Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan dive into MMA’s brutal past—from Charles Bronson’s cage-fighting lore to Raphael Torrey’s fatal choke claims—while debating modern fighters like Pacquiao, Duran, and Mayhem Miller. They pivot to Picasso’s $200K sketch heist, questioning criminal motives, then explore the Large Hadron Collider’s 11-dimensional theories and Ray Kurzweil’s genetic breakthroughs. Rogan slams marijuana’s illegal status despite its proven benefits for autism, contrasting it with alcohol’s unchecked harm. Concussions, addiction, and evolutionary urges tie into a wild Sheraton orgy story, ending with Rogan’s birthday invite to Callen at The Punchline—where Hicks once performed—before teasing nootropics and a chaotic Montana trip. [Automatically generated summary]
I was silent, but you were on, then I took myself on.
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It's always that character, that Charles Bronson dude who wants to live in the woods by himself and doesn't bother anybody, but the government has to go out there and fuck with them and he winds up killing everybody.
What is it that we admire about that guy who doesn't need anybody?
He told me a story 16 years ago about how Charles Bronson was reading a book in a bookstore, and this guy comes up and goes, Excuse me, Mr. Bronson, I'm a huge fan.
There was a guy named Raphael Torrey, and I've talked about this guy before, because this guy snuck through my crazy radar, and I realized that there was something wrong, and then it turned out he was a killer.
I didn't know.
I was around this guy.
He was a friend of a friend.
He was a friend of Eddie's.
And I was around this guy a couple times, and normally my crazy radars are really good, but this guy snuck right through it.
And he was such a pathological liar.
This is one of the things that he did.
He was a fake black belt.
One of the things he did was he had a friend drive him to this spot, and he said, I'm going into the woods.
You can't come any further.
I'm going to go to this kumite, and I'll be back in two days.
So his friend drives him into the woods, and then he sees him walk around and hide behind a tree.
And it's like, what the fuck is he doing, right?
So he kind of hangs back to watch, and the dude starts walking back down the road where he came from.
So the guy drives off, right?
He goes like, I don't know what the fuck his deal was, but he wanted to be dropped off in the woods.
The guy comes back two days later with a trophy.
He comes out of the woods, and he has a story about, well, I had to fight 50 men, all bare knuckle.
Some guys chose to have glass on their hands, some guys not.
Just had just crazy, nutty, fake cage fighting stories.
Yeah, that's the story, is that this guy was just this crazy pathological liar, and he wound up hooking up with this girl, and the girl was married, and he choked the husband to death.
So, in real life, when you choke somebody to death, instead of just choking them jujitsu style, you have to continue to choke them when they're already passed out.
There was one point in time when Tom Erickson was the scariest guy on the planet.
And he kind of missed both boats as far as like fame.
And a lot of people don't know about Erickson because of that.
But if you go back to when Erickson fought Kevin Randall and smashed him and knocked him unconscious, he was fucking really close to 300 pounds, corn-fed, just one of those big, crazy white boys, and a powerful wrestler, just a real good wrestler.
There's this guy, Fabio Maldonado, that's been fighting out of Brazil, and he just fought recently.
And this fucking kid is, he's got nasty hands, dude.
And he fought Kyle Kingsbury, who's like a serious athlete, 205. And Kyle Kingsbury was grabbing in the Muay Thai clinch, and he was just ripping hooks to his body.
And Kingsbury had to let it go, which is rare.
Most of the times when a guy gets you in the Muay Thai clinch and you punch his body, the guys can take it.
But he turns his punches over so good and he's so loose with them that just, bam, bam!
Like, there were just vicious body punches.
You see the difference between a guy who could really punch.
Like, if you got a guy like Manny Pacquiao and you gave him those little gloves...
You know, I remember when they There was an old interview, and you could probably YouTube it, where he's being asked by Brent Musburger or someone about his fight with Hector Macho Camacho.
He had some fight.
It was later on in his career.
and and you'd hear him say some stuff in like Spanish and and well I then interpreter would say because because Brent Mars but do you feel like you're fighting in an outside It's going to be hot?
Is the heat going to affect you?
Or do you think you're used to that against someone like Macho who moves around so much in a ring?
He's referring to Mr. Camacho as a homosexual person.
But do you think that you're fighting now with 10-ounce gloves as opposed to 12-ounce gloves now, and you are a harder hitter, and a lot of people say, do you think that's going to favor you in the fight?
Are you going to go to the body, you think, more than the chin?
He's still referring to Mr. Macho as a homosexual.
And then finally, I think it was the third time, whoever it was, he's still calling him a homosexual.
Well, anyway, that's Roberto Duran.
I guess we're not going to get anything out of him.
It's going to be interesting to see guys like Nick Diaz who are coming out of Andre Ward's camp and these guys who are really studying boxing.
And even though you have to know everything in MMA, which is what I love about it, you are going to get some guys who are going to become incredible boxers.
And I think that it's going to be an issue about you're going to have fights that last.
You can't have very good punchers.
You can't slip when you don't have gloves.
When guys can punch that hard, I think something's going to have to give there.
But Kongo is always dangerous to anybody because he's got some pop in those hands, dude.
He's the only guy to really hurt Velasquez, too.
And he's also very hard to hurt, right?
He's tough as shit.
He went three full rounds with Kane, and Kane beat the fuck out of him in that fight.
He's obviously durable, because Kongo caught him with some big punches.
Mir put him to sleep, but Mir got him in a guillotine.
Mir's guillotine's nasty, and he did it so perfect.
If you watch the way he locked it up, he cinches it up, he blocks off the neck with his left arm and squeezing with his right.
Mir is one of those guys, man, if he catches you, especially in the early part of the fight where he's not even a little bit tired, And you give up an arm or a choke or something like that, he's going to break your neck, man.
