Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan tackle nootropics like AlphaBrain, critiquing U.S. gun control laws and TSA radiation scanners while debating remote warfare’s ethical detachment. Rogan admits past dating missteps after Diana exposed his arrogance, and they both reject conformist masculinity, advocating for authentic passion—whether in comedy or UFC judging, where Rogan’s multi-angle fight analysis clashes with subjective perceptions. Callen’s return to stand-up, inspired by Dane Cook, underscores vulnerability’s role in connection, contrasting modern alienation with Rogan’s "boy party weekend" camaraderie and upcoming guests like Jamie Kilstein and Andrew Dice Clay. [Automatically generated summary]
That's O-N-N-I-T. And what is alpha brain that I just took?
It's a combinatory sort of a supplement.
It's all a bunch of different nootropics.
And what nootropics are is nutrients that have been shown to have a positive effect on brain function.
And you can go to Onnit.com and there is a plethora of information on this subject.
And look at Google, too, because it's a controversial subject.
And, you know, some people are not into it.
And, you know, they don't want to believe that supplements can help them.
And that's fine.
I am not pushing it on anybody that's not interested.
But if you're a person that does supplement your vitamins and you're a person like me who absolutely knows that it affects your health, it does.
I sometimes don't get enough nutrients from my food.
In a perfect world, we would all be eating mineral-rich vegetables, and we would all be getting the perfect amount of water, and we would all be having the best food ever and grass-fed diet, but the reality is it doesn't always fucking work out that way, and a lot of things get affected by not supplementing.
I think it has most certainly enhanced my health.
And the supplements that I've been most interested in are nootropics.
And this, along with Neuro-1, which is Bill Romanowski's formula, that was the one I first discovered.
A lot of those people that are running those diet pills.
All this stuff that we're talking about here, folks, is all vitamins.
It's nothing that you have to worry about.
It's nothing that's dangerous.
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All right, you dirty freaks.
Brian Callens here, and I don't I don't know how to turn the music on.
He's a very, very credible science, and he looks at a lot of science.
It says a plant-based whole food diet is the best way to go.
The problem is that I think, like we talked about, if you're doing sports and lifting, personally, I went about a week eating just a whole food plant-based diet.
But my point is, when they're wild and they're running around and then you just hunt them and kill them, I think, first of all, the whole thing is way more humane because they lived the real life.
They're also, by the way, they are food in the wild.
Of course!
That's why they're there!
Joseph Campbell always said that one of the problems with the original peoples and their mythology was that they would look around at nature and realize that life ate life.
And if you look at a lot of, whether it's Native Americans or whatever, the traditions of killing animals, they were always fairly, most cultures were always very uneasy with killing an animal.
Which is why when you killed an animal, there was a ritual around that.
And when you actually have to kill something with a spear or a bow and arrow or a knife, and you feel its heartbeat and you smell that animal, that's very intimate.
It's physically intimate.
And almost all...
Almost all Aboriginal cultures had, all that I can think of, had sort of a ritual around that.
They would say prayers, they'd do all kinds of things, because it makes sense.
What we've become is so removed from our food.
We're so removed with factory farming and things.
It feeds a lot of people, gets a lot of protein, and people don't go hungry anymore.
I always remind people 30 years ago, I mean half of India, A lot of China went through major famines, and certainly most of Africa, but now that's becoming more and more a relic of the past.
It's because we've become very efficient at getting food to a maximum number of people, but there's a huge disconnection.
So when you eat a pig, when you eat bacon that's been in a gestation crate and goes crazy because it's chewing on the bars, you're not really thinking about it, man.
I'm just hungry.
You're not thinking it's a pig.
You're thinking it's just a piece of ham.
We've actually given these really euphemistic names to meat.
If you ever go to a farm, though, and you're playing around with the lambs and the goats and playing around with them, but you realize, oh, wow, man, that thing is a living, breathing creature that is reacting to me and reacting to its environment.
And so apparently that came from the fact that you had cows cannibalizing their own tissue because when you slaughter cows, there are certain parts, I guess, that you don't necessarily need.
You take 5% of that, you put it into the slop and they'll eat it.
And one of the tricks you do when you don't have earplugs is keep your mouth open when you shoot a gun that loud because the sound has somewhere to go.
