Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell blend absurdity with deep dives—from space sex toys (Rogan’s Fleshlight joke) to psychedelic theories (Trussell citing Allegro’s mushroom cult claim), nuclear power as "demonic," and quantum physics vs. public apathy. They critique power structures (Clinton’s 456 pardons, Ali’s persecution) and institutional inertia, contrasting it with Reddit’s grassroots impact, while advocating personal generosity over systemic change. Comedy’s raw honesty and Rogan’s mentorship (like Ari Shafir’s rise) clash with festival payment disputes, resolved via "shit ping pong" forgiveness. Ultimately, their open-ended discussions fuel fan energy, proving niche curiosity can spark real connection—even amid chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
If you go to JoeRogan.net, click on the link for The Fleshlight, and enter in the code name ROGAN, you will get 15% off the number one sex toy for men.
Yeah, and you would fly to villages in Africa that were, like, afflicted with malaria, and you would go there and pay the villagers money to let them fuck diving.
The mind of a guy who jerks off all day and shirks his responsibilities It makes it so that you can easily shirk your responsibilities without feeling guilty Like before I would play World of Warcraft for like four hours straight and I'd feel terrible Now on Beta Brain I can play World of Warcraft for two days straight Shit myself, piss myself, no shred of guilt It's great stuff guys So you compartmentalize essentially Yeah, you just don't feel the guilt.
Could you imagine if that was the way the world worked?
If you, you entered into contracts, and, you know, as you, as you left, like, you would have to agree to be with this woman, or pay for this woman for ten years.
Well, you know, it's really good to do depression with your girl.
Because when you get through it and it wears off, it's like you get to really appreciate how good you have it when you're getting along great.
Because when you take depression, it's really like going through one of those life-changing experiences on weird African drugs that make you almost die.
You know, they have a bunch of those crazy drugs that they give, like jungle drugs, where you almost die.
It's so hard to separate yourself from, you know, from you and your needs and your ideas of you and what you want and what you want to accomplish or whatever.
Whatever you associate with you and the idea that you're a part of a whole.
Well, you can intellectually imagine it, but really being in that state, the only time I've ever truly been in that state was when I had taken a huge dose of LSD and was out in the desert, and I remember just having that fading away, merging thing where you're no longer anything.
You're everything.
You just merge into it all.
And I don't know how you would really function in that state.
I don't really know what you would be like in the world if that lasted longer than the amount of time an acid trip is, or a few hours.
But they do say that through meditation and through strict yogic disciplines, you can hit that place permanently.
And somehow that place is nirvana or paradise.
It's a beautiful way to be all the time.
But I don't know.
I've only heard stories about people like that.
Descriptions of people like, he was a corpse that the universe spoke through is one great description of.
Yeah, it's like when you look at him and, you know, people who are psychedelic enthusiasts, you know, you look at someone like him and you go, there's a guy, he made it through.
You have this contact, or whatever you want to call it, with some kind of either hidden interior realm or some kind of exterior realm that, as humans, our perceptual mechanism...
And when you smoke pot, all that shit comes to life.
And on top of that, you're just disoriented.
It's like surfing.
It's like surfing can be great.
Surfing can be like, I watch those guys when they look like they're having a great fucking time and I go, God damn, surfing looks like fun.
But you know when surfing doesn't look like fun?
When that wave comes over your fucking head and smashes you into the rocks and pulverizes your bones with a million pounds of pressure and you can't get to the surface.
There's people that are fighting reality every day.
And they often have like a...
Sort of a fake map of the world that they've devised in their head, and that's how they navigate.
They navigate through this fake map of the world.
But a lot of the little segments in their mind that they have associated with certain things and details, a lot of it is...
Delusional.
Because you're trying to protect yourself from your own failures.
Especially with men, I think.
Guys have these fucked up egos that are designed to make sure that you have a will to survive when a cheetah attacks or fight off another tribe so that your DNA stays intact.
That will is a fucking creepy thing, just running around through your vans.
Yeah, John Marko Allegro talking about how early Christianity was a mushroom cult.
And you go back and you look at the idea of when you're going to take communion or when you go to pray or when you go to the sacred place, you're supposed to forgive your brothers and your sisters because So the idea is, before you go into a psychedelic state, you need to, as much as you can, work out the shit that you're avoiding.
Because when you go into that psychedelic state, anything that you're trying to skip around, any of those aspects of your personality that need to be leveled or need to be Balanced are going to spring out at you in a million different ways that are really intense.
And if you're not prepared for that, then you'll have the bad trip.
And the bad trip is you hallucinate.
You can see crazy shit.
You'll look in the walls and see skulls.
Why are you seeing skulls, you know?
Why are you seeing bubbling skulls in the wall?
Well, you're seeing bubbling skulls because that's what you're projecting from inside of you because you're fucking scared to death.
You're scared to die.
You're terrified of letting go.
Your body doesn't want to die.
And until you deal with that initial thing, then all these other neuroses will spring up after that.
Your avoidance of reality, all the different weird ways that you're trying to avoid reality, which is essentially just trying to avoid coming to the terrain that you're on.
And the terrain that we're all on is fucking intense.
We're on a terrain where we are going to go extinct.
And, you know, who knows, depending on how old you are, you know, but depending on how much technology advances, between like 70 and 10 years, two years, one year, that's an intense realm to exist on.
You know, there's a situation right now in Fukushima, you know, the whole thing with the fourth reactor, they're terrified that if any seismic event occurred, like there's a zero chance of surviving a seismic event, and that they would have another blown reactor, and we and that they would have another blown reactor, and we were talking about it on the podcast.
And someone made a clip of it and put it on this website where it's like, and people were like discussing this, like this is a serious issue.
One of the things that I was saying was that we're going to have spots in this world because of nuclear power where for hundreds of thousands of years it's going to be dead.
Like, you have summoned a demon when you have nuclear power.
If you really stop and think about that, if a demon existed, and in his very presence, he was poisoned in the environment, no plants could grow, I mean, that is a demon by definition.
Anyone that gets near him dies a horrible, twisted death, that's a demon.
Yeah, this is something people don't understand with like cult talk where people talk about demons, like summoning demons and summoning spirits.
They take that shit literally.
So they hear someone saying, you know, I'll invoke these things to summon a demon.
And so then a lot of great movies have been made after the literal interpretation of that.
But every fucking day, man, not just on the grand scale with us summoning nuclear power, But in little ways, people fucking summon demons into their life all the time with no thought of how to get rid of it.
You know when people shoot heroin?
That's summoning a fucking demon.
You've been told by every single other necromancer who summoned that demon, that shit will fuck you up.
But people who do heroin, they always start off with, you know what, I'm just going to do it once.
I just want to see what it feels like.
Everyone does that.
And then you fucking end up under a fucking bridge with three cocks in your mouth.
You know what I mean?
All from summoning this one stupid fucking demon that has just destroyed so many people.
And heroin.
Demon's a great word for heroin.
Because it offers you something.
Because so many people, they say, oh yeah, fucking, uh, Jimi Hendrix, love this stuff.
Or, uh, Elliot Smith, listen to how beautiful his music is.
You can go on and on about the people who shot heroin and, like, made beautiful stuff.
So there is an exchange.
I mean, doesn't that kind of tickle around in your head?
It's amazing to see the traps that we set for ourselves in the world that are completely avoidable, but for some reason we always set these traps and then they smash on us and we go through this awful period and then if you're lucky you get out on the other side.
That kind of goes back to what you were talking about, this idea of like having that near-death experience or having this awful catastrophe happen in your life.
If you handle it the right way, You can become a million times stronger and better from that catastrophe.
People don't realize that, so they're always putting off what could essentially be the thing that makes them happier than they've ever been in their life.
I have a friend who, I guess he's like 60, and he smokes two packs a day, and he'll tell you, he's always making excuses, like, They've even said now that it's all either you have the gene or you do not.
So there's a lot of people that will smoke cigarettes and never.