For the last five minutes, I've been thinking about that.
And you're like, you know, like you said, beautiful body.
You said you should see his, if he gets a hold of you on top, you know, you're, like, you just replay the whole thing, what you're saying, and act like you were talking about other guys, like gossiping.
Anyway, if you ever meet Mayhem, ask him to tell you the story about when he was in Florida and he ended up ninja-ing like six guys because he was dancing with a girl and the guy's like, are you trying to disrespect me?
He was like, no, I'm not disrespecting.
The guy's like, and he throws a punch and Mayhem basically goes, hey, get!
With an elbow, get!
And knocks him out.
He goes, I gotta get out of here.
He goes out there and like six guys come out.
He's like, uh-oh, here it goes.
They had no idea what they were getting into.
It's like...
It's like a bunch of, you know, coyotes coming in on a pit bull or something.
Well, what people don't understand the difference between a professional fighter and a regular human being is this is something they're doing every day, all day, for hours.
And mayhem doesn't take time off.
He doesn't get fat.
If mayhem doesn't have a fight going on, he's still training.
He's still doing jujitsu.
He's still doing his boxing.
He's still doing everything.
It's literally like trying to have an argument with a guy and all you have is a book on the language and he's fluent in it.
I don't think so, mainly because it depends on how he reacts to it.
But if you're older now, first of all, nobody wants to see him as an action hero.
Number two, you know, look, I understand infidelity.
I can understand as a man, you may stray.
Let's all be respectful.
Let's all be forgiving, etc.
Okay?
Not that I've ever had thoughts like that, but the point is that if you're going to funk the housekeeper, first of all, that's outrageous, but I'll give it to you.
The whole thing of doing it is you're not even supposed to be doing this and she's sucking your raw cock and you just look at that fucking housekeeper pussy.
That was kind of a weird movie for Sylvester Stallone, where it was kind of like he played a little chubby.
I think if Arnold does a movie like that, where he plays a character that's kind of down on his luck, coming back, kind of like a dirty cop or something like that, I think he could do it.
Yeah, when he's angry and he's like, this is all he's got in his house and Bert's around there and he's yelling and screaming, that was so fucking real!
Yeah, it's like when he gets his shit together and got up and starts drinking raw eggs, you're fucking, you start moving in your seat and you get goosebumps.
But I also think what happens is, like with Arnold or anybody, when you surround yourself, and it's almost impossible to avoid, when you surround yourself with an army of people that make their living off you, What happens, I think, is that, like anything, a politician who's been in power too long, you lose self-awareness because everybody's telling you you're perfect, you're great.
They laugh at your jokes and everything.
You're the emperor.
And I think that the biggest trapping of that kind of fame is that you start to drink the Kool-Aid.
You keep playing the same note over and over again because people keep telling you it's great.
And instead of like actually putting yourself back in the real arena, which is competing with what's really going on and having people really give you real critiques.
You know, I was in an acting class and Burt Reynolds showed up and he did some scenes in class.
And I thought to myself, Burt Reynolds at 70, whatever, is still not only doing scenes in class, but kind of failing in front of people and having a teacher critique his performance.
When you say aggressive gay man, for a while I never knew that crystal meth was so popular in the gay community.
I had no idea that meth and amphetamines and speed and And amyl nitrates and a bunch of like really crazy chemicals were so prevalent in the gay community.
So I would occasionally run into dudes that were gay, especially around West Hollywood, near the comedy store, that had this crazy fucking look in their eye.
They were like really obviously gay.
I didn't know they were hopped up on drugs.
So in my silly 25 year old just moving to LA mind, I was like, wow, there's a certain look that some of these gay guys get when they're really crazy.
It's like an animal of prey that sees, like if you put a cow in a, not an animal of prey, not that a cow is an animal of prey, but like if you put an animal of flight in like a stall and there's a piece of like a string hanging that it hasn't seen, they won't go in that stall.
And you have a very good eye for something that's like that sharp F, like there's music and all of a sudden somebody comes in with a horn like, you know, you're like, that's something weird.
You pick up on that stuff better than anybody I know.
When you say smell, that's a thing that they believe about psychosis, about some psychotic behavior may actually be triggered by pheromones.
And literally, you put out a certain smell, and this is all theoretical, and they really don't exactly know what causes some people's psychotic episodes.
But they think you put out a certain smell and then people smell this and they're put off by you.
And so people are acting weird with you.
So you think, am I weird?
And it starts this chain reaction that literally can make a person slowly go crazy.
We know the worst thing you can do to a person in prison is to put them in solitary confinement and leave them alone with their own thoughts without interacting with people.
I think people vibrate at the wrong frequency sometimes.
Sometimes.
They're jerking differently.
And your body, there's a book, I mean, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that book, Blink, about that, where a human eye can pick up a massive amount of information.
Did you ever hear, did you ever read that book?
He uses an amazing example of, there was this, the Getty Museum paid a fortune.
A fortune for a statue that was a young Greek boy.
It was called a Kouros.
And they found the statue in Greece, fully formed.
And they were like, whoa, this statue is like, I mean, they had never found something.
And it was worth a fortune.
And the Getty was going to pay something like $300 million, some crazy amount, $30 million, whatever it is.
And it was a lot of money.
But the thing is, the Getty kept running these tests on it.
And this guy, the guy who was the creator, the first thing that came to his mind, he said, when I saw it, there was something off.
I said, what was it?
He said, the first word that came to mind was fresh.
When I saw it, it looked fresh.
He said, and if something's been in the ground for 5,000 years, it shouldn't come out looking fresh.
So they ran all these tests.
They dug into the marble really, really deep.
They took the mold on the actual marble to see how old it was.
And they did all these tests.