But one of the things I always say, one of the things I was talking about with gun control...
Is gun control in this country, in my opinion, will never work in terms of what people are calling for because I think that men like their guns not because they're shiny and they go boom.
I actually really believe most men own guns because it's for them, and certainly for me, a feeling that at least I can protect my family if the shit hits the fan.
Because a golf club or a sharp stick ain't gonna do it.
I want an arsenal in case.
And I think most men go, when a politician says...
And they have good points, but if a politician says, we want to take your gun away, Americans in particular go, I don't fucking, I don't know, because you're not going to be there when somebody tries to break into my house at four in the morning.
I could call 911, but the feeling of a phone in my hand versus my Mossberg 20 gauge, you know, pump action shotgun feels a lot better to me.
But here's where the debate actually lies for me, after this terrible tragedy with the Batman thing.
I do think, and the NRA, from what I can understand, isn't that cooperative with this, I do think there's a debate to be had about the lethality of weapons.
All the law-abiding people out there, like my friend Anthony Cumia from the Opie and Anthony show who's a gun nut, why shouldn't he be allowed to have them?
I mean, I think that there was a politician on, he said this about it, and it was really kind of, he was honest, it was really interesting.
He said, what can we do about these madmen?
And he said, unfortunately, in a society like ours, that's free and as big as we are, you can't ultimately do anything about a lone, crazy, demented human being who is, whatever he is, schizophrenic.
I think, though, the debate lies, can you, though, create a situation where you can keep very lethal...
Efficient weapons like machine guns out of their hands.
That seems to be the debate.
I mean, I don't think you're ever going to stop crazies from getting guns and shooting people.
But it'd be nice if they got just a Glock as opposed to an AR-15 with a drum of 100 rounds.
Now, this is where the conspiracy theory kicks in, is where all these people believe that the government has brainwashed people like this Joker guy to go and commit these things so they can clamp down on gun control.
And that when you see, what is this, Eric Holder, you see like, first of all, the nonsense of them selling illegal guns to Mexico and having those guns be used on American Border Patrol agents in murder of border...
Well, Alex Jones, of course, put your tinfoil hat on, believes that they did that shit on purpose and they're making money off of it and they wrapped it up in a ridiculous, completely implausible plot.
Yeah, the problem with a guy like Alex Jones, in my opinion, is whenever you talk about the government, the government is so diversified with so many different interests.
There are so many people that actually are against gun control in government and passionate about it.
There are a lot of people in government that are very for gun control.
I think there's a lot of debate even within the U.S. Army and the FBI and the CIA about what we should do about everything.
What he's saying is it's a much more sinister thing than the government itself.
What he's talking about is like the World Banks and the New World Order getting together and physically engineering a situation where they can clamp down on people to take away their guns because they're worried about the economy going into the toilet and then, you know, when they're passing things like the NBA... It's giving a lot of credit to our group of people.
When they're passing things like the NDAA, when they pass things like that, you realize, well, they are slowly but steadily taking our rights away in a place, in a time where it's really not necessary.
There's no personal attacks.
I mean, there's no attacks going on here in America.
You know, those kinds of things, where before you know it, there is a...
I keep telling you about this.
My father, I did a podcast with my dad on the Brian Callen Show, and he was talking about how he spent a lot of time in government, a lot of time down there, watched how it really works.
It's not that politicians are bad.
It's not that, you know, Republicans are Democrats.
A lot of people have good ideas.
They're trying to get shit done.
Obama is not a socialist.
It's government in the business of intent.
You're in the business of intent.
You have a law and you have an intention.
The problem when you have an intention is that there are so many different interests that you have to appease to get that law whole and passed.
And what happens is What you intended usually has other consequences, which would make sense.
And I think what we have to worry about is, like what you're talking about, where we start losing our own power, but it's almost like it happens without us even realizing it.
Like, you pass a law that seems to be a good law, it has other unintended consequences.
And whenever you do anything that compromises people's freedom and liberty, then you have to say, well, what is the end game in this?
Because this seems like even in the name of safety, you're going to clamp down on freedom and liberty and safety isn't going to be worth nearly as much.
He's just about personal liberty, but he also understands that he's very moderate about that stuff.
You know, he's somebody who talks about, for example, whatever your intention, whatever your intention, as government grows, and both sides are responsible, Democrats, Republicans, it's human.
