Louis Theroux traces his obsession with human extremes—from childhood exposure to KKK literature and The Unexplained magazine’s conspiracy theories to documenting mercenaries like Blackwater, failed MMA access, and bare-knuckle gypsy fights—rooted in "human angst" rather than spectacle. His 2000 Savile investigation revealed chilling evasiveness before the DJ’s decades-long abuse scandal, mirroring Jerry Sandusky’s alleged cover-ups, while Rogan dissects Kennedy’s assassination, questioning Oswald’s lone-gunman theory and the Warren Commission’s "tracheotomy" reclassification. Theroux’s upcoming projects—abandoned dogs in LA, terminal patients pressured into experimental treatments, and sex offenders in Torrance hostels—probe societal hypocrisy, from trophy hunting’s detached violence to Scientology’s tax-exempt auditing tactics, exposing how modern institutions exploit vulnerability under the guise of morality or profit. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by NatureBox.
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Bill Romanowski, if you don't know who he is, he's a former pro football player who was experiencing a lot of what we're hearing about today in the news, about pro-football players.
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All right, ladies and gentlemen, Louis Thoreau is here, and I'm very excited to talk to him.
This is probably something that we should do before the podcast starts.
Do, do, do, do.
Is that better?
Is that better?
Is that beautiful?
Louis, first of all, thank you very much for doing this.
I'm a huge fan.
I've enjoyed your work over the years.
You have had probably one of the most unique views of Americans as an outsider, I think possibly ever.
You know, your shows are all about What he's done is found the wackiest Americans ever known and put them on television and shown just how fucked up we really can be.
Well, you know, maybe I am cowardly, but I'm more afraid of the consequences of somehow not delivering on a creative idea than I am of the danger that fulfilling it involves, if that makes sense.
So sometimes you're in a spot with a story.
You know, people say like, you must be afraid when you're out on location.
You know what I'm afraid of is going home without a story.
Like, that's what keeps me awake at night.
Like, are we actually going to get any usable material?
So I was in Johannesburg doing a story on crime in Joburg, where the police are hugely under-resourced.
And so private security agencies go around policing the streets.
They're heavily armed.
They're accountable to no one.
And yet after, so we went out to do this story.
And after about two weeks of being there, we hadn't really seen any violent crime.
And I was getting to the point of, you know, we've got to go and cause some crimes ourselves if we have to.
Like, we've got to get the story.
And so I tended to thrust myself into dangerous situations just out of a sense of panic, you know, that we weren't kind of doing what we were supposed to do.
So essentially what's going on in South Africa is like a lot of what happened, where it was criticized.
The American military started using mercenaries that were accountable to no one, Blackwater and the like.
And that was a huge, huge issue because these folks were doing a lot of things that if soldiers had done them, they would be responsible for war crimes.
But they fell into this very strange and gray area because they were mercenaries.
And in fact, we spent a long time looking at trying to do that story and getting into Blackwater.
They rebranded themselves as something else now.
And the fact that these private citizens, essentially, because they weren't servants of the state, they were citizens of private companies, but they were still in Iraq, but accountable to no government because they could commit crimes, more or less, in Iraq, but go unarrested and unprosecuted because they were in this legal gray area.
But it's across the board as well because I've done several stories on prisons and there are private prisons as well.
And if I can make a general observation, it's that what I found in the course of making documentaries is that nine times out of ten, you get more access and more accountability from a public agency.
I mean, I've been inside and spent weeks inside San Quentin Prison and Miami Jail and a Maximum Security Mental Hospital for paedophiles here in California.
And all of those opened their doors to us and let us wander around and document what was going on in a way that I thought was very laudable.
I didn't agree with all the practices that were going on.
And yet, if there are private prisons, they don't feel like opening up their doors.
Well, they also, they're a business, and that's a real issue.
Anything that you say that's negative could negatively impact their bottom line.
They can make less money because of you, and so there's no benefit in having you there.
Whereas the public outrage in a public institution can have a real impact.
You know, the public can actually vote to get people out of positions that are causing certain rules to be into effect.
You can't really do that with private prisons.
Private prisons are, in my opinion, one of the most disturbing aspects of the current situation that we're in right now because so few people are actually aware of what's going on.
Most folks who have nine to five jobs plus whatever commute time and family, they don't have the time to research any of this stuff.
And they're really unaware of what's going on that we have this good percentage of our prisons in this country are actually businesses.
They're making money.
And even more disturbing, they're lobbying to make sure that certain laws are in place so that they can ensure that they have more people in their prisons and make more money.
In a weird way, it kind of aligns with certain aspects of the sovereign citizen movement where you see yourself as not beholden to the federal government and an independent entity.
The ethical grounds about the roads, there's a large argument for that for sure.
But then there's also weirdness, like in New York, where it used to be that they set up the toll systems on the bridges and the tunnels.
And what was going to happen is once the bridges were paid off, then the tolls would stop.
But the state and the city obviously got addicted to all that money that keeps coming in from those tolls.
So even though the bridges are long since paid for, it still costs like nine bucks every time you go across, whatever the fuck.
It's really ridiculous now.
When I was living there, it was much less.
But it's a substantial amount of revenue that they're just not willing to give up.
So it doesn't matter if it's paid for.
The money has to keep coming in.
And then, of course, the money funds this bloated bureaucracy that keeps expanding in order to keep itself alive like any other organism.
It continues to expand and just gets more and more ridiculous and needs tax money to stay open.
So a guy like Wesley Snipes comes along and says, I'm not paying taxes, you know, it's hard for everybody to be sympathetic to that because here's a guy who makes millions of dollars, doesn't want to pay taxes, and the regular folks that have to pay taxes and make a fraction of that, they don't have any sympathy for a guy like that.
We were supposed to have a mixed martial arts fight several years ago.
Before he went into jail, he owed a lot of money in taxes.
And a promoter, one of the original promoters for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, apparently he contacted them and wanted to have a mixed martial arts fight in order to make some money.
And they contacted me and offered me some ridiculous amount of money.
And I said, yeah, I'll fight that guy.
I'll fight that guy for that much money.
But he changed his mind after time went on.
And I'm sure he was embroiled in legal battles, and there might have been some chemicals involved in his decision-making.
Well, it's an interesting question because it's one of the few times when now and then we approach a story because it feels like it should be right for us and then it doesn't pan out for whatever reason.
So I'm well aware of your work with the UFC and about three years ago we spent a couple of months really trying to crack it as a story.
And then what happened was we didn't get, well we were trying to do MMA and we didn't get access to the UFC or not good enough access.
So we were looking at the second tier but it's quite a big drop-off from the UFC down to the smaller leagues.
There was a guy we were dealing with called Terry Treblecock.
They were doing a series of fights up in northern Michigan.
And it was kind of interesting.
But there was another one we would, and part of the same shoot, we looked at an outfit that was, I want to say it was cops versus cons, or does that ring a bell?
But the guy in charge of it had got religion, and he'd started a new outfit, and he was in the awkward maneuver of trying to edge away from the brutal, super brutal, horrible stuff into a lighter mode, more acceptable fare, but still kind of trying to keep his brand viable.
And his new thing was called something like cops versus cons.
And the concept was it was law enforcement personnel fighting representatives of the criminal fraternity.
That was his, because it was like, he wants to show how there was some rationale, like he wants to show how we can all be on the same team and kind of fight and then shake hands at the end of the day.
And there's not a big difference between cops and the street brawlers.
It was a kind of a spin, but when it got down to it, it was nowhere near as brutal as what he'd been doing with felony fights.