I've been smoking cigarettes for 40 years.
Obviously, I don't have the gene or I don't have cancer.
I went to the doctor.
My doctor says, you look great.
You look great.
The doctor's looking at you and he's like, you smoke how much a day?
I mean, if you're a doctor, you want your people, well, if you're a real doctor, and it's obviously people that don't operate for money, you know, they operate because they love being an excellent surgeon or an excellent doctor, and, you know, we're not disparaging the medical profession at all.
Of course not.
But, if you were like some money-grubbing crazy doctor, but there are a few of those out there, right?
I've got fucking fillings in my mouth That don't need to be there because my dentist as it turns out was giving unnecessary So I've got like I got fucking what a monster and I When I was a kid, I just thought I naturally was always getting cavities.
Some guy drilling into your baby's head to try to make himself some extra scratch because he likes to be a big shot at a restaurant and buy a nice bottle of wine.
He went rampaging through that camp just killing fucking kids.
And over there, they don't...
They're not like the United States.
They don't have a death penalty.
So like, they're giving this guy a fair trial and they made a big show of the fact that we're going to do this.
There's not going to be some kind of...
A crazy, visceral response to this.
And so in the trial, the guy apparently is going into a detailed account of how he went walking through this camp and shot kids who were hiding from him and shot kids and how they tried to run and how he found some of them by thinking where he would hide if he was one of these kids.
And he's enjoying it.
He's getting off on it because he's a sociopath.
It feels good for him to tell the story.
So in these situations, sometimes I think, Has pacifism gone too far in this situation?
The guy clearly shot a bunch of kids.
Why do we need to discover his true motivation or what his real crime was?
We know what the crime was.
There's a bunch of dead kids because this guy went rampaging through.
Sometimes, don't you think you can go too far on the side of 100%.
Yeah, well, it gets to a certain point in time where you compromise your thinking every day, so much so for work.
You know, if you have to go in and every day you've got to sell vacuum cleaners, and you're a dude, I guarantee you there's some days where you don't want to go in and sell fucking vacuum cleaners.
You don't want to not swear all day.
You don't want to wear a tie.
But you've got to.
That's part of the job.
And so one of the ways to sort of keep that going, where you're extreme, is to make the whole rest of your life less extreme as well.
Yeah, it's a real problem because With corporations, I just learned this word and I really fucking love it.
It's called diffusion of responsibility, which is the idea that in corporations the responsibility gets so many people make decisions on things that no one person's to blame, right?
So you know in the corporation, somewhere in the corporation, not everyone's anti-marijuana, just a couple of cunts.
And you don't know who they are, but they got that in there.
They're all you know at some meeting they just got it in where other people didn't agree with them and they didn't speak up That's what's annoying about it.
You know that this is coming from just a few dipshits The majority of people have no problem with it fucking Nancy Pelosi.
The Walking Dead's got a really fucking good one that I... I could spoil a lot of shit to say it, but there's a lot of different explanations for it that's pretty cool, the way that the creators of these stories come up with, like, what it is.
Return of the Living Dead, they pop out of graves.
Night of the Living Dead, as I recall, the opening of Night of the Living Dead, remember it's in the graveyard and he's trying to scare his girlfriend and she's like, who's that man walking back there?
And there's some dude kind of walking far away.
This is when zombies couldn't walk fast.
And so he just kind of ambles up to the guy and like, It throws him down, the guy hits his head on a gravestone, and then she's like driving away in terror, but we never know if that zombie emerged from a coffin.
I think that was somebody who was like, I don't think, I don't think, yeah, first of all, you're not going to get out of a fucking coffin if you're a zombie.
I don't know, but I, like, for a long time, there's a lot of them.
And it's a, it's, the show is good.
I love the show.
The show gets a little too soap opera-like, but the fucking comics are just brutal, and just, if you, if you haven't downloaded them to your iPad, buy them, because they're fucking awesome.
Remember Dawn of the Dead in the fucking news studio?
Remember that?
It's all falling apart.
It's just starting to fall the fuck apart and people are trying to like rationalize what's happening and SWAT teams are going in and just blowing the shit out of people and all of society is collapsing.
I love that.
I like starting at the collapse of society and then going into the post-apocalyptic state.
I hate movies that are the lead up to the disaster where like...
80% of the movie is like the lead up and then you just get 20% of Apocalypse.
Because even the walking dead, they're trying to find food, but somehow, I guess they're on a farm and part of it, but they end up with some pretty nice home-cooked meals.
And it is entirely within the realm of possibility.
It's ignored, but it's entirely within the realm of possibility.
This is so fragile.
We have a house made of toothpicks and tissue paper, and it's on the edge of a cliff.
In relationship to how our civilization is set up and structured for longevity in this incredibly volatile galaxy, and this incredibly volatile solar system, just the planet itself, all the natural shit that can go down, and on top of it all the dumb fucking shit that we're doing, like nuclear power.
Go look at what the fucking Catholic Church did to our species.
This is where it gets crazy about the Catholic Church, dude.
The Catholic Church molested our species when they were in their teens.
When our species was just fucking getting shit going, the Catholic Church came in and just started torching people, burning people, killing people left and right, wiping out entire civilizations all in the name of Jesus and all of this from an interpretation of the fucking uh new testament uh which is paulian theology from a guy who never met christ and some people speculate uh the real disciples thought he was a liar called him a liar called the paul a liar
which is why when you look at the epistles from paul a lot of times he's defending himself he's like i'm not a liar i mean why would you say this to me because the real disciples were like hey dude who the are you so he was like a late night infomercial salesman there you go exactly and that shit got adopted by the roman empire because they wanted to go to war and they just were like yeah let's use this we're We can use this.
Let's figure out a way to make love your neighbor as yourself and love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul into going into the Middle East and stealing all their gold.
Let's figure out a way to do that.
Oh, I know.
Here's an idea.
I know.
There are heathens.
Let's go over there and kill the motherfuckers in the name of the guy who said, don't kill anybody.
I always look at this shit from the perspective of like, whenever you get to be in any kind of corporation, if you go to a high enough level, you realize that people stop following the same rules that everybody just followed.
Like I can remember, I used to work at this summer camp in North Carolina called Camp Pinnacle, and I can remember like, I went to camp there too as a camper, but I can remember at one point, I can remember at one point, At being a counselor and then like the people who ran the camp came during the time when all the kids are supposed to be taking naps to my cabin like hey come on and then we went out in the lake and just floated on inner tubes and I was like fuck this is breaking all the rules but it's the people running the camp breaking the rules so it's totally cool Wow.
But that's a tiny, tiny, micro example, but it's the same thing all over the place up top, where it's like, look, dude, don't worry about that cocaine charge.
So if you were the president, like, if Obama got pissed and went out of office as the last attack, he could be like, I'm pardoning every prisoner in every prison all over the country.
Well, the idea of pro-America, I mean, look, if we really were living in the Game of Thrones, you better be fucking pro-America.
You know, you better be, like, down for this one team, because otherwise some Dothraki hordes from the other side of the world might fucking hop on a ship and come over and jack you.
Well, man, I heard this thing, and, like, I never read it.
I think a teacher told me this, and I never explored it.
I'm sure I'll find out now, though.
But it was this idea that About communism and how Karl Marx said that real communism was going to be a natural evolution of society into real communism, not something imposed, something that's just a natural, obvious result of people getting smarter and understanding the way things work.
I'm definitely not anti-money, but what I'm starting to see I'm happening is that the more that you work in like little collectives with people, the more you help the people around you, you know, as much as you can, just the people directly around you, the more that group rises up and succeeds, right?
And this is the idea of the, you know, new form of like podcast networks, which is where you have like, Like my friend, he's doing a podcast network called Feral Audio.
An idea is just a group of people that are like plugging in together and like sharing profits.
This is what's beautiful about it, and this is why I bring it up as a new thing.
The reason that it's...
The reason we can do podcasts, and the reason, like...
like seeing comedians shoot their own special owners because we have more access to technology than we had before.