As a government grows with tax revenue or whatever it is, what happens with corporations, they behave just like you and I would, which is I've got to lobby my government so I can get a favorable outcome here because everybody else is doing it.
So pretty soon you've got everybody feeding out of or influencing the government trough.
You can't do business otherwise.
You can't be in business as a bank without having very strong ties to the government.
You can't.
You just can't.
And therein lies the argument.
So no matter what you say, yes, you need government.
Yes, there are good ideas out there.
But just be aware that regardless, the bigger it gets, even if its intentions are good, the argument goes you're going to lose some of your liberties.
If they had less laws and more cops, the world would be a way better place.
And if the cops were paid better and treated better by people...
If more people got their shit together so they didn't look at the cop as like someone who's gonna come and arrest you for doing shitty things, just don't be doing shitty things.
If we could figure out a way to elevate our society to the next level.
But my thoughts of a cop is like a security person, like a friend.
Let's put it this way.
Instead of thinking of cops as someone who's coming to bust you or someone who's going to take your shit, if you had good cops in a community, it's like if you had a fucking fort and your buddy was the guy who had to watch the door with the gun because there's crazy Indians or who knows what the fuck could happen.
You need that.
Like, that shit is very important.
You have to have somebody guarding the wall.
And somewhere along the line, it stopped being that, and it became an us versus them.
Accessibility to everything that's everything and feeling safe doing it.
First of all, you've got the Lower East Side, which is totally different than the Lower West Side, which is totally different than the Upper West Side, which is totally different than Midtown, which is totally different than the Upper East Side.
And there's an experience to be had in all quadrants of Manhattan.
You can get there in 15 minutes by cab or less or by subway.
And most importantly, you no longer walk around New York feeling like you're going to get mugged or anything else.
But if you look at the statistics, the police have done an amazing job of policing.
And you know who else has done a really good job?
I can't remember our police chief here in L.A., but...
They've done a really good job, really good job at controlling gang violence in this, and it's almost impossible in such a huge area, but they've done a really innovative job, you know, comparatively.
They've learned a lot from the gang explosions in the 80s and the 90s, and they've done a really good job in a lot of places.
Everybody has the need to belong to a team or a tribe.
That's why we call ourselves a death squad.
That's why I love being a part of 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu.
When you become a part of a team, you feel stronger.
So some kid who's out there on his own, his family just fucking sucks and his whole life has been shit, and he's there with some dude who will shoot a dude for him.
Well, this is an even more intimate experience because you're in people's fucking heads, man.
That's why people get so annoyed if you say something over, repeat things, or if you do something they don't like.
People are allowing you the most intimate input into their brain.
You're in the fucking earbuds and you're literally playing inside their ear and you're talking inside their head and if you're annoying, that's a mindfuck, but if you are really genuinely on a good path and you really are genuinely promoting Other people to be on a good path to and just brotherhood.
You know, Tom Rhodes sent me a text today that was a really fucking awesome text because Tom just did the Ice House Chronicles show that we do at the Death Squad at the Ice House.
The Ice House is an amazing old comedy club, and we've been doing these shows, and we're going to do one this Friday night, where we have all these comics go up, it was Dom Herrera, you know, this week it's Greg Fitzsimmons, Joey Diaz, Joey's on all the time, Bert Kreischer was there this week, I mean, these shows are fucking incredible, okay?
And we're hanging around in the back room and we're doing a podcast and it's me and Kreischer and Tom Rhodes and Dom Herrera and Brody Stevens and we are laughing our fucking dicks off.
It's so fun.
It's like the stuff we always did but now hundreds of thousands of people But what Tom said, he goes, I really love the feeling of comedy brotherhood.
And that's really what it was.
It's like we have a comedy brotherhood.
And we really genuinely like each other, love each other, and want each other to succeed and are happy when each other succeeds.
That's the one thing that's missing in our group.
Is that weird comic neurosis that often exists where people can't be happy with other people's success.
Well, sociopaths, you were just talking about connection and how important it is and the feeling you get from when you move other people and you get moved from other people.
Your jokes would be hard to steal though because like I was watching you this weekend and one of the things I loved was it was almost like you were, you were, you were, because I know a lot of this stuff is new and so so much of it was just you kind of having an experience.