I mean, literally spent a year testing it before they bought it.
Okay?
So now, they buy it.
And they put it on display.
I believe they brought it to Italy.
It was a traveling exhibit.
And the minute they were setting it up to show, as they pulled it off, I believe, if you guys are listening and you read the book, it's been a while since I read the book, but for the story's sake, the curator of that museum, the guy who's the expert, they lifted the veil to show how they were going to present it.
And after all these tests, he stopped and he went, he goes, Did you guys pay for this already?
And I go, yeah, what are you talking about?
Oh, no, no, can you get your money back?
No, no, this is a fake.
This is a fake.
And I go, what are you talking about?
And he picked up on it.
He picked up on what everybody else picked up on it, but they were so excited that they actually found this thing that they didn't want to believe it.
And he said, if you have to test for a year on the authenticity of something, All of you guys, all of your experienced minds were telling you right away, there's something wrong here.
They had people come to his office, to a psychiatrist's office, and when they mentioned the words orange, Florida, and raisin, People left the office much slower than they did otherwise.
Why?
Because when you mentioned orange, Florida, and raisin, people thought of old people, retirees.
And so young people would actually leave the office, they would walk down the hallway leaving the office much slowly, a lot slower than they did when they didn't hear those words.
So what you hear What is suggested to you has a profound effect on your physiology, not just your mind.
And he uses so many incredible examples of this, I can't even tell you.
It's incredible.
So if you guys are listening, the book is called Blink, and it's outstanding.
I've always felt like there's more senses than we can totally define because there's a sense when someone's lying.
There's a sense that it's very difficult to describe deceptive language because if you looked at it on a computer, the timing seems to be pretty similar.
I mean, if someone's good at it, their timing is pretty similar to someone who's being honest.
I've always wondered if that goes off, though, if you're nervous.
Because you've ever been innocent of something, but someone thinks you're guilty, and when you're describing what actually happened, it sounds ridiculous.
You would think, though, you could easily throw it off by just, like, every time he asks a question, you just think of something like, my dog dying or something like that.
There's, like, they know that people do that, so there's tactics in order to, like, to trip you up with questions that kind of will fuck with your emotions.
Well, you've got to let the guy who's selling it make a big piece of the pie.
That's what you've got to do.
If you got something like that and stolen and you're smart, what you would do is you would go to someone and say, listen, man, we both know this thing's worth $200,000.
I don't think criminals like that do it for the money.
I think criminals do it for the juice.
I think that, you know, we all have, some people have to get drunk, some people have to get, you know, they have to do blow, other people just have to do crime.
If this was just jiu-jitsu, if MMA was just jiu-jitsu, like, see, he's one of those guys that really became an MMA fighter as a jiu-jitsu champion and had to learn everything else from scratch.
And, like, when he first, like, first fought Olofsky, like, you look at that fight, he, like, had no striking.
Even when he fought Alistar the first time, had very little striking.
He just wanted to get guys to the ground, and when he got Alistar to the ground back then, he submitted them.
It's a shame that there's not, like, professional jiu-jitsu and professional wrestling.
Dude, you can't tell me that if you didn't get someone to explain it correctly, you get some really passionate wrestling champion guy to explain it correctly.
Pool is what you're doing with pool is you have a slippery surface of a fast Simonis 860 cloth, right?
It's not even like felt.
People think of it as felt.
But it's a cloth, and the balls roll very nice and smooth and even on that.
And the balls are all waxed and cleaned, and they all weigh the perfect amount of weight.
They all weigh the same exact weight.
And these balls, you're colliding one ball into another, trying to send it into a very small space.
You know, usually in pro tournaments, it's four and a half inch pockets.
So you have very little room for error.
And you're calculating the exact distance, the amount of rotations that ball is going to make on this slippery cloth to get your ball in the perfect position for the next shot.
You know, on that, speaking of balls colliding into each other, you know what that collider actually, that super collider in Switzerland actually does?
The string theory, this notion that there are other dimensions where matter goes, right?
And so when they collide these things together, within this chamber, when these two atoms, I guess, or is that what they're going to hit them at?
When they collide, they give off debris.
They give off energy.
If that energy If part of that energy isn't there anymore, that would prove that those tiny particles that are actually smaller than quarks are going somewhere else, and that's how they're trying to prove that there are other dimensions.
And string theory is based on this notion that at the end of it, the very smallest particles are all these sort of vibrating circles of light.
And those are so small that they can fit into different, I guess, dimensions of where...
And the idea behind string theory is that you have Newtonian reality, which is the reality you and I live in, which is gravity and everything else.
And then you have the subatomic reality, which is whenever you get into the subatomic world, a lot of times the very laws that govern us are, in fact, the opposite.
Light bends, gravity collapses on itself, all these things that I don't know about, but I mean, they'll talk about.
String theory is what Einstein called this unification theory, this one thing that brings all of it together so that you have one theory that can explain how the world really works.
It's like what we discussed when we were talking about fighting an MMA fighter is literally like trying to get in an argument with someone and all you have is a language book for the average person.
They speak the language of mathematics and they've been speaking this language for decades and decades and they go deep, deep, deep into the rabbit hole.
It's all, well, because mathematical theory, which is where you go, is all imagination.
You know, you see these guys sometimes, and they're actually really like, you know, this one dude's working on the particle collider, he gave this lecture at Ted, young, really good-looking kid, like, dressed, like, with these awesome clothes, and just kind of like, jeez, you don't get laid, do you?
And yet he's this brilliant physicist, like, brilliant physicist.
I put up something on my Twitter yesterday about a 3D printer.
And it was on a television show.
There was a video of it on LiveLeak and this 3D printer, this guy takes a wrench and they put the wrench into a copier and the copier looks at the wrench and figures out how the wrench is built and then makes it out of resin.