And the reason we didn't pursue the story was it became clear that it was actually a sport.
And if anything, to my mind, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, but less brutal than boxing, that you take more punishment because boxing bouts are so long and possibly because of the gloves as well, you're getting more brain injuries through boxing.
And that compared with boxing and even maybe, you know, NFL football and stuff, it wasn't that questionable what the UFC or the MMA guys were doing.
They were just going out there fighting and then shaking hands.
Well, there's certainly less animosity between fighters and much more camaraderie.
In fact, two men who are probably two of the best in the world, Leota Machida and Chris Weidman, who are going to fight for the UFC middleweight title.
Wideman is the current champion.
They met recently at a seminar or some convention, and there's a photo of them together smiling, holding like arm in arm.
I mean, these guys are in a couple months, they're going to try to kill each other, but yet they're smiling and very friendly.
It's very common for people to be friendly both before and after the fights.
there's with martial arts the true martial art mentality is not one of a thuggish nature it's not one of it's Those are that Wideman, the guy on the left with the Monster Milk shirt on, is the current champion.
And the other guy, Leoto Machida, the one on the right, is the number one contender who's two amazing fighters who are going to fight.
And you see them hugging and smiling before they're about to fight.
And Wideman, who is a wrestler, which I consider one of the very best martial arts, and Machida is a karate master, a true martial artist, Machida.
He really embodies what you expect from a martial artist in the bowing.
He practices kata.
He's very disciplined, meditates, and really is what you would expect in a sort of a movie version of a martial arts competitor, a martial arts master.
Except, you know, he really truly is a real deal.
But I think that that attitude, the martial arts attitude, is one of the more appealing aspects of fighting, where it's not like a Mike Tyson, you know, the sort of the thuggish, you know, insulting.
There's some of that in MMA as well, but it's very rare in boxing that you get someone who has the martial arts ideals and ethics that sort of competes.
But when it comes down to whether or not it's more or less dangerous, it really depends upon the bouts and it depends upon the style that a person fights in.
If you look at like a Floyd Mayweather fight, Floyd Mayweather is probably like the least hit boxer Of all time.
If you wanted to argue that boxing is a super safe sport, watch a Floyd Mayweather fight.
Watch how he fights.
He rarely gets hit.
And he gets hit and hurt much less than mixed martial arts fighters.
I would think that his style of fighting is probably arguably one of the safest styles ever.
But what martial arts and mixed martial arts provide is more options.
When a boxer gets hurt, they're not even allowed to hold on and clinch.
Whereas with MMA, that's the number one strategy.
If you get hit and you get stunned, you grab a hold of your opponent and try to take them to the ground and fight on the ground.
And having all these different options, it definitely gives you less head impacts, but not really much less.
There's still a lot of stand-up fighting involved in that.
From long careers and from a lot of training, hard training.
There's also a bit of evolution going on right now in mixed martial arts as far as how they train, how fighters train.
And there was a lack of knowledge and understanding about the proper way to go about training in the old days when it was first starting out, where people would just try to be as rough and tough as possible.
So they would spar in the gym at 100%.
They would basically have fights in the gym.
They weren't just sparring matches.
They were like full-on fights.
Your mic is on, so when you do that, that click is making noise.
They're full-on fights where they don't do that anymore.
Now, it's very wise to rarely spar at 100%.
Most of the time, spar at a lighter impact rate and work much more on technique and much more on strategy and positioning and preserve yourself inside the gym.
You know, with that story, we needed some extra dimension.
And I think that possibly if we'd got to the top tier, like with the UFC, then there would have been a sufficient sort of show business gloss to it to feel or just a sense of stakes.
But the guys we were meeting were all part-timers.
They were guys who worked during the week as mechanics, teachers, personal trainers.
And every couple of weekends, they would fight a few bouts.
So it felt like a, I mean, I'm not disrespecting them, but they were not full-time fighters.
And it was missing some kind of sense of scale or something.
When they would go to these Native American reservations, the Native American tribes could form their own rules.
And so I went to see a lot of the King of the Cage bouts in the 90s.
And when we would go see them, they were all on Native American reservations.
Then they also started doing a thing called pancrease fights.
And what pancrease fights were, there was this strange rule loophole where you were allowed to fight, but you could slap.
You couldn't close your fists and punch to the face, but you could pull your hands back and hit with the palms to the face and then kick full blast to the face, kick full blast to the body.
So there was a lot of those fights going on in the United States as well when there was no regulatory body for that.
It just sort of fit into some strange loophole.
But King of the Cage is still one of those places right now where young fighters, when they're looking to get experience, they'll start.
It's one of my favorite documentaries about Irish traveler families and the feuds that go on between these families spanning generations.
There's the Joyce family and another family, I can't remember their name, but and the strange dynamic, it's just really weird.
Like the families, they're very traditional, they got no money, like very close to the soil kind of families.
And they issue these like fight videos, like calling each other out into the fights, saying like, you come and see me and I'll tell you, you never insult me.
And we spent about three or four months trying to get into that world.
I always found it fascinating.
And the code of honor and the defending your name and the strangeness of the rules whereby there was always this whole code of rules about if you were called out, you had to fight.
If they insulted your dad, you had to fight.
And then the kids getting groomed into it very young.
And we could never build trust with the families.
But the guy who made Knuckle, do you remember how he gets in with the families?
Yeah, it's a fascinating, fascinating documentary.
And there's so many of those call-out videos that are available now.
They put them up on YouTube now to really embarrass the person that they're calling out instead of just a video where you hand a cassette off to somebody else like in the olden days.
Now they put these videos up on YouTube and they're damn hilarious.
People sometimes ask me what the strangest or the most difficult story I've ever done.
And one of them was definitely this gypsy one.
And it wasn't for lack of a story being that the story was there, but we just couldn't figure out how to get to it.
And there was just no sense of, you'd be having these conversations with the guy, you know, there was a guy who was very high up in the gypsy community, and he had a number of sons, and he was big in the fighting world, and he was just connected in various ways, both legal and probably not legal.
But you would have conversations with him, and you couldn't figure out what was real and what wasn't real.
And there was a slight sense of, you know, they call non-gypsies gorgeous.
Or maybe, I mean, the spellings could vary, but we were gorgeous.
And I always felt that because we were gorgeous, you know, non-gypsies, that he as a gypsy just felt like no real sense of needing to tell the truth to us a lot of the time.
You know, I'm not trying to generalize that or be, you know, say that's true for all gypsies or travelers, but for him, it was like, because we were gorgeous, it felt like, you know, we just didn't count.
And they, well, was that movie Snatch sort of highlighted it a bit with Brad Pitt.
But these people, they travel, you know, and they set up shopping places.
And I have some friends from England, and they have friends that live in this wealthy community, this suburban community outside of London.
And these people apparently just moved into the area, set up their caravans, set up shop, and just started destroying the area.
They started putting garbage everywhere.
They started robbing people.
I mean, and they can't do anything about it.
Apparently, there's like massive protection of these people in England, and they're trying to be polite about it and the way they go about dealing with the situation.
And these folks that lived in these multi-million dollar estates are really kind of fucked.
Well, it's one of these situations where it's very hard to find the right line because on the one hand, we're talking about a community that is heavily discriminated against, is deeply poor, has massive dislocation in various respects, very high rates of illiteracy, of children not going to school, their children's health not being good, and massively out of work.
And then, so, you know, by all normal sort of barometers, you'd think that's a community that needs help, but also there's various social vices that go along with that.