And technology is shrinking, getting smaller, which is basically creating a situation where collectives form instead of the pyramid, Illuminati, top-down power structure where someone owns the equipment and gets the majority of the dough.
Do you know what I'm saying?
It's like everything's shifting, widening out, spreading out.
And that's why these fucking tyrants in the Middle East, it doesn't work when people have information.
Yeah, that phenomena that you just described has been going on since the history of top-down power structures.
This book I'm reading, now I can't remember the name, it's so fucking good, but it's got a picture of Copernicus standing before Catholic popes and being judged for talking about the fact that the earth revolves around the sun.
You know, it's like this is a people say the truth throughout history and many people have gone to jail or gotten burned at the fucking stake for it.
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I think the last time I drank this energy It's pretty mellow for an energy drink.
My friend Tom Atencio, he used to run Affliction, and he was the guy who put together the, or one of the guys who put together their mixed martial arts cards that they had, and I always appreciated that, that he did that, that Affliction supported MMA. So I became friends with him.
And I was wearing their shirts for a little while, but then they fired him, so I quit out of respect for my friend.
What's really funny about watching her is she's gotten down this casual wave to the hordes of pervs who are screaming at her, like, not acknowledging the fact that it's like, It's like an apocalypse now.
Yeah, I mean, when you have a trillion bucks, like, from what I understand, there's, like, royal families that have so much money, and their money's not public.
Like, when people look at, like, who's, like, the richest man in the world, oh, it's Bill Gates, or it's...
It's probably not.
It's actually probably some dude in the Middle East that doesn't talk about it at all.
And, you know, some prancer.
Like, they have extraordinary amounts of money.
And I don't think that a lot of times it gets measured up in the same pile.
I might be wrong about that, but from what people have told me about really, really wealthy people in the Middle East, there's some of the wealthiest people on earth.
That it's like insane, staggering amounts of wealth.
Well, when you have power for no reason, which essentially everyone at the very top of the heat pass, there's no reason why you should have power.
Okay, now if you have power for no reason, you know that...
It's not like you earned your power through your basketball skills, you know, the fact that you shoot a wicked three-pointer, or you're awesome at the violin.
No, there's no real tangible skill that you present that anybody else couldn't also have.
You know, I mean, what is vague characteristics like leadership and intelligence, the ability to speak well?
Goddamn, there's a lot of people that have that.
Yeah, there's thousands of people out there in your neighborhood that can do that, okay?
So they know that you have to be treacherous in order to retain this power.
When you see different laws every day that are being brought up, like the National Defense Authorization Act and all this other different stuff.
When you see civil liberties getting eroded and you see corruption getting eroded, there's your evidence.
That is the exact evidence that you need to know that the people that are in a position of power Shouldn't be in power.
They're trying to get more and more and more control.
Why are you trying to get more and more control?
Why are you actively trying to get control?
Instead of dealing with the issues that we already have, dealing with the crime that we already have, dealing with unsolved murders or what have you, instead of devoting your time into that aspect of helping society with law, instead of doing that, you're trying to take away civil liberties.
Yeah, they didn't even zoom in to see if the people do have guns.
They just fucking gunned them down, man.
To have that ability and that kind of power, and they're saying, oh, we're pretty sure this guy's got a gun, and this guy's got a gun, and they're like, permission to engage, and they get permission, they just fucking open up on these people.
Yeah, but this is going to drive me crazy if I don't remember what this fucking guy's video was about.
Oh, the Iraqi...
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Oh, yeah.
This is why.
It was so disturbing.
I'm probably trying to forget it.
It was watching the Blackwater guys.
The Young Turks made a video about this and exposed it and showed...
There's new videos that have been released that were like from the actual cars of the guys in Blackwater that were driving around smashing into people's cars.
One of them, they hit a lady while she was walking across the street.
And you see the guy, see the lady go down, go, oh, shit.
And they just drive on.
They just left her there.
And they're smashed into people's cars.
They're sticking their guns out the window and just randomly shooting at things.
It's really fucking crazy.
It's really crazy to watch, man.
It's really crazy.
And that's just...
There's no getting around that.
You can't...
You know what you were talking about?
making the Catholic religion or any kind of crazy cult that wants to have some sort of justification for doing something really fucking wrong will read you some huge, huge volume and tone on why it is that what they're doing is the correct move for everybody else in the long run.
When you show a video like that, is that correct move using mercenaries, man?
You see how crazy this is?
You got people that are willing to kill people for money, and you're paying them a fuckload of it, and you're letting them just run amok.
It's just amazing that in 2012, after all the time and all the supposed shit that we had learned from the Dark Ages, and today, even still, you've got this video released, this Blackwater video, of people just going to a foreign land and just fucking people up.
You know, it's...
That is at the very peak of our society when it comes to like causing change and damage and that is like the highest, most impactful part of our world is war, right?
And as far as, like, destruction and as far as, like, that's, like, society at its breaking point or its boiling point.
And it seems to stay at that same level.
It seems to stay at that same level where we're always just that close to fucking everything up.
We're always that close.
And, like, as good as it ever got was, like, when Clinton was in office.
It didn't really seem like we were going to war anymore.
It seemed like the Soviet Union had kind of fallen apart and we're the only big dog in town.
We're pretty cool and we're not going to fuck with anybody.
So it felt like everything was going to be okay.
But then it went right back up to its boiling point.
And you realize that boiling point where we had with the Clinton boiling point, that was unusual.
That was unusual.
The lack of threat of imminent death.
That's the unusual thing.
This normal thing that we've gone through with the Bush administration and that we go through with the Obama administration now, that's unusual.
Or that is rather the norm.
The unusual thing is peace.
The unusual thing is prosperity and relaxation and not worrying about fucking bombs dropping over your head from the other side of the world.
Do you think this call is like, hey, I heard that y'all are running a surplus on a certain missile that we're about to go into construction on and we don't want to come out with version two while y'all still got version one going on.
Do you think you can make some campaigns where you can put those bad boys to use?
We shouldn't be afraid to Do you think that a fucking Robert Downey Jr. contractor character could call somebody up and ask him to launch the missiles?
What about dudes that have never been to war, but they're obsessed with Soldier Fortune magazine and home protection and fucking packing heat everywhere they go?
They live in the Wild West in the back of their head.
If you feel like you've been put in a situation where you could have been in danger physically because some asshole wanted to fuck you up, and they could have done that to you, that's a terrible, terrible feeling.
So once you've experienced that terrible feeling, you want to have some sort of an equalizer.
I really, I mean, and it seems so weird because I know I come off as this kind of, like, hippie dude, but I was raised in the South, man, and my dad taught me how to be safe with a gun, taught me how fun it was to shoot a gun, taught me, like, you know, took me hunting, and I'm not afraid of guns.
I think they're fucking awesome, man.
They're really cool.
I just don't, I haven't gotten around to buying one.
In LA, and now it feels like there's this, you know, we were talking about this around Diaz, and he was saying, like, it'll attract guns.
What if you're trying to, like, control your sperm and you're on this Dalai Lama-type journey and some hot chick breaks into his house and sucks his dick and ruins his whole spiritual journey?
He's going to realize that he wasted his whole stupid life dressing up like a genie when he could have been just getting his dick sucked from the get-go.
If I was the first guy that the Dalai Lama told to go fuck himself, I'd be like, wow, I must be a dick.
I'm sure he's a great guy, and I don't think there's anything wrong with doing life the way he's doing.
I just think it's, when I look at his life in comparison to a life that I would find interesting, I'm like, come on, man.
You don't want to have a wife or a girlfriend?
You don't want to have sex?
You don't want to, like, really?
You don't want to engage in, like, fun things?
Really?
Is it really too much of an effort to have a relationship or can it be managed and you're just a lazy bitch and you can't figure out how to manage your own life and manage your own relationships in a way that you would attract someone who would also have sort of a harmonious relationship with you?