Makes it out of this incredibly hard resin where you can actually use it as a fucking wrench.
So this thing literally physically made this wrench with moving parts and prints it all in one piece.
It's so genius.
You know how a wrench has that thing in the middle where you have to screw it with your thumb to adjust it?
Well, it made that all in one printing.
And it made that part that screws with your thumb a different color.
In Transcendent Man, what they were talking about, basically, that we are going to mesh with machines, there's no question, and our biology is going to die off.
As you make eyes that work better, as you make skin that can heat up, as you make, you know, your body is going to start meshing with biocompatible components that mimic and are, in fact, better than the very...
Material you currently live in.
And it's going to be a world where people are going to decide to go that way or other people are going to decide, you know what, I'm going to die with my old biological self.
And that's the same story with that guy, Ronald Mallet, the professor out of the University of Connecticut, that's the leading theorist on time travel.
His father died when he was a kid, and it freaked him out so bad that he dedicated his life to developing a time machine because he wants to go back in time and save his old man.
And this guy's like, no, he's in his 50s, and he's like the leading...
And not only that, he's figured out, at least theoretically, through his studies, that that would actually be impossible.
And that what's going to happen with the time machine, the current theory is that when a time machine is invented, What the issue becomes is then all time ceases to become linear because everyone from the invention of that time machine on to the end of time can come back to that moment in time and any moment in between and any time they choose.
So time loses all of its linear quality but only the moment the door is opened.
That's when it happens.
So literally the idea is that the way they describe it is you can't travel where there are no roads.
Once the road has been created from that moment in time on, time ceases to become what we define as time today.
The smaller ball is rotating within, around that, because it's created an indentation there in its own orbit.
So that little ball is now going around the perimeter of where that one ball is sitting.
It creates a vortex.
And that's how Einstein described gravity to a four-year-old.
He said, this is how gravity and time works.
And of course, the farther away you get from that, the less you spin or the longer it takes to complete one revolution, which means then that you get, as you go farther away, you don't age as quickly.
Like, what I'm saying is, if you went out and you were 30 years at the speed of light, and then you came back and everyone was dead, and, you know, the people that were children were old people, you would be the same age, but...
You would feel like you had only lived 30 years or whatever the fuck it was.
It's amazing how guys like Einstein and guys like Nikola Tesla, they live amongst you and I. But they literally couldn't be any further from the type of person, especially you and I. You and I are like mirror images of each other.
We always have been our whole lives.
When I first met Brian, I was on MADtv with his cup he's got right there.
And I was like, who's this fucking guy who's just like me?
You know?
Immediately it was like, we were the same age.
We were both ridiculous.
We were both like, I can't believe I'm in fucking Hollywood.
Yeah, the federal government has declared there's no medical, no, I forget the wording, but no valid medical use for marijuana, which is just fucking ridiculous.
We have a friend that has a brother that has, he's on the autism spectrum.
I mean, he communicates with you.
He's, you know, he's right there.
He's present.
But he's very, very shy.
And you give this kid pot, and you can noticeably see him relax.
And it's been known to alleviate a lot of the social anxiety and the weirdness that autistic people have in communicating.
It's a chemical that's going to affect your brain.
Maybe some people it affects them negatively, other people it's going to affect them positively, you know.
If you're going to tell me that if you look at the amount of damage just in money terms, and by the way in lives, that alcohol does versus weed, one of the funniest and craziest things that make no sense is that weed's illegal but alcohol is?
They change very slowly because when people get ideas...
Ideas have...
Ideas are really what move and change everything in the world.
And this goes back to these guys like Tesla.
When you think about people who are thinking of truly seminal ideas, like some people sit around and they fucking just sit around and think like up new constructs.
They change everything for the next hundred years.
What a privilege.
What an amazing accomplishment.
Like, what an amazing accomplishment.
I'm going to come up with, I'm going to change everybody in the world's paradigm.
I'm going to change how you live the rest of your life.
From what I understand with that marijuana thing, this is actually the third time this has happened where the US government has said, no, there's nothing good with this shit.
But it's good for us because now we can take it to the courts or whatever, the federal court, and go against everything they say.
So if they say, no, this doesn't help headaches, we can put the proof up like, no, it does.
Here's 5,000 scientists.
So this is actually a good thing that they did this.
The only reason why people would be going after marijuana in this day and age, wasting any resources on something that kills nobody, is they're getting paid to do it.
There was an article, there was a big debate about ethanol today and there's an ethanol lobby and ethanol is The problem with ethanol, you got to grow a lot of corn and it's not that efficient.
It's not that economical.
It's proven to be not.
We got only 10 million cars on the road that actually are flex fuel compatible, which means basically 5% of the cars on the road right now in the United States.
The reason you have lobbyists, and you always have had lobbyists, is because in the Constitution you have the right to petition your government.
The reason lobbying has become such a force and the reason politicians essentially are beholden to the NRA and these kinds of people is essentially because whenever you create, as the government becomes bigger and has more influence, which is what it's going to do as it grows, regardless of what side, right, left, it's not a right-left argument.
If something like this gets bigger, you are going to have industry that is going to find a way to influence that power structure.
How do you do it?
You hire people who have contacts with the government.
Either they work for the administration, whatever it might be.
But that's what happens.
So now you have a county, like Potomac, In Maryland, which is one of the richest, I think it's probably the third richest county in the world.
Do you think they manufacture anything?
No.
You know what they are?
They're all government lobbyists.
Isn't that amazing?
And when you try to go from Potomac to Washington DC to the capital, you'll be in the car for about two hours and it's about 20 miles away or whatever it is.
It's a parking lot.
Why?
Because they're producing anything?
Are they producing things you and I can use?
Nah.