And so then I think it's fair to say many of the traveling folk are not well liked in rural areas.
And they are, and there's a cultural thing too, where they say, like, it's not in our culture to stay in one place.
We have to roam around and we have to be allowed to build a house in a field where you're not supposed to build houses.
So it's like one of these, you know, they can sort of make a cultural argument, say, like, we're culturally, you can't, our tradition is, it's like, you know, it's like Native Americans saying like, we have to be allowed to kill whales.
You know, like, you know, there's these debates and there's a spectrum of, and there's a point where you say like, well, it's your culture to mutilate female genitalia, but it's still illegal and you can't do it, right?
Or what you say, it's your culture to hunt whales.
Well, well, we don't really want you to do that, but maybe you can hunt deer Instead, it's our culture to, you know, so you've got to try and find, it's a tricky area.
The area about the hunting whales is a very unique one because I believe there's certain Inuit tribes that are still allowed to hunt certain animals, like seal.
But, you know, what is, you know, culture, that's where things get strange.
You know, what do we accept?
Clearly, you know, we moved, we, meaning North Americans, whoever came here from Europe and wherever, when they migrated here, encroached on Native American land and sort of changed the whole rules.
So what are the rules remaining?
And that's where this whole Indian reservation thing comes into play here.
We allowed them to set up shop in these areas, usually that sucked, places that the new people didn't want at all.
They allowed these Native Americans to have these areas and then they allowed them to sort of establish their own rules in these areas.
So then that was fine for the longest time and they just sort of lived in poverty until they started making casinos.
Then it got really strange because then non-Native Americans were allowed to invest in these casinos and then they established these crazy businesses where they make millions and millions and millions of dollars and they allow gambling, which is frowned upon everywhere else.
That's another one that I'd like to do a story on.
I didn't figure out a way of doing it.
But you know, in talking about this, I think what the realization I had was in the end, the stories I do aren't about wackiness, in my view, or even stuff that's sort of ethically dubious, although I sometimes go into those areas.
What I'm interested in is angst and the deepest kinds of human angst, where you are facing issues that emotionally take you to the core of your being and your soul.
And in some cases, it's, you know, it could be stuff that seems kind of dubious, like the world, I've done a story on brothels, or I did a story about porn performers, and it's the strangeness of taking the intimacy of the sex act and putting that on TV.
And then in other cases, it's stories where the angst is something where you're presented with a choice that is really through no fault of yours.
Like you've got a parent who's got dementia, serious Alzheimer's, or a loved one, let's say.
Your husband, who you've been married to for 50 years, doesn't recognize you anymore and is having sex at his old people's home with some of the other women there.
And some of the homes, as I understand it, there, I mean, we didn't actually film elderly people having sex, but it was clear when one of the women I was spending time with was visiting her husband of 30 years.
Whenever she visited him, he would take one of his new girlfriends out.
They'd go out for a meal and they went out as a sort of threesome because he didn't remember that he was married to his wife.
He thought he had a new girlfriend.
And so, I mean, but I'm just taking that as an, so when I come to this question of why didn't the story about the mixed martial arts work out, I think it was to do with, like, there wasn't a great deal of angst there.
It was kind of healthy and people just venting a little bit of male aggression.
So I'm trying to give you the DNA of, we started out by talking about wackiness, American culture, but the DNA for what I do is much more about the fundamental existential kind of the irresoluble.
But they kind of have a lot of cozy chats, and I'm watching this, like, okay, I'm not getting, where's this going to start?
And I think like, and maybe I'm programmed in a different way from some people, because I could not watch that film and get what people were getting out of it.
But there was this character who is this yoga master, quasi spiritual leader, whatever he is, you know, without judging.
And there's this guy named Mike, who was a devotee, who lived in this guy's ashram, I guess, and believed that this man could materialize jewelry and objects.
And the story of him stomping his foot down and a 50-pound note appeared in his hand.
One of my favorite moments was you sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to him, and you asked him whether or not, you said, try not to take this the wrong way, but did you have sadness in your life before you met this guy?
The deep story there is that I spent, that was at Weird Weekends Days, which was about 10 years ago.
And I used to try and spend, it was like a little rule of thumb.
I'd find a contributor who I could relate to the most.
Like, you take something that seemed really out of whack, like something that on the face of it, you think, how could people really think it's cool to move to Idaho and not pay taxes and think the UN is going to invade?
How could people really think that an Indian guru is going to manifest Rolex watches, they call them Siddhis, by meditating and cure cancer by jamming on a keyboard, right?
An old Bon Tempe keyboard.
And so, but the technique we used was to try and find the most likable, reasonable, seeming person who exemplified that belief system.
So you take a weird subject, but cast it normal, like cast it a person who's likable and relatable.
And Mike was the guy, we thought.
And when you found that guy, I'd say, and I'll move in, I'll spend a night with them.
It was like supposed to signal my commitment to the story as well.
So in that story, I spent the night at Mike's ashram.
But they had very thin mattresses.
Although I later found out there were different thicknesses.
Depending on how committed you were, you would choose a thinner mattress.
So you can choose a thick one.
But I just found a thin one.
So I put it on.
And I had one of the worst nights of sleep in my life.
And I woke up the next morning kind of groggy.
And as you are after a night's sleep, not just kind of bad-tempered, but also just my chi wasn't flowing right.
And I wasn't in tune with what was going on around me.
And so when he asks, he says something about if you, you know, if you're a fundamentalist because you've had a breakdown.
And I think, oh, he's saying he had a breakdown, I think.
If you back up about three or four minutes before that, find it is you'll see Louis getting out of bed and he looks very groggy and then he communicates with this guy and they have this sort of a weird breakdown.
He says he went to Vegas and I took that as a kind of slightly very subtle coded possible admission that he takes an interest in magic and therefore what he does is a kind of conjuring.
So I sort of was trying to edge towards getting him to admit that, you know, like we know that you can't make a Rolex watch appear out of thin air, right?
And so why not just let's just get that out there and admit that, you know, that's what you do.
And then, I mean, at the same time, it may have taken someone with a certain credulity or a willingness to believe in occult forces to come up with the notion of gravitational pull through a vacuum at a distance, when until then, they'd been grappling with science as mechanistic.
In other words, what I'm saying is gravity, nothing explains why gravity exists.
And at that time, the paradigm of science in the 17th century was that all that nonsense that they used to believe in the Middle Ages was nonsense that you didn't have, and even Aristotelian ideas of things going up.
Everything could be explained mechanistically.
It was a mechanistic that objects banged into each other, and that's why things moved.
So it took a leap of faith to say, you know what, maybe objects move each other through forces that are invisible and can't really be explained.
Well, I think it's really interesting just going back into our past, just recent past, that we have with recordings and television and watching how different our culture is from today, say from the 1920s and 1930s, even films from the 1940s and 50s.
They vary.
There's so much of a difference.
I'm a stand-up comedian, and when I go back and I listen to the stand-up comedians of the 1950s and the 1960s, I mean, it's incredible how much different culture is between now and then.
The greatest, probably the most important comedian ever is Lenny Bruce, in my opinion.
But if you try to listen to Lenny Bruce today, it's really not funny.
If it was released today, if someone tried to release a Three Stooges movie today, you'd be like, what a piece of shit.
And that's a person, you know, I have great respect for the Three Stooges.
It sounds crazy to say, but I think that it's an evidence of the references.
Our culture is just extremely different now.