You know, for some people that's like too much work to try to get their own shit together to attract someone.
So, I mean, it's like a real complicated formula.
So to say, oh, that's too much work, I think you miss out on a big part of what it is to be a human being.
He obviously has compassionate relationships with people, where he's friends with them, he communicates with them.
But to not be exchanging affection, in my opinion, is just this massive misunderstanding of the joy of life.
Right.
Sex with someone you love that you're really attracted to is one of the most intense physical experiences and beautiful experiences a person can ever have.
It really is.
It's intense.
It's a beautiful, intense experience that cannot be recreated in a solo environment.
These are things that are impossible to answer because I only read about them.
I don't know if it's true or not.
But I think a lot of people who become hermits and leave society, of all the people who leave society and become a monk, Go and become a hermit, go into the woods and vanish from life.
Of all those people, probably a big percentage of them are doing it as an escape mechanism.
But I bet there's a small percentage in them that have heard of these peaks that you can climb to and consciousness that certain things will get in the way of getting to those peaks.
It's not impossible, but it's kind of like, you know, there's a lot of different paths through the forest.
Some of them are more difficult than others, and some of them are, especially when you've got the complication of a wife and children, you can't go through some of the forms of discipline that apparently are required To hit a transcendent experience that a lot of people, many, many, many, many people have written about.
You know what I mean?
So I think there is a small group of people who really authentically are just like, I want to fucking go for it.
I want to see how far I can go into this.
Is there enlightenment?
Is there this state of Um, higher awareness that you can get through meditation.
I want to do that.
And that, you know, the prescription for some of these things is to fucking meditate for years straight.
It's the, the, the, the, the, the, those, um, what, what, what vision is it, what they use when they're doing, like, cross sections of the brain during any sort of a neural activity.
Dude, I don't think my brain's changed, but one of my favorite parts of the day, I wake up in the morning and chant.
I fucking love it, dude.
And I'll tell you, I'll wake up with my brain squirming with shit thoughts and anxious sometimes.
Maybe I had a bad dream or I'm stressed out about something.
I'll sit down and fucking meditate.
10 minutes, 15 minutes later, it's not gone.
I'm not healed, I'm not cured of the thoughts, but now the thoughts aren't on top, they're underneath my will.
You know what I mean?
And that changes everything for the rest of the day, because now when I'm attacking the different problems and things I have to accomplish, the first thing I'm feeling is this sense of self-control, and underneath it are all the anxieties, instead of approaching your problems with an anxious mind or a turbulent mind.
I mean, look, when you write, when you write, don't you notice that if you, like, take time off and write again, you start writing and you feel, like, a little clunky at first.
McKenna had this funny story about, or this funny analogy about UFO abductees, is that the real problem with any stories that you ever hear about UFOs is that you have to automatically discount every one of them that involved five grams of mushrooms.
Or maybe a lot of different philosophies came from people getting really high.
That's that book that I showed you.
That cannabis is a very old plant that we've had a relationship with for a long time.
And people love to invalidate Things that you thought up when you were stoned.
They love to validate states of consciousness you obtain through merging with a plant mother.
But I'll tell you man, fucking getting high, chanting and getting high, wow.
That's like, now if you want me to like come up with a time when I wasn't stoned and meditating, I could think of a time when I was on the zen retreat sitting and staring at a wall and for like seven hours straight and like definitely there was a shift in consciousness and i was like getting retarded getting confused i take offense at that i really do i was getting confused because i've been staring at a wall for so long i was getting confused about My identity.
But other people who don't have such lofty ideals to merge with the nothingness, these people are trying to accomplish things.
And I believe the name of these superpowers or magical traits that you get from disciplining the will are called cities, S-I-D-D-H-I-S. Cities of consciousness.
Yeah, and these are like the ability, if you start focusing, you know, I would even say that in some weird way, stand-up comedy is a form of city in the sense that you're able to get in front of a group of people and make them fucking laugh.
I laugh.
And it takes a long time to develop.
It's a discipline that takes a long time to develop.
And you get this skill that's kind of abnormal that some people aren't able to do.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't have to be reading someone's mind.
It doesn't have to be levitating or walking through a wall.
It's just like, shit, man.
When I watch the fucking UFC and see somebody do a flying leg kick into someone's head, that's magic to me.
These fucking assholes, not they're not really assholes, but when you see them getting their backflip contact, these guys throw a fucking backflip like it's nothing.
And if the backflip doesn't land and you fall, that's going to be played on the internet.
Definitely.
So the risk involved in that backflip It's super extreme, man.
So to me, that's also...
It's not real magic in the sense it's explainable, but it's like...
I think that people can develop other forms of this.
And the other forms of it...
I don't want to use the term telepathy, but maybe people get really good at reading micro gestures or micro movements in someone's face and recognizing when they're telling the truth or when they're telling a lot.
Fuck, man.
Just someone who's really focused...
And sitting and listening to you and looking you in the eye in a really focused way, that's unnerving sometimes when someone's got real fucking focus.
Because most people don't.
Most people are scattered.
They're scattered to the fucking winds, man.
They can barely listen to you for four minutes without fading out or checking their phone or fucking...
You know what I mean?
So will itself, just the ability to draw your senses in and focus on the moment, that's a pretty potent thing to be able to...
To do and you're not going to get that from playing video games.
You're not going to get that from getting drunk all the time.
You're not going to get that from fucking all the time.
You're going to get that from stopping the show, sitting down, crossing your legs, taking a breath and not moving for 10 minutes and watch your mind freak the fuck out.
Your mind will turn into a cat That you're trying to put in the bathtub.
Your mind will just start wriggling, squirming, warming.
Hey, what are you doing?
That's almost the first thing.
It's like, come on, what are you fucking doing here?
What are you sitting here not moving for?
What is this?
Who do you think you are?
You think you're fucking Gandhi?
What do you think you're doing?
Really, you're going to do this?
And then that, if you overcome that, then that'll change a little bit.
And all of a sudden, you'll start relaxing a little bit.
Your body will relax.
And all of a sudden, it's like, oh shit, man.
I didn't put that fucking candle out in the other room.
I should go put that candle out in the other room.
I think I'll have the candle burning in the other room.
And then you just breathe through that, and then it's going to be, oh fuck, I gotta call Jack!
I forgot to call Jack!
It's all these moments trying to take you away, and it's almost like your mind has set all these infinite That will keep you from getting in this state of stillness.
But eventually, the more you do that, the more your mind will begin to be in the moment and not be in a place of expectation and not be waiting for the meditation to end and not be thinking about how cool it is that you're meditating or how dumb it is that you're meditating.
Something else kicks in.
That thing.
That fucking thing, man.
That's the thing that I think people are trying to extend through their entire lifetime.
It's just that state of being present in the moment with no goal for what's going to happen, not caring about what happened.
Yeah, and you don't always want to be there either.
You don't want to be there all day.
Because you have to live with humans.
And if you're going to live completely in that total zen state, I guess you could do it Ram Dass style and just go video conferencing with people all day online.
But if you want to actually try to make a living...
Right, but don't you have some sort of an ethical responsibility for animal cruelty and the pollution of the environment and all the different variables that really, even though you have no control over, you are a part of society and contribute to the problem by continuing support.
The starving kid in Africa has stopped many, many people from experimenting with bringing their will into the world because they think, yeah, what about the fucking starving kid in Africa?
What about the macro?
What about the eating meat hurts animals?
The bigger picture.
I think that that is a very valid thing to think about.
But I think the first thing to think about before you start thinking about the bigger picture is your little picture.
It's thinking about how are you treating the people around you?
What living condition are you in?
Are you healthy?
Are you exercising?
First deal with that.
Deal with that and then worry about the fucking kid in Africa.
First deal with that thing and you'll get your focus back.
Come out of autopilot first, because your ego will tell you, like, look, man, we've got to think about the big picture here.
The ego always wants to think about the big fucking picture.
The ego always wants to think about, like, the ego is messianic.