You know what they're doing?
It's a machine.
It is a group of people from all different kinds of industries that live there 24-7 and do whatever they can to influence their congressman in their state.
That's how it works, baby.
And so when you start talking about government, understand, I've said this before, I always say it, regardless of what side of the aisle you're on, Government has two functions, to pass laws and to tax.
Do you need laws and taxes?
Absolutely.
The question is always in political philosophy, how much do you need?
And it seems to me that we're headed to a point where government's going to be 42% of GDP. Government is taking over so much.
So many people in this country are dependent on a government paycheck.
That's not the American way.
And I'll tell you something.
It means you're a bureaucrat.
Some people are doing good things.
They're doing good things.
But for the most part...
A country grows when it produces things you and I need, whether it's intellectual ideas, physical products, and we export those things.
And we need to stay the leader of innovation.
Innovation and ideas is what it is.
But when you have Potomac being that rich because they basically rely on the U.S. government, there's something fucking very wrong.
You know what I love about that example you just used?
In Health and Human Resources, there's a building in Washington where you can go down one floor and it's Health and Human Resources or the Department of Health.
And the Department of Health has a huge campaign to get people to stop smoking, and it's a good, noble program.
You go up three flights from there, or whatever it is, but it's in the same building, and you have essentially the Department of Agriculture.
You know what the Department of Agriculture does?
It pays farmers to produce tobacco because it's called a subsidy.
Interesting, isn't it?
So you got one floor that's paying farmers to grow tobacco because they have a strong lobby.
And then if you go down three floors, you've got the Department of Health, which is trying to get people to stop smoking.
You find me one business in the world that behaves that way.
But guess what?
It's the US government, baby.
And that's how we work.
And that's where your taxes go.
Your taxes go to stopping people from smoking with big, big programs.
And they go to getting farmers to grow more tobacco.
And that's why if you don't educate yourself on how the government works and what the history of expansive government is, you're going to pay a price for it out of your pocketbook and with your freedom.
And doesn't it seem like as the economy corrodes and they start trying to add more and more government jobs, people don't want to resist this because it does provide some sort of a tangible boost in the economy.
They've created two million jobs, but they don't tell you that these two million jobs are all census people.
The nature of human beings, in my opinion, you look at history, is to try to control other people.
I try to do it.
I try to do it with people I love.
I try to help them.
I'm trying to control them.
I tell them how to eat.
It's my nature.
I care about people.
So what am I going to do?
I'm going to try to get in there, and I'm going to try to educate you according to my paradigm.
Well, that's just my nature.
I'll never be any different.
The problem, the founding fathers knew that was part of human nature, and that's why they created...
Checks and balances.
That's why they created the nation.
This nation was founded on the idea that you are self-reliant, that if you're going to create alliances and stuff, they should be voluntary alliances, not government-mandated alliances, etc.
And we're headed to a point where people are trying to solve problems, and that means I'm going to pass a government mandate.
And what happened was during the Korean War, we decided to make uniforms out of alpaca and alpaca blend because they would be warmer because Korea is very fucking cold.
But guess what?
Those farmers, they're still getting paid to grow alpacas.
To herd alpacas, and you pay for it.
Now, it might be 0.1% out of your paycheck, but that's what goes on with the government.
In fact, I would argue that there's a huge movement to bring government, on both sides of the aisle, to bring government into a manageable, you know, to make it smaller.
Actually, every time you hear a politician now who wants to get re-elected, they all have to justify their spending.
And let me tell you something.
We are in dire...
I mean, a lot of government programs are being cut.
The whole Tea Party movement, which is a formidable movement in some ways, and Michelle Bachman and these guys, their platform is basically like, no matter what you say...
The government's too big.
Now, I have some issues with those guys, but I'm just saying that at the end of the day, they gained that much traction because they said, what the hell's going on here?
You ever, like, call a customer service somewhere and you know you're talking to a black guy?
Yeah.
That's how gay he is.
You know?
And I'm not saying that every black guy talks like that, but there are certain black guys that, man, you call the guy up on the phone, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but you know you're talking to a black guy.
This guy's one of those guys, you hear him talking, you go, that's a gay guy.
There's no doubt about it.
And he talks about barbarians and gay people being barbarians.
She wants to get rid of all porn too, which is hilarious, because then the rapes would go through the fucking roof.
It's one thing they've realized and one thing they actually believe could help child pornography, could actually help child molesters not have sex with children.
Scientifically, though, they're proposing that this actually could be a possibility because it's a terrible idea.
But you obviously could never do it because those kids in those videos are victims.
But regular pornography has been shown to curb rape.
Regular pornography in other countries is accepted, in Japan especially, that pornography and even violent things actually keep people from acting out.
There have been a lot of psychological studies about the fact that, you know, movies like Saw and stuff, there are less maniacs out there actually doing it because they can simulate, they can see it being done and get off on it.
There's a bunch of people in this country, though, that don't think that way.
That's one of the things about this world, is that, you know, there's people in this life that are at various stages of awakening.
And I'm not claiming to be any enlightened being, but there's people that have the benefit of having more free time, more open-minded friends, live in a better geographic environment where people think a little clearer.
There's a lot of people, though, in certain spots of this country alone, and forget about the rest of the world, but certain spots of this country, they were just in some fucked spot.
Remember like Dov Davidoff used this thing when he was in Jersey and he'd go to school and his mom would pack pita bread and he'd get the shit kicked out of him because he's eating pita bread.
He's like, hey mom!
Give me white bread, because I know pita's good for me, but it's not good for me when I get my fucking teeth knocked in for being a communist, because I'm eating pita bread, right?
That's why when you adopt a child, if she's a girl and she's a little older, and you put her in a new school, she has a much harder time making friends than a boy does when he's just around...
