May 6, 2014 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:57:31
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
|
Hello, everybody! | |
| This episode of the podcast is brought to you by 1-800-Flowers. | ||
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| So I'm not going to say my listeners. | ||
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| We are also brought to you by Ting. | ||
| Ting is a mobile company that does things on their own terms. | ||
| And their own terms is they decided to cut out all the nonsense that's usually associated with owning a cell phone and having cell phone coverage. | ||
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| We're also brought to you by Onnit. | ||
| On it is what we call a human optimization website. | ||
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| The government doesn't trust hemp. | ||
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| We live in a time that will be mocked one day. | ||
| Mocked the same way we mock powdered wigs and putting skirts over tables, the way they used to put table leg dresses in the olden days to keep people from getting impure thoughts. | ||
| They will mock us. | ||
| They will mock us for this thing that we have with hemp. | ||
| But we sell it, and if you're in America or in a country that's not retarded, you can buy it, and you can eat it, and it's good for you. | ||
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| All right. | ||
| Nick Cutter, a.k.a. | ||
| Craig Davidson, is here. | ||
| Cue the music, young Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast. | |
| Check it out. | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
| All day! | ||
| All day! | ||
| So my pal Matt Staggs, he sends me this book. | ||
| And he's like, dude, you gotta read this book. | ||
| This book is fucked up. | ||
| You're gonna love it. | ||
| Because he knows I love Stephen King and that sort of twisted genre. | ||
| So he sends me this book right here. | ||
| It's in my bag here somewhere. | ||
| He sends me your book. | ||
| And I enjoy the fucking shit out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks. | |
| I want to pull it out because it's so beat up and dog-eared. | ||
| It proves that I've actually been reading it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nothing looks better. | |
| Oh, there we go. | ||
| The Troop. | ||
| And I guess I'm about 200 plus pages into it. | ||
| It's really getting juicy. | ||
| I'm really enjoying it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good. | |
| It's really good. | ||
| Good, good. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's really fun, and it's along the lines of Stand By Me or one of those classic old Stephen King books, like The Stand or Pet Sematary, where it's just twisted and dark, and there's psychological shit going on, and there's horrific things happening, there's monsters, and it's really fucking cool, man. | ||
| And When he sent it to me, he told me that Nick Cutter wasn't your real name. | ||
| And I was like, well, what's... | ||
| What's the deal there? | ||
| Yeah, what is... | ||
| What's the deal there? | ||
| Well, you know, I think the most concerning thing to me would be is that anyone... | ||
| Because, I mean, I grew up like you. | ||
| Like, Stephen King is my idol. | ||
| Steve, there's nobody I've read more than Stephen King. | ||
| And beyond that, like, I grew up as a horror reader. | ||
| I mean, I've read everything now. | ||
| I mean, you sort of diversify. | ||
| But I wouldn't even say diversify, because that's sort of like... | ||
| I love... | ||
| The horror genre. | ||
| So like Clyde Barker, obviously Stephen King, Peter Straub, Robert R. McCammon. | ||
| I mean, the list goes on and on and on. | ||
| That was sort of who I cut my teeth on. | ||
| So really my agent said, listen, you've been writing these things under your own name and they're kind of... | ||
| I wouldn't even classify them as literary, but maybe they would be a little more to that side rather than the horror genre. | ||
| And he sort of felt like, listen, people aren't going to... | ||
| People might be confused or people might, you know, let's have some separation basically. | ||
| And the best way to do this separation is just to give you a new name, put this horror work, because when I sent him the troupe, I mean there's no way it's anything other than just like, I wanted to write like an 80s style. | ||
| Hard fireball and sort of horror novel. | ||
| Like not splitting any hairs, not trying to make it meta-ironic or anything, just trying to go straight ahead the horror that I grew up loving and try and sort of be an homage to those writers in that time. | ||
| So there's no doubt it was going to come out as clearly a horror novel. | ||
| So he said, let's just make up a pseudonym. | ||
| And I wouldn't say I'm new to this, but... | ||
| You know, you have an agent as well. | ||
| I mean, I trust my agent. | ||
| I imagine in most cases you trust your agent, maybe not always. | ||
| I don't trust them at all. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, they don't get to talk to me. | |
| That type of thing, yeah. | ||
| I don't allow them. | ||
| I think maybe looking back, you know, what we did is we settled on this pseudonym and then I quickly went away, you know, trying to erase any sort of sentiment that I was ashamed of it. | ||
| Because I think that's... | ||