The ego wants to be Jesus.
The ego wants to heal the world, or the ego wants to fucking do all this crazy shit.
This, I think, is the recipe for a true revolution.
The recipe for a true revolution does not involve going out into the world and trying to attack these ancient, powerful, monolithic structures by throwing Molotov cocktails at them.
It fucking involves stopping, looking at the way you're treating the people directly around you.
How do you treat waiters?
How do you treat people at the cash register?
How do you treat people That you have power over.
Even if the power is illusionary and it's just a game.
Because when you're with a waiter, you're playing the game of someone being served.
Then, once you start feeling good and healthy again, the depression will start wearing off and then you start looking at the way you're treating people around you.
Then you start tipping too much.
This is something you taught me, man.
I don't want to go all fucking secret on everybody's ass here, but ever since I started tipping too much, Fucking more money than I've ever made has been coming into my life, dude.
And I feel like there's some kind of, like, direct correlation between how much you put out and how much comes back to you.
It's also possible that it just came in a coincidental time to when you started making money and could tip because you had some momentum running your way.
And the idea was give ten percent of your income to the church, right?
Because the church will deal with giving the money out.
Now, I think that this is based on a metaphysical principle.
I think it's based on a metaphysical principle, which is that if you give out...
I think we may have talked about this before, but imagine if you cut out 10% of your income and just put it in a pile and made the decision that that 10%, you're going to just fucking give to people who need it.
You're just going to give it to help people.
You're going to use it to help people.
That's 10% of your income is going out into the world to help people.
That would be your favorite money.
That fucking 10%.
Like on a Saturday, if you get to go into that account, you'd be like, fuck man, I'm going to buy my friend an Xbox.
Everybody thinks it's like, oh, I'm going to go give a ham sandwich to a heroin addict.
No!
Go fucking surprise your friend.
Take him out to dinner and then fucking buy dinner when they didn't expect it.
Take one of your friends out who doesn't have a lot of money right now and do something really cool for them when they don't expect it and don't act like they owe you.
Just be like, no, dude, I just thought it would be fun.
That's fun!
That's tithing, if you ask me, instead of letting the church be in control of it.
Well, the problem with the church is always going to be, like, who are they?
They're just people, man.
They're not really representing God.
So if you've got a good church, you can work out well.
There's a lot of churches that do a lot of great stuff for the community.
There's a lot of churches that keep people together.
There's a lot of people out there, dude, they haven't thought too much about the world.
They haven't thought too much about the complexities of the various different things that we do understand about the world.
Subatomic particles interacting with each other across the universe at the exact same time.
Communication through subatomic particles, particles that are in both a superposition where they're in a state of both standing and moving at the same time.
There's just too much craziness going on in the world.
And there's not enough curiosity.
And that combination of that and their culture and whatever the fuck their genetic imprint was, whatever 9-volt battery that they were born with, all that combined, some people need religion, man.
Some people it's like a super beneficial tool.
I don't deny it.
Look, essentially what Christianity is supposed to be is supposed to be somewhat about being positive, about representing God, living life by God's standards.
Well, if you look at what God's standards are sort of vaguely, and you take out the stories about killing people that he tells you to kill, and what happens if you're a gay dude, and, you know...
I don't know the name of the denomination, but they're into this book called The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes, which is like this idea that you create your own reality by the thoughts that you think.
And it's that mixed in with all the world religions, mixed in with like...
Kind of like, I mean listen man, it's a big church and I'm not saying every moment of the ceremony wasn't slightly embarrassing and I'm not saying that there are not people there dressed in like baggy, big baggy pants and wearing sandals and have really gone deep into fruit land.
I'm not saying that that didn't happen, but that church, man, some of the information I got out of there, it was fucking really high-tech information.
I'll tell you something else that happened to me there, and I'm sure I'm gonna get fucking made fun of for this, but I'll tell you, man, I had a fucking terrible...
I'd throw my back out.
Throw my fucking back out and couldn't move my fucking neck.
And I was, like, fucked up and in a lot of pain.
And I'm standing there...
Oh my god, there's a song you sing that we're singing this song?
So some guy came up and his desire to stick his penis inside your asshole was so strong that as he touched your back, the jolt just realigned your back because your back knew that it had to fight to survive.
You felt the love and lust of this man's fingertips.
Yeah, and people would go up and down the aisles with Kleenex because people would start crying.
It was like...
But, you know, I've learned to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And so, like, a lot of the stuff, yeah, I don't know if I necessarily was, like, you know, fully on board, but I got some good information from there, man.
There was, like, some really...
The shit that he talked about was...
This concept of being able to like, you decide when it's time to be happy.
You decide to not be a victim.
You decide to pull yourself out of the negative mire that you're in and you can just do it.
You don't have to come up with excuses.
You don't have to go to the fucking mountains and meditate forever.
You don't have to.
You can just stop being a victim right away.
And the moment you do that, your life will become a million times better.
Everything else will follow from there.
You'll start treating people around you better, and when you start treating people around you better, you're going to get more prosperity.
Because if you're treating people around you like shit, you're cutting off all these currents and circuits that...
Well, any interaction you have with someone that ends up in a negative, a negative on their side or a negative on your side, it's going to leave you with a little bit of a deficit.
And you don't realize how much of an impact Your words or your actions can really have until you see them upset someone and then you realize, then it all manifests itself to you.
It all shows, and you're like, God damn it, what the fuck was I thinking?
I just got so flippant with, you know, being rude or being aggressive or being, you know, adamant or argumentative or whatever it is that causes these blips in the matrix.
But sometimes you need to have those in your life just as a reminder.
You can get caught up in a long game of shit ping pong with people.
And it's like, look, there's no way that you're going to be perfect and there's no way you're going to avoid conflict and there's no way you're going to avoid getting angry.
But the main thing is, man, here's the main thing.
Forgiveness.
And forgiveness, it fucking isn't always fair.
That's the thing about forgiveness, dude.
It's not always fair.
It's not always about who wins or who loses or who's right or who's wrong.
Sometimes you just have to be like, look, man, we got fucking blasted out of a pussy.
So what happened is during a podcast in Atlanta with Marshall Childs and the Laughing Skull, I was starting to talk about those videos I made for South by Southwest because I was trying to lead into talking about the Moon Tower Comedy Festival.
I'm pretty adamant about, in my opinion, the very correct idea that if you're going to have a festival where you profit off of it and you have comedians perform at your festival, at the very least you have to fly them there.
If you want them to work for free, you can't really expect them to fly themselves there.
And then when you find out the whole thing is sponsored by an airline, you're like, what?
Because they're going to profit by the fact that people have to fly in.
The whole thing is crazy.
So, you made this video where it was Hitler, and then over Hitler screaming, you had the translation, the Hitler meme, yes.
The translation was saying, you know, how preposterous it is.
It was just the basic idea, which is that if you charge for, if you have an event centered around comedians, artists, whatever, that couldn't function without the comedians or artists, You have to fairly compensate them.
You have to pay them.
Pay them a percentage of the door.
It doesn't have to be a lot.
Give them a little cut.
Whether it's a flight, hotel, I don't know, whatever the fuck it is.
Just make it fair.
So I was starting to talk about that.
And then Brian got on the microphone and started talking about how, no, no, no, they pay the performers.
What he was talking about was, as a comedian, you can get sponsorship from other people, like brown paper tickets or other corporations will pay for you to perform at their parties or will in some way fund you.
People who pay based on a percentage from the door or some other form of like money compensation and people who feel like they're offering a venue and they're offering the benefits that you get from Performing on a show whether it's working out or it's kind of amazing the idea that you know you could have a festival of art and a profitable festival of art and I
South by Southwest is an expensive festival, and a lot of people like seeing bands, and some comics like seeing bands, and we're going to go to South by Southwest anyway, so now they don't have to pay the $700 that you would pay to see everything.