Yeah, but I think the reason that somebody gets beaten up when they show up with all this decoration is because you can't go hunting with somebody with jewelry on it.
It makes too much fucking noise.
If he's walking along with his bangles like clang-clang, my fucking deer are gone.
If you're shiny and you've got glitter on, why don't guys wear glitter and shiny shit?
That might also be you're trying to get the girls.
You're not working with us.
You're fucking showing off your tits and ass.
And you didn't get permission from us, motherfucker.
You can't walk in like the King Peacock.
Because then guys are going to be like, that guy's a fucking peacock, and I guess he thinks he's a tough guy because he's showing me his muscles, which is an affront to me.
Anyway, the point is he's swimming with great whites.
And all I can say, I don't want to ruin anything, but he's basically, without any protection at all, slowing his heart rate down and just in the middle of the ocean with a weight belt on, floating.
No oxygen, no nothing.
Holding his breath while huge great whites go by him and all he can see is shadows.
His mother was Jewish, so he was always obsessed with the Holocaust, but also his mother died very, very painfully and slowly of cancer.
When I met him, she was going through this terrible time.
It was very hard for him.
And he always, he became obsessed with suffering and with how to suffer with dignity, how to overcome, in my opinion, I'm speaking for him, but we've talked a little bit about it.
But Dave has read so much about the Holocaust and so much about "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl and those kind of guys.
He's obsessed with the notion of how one deals with all the suffering in the world.
He's got a huge heart that's happening. - So his facet, Fascination has led him into dealing with adverse situations, like really bizarre situations, like standing in that ice cube.
What's really crazy is that I've read that something, some ridiculous number, like after two years of retirement, 80% of NFL players file for bankruptcy and 60% of NBA players.
Yeah, what a strange way to go and live your life, to commit to being one of the most disciplined, hardened, well-trained, fighting, killing machines in the world.
My buddy hangs with those guys in Afghanistan, and he works with them, and I said, what delineates a Delta Force guy from a SEAL team or a regular guy?
Look, I've always said that that Tower 7 looks ridiculous.
It looks like a controlled demolition, but what the fuck do I know?
I'm not an engineer.
It might have looked like controlled demolition just because of the very bizarre way in which it was injured, that it was injured on the bottom floors, and that's what gave in first, and everything pancaked down.
It's very possible.
What the fuck do I know?
But it does look like a controlled demolition.
But that video, what I thought was most fascinating was all the buildings or the cars outside that had been blown up and on fire.
I didn't realize that that had happened.
I kind of thought that, of course, everything fell and collapsed, but I thought there was probably just this massive pile of debris.
I didn't realize that all these cars had been lit on fire.
You decided to tell this story recently at the UCB. I told the story at the UCB podcast and it was interesting because they're all a very nice group and very funny and talented group of people, but they probably not live the kind of sexual deviancy that I have gone through.
And so I just feel that.
They just seem like wholesome, good people, you know, that don't have just this deep, dark matter living inside their eyes.
And so I got up and told this story that I'm about to tell you guys about, essentially, my experience in a fucking orgy.
I've never told anybody because, you know, I mean, it's just like, I was like, I want to tell something that's a little outrageous because I don't want any secrets in my fucking life.
I just want to be fucking out there and I don't give a fuck.
I don't care what, really care what other people think.
I care what my friends think, you know, and my friends all know exactly who the fuck I am.
So I'm driving and I go, I hang on my first 10 balls, I can't do it, I can't do it.
Now I had listened, there was this thing where, you might have told me, Joe, but we were talking about a woman who was dying of cancer.
And they said, if you could do it all over again, what would you do?
And she said, I wouldn't do anything because it made sense.
And I was thinking about that when I got this phone call.
I was thinking, you know, I want to, I want to do, you know, you got to live your life sometimes and you got to have experiences and you got to fucking do something that kind of shocks and astonishes yourself.
And by the way, you don't know a guy out there who wouldn't want to fuck six girls at the same time.
So I hear that, but I'm driving and I, my first impulse, nah, I got to go get it.
I got to study my audition.
I got an audition tomorrow.
But now I'm thinking, holy fuck, these girls are You know what I'll do?
I'm going to drive.
If I see a 7-Eleven, I'll stop and get condoms.
It doesn't mean I'm going there.
I'm not turning the crime on, but I'm going to stop.
And maybe if I get another call, I'll get some...
Oh, look, a 7-Eleven.
I'm going to pull off, but I'm definitely not going in this shirt.
And there's no way.
I pull off and I go, oh, you guys don't have any condoms?
I walk in, I walk in, and I go, and I see fucking four of the hottest girls I've ever seen.
One girl's getting banged on the bed by some muscular dude, and then there's a dude who's kind of just standing off the side, not doing anything, with like a shaved chest, and I'm like, I don't like that guy.
He's weird.
He fucking looks all blue.
He's just been lifting a lot of weights and never did a sport in his life.
She goes, you've got to take your clothes off right now.
No clothes.
So she starts peeling my pants off.
She gets on her knees and starts to work me.
And as I'm getting worked by my old girlfriend, I got this porcelain doll mask on.
I look in the mirror and I look at my fucking doll mask and I go, this is the first thought, literally.
Not that my dick is getting sucked.
I go, That's weird.
My fucking doll mask is as white as my legs.
I gotta start tanning.
That's gross.
I'm like, I'm fucking gross.
And this one girl goes, yeah, you with the white skin and that doll mask and a hard-on, that's not creepy.
I'm like, oh, yeah, whatever.
So this really hot girl, who turns out to be the birthday girl, who happens to be the celebrity's wife, She gets down on her knees, and I get pushed over to her.
And now I'm getting worked by her.
But the thing is, she's really fucking good at it.
