frequency they had nailed in the 60s, the echoes of it had died down by the time the 80s hit.
I think Hunter S. Thompson had a fucking brilliant story that he wrote, a brilliant...
That he wrote, The Wave, talking about how the 60s was like a wave and that when the 60s ended you could see where the wave broke back, like where they thought that people could be, like where they saw the true potential of humanity, of the United States, of the human race in general, and you saw it just roll back and go back to where it was.
And that's what it was between the 60s and the 70s, you know?
And he nailed that shit better than anybody.
Hunter S. Thompson's words today, still, when you look at, like, especially what was going on with the Bush administration, and what was just, like, the clearest evidence ever of massive amounts of corruption in government, where, you know, it's, I mean, they got us into a war that made no fucking sense.
I mean, and it was obvious, like, across the board.
The internet was, you know, up.
Information was being, you know, very easily transferred back and forth, and yet it still managed to go through.
And the way he felt about the Nixon administration, I mean, you literally could substitute Nixon for Bush and then insert most of the shit that he said into the early 2000s.
Raw sound?
Does it sound shitty?
What do you think about doing a radio show of my own?
I would love to do a radio show.
The only problem is I don't think anybody wants to pay me to do a radio show.
I might have to do a radio show like this because right now, I mean, Adam Carolla has a suite set up where he does podcasts and he gets a lot of people to listen to it.
And that might be the way to go.
Because satellite radio is struggling financially.
And, you know, some people make money from it.
Like, you know, obviously Howard Stern makes a lot of money from it.
And I think Opie and Anthony make good money from it.
But they don't want to pay anybody else.
They're not making money.
So they don't have the money to give out.
So I think if I'm going to do any sort of...
Let me turn that up.
Does it work?
Is that any better?
Is that louder, anybody?
If I'm going to do any sort of a...
A podcast or something like that.
It's gonna be this.
It's gonna be like this.
And I saw Soulja Boy do it.
So I was like, yeah.
unidentified
Remember that video of Soulja Boy and the guy in the background with his gold necklace?
I used to play pool 8 hours a day, more even sometimes.
I used to get addicted to video games.
That's why I'm scared of golf.
I've never played golf.
I'm terrified of that shit because I know dudes who play golf.
They sit around all day and practice fake swinging.
They get addicted.
And I get very badly addicted to games.
So I try to leave my addictions to things that benefit me now.
Like pool.
I like pool.
I don't play as much as I used to.
I just fuck around with it.
But, like, jujitsu and stand-up comedy, I try to be more...
I try to be addicted to things that are beneficial to me instead of things that are just going to, like, eat up all my day, which is what pool used to be for me and what video games used to be for me.
I used to have real fucking problems.
Thank you.
I'm glad you enjoyed the drawing.
I Twittered a drawing that I made when I was...
I think I was, like, 18 or 19 years old.
I used to want to be a comic book artist.
Red Dragons.
Indeed.
Red Dragons.
unidentified
Have you seen the new preview for the new Karate Kid movie?
Man, I don't know if there's anybody at 155 that can fuck with BJ Penn now.
Now that BJ's taking everything super serious and training like a dedicated athlete, he's a destroyer.
At 155, there's nobody that's even close to him.
I mean, no one's even in his frequency.
He's in the Matrix right now.
There's certain dudes that get to a certain point...
With confidence, with experience, with skill, technique, and then you add discipline and conditioning to that, they get to this crazy place that very few people can reach, this crazy high air.
And that's where BJ Penn's at right now, right?
Anderson Silva, too.
He's another one.
He's just in this air that nobody can fuck with that.
But, you know, there's such a gigantic gap between these guys that have fought in these smaller organizations and the guys at the top of the food chain.
And you see, like, with Fedor Emelianenko, like, it takes so many years for a guy to become, like, the Fedor of today.
And Anderson Silva's a perfect example of that.
Like, Anderson Silva, when he's fighting in Pride, I mean, he got submitted by Rio Chonan, uh, Takassi got him in a mounted triangle.
Dudes were beating him.
Dudes were submitting him.
He knocked out Carlos Dundon, but he just didn't look like the Anderson Silva of today.
And he had to have those fights.
He had to have those losses.