It's like what I like about your stand-up is you're always kind of having an experience and you're doing it For you and you're working something out and you're looking at how weirdly, how weird we are structured as a society, our minds are, why we do things that make no sense, why contextually something makes sense but then it doesn't in this case.
And it was so fun to watch because I was like, you know, the comedy is almost secondary to the experience.
Yeah, yeah, it's funny, yes.
But you're almost like...
I really think people are watching you kind of have your own very authentic and unique experience, verbal experience.
That's what I felt like.
I come away with a very different perspective.
It's very inspiring to me because I start writing differently.
It's what I love about having friends that inspire me, which you've always done.
That's who your friends should be.
I have friends that are wonderful that I play grab ass with, but then you have friends that really inspire you to be better and push you just by their example.
I don't know how to describe where you place the bar, but I always would watch you, and I've seen you at your best.
I've seen you when your shit is fucking so tight, and you're just a machine gun.
I remember when you were younger, I'd never seen...
You did something to a crowd in New York, I remember.
I was with Patty Jenkins.
You were a fucking machine gun!
It was like, literally, these New Yorkers, like all these comics got on them, and then Joe Rogan gets up, and it was literally like, we were like looking at each other going, what the fuck is, what the fuck is this?
And it was, what it was was somebody who had never taken a day off, and had only been working on being as authentic with their experience, and what a lot of people don't know about your early stuff is you were so good at impressions, you did all of it.
It was funny, but really true.
So for me, it was just literally like a fucking tsunami.
We were like, Jesus Christ!
That's how you do stand-up.
That's how you do it.
Good luck anybody trying to follow that fucking ball of fucking energy, because you just come on like...
And you were so physical, like muscular, but really flexible, like you do weird shit.
Like fall into the splits.
I remember one time we had a meeting.
Remember that we were pitching a TV show and we're sitting on a couch and it's like, I think it was with Eric Tannenbaum and like big producers and you go, and we were talking about martial arts and you go, yeah, I'm flexible.
And I was like, yeah, I'm flexible too.
And you go, yeah, but you can't do this.
And you grabbed your ankles and fucking pulled them up and you did the splits in the air.
And we were all like, what the fuck is that?
What is that?
He's like made of rubber.
And you used to bring that shit to the stage and it's just really wild to watch you kind of Continue to grow and change your expression, you know?
What I think the secret to your success is, and I always try to tell people this because people get very frustrated and discouraged by the process of accomplishment because there are so many plateaus and you're always, always, like a lot of people, well, this didn't work out and I'm not good at it.
And I'll just say this to everybody because I've been pretty successful and I have people come up to me and when you do a show they want to take pictures and they look at you as a success in this business.
And you, being one of my closest friends, you had a critique of my recent special on Showtime, which I wasn't very happy with.
But what was great about it is you said, hey, Brian, you could be way better than you are.
Now, I shot a fucking Showtime special.
A lot of people are like, whoa, you shot a special.
I'm not working on my second.
But you said, you're putting a little too much English on the ball, okay?
Even when I stumble through like one, I'll fuck up the one word, you know, I'll have one little stumble in there, and it's just like watching a puppy get hit with a hammer.
The first time I saw myself on camera was when I was a wrestler when I was 14. And I walked out on the mat and I used to think I was the baddest guy on the planet.
I looked at this video and I went, well, who the fuck is the kid with rickets?
Who the fuck is that?
It was me.
I've never been more devastated.
I was like, I'm that skinny in a singlet?
I'm never wrestling again.
I'll go out in a burka before I fucking go out in a singlet.
That's an affront.
My buddy wrote a book.
Which I told you, you should have them on your podcast.
His name is Hunter Motz.
He wrote a book called A Straight A Conspiracy.
He speaks 10 languages fluently, this kid.
Graduated from Harvard with a biochemistry degree.
And I said, why'd you write the book?
He said, well, I said, how do you learn 10 languages fluently?
And he's fluent.
And he said, oh, it's because I know I can do it and everybody who learns languages or math thinks they can't because they have an emotional context around it.
That's all.
And I went, what does that mean?
He said, I'm writing a book about it.
I'll tell you about it later.
I had him on my podcast.
He wrote a book called The Straight A Conspiracy.