And I go, I'm going to go.
I'm not a porn star.
When a girl is hot as mowing me with a mask on, and I'm totally anonymous with a mask on my face, I'm fucking going to come.
Plus, I've got to come because I've got an audition tomorrow, so I want to get in and out.
So I'm like, oh, and I go, I'm going to fucking keep doing it, I'm going to come.
And the guy goes, and I hear, you're going to come?
And I look over, and it's a guy, I'm like, I think I recognize that guy.
I know him from somewhere, but whatever.
He goes, hold on!
And a video camera comes out, and it's right on the girl.
And I'm like, oh, really?
All right, I guess this is what it's like to do porn.
My knees lock up, and which, by the way, I never lock up.
And so now we're going to do the whole money shot thing.
And I just, it's been a long time and I just lose it, you know, right away again.
And as I'm, you know, coming, uh, I, I see Mr. Celebrity come running around with the camera and he comes around and he goes, Oh, what the, no, no, no, no, no.
Oh, fuck, honey.
Why'd you let him come so fast?
I wanted to film it.
And she goes, what am I supposed to do?
Stick my dick in his fucking...
Stick my finger in his dick?
Don't be an asshole!
I don't have any control of it.
And now they get in an argument about that.
And as they're arguing, I'm like, alright, thank you so much.
I mean, I don't want to get too detailed, but when I was single in L.A. and with a house and no worries and I was a young guy, I did that kind of stuff.
It's a funny thing to talk about though, isn't it?
It's a funny thing to talk about because when you start saying, you know, I banged all these girls, I banged this girl, you open yourself up to people getting angry at you.
It's taboo because when I was telling the story of the UCB, it was actually kind of an experiment.
I was like, I want to see what happens to this audience when I tell a real story about something that most people would never admit to because it makes you look to a lot of people bad or it makes you look like a pervert.
But I don't believe in that shit.
I don't buy it.
And anybody who knows me knows I'm just not hung up on that stuff.
I'm really not.
And I wouldn't change that experience for the fucking world.
Do you know what I noticed about, especially women, when, what I noticed about, I told that story, and there were a lot of women in UCB, women were really open.
Women were really, like, I had a couple women say, hi, I found that story really honest and refreshing.
Like, if somebody calls you about an orgy, if you don't turn around and drive home immediately and throw handcuffs on yourself, Anything else is a slippery slope.
You're going down that slope if you're a guy like me.
That story about getting a call like that is what a lot of us deal with on a day-to-day basis with our addictions, whether it's I'm trying to stop smoking, I'm trying to stop drinking, I'm trying to stop fucking You know, watching porn all day.
Whatever it is, people have these addictions.
I'm trying to stop meth.
I'm trying to stop heroin.
It's the same addiction, man.
It's the same impulse.
And so to suggest that I don't have some of that in me and that I, in the past, haven't acted on that is dishonest.
I think that that kind of behavior ultimately does two things, or a couple things.
Historically, it threatens, first of all, it's unsafe activity.
You can actually catch a disease and you can spread it.
So there's that.
I mean, I use condoms and stuff.
But there's this notion that historically, if you had sex with a lot of people, you came down with shit like syphilis.
And we have a historical memory of promiscuous behavior leads to really shitty diseases.
That's the first thing.
But I also think that a society has to have certain norms and certain rules.
Because that was always the way you were able to be more efficient.
I think when you had a credo that people bought into, it was easier to organize things.
It was easier to create a cohesive culture, a cohesive belief system.
And those are very human impulses and developments.
And so when you have somebody who decides, I'm going to follow my appetites, And I'm just going to fuck and be a real slut or a real, you know, a real dirtbag, whatever.
These are the words people use.
I think we all go, all of us rightly in some ways go, well, that's really indulging your appetites.
And nobody can sustain that because actually what leads to that kind of behavior isn't necessarily anything positive.
I think I know that there's a book I read called The Selfish Gene.
I know that a scientist...
I can't remember who wrote it, but I know that a scientist would...
I would suggest that genetic variation has both ends of the spectrum.
The need for sex is very strong in human beings.
I would imagine that you have examples of people who have a very strong sex drive and they're on one side of the spectrum and other people that are asexual.
And it just probably, you can chalk it up to hormones or whatever it might be.
So you think there's like some sort of a gap and then the average person working a 9 to 5 existence with some sort of staid behavior pattern that they have to follow throughout the day that these people have like a hole that needs to be filled.
There's no question.
And then the porn comes in or drugs come in or gambling come in.
And by the way, I'll tell you what need it probably fills.
We have needs...
We have a need for certainty.
We have a need to feel like, I know where my paycheck's coming.
I got a roof over my head.
I think we have a need to connect with people, you know...
But we also have a need, a lot of that behavior when you gamble.
Look at it.
When you show up in a room and six girls you've never met are there to fuck you or you don't even know what they look like and your heart's beating.
You know what you're really responding to?
Adventure.
Uncertainty.
The need to not know what's coming next.
And human beings have a very deep need to put themselves into the unpredictable.
Just as much as they have a need to be in the predictable.
But if you look at somebody who doesn't have anything that's unpredictable in their lives, what happens?
They get fucking bored.
It's why when you make all the money in the world and you've done it all, a lot of people get a sense of loss because there's no longer that feeling like Zoros.
Yeah, well Zoros, the rich, the multi-millionaire, the billionaire guy, He was a, I think, I believe he was a Jewish refugee, and he was 15 or 13 years old in Hungary as a Jew, and he was hiding from the Nazis.
I mean, he had to hide from the Nazis, and otherwise he was going to be killed.
And he said that in many ways, those were the most exciting, as terrifying and as horrible times.
They were also the times he felt the most alive, because he didn't know if he was going to make it till tomorrow.