It's really fascinating how he's got, you know, Doug's got this, you know, this thing where he can show up at like a regular club, like it has a full weekend, and he comes on at 420 in the afternoon, and he does these 420 shows where it's all his fans.
It's really funny how you look on Twitter, and some porn girls have, like, pick of the day, and you click on it, and it's them with a giant f***ing dick in their mouth and on their ass, and you're like, whoa!
What happened was, you in this elevated snippy state, I'll just cut to the chase, you called Brian out for something that you believed that he was doing incorrectly with how he was putting on a comedy show.
And he defended himself and got very upset at you and couldn't believe that you said it on the air and he was really hurt and stormed out of the room and then, you know, we sort of sat around and talked about the importance of comedians getting paid and whether or not that was the right thing to do and what the real issue is and, you know, there's a side to be had on both men's point of view, Brian's and yours.
You know, there's a side to be had on Brian's about the way you presented it, that you did it, and you were in this elevated state, and you were responding to him questioning you in the South by Southwest thing, and you attacked.
You're not trying to make it more than it already is.
Right, I didn't want it to be more than that.
And Brian is very upset about it, and his side of it is that he did pay some people, and that there's a lot of expenses, and that he had to pay for taxes, and he's paying for the rent to keep that place open, and to be honest, he probably bit off more than he could chew,
and he didn't realize how much was involved in not just putting on a podcast where you're just being the producer of the podcast, but also running a comedy show at the same time, calling people, booking it, having the comedians show up, putting together a flyer, trying to get people to come, tweeting it, making a big deal.
It's more involved.
Like those guys that do comedy juice or something like that, there's a lot of work involved in that.
There's mailing lists.
I get their mailing lists all the time, and they're constantly emailing me all the time asking me to come and perform.
It's a business for these guys.
They're trying to...
There's a lot of work behind it.
I think it got away from him, and he's corrected it.
And he's corrected it now, and because of this confrontation, the good that's come out of it is that the money situation has been taken completely out of his hands, so he doesn't have to worry about it anymore.
You know, if you wanted to look back at yourself and how that whole thing went down, you know, where you're going back and forth at each other, where you, you know...
You were pissed because you felt that he was incorrectly correcting you and that he was putting his two cents in into an argument that you have that's a very...
Big one.
It's not just about South by Southwest, but it's about a lot of other organizations that don't pay the performance.
And I think that the tides are shifting now, and I think that that paradigm where you charge money for a show and don't pay the comics is going to hopefully be gone permanently.
Because what I really liked about the South by Southwest video I think it encouraged some comedians to start speaking up.
And I think artists are very afraid of confrontation and are afraid of speaking up about things that are obviously right.
There's a time to speak up and there's a time to not speak up.
And I think with Brian, when I Uh, said you're robbing comics.
That wasn't coming out of some altruistic, you know, uh, state of wanting to, like, be Gandhi and help fucking comics.
That was coming as like, oh, you slap me, I'm gonna slap you back.
And so, I went on my podcast, and I, uh, and I apologize.
And I, uh, admitted that that was wrong.
And also, I think the term robbing is totally wrong, because robbing implies that It implies forcefully taking something for someone.
Whereas if someone goes and does a show at the Ice House and Brian has said he's not paying or didn't mention payment, then you're entering into an agreement where you're going to perform for free.
So it's more of the performer's deal.
Like it's you decided to go and do that.
So robbing is the wrong word.
So there's that.
Watching it explode, you know what I mean?
Watching the fireball grow bigger and bigger, it's been a huge lesson for me, you know?
And it really has taught me, like, fuck man, you've got to learn to...
If you're angry, and especially your anger is at a friend, and even though, like, I think Brian hates my guts permanently now, we've been friends for like, I don't know, Seven years?
I'm a lot less sorry that I stabbed him with a pencil than I am that in a fucking public forum I called him out on something that I should have addressed privately.
Because when I stabbed him with a fucking pencil, he kept poking my back on an airplane when I'm trying to sleep, man.
And I had to fucking fight back.
I don't feel bad about that.
I was retarded, babyish, stupid, but that was just an instant reaction to being annoyed.
What happened at the Laughing Skull was using a public forum To address a private issue.
And I think that that is not fucking cool.
And the end result of that, even though that podcast didn't get uploaded, is that we've created a fucking Kardashian episode with the Death Squad.
Taking sides and attacking me or attacking Brian or like, like all this stuff that ultimately, so now what happens, this is the fucking thing that happens, you watch this thing that started off as a mid-sized negative energy ball.
Turn into a big negative energy ball and then get fucking scattered and spread throughout the fucking internet with people siding up and trying to say hurtful things or saying, this person's right, that person's wrong, this is good, that's bad.
This is why I say simplicity is the most important thing, man, because it's like, ultimately, you just have to say, I forgive you.
It doesn't have to be going into Judge Judy mode and stretching out the events to see who was right and who was wrong and how did you do that and why did you do that.
It's just a simple thing of being like, look, Let's stop playing shit ping pong with negative energy.
Yeah, but it's back to what we were talking about earlier about money being needed to keep score.
Even in fights with friends, someone has to be the one who was right, someone has to be the one who was wrong, someone has to be the one who won the argument, someone has to lose.
It's like when people break up and get divorced and you're like, oh, she won that one.
It's about achievement, forward progress, you know, treading into new territories and taking them over.
I mean, whether it's those actual physical territories, like new lands, or whether it's technological territories, like new inventions and innovations.
We're always moving forward, so you have to like, okay, you're out of the relationship, how'd you do?
I did great.
I only married that asshole for three years, and he has to give me a million dollars, you know?
Well, in his defense, what he's upset about, more than the fact that you brought it up on the podcast and did it like that and threw him under the bus, That even in your apology, you still said that he wasn't paying the comedians.
Uh, address this situation, and I'm addressing it publicly now because it was brought into the public forum, but isn't it the best thing to do to address it privately?
Isn't that the number one, like, best way to handle it?
No, it was really intense to see someone saying, fuck Duncan Trussell in front of possibly half a million people.
That felt really weird, because I... You know, like, it's tough for me to imagine a situation where I would be angry enough to, like, try to publicly disparage somebody in that intense way.
I think you have to treat your friends the way you treat someone that you love like a wife.
You can't insult them.
You can't lash out at them.
You can't do it.
It's a shitty thing when it happens and you gotta make it all better after it's over.
And you gotta really truly feel bad about it and you gotta really truly sort of correct yourself and make sure that you never put yourself into such a situation of almost like verbal combat with a brother, you know?
It's like, what we've got going on here with this, whatever you want to call it, the Death Squad, this podcast, our podcast, is an emergent...
Art form that's incredibly beautiful and all of us are contributing to it in our own way and a lot of people seem really invested in it and a lot of people seem authentically upset by this fight and so I think like out of respect for this whatever this weird fucking thing is that we're building here we've got to like learn how to We're good to
is gonna fall apart.
I think you need blowouts like this.
I would prefer for them to happen in private, but I think in this case, it got into the public eye fine.
The fact that it is in the public eye creates even more of a reason to resolve it in a civilized way that doesn't mean somebody gets hurt or somebody gets fucking excommunicated or somebody gets, like, permanently mad.
It means that...
Because if we can't figure it out, if we can't figure out how to resolve something as silly as this...
Then how can we fucking talk about, stop dropping bombs?
And that's why I think it takes, at some point, if you look at the back and forth that happened in war, it's somebody did this to someone, and then they did something back, and then they did something back bigger, and they did something back bigger, it goes on forever.
At some point, you just have to be like, I'm sorry, I forgive you, I'm sorry, and that's it.
You gotta know when you've been friends with someone for a long time the essence of who that person is.
You know, you gotta be a nice guy both when you are in charge and when you are the employee or the person who has to listen and follow directions, whether you're the fan or whether you're the performer, whether you're the police officer or the guy who has to talk to the cop because his car got stolen.
You know, we have to figure out a way to To always communicate with respect.
It's just so hard to develop a human being that's completely and totally honest.