And if you look at all the science around learning, which he did, one of the things that they find for sure is that people have these myths about themselves.
I'm not a math person.
I am a math person.
I'm artistic.
I'm not artistic.
I'm musical.
I'm not musical.
If you actually look at the science that's being done about learning and why some people are very good at some things and others are not.
I'm talking broad scope here.
What you find is that the emotional context with which they learn something has everything to do with whether or not they're going to excel at that.
Everything.
So in other words, whatever emotional state you approach learning something, growing at something, It means everything.
It's what it's all about.
If you are in a pleasant environment where somebody makes it fun for you, you're going to learn it.
Why are a lot of Asian people, so the stereotype goes, Chinese people are good at math and a lot of Americans aren't.
I'll tell you why.
If you read Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Outliers, and my buddy's book, Straight A Conspiracy, It has to do with a culture that says, well, yeah, this math problem is really hard, and I guess I'll be here for the next two and a half hours.
Americans are like, I'm not going to sit here for two and a half hours.
I got shit to do.
This is fucking really hard.
Guess what?
Not a math person.
And then your parents go, yeah, he's not good at math.
I can't even imagine having my podcast in America in a few years.
That's what's really a problem.
What's really a problem is the more you get shit like this National Defense Authorization Act, the more these different laws are passed that slowly but surely take away your right to say certain things.
They just outlawed protests at military funerals.
The government has recently reinstated propaganda.
They're allowed now, they haven't been since the 1940s, to actively use propaganda on the American people.
That's legal now.
And all this shit is going on while the internet is growing, while people's access to information is just flying at them.
It's like this desperate, last-clawing attempt at a dying culture to hold on to power.
And it's disgusting.
It's disgusting that anybody would ever allow the government to use propaganda, meaning mislead lie and distort the truth for the public.
In order to emphasize their point that you would give that power to the government is so beyond sick.
I mean, what happens after a while is I start to feel like I'm not represented.
I start to feel like if I'm not a corporation with a lot of money to buy lobbyists, I don't have a way of influencing my government.
For example, New York Times ran an article recently about, I travel a lot, as do you, and when you walk through the two boxes where you put your feet and you Yeah, you put your hands up in your hand.
Yeah, I'm not talking about the phone board that goes around you.
I'm talking about the two boxes you walk through.
Well, that's radiation.
And the New York Times wrote an article, and it was about a week ago, if you guys want to look it up, about the fact that they actually aren't too sure how much radiation you're getting.
They think it might be one-tenth of a chest x-ray in some cases.
More importantly, they don't maintain them as well.
They had some crazy number of maintenance requests, many of which were not met.
You're putting your trust into the TSA. They're probably good people doing the best they can and in some ways they do a great job.
But the fact that I didn't know that I was being blasted with radiation no matter how small, not doing it.
And I think if you're not politically committed to some extent, then it's at your own peril.
If everybody wants to be ignorant about what's going on in their world and politics, then good luck trying to change anything, and more importantly, good luck being able to see what's happening before it does.
My point is that what you were saying earlier is that they don't feel like they're being represented, so they don't feel like their efforts put into it have any great reward.
There's a lot of people, I think a good percentage, more than half, that feel completely alienated from the system.
And that's a conservative estimate.
If you say that half the people in this country feel alienated from the system, that's a failing system, no matter how you look at it.
And the problem is people don't feel rewarded for investing in a failing system.
When a guy like Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize and then sends 30,000 more fucking troops to Afghanistan and everybody's like, Jesus Christ, man.
I mean, it's got to be a strange job if you just stop and think about who you are before you become president.
If you take out all the nonsense, the tinfoil hat stuff about the Illuminati running things, and let's just pretend for a brief moment that maybe elections are real, okay?
And maybe Obama is just a regular dude who became a senator, who's a regular dude who ran for president, who activated a big...
Wellspring of hope in this people and then they put him into office and then once he gets in there then he has to deal with these international banks.
He has to deal with things like Halliburton.
He has to deal with people like Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld.
Think about all the people that were in power before him.
Think about all the people that he has to communicate with.
Think about all the shit that went down in that office.
Think about all the people that died all over the world because of the actions of the group of people he replaced.
And think about what that must feel like to step into those shoes and then all of a sudden you realize you are at the helm of a murder machine.