And human beings, I think, have a very, very deep, deep need to be put in the unpredictable.
And there's a way to do that that's positive, and there's a way to do that that's negative.
And as you get older, like I am, you start to realize that going to orgies and that kind of stuff, gambling, those are not necessarily positive things to do.
Because you pay a price for them in some ways.
If you become a sex addict and you're chasing skirt all the time, you're going to pay a price in connection and intimacy.
I believe.
Yeah.
I've had to confront that in myself, and I've had to deal with that on a personal level.
And so you don't get away with anything in the world.
And the best way to do it is not to be too strict with yourself, to fucking be forgiving of yourself and others, to realize that we are all hanging on by a thread in one way or another.
You know, I've watched really good people try to quit smoking, and they can't fucking do it.
You can tell them they have weak character, but I don't choose to believe that.
I believe that they're just...
Fucking weak, like all of us, in one area.
Weakness, courage, intelligence, these are all compartmentalized skills, compartmentalized virtues.
Nobody is, you know, very few people are sober all the way through.
And if you are sober all the way through and you don't have any vices, you might be fucking too boring for me to hang out with.
Well, and you know, but let me tell you something.
When you start talking in terms of I better learn how to control it, you know, that's not how people control themselves.
The minute you start saying things like, I can't do that, not going to do that, like I was doing with that hotel room, I'm not going to go up there and fuck those six girls because it's wrong.
Well, I think you either need a different kind of philosophy, but I think more importantly when it comes to dealing with an addiction, I think you've got to substitute.
I think you've got to associate, you've got to figure out a way to associate that behavior with nothing positive, and you've got to be able to associate a different kind of behavior with something that's more pleasurable.
Yeah, because you've got to start eating better and you've got to start working out.
What they think is, oh my God, that means I'm going to have to sweat in a gym and I've got to eat better.
No.
All I want to do is show you very gently and slowly how much better you feel when you are in shape versus when you're not.
And once you feel the difference, you will slowly start to go to that.
And when you go back to your old habits, you'll go, damn, I don't feel as good as I did.
I gotta do something here.
And you'll try to get out of that state.
It's the only way I think people really change.
I really believe that.
I don't think you change with a gun to your head.
I think real change happens when you see and understand the difference.
And that can be taken to, I think, movements like Al-Qaeda's movement, this Muslim fundamentalism.
When you show, they have a really interesting program in Yemen, where they take these young, idealistic Al-Qaeda guys, and they get these Muslim scholars in a room, these really kind of smart guys who've been around, older guys, and they debate them.
They challenge them to a debate, and they go, what are your ideas on Islam?
You're on Islamic fundamentalism.
You love the Quran.
Let's have a talk.
Since I'm an Iman, I've been doing this for 50 years.
What are your ideas?
And they just dismantle their ideas mentally.
And a lot of these guys just go, I didn't know any of that.
Well, religion, whether it's Christianity, Muslim, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, can serve that function and has for many addicts and is a real place for people to kind of live.
I remember when I got into stand-up after I heard your album and that Voodoo Panani song and all that stuff.
Seriously, and I went home that day.
See, you don't know this.
I never told you this.
I'm glad I'm talking about this.
Because I listened to your album and I had to leave early.
I got out of there and you couldn't understand.
You got mad at me.
You called me up and you go, you just left without saying bye?
You just took off?
You know why I took off?
I couldn't handle being around you because I was so, not only inspired, but I went, my friend's doing something really special here and I have, I know I have something in me and I'm not living up to it.
And being around him is reminding me of the fact that I'm not living my fucking life.
And I remember you called me and you were mad and I made up some excuse like, I was like, I started telling you like some excuse and then I went, dude, I gotta be honest with you.
You fucked me up a little bit.
I said, that song and your jokes were so awe-inspiring to me.
And I went home and I started writing.
And so that's what happened to me.
That was a huge catalyst for me.
I went home and started writing because after I heard that song and after I heard those fucking jokes, you were coming to those...
Goddamn, this was...
I don't know how many years ago.
99. They were so fucking well-formed.
You were such a tidal wave.
It was like an example for the first time where I went, I saw an artist...
Just peak, come together, and just put out, the power you were putting out was so retarded that it was changing the whole fucking room.
And if you don't have that in your life, you gotta find it.
Either surround yourself with friends who do it, Go to TED.com.
Do whatever you have to do, man.
Find it.
It's out there.
And the beautiful thing about technology, and this is for young people, is that you can spend your time listening to music and reading about what Lady Gaga wore to the gym, or you can fucking open your mind to a whole world out there that is going to bite you in the ass if you're not ready for it anyway.
If you open yourself up to something beautiful and great and let that work through you and really be affected, be astonished by it, be scared by it, be brought to your knees by it, whatever it takes, you will find way more strength in that surrender to the beautiful than you will you will find way more strength in that surrender to the beautiful than you will And all of us, man, all of us had this notion to go, I'm closing myself off.
Everybody wants to win the lottery, but the lottery will fucking ruin you.
You have to earn the whole thing.
In order to be a real man or a real woman, you have to earn the whole thing.
And the crazy thing is to be the man, to get to that point, to be the man, You literally have to not ever be possibly the man because you have to get to this zen state where there is no the man.
It's all about the work.
It's all about what genius you're putting out is all about, whether it's music or whether it's writing or whatever the fuck it is.
It's all about finding that real pure place.
So there is never the man.
That's when the muse kicks in.
The idea of this all comes from somewhere else.
It's like, Maybe it is just an attitude that allows you to bypass the ego.
Maybe that's what the muse is.
It's just a scientific or a method of thinking that allows you to bypass the ego.
The last time he was there, he gave it to me on DVD. That's what's so amazing about being a comic is you're performing with such history in rooms like that.