He had to get better.
He had to rise.
He had to really get his shit together, really focus on his jiu-jitsu and really become black belts on the ground so he had this full package so that he was totally confident in throwing his strikes because he didn't worry at all about being on the ground.
And that's the Anderson Silva that you have now, this fully complete fighter.
But we had to see him evolve.
It took a long time for him to become the guy that he is today.
It takes a long time to make a full, complete mixed martial artist.
These guys today, the competition is staggering.
There's so many fighters now.
There's so many different organizations, so many fighters, and so many guys are good.
It's so hard to advance and to make it to the very top of the food chain in today's mixed martial arts world.
I mean, there's so much fucking competition.
It's amazing.
I mean, when I first started doing the UFC, I first started working for them in 1997, and it was tiny.
We did the first show in Dothan, Alabama.
There was nobody there.
I mean, there was like a thousand people or something like that, and it's because the tickets were really cheap, and because people came to see a fucking freak show.
There was nobody there that knew when someone was passing the guard, and nobody passed the guard back then either.
You know, nobody knew what the fuck was going on.
Nobody knew, you know, that leg kicks were, you know, really bad for you.
They'd fuck your legs up.
People would see a guy kicking somebody in the legs like, why is he doing that?
You know, like, back then you were allowed to punch people in the balls.
If you want to know about flotation tanks, these are...
What this guy's asking about is a thing called a sensory deprivation tank.
And what that is is there's a tank filled with water.
If you haven't heard about this before, you can Google it and there's videos that we made that you can find online that Brian made.
If you see any of my videos from my website, and you go, wow, those are fucking really cool and creative.
This guy makes something.
That's Brian Reichel.
He's a fucking video genius, bitches.
Recognize.
And we made a really cool one that explains the isolation tank.
But what it is is a tank of water that has 800 pounds of salt in it.
And the water is heated to the same temperature of your skin.
And the salt makes you very buoyant, so you lie in the water and you float.
And the fact that the water is heated to the same temperature as your skin, you don't feel it.
So you're floating in this water.
You don't really feel the water anymore because the water and the air and everything, it all feels like one thing.
It feels like you're weightless and you're flying through space.
And when you close the door in this thing, you're in total darkness.
You're in total silence.
Your ears are underwater.
You don't hear anything.
And in the absence of any sensory input, you don't hear anything, you don't feel anything, you don't see anything.
In the absence of all that, your mind has no distractions, and your brain becomes supercharged, and you start having vivid hallucinations, and you start, like, it's really like a psychedelic experience.
You really start, you start, like, really, like, researching, like, your thoughts and getting to the heart of who you are, separate from culture, separate from language, separate from You know, your experiences.
You get down to who you are.
And then when you get to that, once you get past that is when the hallucinations start.
Because you kind of cease to exist as you define yourself as who you are by your job, the car you drive, the house you live in, the family you have, the friends you keep.
You define yourself by all these different things.
But when you're in that tank, all those things are gone.
There's no outside world.
There's just the mind.
It's the mind untethered from the body.
And when you're in that state, You kind of transverse.
You kind of travel between this consciousness and this reality to another one.
You travel outside of this world.
And you travel to the world of the deep inner thoughts.
The deep inner connection between whatever the fuck this life is.
The connection between your consciousness and the universe.
And it gets pretty fucking crazy.
I have one of those bitches in my basement.
I do it all the time.
Is it like a really great power nap?
No, it's not like a really great power nap.
It's like a really great mushroom trip.
But the best thing about it is you can end it at any second.
Anytime you want to end it, you just open up the door and you're stone cold sober.
So you can be in this deep trance where you're...
I've had really vivid, vivid hallucinations in there where I felt like I had traveled down to the very atomic structure of human beings and gotten through the lowest point.
And at that lowest point...
As you get lower and lower and deeper and deeper, it became like another universe.
And the idea in my head was that all of this life that we see, you know, subatomic particles to atoms to all these things, like this progression of things getting bigger and bigger and bigger to humans, to countries, to continents, to planets, to planets, to galaxies.
To galaxies, to universes, and this idea that things just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, well, it works infinitely in both directions.