You are at the helm of a thing that is in every single part of the world.
No, it's being pilfered by a bunch of different interests, but they're profiting in massive, massive amounts on war itself.
Boeing and Raytheon and all those companies that make a lot of money off of what what they what eisenhower called the industrial military industrial and so as a as a president do you feel like you know when you get in there you just slowly try to put on the brakes i mean how much control does a guy have because it doesn't seem like much i think we deviated much from bush to obama at all and in fact they cracked down on secrecy issues and cracked down on prosecuting people for leaking information and And Obama was very much
There is a psychological component when you're removing yourself from the actual...
When you're a Marine, you're drawing a bead, you're shooting a guy, and you're running, and you see the guy die and stuff.
when you're in a room in your country and you go home after operating these drones and killing whatever it might be, maybe it's one person, maybe 25, whatever it is, or you drop a 1,000-pound bomb on, shoot a hellfire missile, whatever comes out of those things, that's kind of really, that raises a lot of questions. that's kind of really, that raises a lot of questions.
It raises a lot of questions when we're this removed from the actual experience of killing.
It's also important when you have a debate and we have a discussion like we do to actually take a look at where to place the focus.
For example, there are a lot of people in the military who are doing these things that never agreed with the war in the first place.
We have a civilian government that controls the military, that makes these decisions for the military.
The military just carries out orders.
That's how our government works.
The military has a job to do.
If you send them into a war zone, they're going to get the job done.
And a lot of guys, I know, I went to Afghanistan, but I know enough people in the armed forces.
A lot of men in the armed forces and women have an ideology that they believe in.
It's this country, it's the things that they'll do, and they come in, they're loyal servants, they risk their fucking lives, and they go do their job.
And a lot of them get maimed, they lose their arms, they lose their friends, and everything else.
I think that when you start to look at how this war's gone over the past 11 years, and I'm talking about Afghanistan and Iraq.
You've got to be very, very conscientious about not only how this really started, who were the architects, who was the intellectual force, who was the argument behind it, how did this happen, how did this turn into a huge snowball, and the reason you should know about that is because your lives and other people's lives depend on it in the future.
Well, my buddy, I think I put it on Red Band's thing, on Best Squad, but my buddy who I interviewed, who's a special forces guy, who's a real, I don't know what he does, but I know he's very much involved.
He was the baddest guy I ever knew growing up.
And he said, he just said about the war effort, he watched what's happening, he'd been in Iraq for, I guess, seven years, and he said, Iraq is a country now, we've created a mini Saddam and this guy Maliki.
He's a Shiite.
He's got police squads that report directly to him.
So we go into Iraq, there's this notion that, well, he's got the fourth largest army in the world.
We've got to stop him from dropping a weapon in al-Qaeda's hands.
Those are the arguments and stuff.
What we've done in some ways, if you look at Iraq, with the exception of Kurdistan and stuff, is that we've really destroyed that country.
A lot of people are dead.
And we've put into place somebody who is keeping his people or has the potential of keeping his people.
In the same kind of oppression, technically, as Saddam did.
Now, what is the objective?
What are we doing?
Was this worth it?
Was it worth killing all those people?
Was it worth all those soldiers who didn't come back and many more who were wounded?
That's the question.
And more importantly, what lessons can be learned?
What do we have to learn from Iraq and Afghanistan?
What do we have to learn so we don't get ourselves into the situation again?
I think that the access to information is ultimately changing the world that we live in.
And it's happening so quickly.
And these kind of conversations really weren't commonplace when we were kids.
When we were 16 and 17, our parents weren't having these kind of conversations.
They just weren't.
It's a different world.
We know more about how things work.
And because of that, it makes it harder and harder to accomplish fuckery.
It's still going on right now, but ultimately it's got to die off.
In order for us to have any sort of religious society, we're going to have to evolve past that and realize, just as you and I realize as friends and as members of our community, that it's not necessary.
And that kind of energy that you put out to control people and to profit from other people's losses Is totally non-beneficial to you as well.
Just because you're pulling it off into the guise of a corporation doesn't mean that you are immune to the negative rebound of that.
Because you're not.
And you want to call it karma.
You want to call it what goes around comes around.
Whatever you want to call it.
It's real.
I have experienced it.
I am walking proof of it.