And I think that's one of the more challenging aspects of trying to look back on the 1600s and trying to imagine what life was like, trying to go back to the days when they used to have to put skirts on table legs because they were thinking that people were going to be sexually attracted to table legs and piano legs.
It's hard for people to imagine that that was a real thing.
Oh, there's massive amounts of contradictions that we have in our society.
I mean, I think, first of all, the way people dress will be bizarre.
Women's high heels will be laughed at.
Women's high heels, like when you see women walk around with spikes, you know, and women love wearing stilettos and pumps and all these really bizarre feet-distorting shoe wear or footwear.
I mean, I think that's one of the things that's going to be looked back upon.
Ties.
People look back on ties the way they looked at powdered wigs from the George Washington era.
I mean, and racism was normal in the 19th century.
And even someone like Lincoln, who we think of as being a hero of the civil rights struggle, freeing the slaves, the Emancipation Proclamation, made a number of deeply racist statements.
That guy was a pedophile, and apparently for decades, and it was covered up, much like the Jerry Sandusky case in America.
A lot of folks are aware of that.
The Pennsylvania state, the guy who was a coach, a football coach, who was just a massive pedophile.
And they covered it up.
They covered it up so much, so I don't know if you're familiar with that case, but the DA, the guy who was a, the prosecutor was trying to try to find out information.
He turned up missing.
He turned up missing, and they found his laptop in a river with no hard drive.
They killed that fucking guy.
They killed the guy that is investigating Jerry Sandusky.
Someone did.
And you would go, well, why would someone do that when you're talking about a pedophile?
Well, then you find out how much money the school makes.
And the school makes from their football program.
The school makes from people who went to that school who donate to the school.
And it's an insane amount of money.
It's hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Well, see, it's been a matter of a lot of soul-searching for me because of the strangeness of then discovering that he had this track record of apparently sexually abusing.
So there's no exact cultural figure in America to compare him with, but he was mainly known as a DJ.
And from the late 60s right through to the 90s, he was just on the radio a lot.
And then he got a TV show on the back of his DJing career where it was called Jibble Fixit.
And people would call in with requests for special fix-its, which were dreams that he would make come true for them.
So kids would say, I've always wanted to box with a big box, you know, meet Muhammad Ali or drive a ferry or whatever it was, dance with Shawadi Wadi, or, you know, like just, and they would come on and he would fix it for them to do their things.
It was a very popular mainstream TV show for 20 years.
And all, so everyone in Britain knew who he was and he was very, very, in his appearance, he was very odd.
You know, you could see him there, but even more so in his younger years, he had this helmet of hair.
And so you always looked at him and thought, God, he looks really odd, like something not right about him.
Was culture, were they- I don't think, you know, there wasn't like a memo that went out saying, don't touch him.
He does a lot of works for charity.
But there was an atmosphere of feeling that he was doing good works for charity and that he was a VIP.
And, you know, I think abuse victims, even when it's not a celebrity, there's a lot of pressure on them not to come forward due to embarrassment and a misplaced sense of guilt.
And when it's a prominent member of the celebrity world who's viewed as a kind of a benevolent philanthropist, even more so.
Yeah, that was the issue with Sandusky as well, that he worked in charities, charitable organizations that helped a lot of young kids that were orphans.
And he took a lot of these young kids on trips.
And this was apparently when he had sexually molested them, allegedly, what have you.
I don't know if he's ever admitted to any of this, but of course he's obviously guilty of something.
But that was his thing, that he had helped all these kids, and he was involved in all these charitable organizations.
But there were suspicions about him, and there was stories about him for a long time.
And someone had protected him.
And the idea is the reason why they had protected him was because it would take down Penn State, this enormous money-making machine, this huge cultural, it was a huge business, and it was also like a big part of the community.
I mean, Penn State is this institution, this established institution that would be brought down by this.
My friend Dama Reira is actually friends with the prosecutor, the one who chased him down at the end, not the guy that turned up missing, but one of the ones who was involved at the very end when he did wind up getting prosecuted.
Yeah, I mean, I think the news was just absolutely devastating.
And when he was, I don't think he took early retirement.
I believe he was removed.
I believe he was removed as a coach.
And that's when everybody went crazy.
I mean, there was like riots when they removed him as the coach.
And then the news came out.
And then when the news came out, everybody was like, oh, fuck.
And then he died shortly afterwards.
And I would probably safely say that a good reason why he died was not just old age.
The devastating effect of this all becoming public was probably just unbelievably hard to deal with.
Of course, you know, not minimizing what happened to those kids is much more difficult for them to deal with it.
The whole thing is just totally disgusting, but fascinating in some sort of a strange, bizarre way that human beings are capable of doing something like that, that they're capable of shielding this monster.
It's hard to explain, but, you know, sometimes I think, you know, in a male way, I'm not that connected to the deepest sources of my emotions.
So I don't really know what it was, but I do think that being hugged is a very simple, and it's a physical act, but It creates all kinds of emotions inside of you, and it just sort of welled up from nowhere.
I thought about that quite a bit after I watched it, and one of the things that I took from it was the emotions and just the whole group of people waiting in line to hug someone, the anticipation of it, and the love that's in the air.
There's sort of this group-minded thing that's going on.
I would think that just the experience itself of being around all those people that were in this sort of dancing, joyous state and this long line to get to this woman.
And she probably had some sincere, loving gesture towards everyone as well.
I mean, imagine what it would be like to be adored by so many people and such a large group of people that are established there to come see you and get in line to hug you.
Well, religion is certainly one of life's great mysteries.
I think there's also group states of like-mindedness that I find quite fascinating.
And you can get them when people...
It was a UFC fight for the troops.
And they sang the national anthem.
It's in the middle of the Iraq war.
And when they sang the national anthem, the intensity and the feeling in the air, the patriotism, just the emotions involved.
You're dealing with thousands of people in the audience who have lost loved ones, lost friends, maybe been wounded themselves, maybe taken lives themselves.
Many of them, I'm sure, taken lives themselves.
And the palpable, the patriotism and the emotion.
And I am a person who was absolutely against all of these wars, whether it's the Iraq invasion, the Afghanistan war.
I thought the whole thing was about money and the whole thing was ill-advised.
I thought that the idea of going in for these supposed weapons of mass destruction was incredibly transparent.
And then I thought that the government and the military-industrial complex was capitalizing on a horrible event in September 11th and using that as an impetus to go and invade these countries and take over, you know, resources.
But that moment when that thing was happening and that person was singing the national anthem, was a soldier that was singing the national anthem and everyone was standing there proud and the energy in the air and the cheer when it was over.
You were ready to go to war.
I mean, you were ready to support the troops.
You're ready to not just support the troops, but support the war.
You're ready to back them.
I mean, there's this weird thing that happens, these group-minded sort of states that...
And it's not the only time when, I mean, it's the only time I think I felt that exact sort of emotion of whatever that was, sort of religious transcendence.
But I've, you know, there's plenty of times when you are around people.
I mean, in a way, a lot of the stories I do are about the altered consciousness of being exposed to people who believe things passionately and the slight sense of Stockholm syndrome that sets in when you're there for prolonged periods, you know, and the weird change in consciousness that takes place.
You know, I did a story where I was with the Phelps clan, the Westboro Baptist Church.
I spent three weeks with them.
In fact, I did two different things, but for the first one, I was there for three weeks.
It was called The Most Hated Family in America.
And it was really odd because when you're inside their little compound in their castle, imbibing their air and their doctrine round the clock, stuff that seems really weird and hateful on the outside starts to seem mundane.
You know, you're still able to step outside and say, I'm here to do a job and this is wrong, but you get anesthetized.