It was like I was taken on a trip through the whole experience, from subatomic To atomic, to planets, to flying through space, to space being subatomic, to this new atom that exists, and it's a part of new organisms that exist, that are part of a new ecosystem that exists, that's a part of a new planet, that's a part of a new galaxy, that's a part of a new universe, and it goes on and on and on.
And I went through this whole thing over and over again, like multiple times, and it was really fucking crazy.
It was very, very vivid and very realistic and very, you know, very life-changing.
The whole thing is like doing it a lot.
You've got to do the isolation tank a lot and you've got to learn to relax and you've got to learn to give in to the experience because so many times when you're in there, you're thinking about things and you're worrying about things and you think about your bills and your bullshit and, you know, I'm going to lose weight and I've got to do this and all those thoughts Distract you.
It's like the state of mind that you can achieve in this isolation tank is very similar to the state of mind that you can achieve from, you know, when monks go through, you know, decades and decades of intense meditation.
Like they achieve the same type of state of mind, but you're achieving it like with no discipline.
So it's hard to manage sometimes.
But if you can learn to manage it and if you learn to go in with the correct thought process and to approach it the right way and maybe meditate before you go in and calm yourself and put yourself in a good state of mind and know how to navigate the waters of these experiences, then you can get to the crazy part.
The crazy part is hard to get to but it's there.
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We should ask them which sounds better and switch between the three.
You can still buy tickets, but get them quick because that bitch is going to sell out.
Maybe we'll add an 8 o'clock show.
I don't want anybody to get shut out.
And sometimes 8 o'clock is the move.
You go there, have a show, have a good time, get your freak on, have a couple laughs, and then go hide when it comes to midnight so you don't get bullets dropping on your fucking head from all the douchebags out here like to fire guns in the air and get crazy.
The one thing that I won't do anymore is I used to do the House of Blues and I had most of the people were seated but then there was all the standing room in the back.
The problem is that standing room by the bar just becomes a bar and people just start talking and it becomes a fucking nightmare.
So no more shows.
I'm not doing any more shows ever anywhere where people have to stand out while they're watching the show.
And the reason being is because I went to see Doug Stanhope when he was in LA. And we went to see him and we're standing in the back of the room.
He did a standing room only show.
And it's like, after like an hour, your fucking back hurts.
Your neck starts bothering you.
It's not comfortable to stand up and watch a show.
I always figured, because I'm on stage standing for an hour, it's no big deal.
You can stand for an hour and a half and...
Talk on stage and it doesn't feel...
It's not a problem.
But standing still watching someone is a big difference.
Because I had a show booked in March at the Fillmore in New York City.
And they said that the whole balcony had to be standing.
I'm like, fuck that, man.
Give me less money.
Let's see what we can.
But they were like, you know, we can make more money if people stand.
And I was like, alright, you're done.
And so I canceled that gig.
And then the same thing happened in Houston.
I was supposed to do the House of Blues.
And the same thing.
They were like, well, you know, we need to have people standing in the back.
And I had it booked.
I don't know.
My agents are not communicating this to the people or they're not paying attention.
It's going through too many people before it gets to the person that makes the decision, but they wanted to have people stand, and I said, fuck that, so now I'm going to have to find a new gig in New York and a new gig in Houston, and I'm probably going to wind up doing the improv in Houston, I don't know, thinking about that, and maybe one of the clubs in New York City.
I think it's very important to call kids on being a liar.
I was a liar when I was a little kid.
This is what I'm saying.
I had a very vivid imagination and not such a good life, so I would always make up stories.
And I wish somebody had called me on my bullshit then, so it wouldn't have taken so long for me to figure it out on my own that people knew I was lying.
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I didn't figure it out until I was like 10. You would think Pinocchio would have worked, though.
You shouldn't, if you're a kid, first of all, if you're in college, you're going to want to be on that stupid show because you're dumb and you're going to want to be on TV. And it's not fair for them to exploit you like that, exploit your vulnerability.
They have this incredible access.
They can put you on fucking television.
Like the Jersey Shore, for sure those guys are getting exploited.
unidentified
Here's the question, though.
Some of the people in the show are blurred out, and regular cops and the show, but most of the time they're not blurred.
Please talk about ancient alien theories, he says in all caps, JG129. Please talk about ancient alien theories.