That we live in this world of maybes and half-truths and bullshit and lies.
And then behind the lies there's things that are true but make no sense.
Like legislation and laws.
And all of it adds up to be this really confusing, frustrating, unfair feeling of life in general.
Just as a pattern of your whole fucking situation.
But all of it.
All of it can be cured by the simple truth that we have to start treating each other as if we are treating ourselves living another life.
If we are all this one thing that is born into this world in various circumstances, in various biological situations, in various states of the world, in various climates, but at the soul of it all, behind the sex and behind the height and the weight and The essence of what a fucking human being is, it could just be easily you.
You could be that guy.
You could be this guy.
What you are, stripped of culture and language, and what I am is the same thing.
I'm just going through this in a completely different ride, with a totally different flesh vehicle, and we happen to see each other along the journey, and we become friends and united in our struggle together, and enhanced each other.
But at the end of the day, we're the same fucking thing.
And once we realize that I'm the same as some poor fuck that was born in Afghanistan and is living in a cave, I'm the same as that guy.
I just got a way better roll of the dice than I was born in New Jersey.
You know what I'm saying?
The only way we're ever going to get over this hump of existence is if we drop all the bullshit and the one law that we should all recognize, the one thing that we should all practice, Is the ideal that you are me, and I am you, and we are living completely different lives, but inside the body, inside the beaming of what it is.
When you think of you, I can easily be you.
I could easily be my mother.
I could easily be this asshole that lives on the street from me that I can't talk to because he's dumb.
It could be this guy.
I could be that guy.
I could have been born here.
It's just some crazy situation where we may all be the very same thing, living through different epochs, living through different biological identities, living through different genetics and different social circumstances, but at the root of it all, we could be the same fucking thing, and we essentially are.
If we really started treating people like that, if you really looked at the world like that, and it doesn't always mean that you're going to give that person everything they want, because then you could spoil you.
If you have as an intention in dealing with conflict, which everyone's gonna have, wanting a resolution that Wanting not just a resolution, but an evolution.
Yeah, that's it.
If that's your fucking intention behind it, it's going to work out great.
It's going to work out okay.
It might be turbulent, it might be weird, but if that's your intention, then it's a lot different than the intention being, I'm going to win this!
I'm going to conquer!
I'm going to be the one who comes out on top!
That only creates more shit ping pong and more negativity in the world.
That's the thing that we've got to deal with, and this thing with Brian, and I'm sure everyone's got an example of this happening in their life or will have it.
Deal with it in a way that's like accelerating the community, making the community stronger, making the community more...
You know, we have to accept that this is a trial and error sort of a situation in life.
Especially the generation that you and I come from.
You know, you in your 30s, me in my 40s.
We're essentially one of the first generations to be awake.
We're one of the first generations to use the internet and to sort of...
Exchange so much information back and forth with each other that we're kind of reformulating our idea of how the world works.
You know, and we don't really necessarily trust our parents that brought us into this thing.
We don't necessarily trust our parents' parents to have a full sort of an account of what really is going on in this life, biologically, physically, geopolitically.
We're one of the first generations to truly have a decent grasp of it because of our use of the internet.
So a lot of what we're doing as adults is essentially trying to re-govern our own culture, to re-figure out how we're communicating with each other.
If the New York Giants fans really want to beat the fuck out of the Raiders and they don't even know them, Isn't there something wrong with that?
Could that not be us on another side of the country?
Do you not understand that?
You really want to go to a fucking ball game in Philly and they break your leg in the hallway because you're wearing the wrong shirt?
That stuff happens.
That's you, man.
That's you on the ground living a different life and you just stomped on your thigh bone and snapped it.
And that's a really unfortunate aspect of life, this sort of a tribal thing that might have existed in that book, The Road, in that movie.
What could happen if the shit hits the fan?
But what we have to understand is the shit's not hitting the fan right now.
There's a guy that I was mentioning earlier that was talking about how life right now that we're unhappy but yet we live very much like kings and emperors, you know, did a hundred years ago, which I thought was really stupid because first of all, The idea of we don't live anything like an emperor.
You don't have a harem.
You can't order them around.
You can't have people killed if they talk shit.
You don't have people carrying you around on a giant tray everywhere you go.
It is an Xbox Kinect that's somehow detecting changes in the terrain of the sandbox and projecting water and grass and sand over different parts of it, I think based on how high or how low the sand is.
So if you, like, go really...
Like, if you hold your hand over it, it makes water appear running through the sandbox.
And if you run your fingers through it, I think water appears as though there's, like, water under the sand, like at the beach.
Speaking of Starcraft, every day in my life is just like downtime until Prometheus comes out.
I'm just like, I would like to clone Ridley Scott and give him an infinite budget and just give him all the acid and mushrooms he needs and him and H.R. Geiger and just lock him in a room together and just make a million alien movies.
Dude, I've been looking at some of these Android phones they have now.
I know I get, like, lusty envy with certain phones, but one of them I've been looking at is this Galaxy Note.
I've been watching videos, and one of the things that everybody keeps saying is, once you get this thing, it's really hard to go back to a regular phone.
Five inches wide.
And it's 4G. It's wicked fast.
It's a crazy fast processor.
And I'm watching these people use it and play with it online and take pictures with it and draw on the picture.
Like, you can write, like, I'm stupid.
And you can send it in an email or send it in a text message.
Is it possible to convert the entire government into a positive force?
Is it possible to have people that are really looking out to do the right thing and get it all together?
or is the job of working for the government so fucking unrewarding and boring that everyone just falls into a place of non-innovation non-responsibility thinking the diffusion of responsibility that comes with the corporation also falls upon you when you're in government it's just it seems so futile it seems so huge it seems so impassable that you just sort of give up and come you just become a part of the wave dude I think right now it's I don't know how you fix it
In the micro you fix it, and if the majority of people start improving their lives and the lives of people around them and actively seeking to put positive energy out in the world, then maybe that'll sort of transform the government itself in a real way.
But as long as people are getting caught up worrying about the macro and thinking that everything's coming to a screeching halt and everything's fucked up and they might as well just live like idiots and give up So I think the idea is it's like, yeah, things are fucked up.
The world, Nancy Grace's world, is a shitty fucking world.
But let's not worry about Lynn, Laniece, Lanou got strangled in the Everglades.
And let's start worrying about the way that we're treating our fucking wife or our friends or our kids or whatever and deal with that.
And then if enough people started doing that, I think a big change would happen in the world, man.
And everybody can change their own environment by surrounding yourself with other people that are like-minded.
That is possible.
And that's one of the things that I think that this podcast does.
We've talked about this before, but it's important to recognize that we're aware of this.
That this is not something that existed when we were young.
We didn't have access to people that were just, for sort of, with no real...
I mean, there's no obligation.
There's no real direction that we're trying to go with us.
We are just trying to express ourselves 100% honestly.
There's no ulterior motive.
There's no agenda.
There's no deception.
It's just this is how we really view the world.
And when you're stuck somewhere and you don't have people like that around you, this is the only way you can get that.
And through this, It allows people to connect, like-minded people to connect through Twitter and through Facebook and whatever.
And they seek each other out and all improve the actual environment they live in.
And then it starts these exponential changes all over the world.
That's the only way, in my opinion, we're ever going to change any government anyway.
It's expose them to new ideas that are more satisfying than the stupid, dumb conqueror model that they've been using since before the days of Genghis Khan.
Yeah, it's incredible, man, and it's like definitely, if you look back at history and the way powers always fought to subvert the flow of information and suddenly there's a thing that is like a truth volcano and there's no way to put a fucking cork on it.
There's a giant difference between the world of post-1993, which is really sort of one of the first years of the internet being like a public entity that I can remember.
Maybe it happened a few years before that for the real hardcore guys, like the real hardcore geeks.
But for me, 1993 is about what I... And that's a different fucking era.
They might as well have been...
I mean, before that, there was no cell phones either.
All that happened at the same time as well.