Steve, and his daughter left a couple of years ago.
We went back and did a follow-up because a couple of the people we featured in the first one then left.
But Steve almost, you could argue, by dint of having been born outside the church, was compensating by being even more hardcore because he was the fiercest and the most, in conversation, he was the hardest and the most abusive, I guess, most verbally full of bile.
I mean, by and large, they don't really make converts.
They make a few, but he's not trying to recruit new personnel.
If anything, it's the opposite.
They view it as a confirmation of their holy status and of their salvation that they're rejected because there's some verse somewhere in the Bible saying, ye will be hated of men and people will throw things at you.
It's somewhere in the Bible.
And so every time someone says, you're full of it, you're scum, we hate you, what they hear is, yes, we are saved.
So like 90% of the people in there were born into it and are family members.
And in fact, they hemorrhage membership constantly.
They kick people out.
So when he's preaching, he's not thinking, how do I get new followers?
And he was one of the few times where you try and do an interview with someone who clearly can't stand you.
And I said something like, how can you really believe that there's no, like, even if you accept that what you say is true, you know, their position is there's no other church in the world that is preaching the doctrine.
I said, how would you even know?
Like, there could be some tiny church in Nigeria that's preaching the exact same message.
I think it was like 12 kids, but four of them had left the church.
And each of them had had quite a few kids.
But I think if you're an egomaniac, number one, number two, if for whatever reason you cleave to a certain kind of dogmatic religious outlook, it's probably not that difficult to run, to have a cult.
I'll ask you why in a second, but when you read it, it's like, oh my word, you just have to be kind of come out with a few kind of riddles that you've learned from street pimps, and people fall into your lap.
I think that that guy's the Bob Hope of serial killers.
You know, because Bob Hope was a comedian that never really made anybody in my generation laugh.
Like, we always knew him as a comedian, but it's like, just really wasn't funny.
Manson was never scary to me.
Like, there's some real serial killers that were fucking terrifying.
But when you think of serial killers, it's always Manson, Manson.
Manson is the guy, the crazy guy, the wild guy, because he carved a fucking swastika in his head.
if you I mean Henry Lee Lucas the guy from that they made that movie about him Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer allegedly killed somewhere around 60 people you know Right.
Do you know that Geraldo was like a counterculture figure at one time?
Geraldo was the guy who introduced the world to the Zapruder film.
He had Dick Gregory on his television show, and he showed the world a Zapruder film, essentially establishing the idea that it was more than one person or someone else other than Lee Harvey Oswald that killed Kennedy.
I think he does some shows, but he's more of an activist.
he's very, very old now.
But I saw something recently where Dick Gregory was sitting down with Paul Mooney, who's a great old comedian from Los Angeles, who was a writer for Richard Pryor and just a great comedian.
And the two of them were sitting around talking about racism and culture.
He was the guy who somehow or another got a hold of the Zapruder film.
The Zapruder film was made, obviously, in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated, but it was bought by Time Life magazine, I believe, by whoever owns Life Magazine or Time at the time.
I don't think it was in either or because everybody wants to say that it was either Lee Harvey Oswald or it was other people.
It could have been Lee Harvey Oswald and other people.
And that's, I don't understand why people have to have everything black and white.
And everybody says, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Like, why do you think that?
Why do you think that?
Like, why would anybody think that he acted alone?
If you look at all the injuries that Kennedy had to his body, first of all, the shot in the neck, it's an entry wound.
In Bethesda, Maryland, they called it a tracheotomy.
But in Dallas, Fort Worth, when he was first administered by, taken care of by doctors, they said it was an entry wound.
They changed what the wound in his neck was in order to fit with the established narrative of Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone shooter.
That's one reason to think that there was more than one person.
The other reason to think there was more than one person was a single bullet theory.
And I've heard a lot of people say that the single bullet theory could have happened, that bullets can act very weird when they go through, and they absolutely can.
People have shot people and bullets shot someone from the front and the bullet has ricocheted inside their head and come out their eye and landed in front.
I mean, that has happened.
Bullets take very strange paths when they ricochet off bones.
That's not what's weird about the bullet passing through two people.
What's weird about the bullet passing through two people is, first of all, why did they think that one bullet did that?
And the reason for that is because a bullet hit the underpass, ricocheted off a curbstone, and hurt some person that was standing in the underpass.
So they had to attribute one of the shots, one of the three shots, to that bullet.
They knew that Kennedy and Connolly had both been hit, and then they knew that there was a headshot.
So those are three bullets.
One bullet that hit the curbstone, the other bullet that passed through two bodies, and then the headshot.
That's the reason why they had to make the entry wound on the neck a tracheotomy.
And that's the reason why they had to say that one bullet had caused these wounds on two different people.
They found the bullet on the gurney, in Connolly's hospital gurney, when he was administering the hospital.
Oh, look, we found a bullet in pristine condition.
If you've ever shot a bullet and that bullet hit bone, when bullets hit bone, they distort.
The idea that that bullet came out like that after going through two people's bodies and hitting bone, it's ridiculous.
It doesn't make any sense.
That's the reason why I think that more than one person was involved.
And that's the reason why there's a book called Best Evidence by a guy named David Lifton who goes into great detail.
He was a bookkeeper and an accountant.
And he had some assignment involving the Warren Commission.
And he was such a meticulous guy that he actually read the entire Warren Commission, which is some insane number of pages.
But he read it, and he wrote a book called Best Evidence, all about all the contradictions in the Warren Commission report and why he thought that the entire thing was established to make a predetermined conclusion and to establish that with the American public.
And he thought it was all horseshit.
So I don't think so.
I think more than one person was involved.
But it could have been Lee Harvey Oswald, too.
That's what people, I don't understand why people have to have either Lee Harvey Oswald killed them or there was other people.
Like it has to be either a lone assassin or other people.
I think Lee Harvey Oswald clearly was a fucked up guy who had some sort of a connection to the government.
He went to Russia, lived in Russia, and then came back to the United States, got a passport till he was living in Russia, and then was readmitted back into the United States and had some dubious connections to the world of government.
It was a very strange, strange story that in this day and age, you know, all these years later, we're most likely never going to get the full details.
When Kennedy is holding his body like this, most likely he had been hit.
But they're saying that it was from the front.
How do you know it was from the front?
It was from behind the sign.
He could have been hit from the back.
It's hard to tell what happened.
I mean, he's going like this.
You're assuming that that's because he was hit.
But it might not have been.
I mean, he might have dropped his fucking pen.
I mean, he might have been like, where's my shit?
And then got hit in the head.
I don't know.
You know, I don't know.
It's very difficult to tell from that video how many times he's been hit.
But the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone seems the least likely of the scenarios.
And then the photos of E. Howard Hunt, who was arrested allegedly, along with a bunch of people that were quote-unquote hobos that they had arrested behind the grassy knoll, but then they were all released.
They were hobos, but they were dressed normal.
They were dressed like regular people.
And then Woody Harrelson's dad, who is a known murderer, who supposedly has some sort of a connection to it.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But there's a guy who wanted to get rid of the Federal Reserve.
There's a guy who wanted to get rid of the CIA.
He wanted to pull out of Vietnam.
I mean, there's a lot of shit that Kennedy wanted.
He wanted to put us out of Vietnam.
He wanted to disrupt the military-industrial complex.
He wanted to do a lot of things that were very unpopular.
It's amazing to me that given the level of vitriol that's directed at him from quarters in the far right, that someone – But I think every day there are threats, and probably some of them are credible threats against him.