The big theory of the ancient alien theories is that human beings were manufactured and that they used genetic manipulation to take monkeys and add alien DNA to the monkeys to make people.
I mean, there's billions of them and they look very similar.
That's incredible that they managed to do that.
I mean, I guess they'd probably look at Europeans in a similar way, but the difference is with the blonde hair, red hair, and brown hair.
Europeans come in all different colors and sizes, but even, like, you go Korean to Japanese to Chinese, it's all black hair, it's all real similar skin tones.
I mean, goddamn, there's some similarities in the Asian cultures.
But that was part of the appeal of it to me, is that it was so off the grid.
It was so outside of the way a normal person every day gets to experience life.
I was living in the fucking woods.
Not just kinda in the woods.
I was living on 150 acres on the top of a mountain in Boulder, Colorado.
Outside of Boulder.
I mean, it was like 9 miles above Boulder.
It was pretty trippy.
8,500 feet above sea level and all sorts of wildlife.
Deer every day.
I was on a dirt road for 8 miles.
Every day I would see deer.
Every day I would see foxes.
Occasionally I would see porcupines.
People saw a bear.
I never saw a bear.
I saw a mountain lion in my backyard.
I mean, you saw a lot of shit.
Eagles all the time.
I mean, it was really intense.
It was so real.
It was so like...
You know, you're driving, you're seeing wild animals, like real wild animals, big fucking 10-point bucks walking down the street, you know?
It's very, very interesting.
It's just the fact that you can live somewhere like that.
I think people get stuck into patterns, and I think it's real easy to get stuck in the same way of thinking, the same way of looking at the world, and nothing changes that, like, moving to a new place for a while, and moving to a place that's as stunning as the mountains of Colorado.
I would love to go back, but...
It's just not practical to have a wife and kids and, you know, and have little vulnerable babies and being around fucking wild monsters.
I mean, my dog got eaten by a mountain lion when we were up there.
That's for real.
Like, we saw a mountain lion.
I let the little dog out by himself.
Dog disappears.
I mean, that dog got eaten by a fucking mountain lion.
You know, which is very likely.
And those animals die of predation up there all the time.
It's very common.
They even prey on animals.
They get used to them.
They get used to...
Recognizing and associating the barks.
Barks are these animals with prey.
And so they go towards where they hear barks.
So it's actually kind of dangerous when you have a fucking house with dogs barking.
Because sometimes these mountain lions, like if they're hungry, especially if they're old, and they can't catch deer anymore, they know these dogs are like in a cage.
I mean, look, it doesn't seem like it's a good idea, but what if someone breaks in your house and you need the gun and you just go like that and you've got the gun?
And that keeps you alive.
You know, there's that way of looking at it.
You know, there's a way of looking at it like, hey man, if you think that way, man, fucking nothing can happen to you, man, as long as you think positive.
You can think that way.
You can be one of those dudes that goes through life convinced that nothing ever bad is going to happen to you.
I think, yeah, definitely gun control is important.
You've got to definitely screen people.
You've got to definitely make sure that people can't get access to guns that are fucking crazy.
And that's the problem with a lot of gun shows.
There's a lot of people that sell guns at gun shows that don't give a fuck if you're licensed or not.
They're just trying to make some money.
There's been exposés on that where they've shown that people in gun shows will sell guns to people that are not really supposed to have guns.
But...
Guns are out there.
They're fucking out there.
There's millions of them.
You should have one.
If there's millions of guns out there, better to have it than to need it and not have it.
I'm an optimist.
I'm not a pessimist.
I believe that most human beings are good, but I've come across way too many fucked up people to have complete and total blind trust in the human race.
Once I get the internet to do it, I'll make it HD so you can see how ugly I am.
Like, that nigger's ugly.
Alright, what else we got here?
When or the next time I'm going to be you streaming Johnny Bananas?
That's a very good question.
I think what I'm going to try to do is...
My ultimate goal in 2010...
I'm trying to write a book right now and I've been spending a lot of time writing that and writing stand-up comedy and not so much time updating my website.
But I do go on Twitter because Twitter's fun for me and it's like a little exercise in writing to make things short, make them 140 characters.