My whole life is proof of it.
I have been...
The negative things that I've ever done in my life, I have felt...
In great deep detail and rebounded as much as possible to turn that terrible feeling into positive energy.
And that is why I've been a happy person my whole life.
But do you think that's because, because I always wonder, I try to help people, a friend of mine who's going through a tough time now, and I realize that one of the reasons that he's Going through a hard time is he's not in any way actually really confronted and asked himself what he wants.
But don't you think that part of your success is the fact that you've always been able to see in Technicolor what you wanted and what you wanted to be or...
That constant need to write new shit, to do different things, that constant need to be in motion, the constant need to be doing something, whether it's doing jujitsu or playing pool or writing more jokes or getting on stage, that forward momentum...
Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things.
It's like the idea that once you lock on to what it is to really focus and get good at something, But it's also that it's really satisfying to accomplish things.
But this idea that we were talking about before of community, of all influencing each other in a positive way, that gets lost in big numbers.
And the problem is we could have a great tribe of like 50 people and keep it together and have the most awesome utopia.
As I've heard Boulder described, Boulder is like a really small mountain community, but it's so small, it really almost is like a functional working utopia.
But I think that we could do that, it's possible to do that as a country.
We just have to get more people...
In tune to thinking correctly.
And most people are just never taught how to think.
They're never taught that they can manage their consciousness.
They've never been taught that there are patterns that a mind can go down that's self-destructive, completely self-destructive, and also totally unnecessary.
And you have to learn, like, all the times I've blown my cool for nothing, and still do, I mean, I might be in my car, Retard!
And it's almost always a sign that I'm doing too much.
It's always a sign of some sort of external stress it's affecting, you know, whatever it is.
But when you can see that, if you can see that, and if you can go in the right direction, if we could fucking influence a giant group of people to go in the right direction...
Whether you realize it or not, you're the bitch of all the prejudiced people that want to stop people from being gay.
And if you're a man, you'll go out there and suck some cock.
That's reality.
That's true.
Because that's what life is.
What I like, you probably don't.
But it's my right to like what I like.
And being a man is going after what you like.
And if you want to fucking take the easy way out and take some job that you know you can do instead of pursue a career in writing books or pursue a career racing horses, whatever the fuck you're compelled to...
Steven Pressfield in Going Pro had the best example.
He said, you may have your degree in comparative literature, you may have a PhD in comparative literature and teach comparative literature, but guess what?
You should have written a novel.
So that's just a form of high-tech procrastination.
So you're right.
It's really a question of Going for what you want.
A real man can be a guy who fights in the cage or a guy who's a nurse in a fucking hospital.
Whatever it is that you're doing, whatever you're supposed to do, wherever you're supposed to place your energy, giving, helping, and growing.
They have national headliners there every weekend.
The Comedy Store in La Jolla is a great club, but you could get fucked there and they could send down one of those old school headliners from the 1970s that hasn't written a joke in 100 years and doesn't work anywhere else other than the Comedy Store.
They'll send those down to La Jolla on account.
I don't know if they're still doing that, but back in the day, you would look at the lineup and go, oh my god, no, that's the headliner?
No!
You almost wanted to call the people and go, please, just stay on.
Because that show would be so bad, they would never want to go see stand-up comedy again.
As you get older and if you're trying to do something, what happens, I think, what's supposed to happen as you become a comic is you start stripping away all that other stuff and more and more of who you really are is kind of expressed.
As you were talking, I was thinking about the other thing you get from it, which is when you allow yourself to be a little bit of a silly goose or you allow yourself to be vulnerable or whatever it is and make fun of yourself, what will happen is that people around you feel safer.
Yes.
And what they'll do is they won't be on their guard.
Because a lot of times we come at a situation, if you come at a situation from a power angle or whatever, that person's guard will go up immediately and you won't see who they really are.
How disappointing is it when you meet someone and you have like a level of adulation for them, you know, they're famous, you're a fan, and they're a dick.
And people were, there was a lot, I had this conversation with somebody like, you know, like, well, you know, it's because of your narrow-minded point of view that you didn't enjoy it.
I'm not close-minded or homophobic, but I enjoyed the love thing that they had going on, but I also enjoyed giggling like a fucking schoolchild every time they were kissing each other.