I'm sure the CIA or rather the Secret Service does a great job of stopping a lot of assassination attempts.
I mean, if we lived in a time like during the Lincoln administration when everything was very just, you know, they just didn't have the type of security that they have today.
They didn't have this sort of technology, the ability to track people, the ability to keep an eye on questionable folks.
And there's two types of people when it comes to the hunting community.
There's people that are fair chase hunters and people that believe in high fence operations.
And sometimes they're interchangeable.
Sometimes people support both.
And this is the way I feel about it.
I think that it's a great way of acquiring meat.
It's probably way more ethical than being a farmer.
You know, if you're going to look at it that way, you're going to say, well, this is how I acquire my meat.
I leave food out for them and then I shoot them.
Okay, I see that and I agree with that.
I think it's better than farming in that sense.
But to call it hunting the same way you would call hunting, like climbing up to the Alps and looking for a mountain goat that lives in the wild or going through the Rockies and chasing down a moose that lives in the wild, it's two completely different sort of endeavors.
When you've got these animals fenced in, you have an account of how many are there.
There's 300 deer here.
I need to kill one of them.
And that's not really hunting.
And one of your shows, which I found very fascinating that I watched last night, was about canned hunts in Africa.
And I think the phrase I said, you know, if you've got a fence up and the animal knows it's going to be fed, and you just hide in your little bunker until the warthog or the lion shows up knowing that the food's out, and then you take a pop at it.
Whereas a tiger, I don't say it's a good life for a tiger, but a a tiger doesn't necessarily become dysfunctional from being pent up but a um a chimpanzee is like a person and you need you need stimulation yeah and not only that they also know to go cut the video they also know to to go after your fingers they go after your balls like they know what you want yes well you want to keep your fingers so they bite your fingers off like there's there's a certain intelligence to their attack that's very disturbing,
as opposed to like a tiger that just wants to kill you.
I read a thing about a chimpanzee attack at a zoo.
Like, before I went out to do the story, I was reading up on chimpanzee attacks because I knew for the story to work, I'd probably at some point have to cuddle a chimpanzee or something like that.
And it was making me nervous.
Like, it was making me more nervous than the idea of going into a prison cell or a jail cell where, you know, you know there's enough rationality on the part of the prisoner that he's not going to attack me and bite my balls.
I'm sure there's an idiot out there that would do almost anything that you came up with.
Those guys that you interviewed that were pro wrestlers that were beating each other with fucking barbed wire, I'm sure if you put a mask on one of those dummies, they would get in there and scrap of the chimpanzee.
But my point that I wanted to get back to was the complex, contradictory aspect of those canned hunts in Africa.
You had a draw on a warthog.
You were thinking about shooting it, and you're like, I can't do this.
I mean, it was just the whole situation, the idea that I'm going to take the life of this animal just to indulge my own sense of either what I think I need for this program to work or my sense of like, oh, I'm going to experience this to see what it feels like to take the life.
It didn't feel like, I just didn't feel an urge to do it.
Like, I could have forced myself.
If you'd put a gun to my head and said, do it, I would have done it, of course.
Yeah, they were trophy hunters and they weren't doing it to acquire meat.
These people were doing it to have this, to kill things.
And the video of them being all joyful and happy when they all got together and compared notes after their individual hunts, like several individual hunting parties had went out.
They all came out like after the second day, their first full day of hunting.
And we do an inventory of, they'd got like, you know, three zebras, two kudu, a gazelle, you know, and there was an inventory of kind of, and they, and you can sort of pick them out like they're on a shopping list.
Well, there were $100,000 American in which well that was what was going on in America.
There was a big issue recently all over the news where there was a safari club that had auctioned, it was in Dallas, and they had auctioned off a hunt for an endangered rhino.
And the idea was that all this money that they had auctioned off would go.
If you want to see the most grisly, way more grisly and upsetting than any kind of UFC show, it's watch a nature program with the elephants getting lost in the mist and getting attacked by, you know, like the level of gore.
It's like they're like snuff films, in a sense.
Sure.
And so, and I think one thing that Ted Nugent used to say when I was filming with him was he objected to the Disney of our experience of the natural world.
I mean, think about the animals that we take this weird approach with, like polar bears or, you know, grizzly bears like yogi.
We turn them into our friends.
You know, polar bears are the weirdest ones.
You know, Polar bears are like Klondike bars.
What would you do for a Klondike bar?
Or they're fucking drinking Coke.
It's like this weird thing that we do with the anthropomorphomorphizing these really violent, dangerous animals.
And some of the more violent, more dangerous animals are the ones that we make them cuddly and cute and bizarrely twist their nature up.
And that sometimes is the only exposure that people have to these animals for a long time.
Like my children.
My children, I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old that are just starting to understand that the animals that they see in cartoons are not real animals and that real animals don't talk and real animals are very different.
I mean, they obviously see the five-year-old especially sees that.
But I'm starting to explain to her that if you ever see a bear, like bears are not to be approached and they're not cuddly.
They're not your friends.
And there's a real big difference between a bear that's trained, like a bear in a movie, and a bear that you see in the wild.
And so then they're like, well, are there dogs in the wild?
Well, not necessarily.
Sometimes there are.
And if you see a wild dog, they are dangerous as well.
Because the only thing that's not dangerous about dogs is that they are pets and that we train them, we get them used to people.
So there's this weird relationship with animals that I have to sort of relay to my children.
And in doing so, I start to review this bizarre thing that we have, this weird relationship that we have to certain animals.
I mean, I don't think we really know how we feel about a lot of animals.
And if we gave half as much thought to the conditions in industrial, in factory farms, in the way chickens and pigs are raised, as we do to endangered species,
I mean, I'm more concerned about that in a way, like the conditions of how our food is created, that pigs get fed their own minced up piglets, you know, and just all kinds of hideous practices.
There's a great deal of disgusting practices that are involved in agriculture and farming and taking care of livestock and mad cow disease, which England had a huge issue with.
It's a weird, weird thing, you know, that we dehumanize.
And we also allow ourselves to put money above humanity, above ethics and morality.
And when it comes to animals, it's more profitable to stuff them into containers where they can barely move and just feed them their own bodies and fatten them up and then sell them.
Otherwise, that body, the dead babies or whatever the fuck they feed them, goes to waste.
The parts that we don't use for hamburger and what have you goes to waste.
And did you know, I mean, probably everyone knows this, but do you know in the world of raising chickens for eggs, all the male hatchlings get mashed up within a couple of days of being born?
But it's Fiend to be like, you were a writer and then you turn on his like, yeah, we work from 6 in the evening till 4 in the morning and we like to hang out with Spider and we basically, we all play Yahtzee for a couple of hours and then we work for half an hour.
I mean, it wasn't literally that, but it was kind of like, oh my God, it's like that episode of The Twilight Zone where the kid is in charge of the family and they're all like, oh, we're having a great time.
So it was, but it's kind of like Werner Earhart saying, like, after you've stayed awake for 48 hours and peed your pants, then you have an enlightenment experience.
Is that like if you haven't made a creative breakthrough by 6 o'clock in the evening, then, hey, why don't you go home and have a good night's sleep and try again the next morning?
Well, I think they liked the idea of working under the wire as well.
I think they would oftentimes deliver the script for the run-through, like we had a run-through in the morning or a table read.
So if the table read was Monday morning, Sunday night, they would still be working.
Like if we had to be at the table read at 9 a.m., they would be writing at 8 a.m.