You know, essentially, in a few years post...
You know, it all kind of bubbled together into one big sort of a communicative soup.
With this, more positive for us, you know, for sure.
More positive at the shows.
More people enjoying themselves.
We're having shows that we've never had before.
So the kind of shows we're having where we're going, thousands of people are there, and the thousands of people are screaming and having fun, and this is just a massive burst of positive energy.
Well, that massive burst of positive energy all came out of doing something like this, doing this podcast, connecting with all those people out there, filling their head with something to think about while they're working, while they're doing mundane tasks, while they're commuting, all of it for free, all of it without an agenda, and all of that, we see what it does.
It spreads out more positivity.
And it makes you want to write more shit and it makes you want to perform more comedy and have more material for them and do more shows.
But other than that, it's been overwhelmingly positive.
And that all came from this one thing.
It all came from this one idea, this desire to express yourself and express information, discuss things, and to force ourselves to have these conversations on a regular basis.
And Duncan and I, we started having these conversations when he was working at the Comedy Store.
Because, like, having, like, you be like, hey, man, like, I can remember...
I'll never forget this shit, man.
I can remember being in the OR and doing this joke.
I don't even do it anymore.
But it was like, being in a bad relationship is like having an octopus stuck to your face that every once in a while whispers to you, do you still love me?
It's still my favorite thing to watch as an audience member.
I think it's the greatest art form there is.
As far as me, what entertains me, I just love watching a good comic more than anything.
So I love helping.
I love watching guys become killers.
I remember watching Ari Shafir go from being a guy who was a little bit uncomfortable on stage, trying to find his feet, to one day, you know, just slowly but surely becoming a killer.
And now I just watch, I've seen Ari crush in front of thousands of people.
And I remember taking him on the road with me.
I remember I took him to Denver.
I was taking Mike Young.
Mike Young couldn't make it for some reason.
So we took Ari, and Ari just fucking lit the place on fire.
And I was like, God damn, look at Ari Shafir.
All of a sudden, he's a real comedian.
It's beautiful.
It's beautiful to watch your friends grow and prosper and become real comedians.
But a lot of fucking, a lot of comics who are bringing people on the road with them would not recommend before their sets be like, hey, dude, do that fucking really uncomfortable satanic puppet act.
So that I come out, because I want to see what it's like to come out to a horrified crowd.
Not just a crowd that's like, like, seeing someone bomb, but a crowd that's like, maybe seeing like, either someone who's schizophrenic or like, Well, you know, I mean, I had this conversation with Ari once on the road.
You need to know when you overuse the word fuck and you make for an uncomfortable moment when someone's listening to you.
You're doing it when you're on stage.
Is you're essentially controlling the pattern of thought that goes through someone's mind, because you're going to bring up various topics and various subjects that put various images and feelings in people, and you have to get them to appreciate where your mind is coming from.
Well, if you're adding in a bunch of extra fucks, or you're stammering, or you're coming off like a goof, which oftentimes we do, especially on this podcast when we got too high, like I couldn't remember the Young Turk thing earlier.
Sometimes I've gone on stage and fucking forgotten what's about to come out of my mouth.
That's the worst thing where you're like in the middle of something and that's happened to me a couple of times where I'm like too high and I'm like, shit.
Well, because when you do more than one show, what happens is there's a state of mind when you're on stage, which is like, let's just consider it getting on the trolley and sitting in the same seat, okay?
You get on the trolley, you're in that same seat.
That is the state of mind that you're at when you're on stage.
Like, I'm in this driver's seat, and here we go, I'm on the trolley.
Well, when you're on the trolley again for the second show, And especially if you do it like I do it, where I don't really have necessarily a particular order.
I think I have an idea of probably how I'm going to close, but I don't know how the fuck I'm going to open, and I might go from here to there, and I might jump all over the place.
And when I do that, then I can get lost and say, I don't remember if I did this one already.
It really represents to all of us some sort of a real obvious paradigm shift.
And I can speak for every one of us, for Joey, for Ari, for Duncan.
We're very, very thankful that all this is happening.
And for me personally, as a guy who, you know, I was the one who was on television and I was the one who was taking these guys on the road with me, to see guys like Joey all of a sudden become recognized and people appreciate him for what he is.
Joey has always had a hard time with people recognizing his brilliance because he's so crazy and out there and wild with his comedy that until he was famous, until he was an established personality like he is now, it's almost like it's too hot to handle.
It's too much to deal with.
Nobody wanted to have him middle.
That was a big deal with Joey Diaz.
He couldn't get work on the road because he couldn't headline, but he couldn't middle.
Because nobody wanted Joey Diaz on in front of him.
Because he would just go up and fucking destroy.
But my philosophy of comedy came out of the Comedy Store.
And first of all, what that meant was that we were all brothers in the Comedy Store.
So it was like, if I was going to take anybody on the road with me, I take my Comedy Store brothers.
It was always Ari Shafir, it was always Duncan Trussell, it was different people, Sam Tripoli, different people that are Comedy Store brothers.
And Joey was always a Comedy Store brother.
And so when I started taking him on the road with me, there was two reasons.
One, because he was a Comedy Store brother.
And two, because the philosophy of the Comedy Store also was you wanted to go on with a bunch of other killers.
You didn't want to be the only guy that was good.
Comedy Store was about a bunch of different guys being good.
like the old outlaws of comedy you know with Karl Lebeau and Kinnison like there's a bunch of guys that were really good Ron shock there was a bunch of these dudes that were really good together and that you know so so taking guys like Joey on the road and exposing him to all these people and then seeing them go on stage in these fucking gigantic rounds of applause he gets it's beautiful I couldn't be happier it's amazing to me it's like it's like a vision that's sort of coming true
We have this idea, when we used to do these, you know, when we were calling ourselves a death squad, we used to do these little videos.
I hired Brian to do these death squad videos.
And some of them were really short, like one of them was Joey Diaz talking about mugging this gay guy, and the gay guy beat him up.
I mean, there's a bunch of them.
I'll probably get Brian to try to find them all and organize them and put them online, because some of them were really classic videos.
But the idea didn't really come to fruition in the terms of doing it through these little video clips.
The real way to get to know a guy like Joey is to get to know him on the podcast.
To hear him go off for hours and hours about criminal stories, about sneaking into some girl's fucking bedroom at 2 o'clock in the morning and eating her pussy and then escaping.
Just the crazy shit that he did.
You know, the Lucy Snorbrich story has become so big that a guy in Atlanta...
He had, hello, my name is Lucy Snorbush teaching stickers.
They're amazing, man.
To see that happening and to see it all come out of this one idea that, man, I've got this really talented group of friends and I think that if we all stick together and sort of help each other out and pump each other up, we make each other better.
We make each other funnier and we create a bigger footprint of positive energy.
All of us together have one giant footprint of positive energy.
But it has to be only that.
And that's why it was very important to resolve this whole issue with you and Brian.
As I said, it's not a clear-cut case of either one person having done the right thing.
And there's errors made on both sides, both in...
The actual act itself and in the discussion of the act afterwards.
There's some incorrect thinking and there's some negative thinking going on.
But hopefully we'll work all that shit out.
The most important thing is we're all of us in this fucking thing together.
And the less negative bullshit that you can spread, the more forgiveness that you can give, the more you can call people up and go, I'm fucking sorry.
I'm really sorry.
And the more the person listening can go, it's all good, dude.
The more we can do that in this life, the more we realize that we're all capable in various situations and in various circumstances of making colossal mistakes.
It doesn't necessarily mean you're a horrible person.
It just means sometimes we don't respond well to stress.
Sometimes we don't respond well to character issues and we need to learn and we need to grow.
And you may be more perfect than I am.
You may be further ahead.
But show me.
Show me how you got there.
Don't chastise.
Don't be angry and don't hate.
Try to elevate.
We can all make this.
We're not going to make utopia.
It doesn't exist.
But we can all make our environment and the people we come in contact with a little bit better.