Me and Doug Benson and Brendan Walsh, we were in town, and you were there, too, at the Paramount, and one of the things we were saying, we were walking by the Comedy Works, like, There's no better club.
There's never been a better club invented than the Comedy Works in Denver.
I've always wondered, this is going to sound so weird, but I've always wondered, like, with a building like that, with all that laughter over all those years, And then you take something terrible like the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib or something that Saddam kept all his people in and stuff.
I wonder what the composition of the walls are.
I wonder if there's anything that permeates.
I mean, this is hocus-pocus bullshit, but I've always wondered if in some ways the material, like of the organic material, like the wood, would be a different kind of composition than in a torture chamber or something.
I wonder.
All that positive energy versus all that negative energy.
Well, I know that there's places like the Ice House is a perfect example, that there's been so much laughter in that place that it feels good going in.
I don't know if that's my personal association, though, and it very likely could.
If you led me into that place from the outside blindfolded and I thought I was in a bakery and, you know...
I would try to enjoy it, but until I was in my 30s, until I had really resolved the fact that I was no longer going to compete, I would get nervous every time I'd go to a live event.
One of my favorite things, I was doing stand-up, and they came to the Comedy Works in Denver, and I could see Donald Cerrone's hat going up and down, laughing at my jokes.
I thought he won the fight afterwards by decision, but I would have to honestly go back and watch it again and actually score it with my mouth shut to make an accurate assessment of whether or not my feelings after the fight are over are accurate.
I'm really careful about saying what I think when it's a real close fight like that until I actually sit down and watch it as if I was scoring it.
Because if you're watching it as a commentator, you're also involved in it, you're trying to be entertaining, I'm trying to explain what's going on.
In order to do that and do a really effective calculation of whether or not one person won or the other, especially when it's close.
Because the fight unquestionably was close.
There's no doubt about it.
It was a very close fight.
No doubt about it.
The people who thought Henderson won it agree with that.
The people who thought Edgar won it agree with that.
It was a tightly contested fight.
So to really watch that and judge it, you've got to really shut your fucking mouth and sit there with a pad.
They're counting strikes and there's a whole segment of the show where they'll go to effective strikes, take down attempts, submission attempts.
So we get to look at hard numbers as well as our gut feeling about things.
Sometimes a guy will land little pity-pat shots, and he'll land a bunch of them, but the other dude lands one haymaker.
Well, that haymaker's worth more than those pity-pat shots.
So sometimes numbers don't necessarily mean...
But it's good to have that information to add in addition to your calculations on how you feel about it, just watching it.
So you need almost more than you watching it on your own, because I'm not just watching it.
I'm getting fed information as I'm watching it.
That's ideal for a judge.
Not that it would really, you know, I just, not that it wouldn't help to clean house and just get people in and know what the fuck is going on in an actual fight.
That certainly would be, but I also think they need access to information the way we have.
You know, I swear to God, man, when I have a weekend like this weekend where we did the show at the Paramount and we did the comedy works in Denver and meet all these cool people and everything, it really does feel like this crazy fucking dream life, man.
Before I was the commentator, other people had done it, but I'm saying, when I was a young man, thinking about this as an aspiration, this job didn't even exist.
We need to get Renato de Alonja with you together with your Brazilian Jiu Jitsu rapist character and make something happen.
Because that rapist character, there's two of the funniest moments in my life that I've experienced in my whole life.
One of them is Joey Diaz on the Alex Jones Show, where they fucked up and told Joey Diaz that he didn't have to worry about swearing because this part is on the internet.
And Joey Diaz just opened up a can of Cuban whoop-ass.
He was telling a story about going through the TSA with weed tucked under his balls and about how those fucking machines, they don't scan shit.
And, you know, this is your fucking tax dollars at work.
And Alex Jones is going crazy.
He goes, check yourself before you wreck yourself.
There was that and there was you in the hotel room when we were I think I just got the job at the UFC, and we would all come out to the fights, and it's a fucking great guys event.
I mean, it's so barbaric, man, to go to, fuck, did you see that fight?
And if you're interested in that, go to 10thplanetjujitsu.com because Eddie's got this whole web series called Mastering the System and a lot of that is with Hanato Aranja who is this...
I don't want to tell you the whole story because I don't want to give up the joke.