Like sometimes we would get, we would, we would go to rehearse, we'd have no table read, and we would wind up rehearsing the first, the first like five pages.
That's all they had.
I mean, we wouldn't have a full script.
We would have five pages.
And then while we were rehearsing, you know, like Josh Lee would come stumbling down barefoot, his hair would be all fucked up, be smoking a cigarette.
Here's the next 20 pages.
And we'd have the next, you know, the next X amount of pages.
And we would go over that.
And then the next day they would.
But it always came together as a really solid show.
It was the feeling that unless your guts are on the floor, you know, then there's a chance you might have been able to improve it with more work.
Do you know what I mean?
Like stay late and worry and worry and worry and stay late and work on the weekends until you just despair and you just think, I can't give anything more to the process.
There's a few guys that were family guys that had real issues and wound up leaving.
But they were having fun, and that having fun led them to be funnier.
And I think whether or not it was a consequence of their laziness that it was so good, or whether there was a method to their madness, I mean, you would really have to take that up with Paul, and he would have to really soul search to find the actual correct answer.
Dave Foley, too, who is one of the secret producers of that show.
I mean, I've had Dave on the podcast before, and I'd love that guy to death.
He's so fucking talented.
And if you ever want to hear one of the worst divorce stories of all time, listen to the podcast with him on and just what kind of a nightmare divorce can be.
They had gone through some they had broken up, and he had a boat and slept in his boat for a while and then came back to her and wanted to keep the family together and was trying hard to work it out.
Yes.
Yes.
Very sad.
So when people just are committed in that sort of a situation where they have to stay, or if they do stay, it's devastating to their lifestyle, devastating to their emotional state.
It's very troubling and very scary when they start attacking each other as well, when they go after each other to try to hurt that person.
I reached out a little bit to Andy Dick last year because we were trying to make a bunch of shows that were all set in LA.
Since I was living here, the idea was let's do sort of LA stories.
And one of them was going to be stand-up comedians.
And we were trying to find intriguing guys, guys who sort of represented something about, I couldn't quite figure out what it was, but I thought it was something to do with the pressure on someone who's their own producer, their own writer, their own performer, and whose performance is the performance of themselves or a version of themselves.
And that that entailed a certain kind of vulnerability and a kind of high-stakes professional maneuver that you go on stage and it's just you and a crowd of people and whether you might face heckling and whatnot.
So that was how I'd formulated it in my head.
And also that you might be cannibalizing your own life to some extent for material and whether that imposed a certain set of strains and whether being funny itself came from some angst or something in your background.
Anyway, so that was how I figured.
But it was very hard for us to kind of find the right people.
So it's sort of, we reached out to Andy and a few other people.
And he always said, like, I really want to film with you.
But it's just, you know, comedy is a tricky thing, man.
You know, it's a very bizarre art form where you...
There's so many different styles of comedy.
There's so many different ways you can go about it.
And you're the only one who really knows your best way, and you have to find it.
And the only way you find it is in front of an audience.
It's one of the few art forms that you require other people's input.
You require them to be there while you're creating it.
You write on your own.
I write all my stuff.
Either I have an idea and I write down notes or I actually physically sit in front of the keyboard and I write long form and then cherry-pick ideas out of those long forms and introduce it.
But it doesn't really come alive unless you do it in front of an audience.
If I'd approached you, I don't think we did because I'd remember, but if I had approached you to be in the documentary, what would have been your thought process?
I just sort of tell you what my process is, but I wouldn't want, and I don't even like people filming things at my shows when I'm working on shit because I don't want it getting on YouTube or whatever.
It's not done.
It's like, you know, it's a sketch.
And then if that gets on YouTube and then someone sees it like three months later and it's better, they still know where it's going.
Like part of comedy is you want new stuff.
When you go to see a band, you go to see the Rolling Stones, do you want to hear new Rolling Stone songs?
Fuck no.
You want to hear the classics.
You want to hear Sympathy for the Devil.
You want to hear satisfaction.
You want to hear the songs you already know that you can relate to.
Comedy is the exact opposite.
You want to always hear new stuff.
Like I have a stand-up comedy special that premiered on Comedy Central Friday night.
And one of the points that I've made in advertising all these current shows that I'm doing is it's all new material.
Like if you saw the thing from Saturday night or Friday night that aired, if you go see me live next week, you're not going to see any of that material.
That material is done.
It's gone.
Throw it away.
It's filmed.
It's out there in the internet and the ether and Comedy Central and it's there forever.
But what I do on stage, now I'm on to new stuff.
So I don't want my process to be a part of what's like record because it's not done.
When you know the whole process behind it, I mean, for someone who's like a comedy nerd or a dork, but I say that in all loving terms, like there's comedy nerds that come to dozens and dozens of shows every month, and they'll have seen me three or four times in a period of three or four months.
I've had people come up to me and say, I love watching the material grow.
I think it's amazing watching you add new bits to it or come up with new things.
And I'm always uncomfortable about that because then the last thing you want to do is see someone in the front row two nights in a row.
Like that happens.
Like you'll see someone, like you'll be in Portland for the weekend and you see a person in the front row Friday and then they're Saturday too.
And you're like, shit, this guy knows all my fucking jokes.
They know all the setup.
So you feel artificial when you're setting up the bits.
You would like people to see your bits when they're as close to done as possible.
When they're as close to the finished form as possible.
That way they're going to get the best show.
You have the best economy of words.
You have the best manipulation of language, the best setup segues.
All that stuff has been fleshed out.
It's been worked out on stage countless hours examining notes, listening to recordings, and then performing.
That's what you want.
You want people to get the show at its best.
And which is why when someone releases a special, like right after they release a special, it's oftentimes not the best time to go see them because all the material is like fucking scattered and they're trying to put it all together.
And then you see the same person six months later and it's just fucking just boom, boom, boom.
It all comes together.
It's a long sort of a brutal process.
But exciting.
It's challenging and it's got a lot of downs to it.
What is the issue that you're having in trying to pursue this?
And what exactly is the reaction to people in the Scientology community now?
Because it seems like the Internet has sort of exposed that religion in a way that before it was always like, What Scientology?
What is this?
But now the internet is sort of all the Tom Cruise recruitment videos have been released, and all the craziness is out, and the people like that have wrote like going clear that book.
I'm reading that right now.
Lawrence Wright's book.
The whole religion, call it a religion or whatever the fuck it is, the whole movement seems to be in a very state of flux right now.
At the same time, I think for students of, I guess, religious oddity or new religions or whatever you want to call it, it's known and it's out there.
And you're reading Lawrence Wright, I read the Lawrence Wright, but there's a vast mass of kind of mainstream people for whom they still, all they know is that thing that Tom Cruise is involved in.
It's kind of weird, you know?
And so they don't know.
So I think there's a huge, so I think step one for a lot of people is like, what is it?
You know, it's something to do with UFOs and Tom Cruise and John Travolta and maybe his sexuality.
But beyond that, they don't know it.
So part of it is trying to convey what it actually is.
I mean, I've been studying in the area for, you know, like reading all the books for about 15, 20 years.
You know, before Lawrence Wright's, there was one by Janet Reitman called Inside Scientology.
There's a whole laundry list of books about Scientology.
And he's standing in front of all those people, and he's such a charismatic person.
There it is, right there.
Oh, Jesus Louis.
Look at that fucking thing.
Come on.
Just the lack of understanding how you come across that would allow you to wear that.
The lack of objectivity that will allow you to put that on and be able to do this fingertips down thing on the desk, like you're making a very important point while you're wearing a fucking frisbee, a gold frisbee around your neck.
It's almost like he's trying to convince himself by tricking all these people.
I think there's something to that.
There's something to...
you know, all the other wacky shit that they believe.
There's something to that where he's putting on this massive performance, not just for them, but for himself as well.
And, you know, not to say they shouldn't be, I mean, you know, do whatever the fuck you want.
And my point is, though, is that so, like, with Tom Cruise, okay, he's got his fingers down.
But in the end, like, so why pick on TC and Scientology, but we're letting the Oscars, you know, we say that, we'll give that a pass, but we can't have guys wearing little golden ones around their neck.
Well, and also, why is it okay to pick on Tom Cruise, but it's not okay to pick on Jewish people with curls and their bobbing up and down, and that's their religion.
That's their traditions.
This is just a tradition where it's not a real religion in our eyes.
And I think what I would try and do in making a documentary about it is to try and see past a lot of the things that people find weird or ludicrous about it, you know, which is, you know, the fact that they have big glitzy Scientology events and get to the core of what it is.
There's also the ambiguous sexuality aspect of it.
There's the rumors of homosexuality that are attached to famous male Scientologists that they shield them, you know, and especially the John Travolta thing.
And there's also the people that, if you talk to people that have done exposés on Scientology, what they say is that during the auditing process, when they audit you, meaning you go over past life experiences that are quite troubling, you repeat them over and over again until they lose their meaning.
Like the same thing is like, if you say fuck around someone who never says fuck, they're like, oh, say fuck around a priest, they'll act like it's some horrible thing that you've done.
But you say fuck around your friends, you don't even, it doesn't even register.
It's like, oh, this fucking thing.
It's another word.
It just, it has no power because it's so used so much.
And I think maybe that's a bad analogy, but in a sense, it works because what they're doing is repeating these stories over and over and over and over and over again until they lose their meaning.
But in the process, they're recording all this shit.
So they have all this dirt on you.
They have all these crazy stories.
If you're going through the process earnestly, you're telling them all the secrets of your life, all the crazy gay orgies you've been a part of, all the nutty fucking cocaine binges, whatever the fuck you've done that you're ashamed of.
Yes, he dabbled in Scientology, and that rumor was released.
When the Tom Cruise or the John Travolta massage therapy stories were released, allegedly, that's when John Travolta was having issues with Scientology.
It's a way to keep you under wraps.
This is the rumors.
Obviously, completely unsubstantiated.
I'm talking out of my ass 100%.
But that makes sense, doesn't it?
I mean, if you have a powerful organization that gets a certain percentage of the amount of money that you make every year and they have a lot of crazy shit on you, you like to go and get massages and talk these guys into letting you fuck them.
I mean, I would think that would be something that, you know, maybe if you were going to leave and take all that money away, they might bring, you know, assuming the organization.
She alleged that David Miscavige's wife, who hasn't been publicly photographed allegedly for a number of years, maybe even sort of five or ten years, was being held captive or had been disappeared in some way.
And that she'd been at Tom Cruise's wedding to, who would it have been at that point?
Katie Holmes in Italy, I think, and said, here's David Miscavige.
Where's Shelly?
Why aren't you here with your wife?
And it became a scandal within Scientology.
People felt it was disrespectful to the head honcho, David Miscavige, to be asking where his wife was.
So she got into trouble and then she left.
And then after she left, she initiated a police inquiry.
She filed a missing person's report.
But then the police, after a couple of days, said, no, she's not missing.
So I guess she's not missing.
The fact is she must be in a retreat somewhere.
I think there's people who know know where she is.
Scientology watchers say there's a certain church headquarters up in the hills.
I can't remember.
Somewhere in Southern California, and that's where she's living.
But I think this kind of goes back to the Swami G. Is that what his name was?
The guy who was the supposed physicist who's living with Swami G. I think people love being a part of a group, whether the group makes sense or doesn't make sense.
I think people, they find comfort in that, and they also get addicted to being a part of a group.
And then when you're a part of something as powerful as Scientology, especially when you look at all the examples of people who are Scientologists who are greatly successful, my old neighbor was a Scientologist, and we had this really weird revelation when it came out, where he and I were talking.
He was talking about buying a piece of land in our neighborhood.
And he said he couldn't buy it right now because his wife was going clear.
And I said, what are you talking about?
Like, what does that mean?
And he said, well, we're Scientologists and my wife is going to go clear and it costs $50,000.
And I was like, this is a guy who's a contractor.
He builds buildings.
He's not a wealthy man.
he does fairly well, but he made $50,000 is a giant chunk of his income.
And he was talking about how his wife is going to be no longer affected by outside influence, and that by going clear, it eliminates all the negative impact of people talking shit about you or, you know, fucking traffic, anything.
Nothing was going to get in anymore.
was clear of all that stuff, that she was going to be removed from...
I mean, but this poor guy was going to spend $50,000 on this.
And he had this sort of glassy-eyed thing about him, this sort of lost thing.
I think being a part of a group, we have these ancestral instincts that I think are passed down from the time where it was very important to be a part of a tribe, to stay alive.
If you're by yourself in the hunter-and-gatherer times, it was very difficult to get enough food to stay alive.
It was very hard.
And I think we have this bond with being a part of a group, whether it's fucking Mac users, man.
I mean, people that love Mac, they hate PC users.
People that love PC, they hate Mac.
They get in these groups.
The Protestants versus the Catholics.
You know, there's Chevy versus Ford.
People are weird that we have these weird desires to be a part of groups.
And I think someone like the Westboro Baptist Church or someone like Swami G's disciples or someone like Scientology, part of the appeal of that is being in a group.
And then when you have Scientology, I'm not too familiar with what Scientology does do that's beneficial, but you look at a guy like Tom Cruise.
Sexual stuff aside, you're talking about a tremendously successful person who looks great.
He's fucking 50 and he looks amazing.
I mean, he's in great health.
He seems like really optimistic all the time and very, very charismatic, very appealing to be a part of a group that that guy is in.
If he is benefiting from Scientology and from the principles of Scientology, surely it can't all be wrong.
Surely it can't all be bad.
That's what he's doing.
Louie, you're awesome, man.
You got to get out of here.
And this is, I think we're done anyway.
This is, we're run out of, three hours in, we turn into a pumpkin.
Well, I've got three shows going out in Britain, new ones going out at the end of March, and so they'll probably be put up quite soon.
And it's the thing I was telling you about, LA stories.
The first one is about stray and abandoned dogs and our attempts to rehabilitate them using controversial dog therapy.
You know, it's like turning criminal dogs and bringing them, rescuing them, bringing them into middle-class homes, and then sometimes they attack their new owners.
And then thousands of them are killed every year in the shelters in LA.
There's a huge stray and neglected dog problem in LA.
Second one is about the hospitals where people are sort of under pressure to keep trying new, like they're close to possibly dying, but there's a new experimental therapy and they have the insurance to pay for it.
And it's this weird 21st century conundrum of when do I stop and say like, I just want to have a peaceful death?
When am I allowed to say like I don't want to try any more chemo?
And the third one is about sex offenders living down in South LA, especially around Torrance, who live in these hostels with electronic bracelets, heavily monitored lives, and the whole strangeness of having done something so terrible.
You know, they've abused their own children or some of them are rapists and so on.
But they've done whatever or 10 years in prison and they've come out and they're on parole.
And to what extent, if any, do we give people like that a second chance?
Like, given that they're out, we are living alongside them, you know, more or less with certain restrictions.