| I live in Toronto and I hang out with a lot of people in the horror genre, sort of genre writers, and their question was, like, are you ashamed? | ||
| I'm like, fuck no. | ||
| That would be the worst thing for me for people to think that, you know, because I'm as proud as what I've done as The Troop as any other writing I've ever done. | ||
| So when you say literary, what are your other books? | ||
| I'm not familiar with your other books. | ||
| The other books... | ||
| I wrote a book called Rust and Bone, which is like a book... | ||
| Is it fiction? | ||
| Yeah, short stories. | ||
| And then I wrote a book called The Fighter. | ||
| Not the same Fighter, the Christian Bale movie. | ||
| And I wrote a book just recently called Cataract City, which is... | ||
| So it's sort of like, I don't know, I wouldn't say Chuck Palahniuk, he was an early influence, but sort of like macho, like fighting, boxing, dogfighting, repossession, you know, those were sort of the things, really sort of manly endeavors that I was concerned about and interested in with those books. | ||
| But they certainly weren't literary like Alice Munro or something like that. | ||
| I don't know who Alice Munro is. | ||
| She's a Canadian short story writer like Salman Rushdie or Philip Roth, those kind of serious literary writers. | ||
| All I know about Salman Rushdie is a bunch of Muslims really mad at him. | ||
| Don't like that dude. | ||
| And then Cat Stevens was on their side and I was very disappointed. | ||
| And he was finally allowed to stick his head up after, I don't know, like they put a fatwa out on him, right? | ||
| Is it over? | ||
| Is the fatwa over? | ||
| I think the guy who put it out died. | ||
| So I think the fatwa died with him. | ||
| Or maybe they carried it over. | ||
| I don't really know how that works, but he is showing up at public functions, so I think he's less concerned about being killed. | ||
| Poor guy. | ||
| Yeah, you think about, like, man, of all the stuff, could you imagine someone puts a fatwa on you for something that you say during a podcast? | ||
| Well, it's pretty ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| I would find out whoever did it and I'd kill them. | ||
| Can you get to them first? | ||
| Yeah, if you can just kill the guy and the fatwa ends, that's... | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You're fucked. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| They shouldn't be putting out too many fatwas because it's like, I'm going to get you. | ||
| It's the day and age you can't hide behind a fatwa anymore. | ||
| No, exactly. | ||
| In today's internet, you know... | ||
| They can find you, but I can find you too. | ||
| You could publicly expose them for their fatwa shaming. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So, I'm not familiar with Salman Rushdie's work. | ||
| I read a little bit of it and I found it quite boring. | ||
| To me, honestly, yeah. | ||
| I think, too, there's somewhat with... | ||
| Literary writing. | ||
| I had to read it because you went to school and did an English degree. | ||
| So I feel like there's medicine. | ||
| It's good for you. | ||
| There's a sense of you should be reading it because it's good for you and it'll make you a better person. | ||
| But I'm past all that now. | ||
| I just like to read what I like to read. | ||
| And if that happens to be sort of crunchy literary fiction where it's like dense text, well, fine. | ||
| But if it's something like a really good horror novel or a thriller novel, I mean... | ||
| I'm all over that too. | ||
| Yeah, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to fiction, whether it's a film or whether it's a book, I only want to be entertained. | ||
|
unidentified
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Totally. | |
| You're not illuminating, elucidating. | ||
| You're not enriching me with your fiction. | ||
| No. | ||
| You're just not. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But you go to school, right? | ||
| And you have too much time on your hands, right? | ||
| You wake up in the morning and what do you have to do? | ||
| Maybe go to a class for two hours a day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I think people in that realm feel like they, because they have the time to, like, invest in, like, really crunchy mind sort of melting, you know, fiction that really tests you. | ||
| But, you know, and then they sort of look down on someone who just wants to read, like, for example, I didn't mention at all in my first, when I did my English degree, you won't talk about Stephen King. | ||
|
unidentified
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Isn't that fun? | |
| Because you get these sort of looks like, oh, him. | ||
| Oh, well, yeah, I used to read him when I was 12. Yeah, he gets mocked. | ||
| Yeah, he gets mocked. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| You know, after a while, you're just like, wait a sec. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| You know, like, I love Stephen King. | ||
| I love a lot of writers that you guys seem to think are... | ||
| You know, base or below your esteem. | ||
| And who are you in the first place? | ||
| We're just sitting in some writing workshop. | ||
| You haven't published a goddamn thing. | ||
| Like, not to be an asshole. | ||
| I mean, I like some of these people that I'm talking about. | ||
| But, like, you know, yeah, there was that certain hierarchy, unless you're reading at this level. | ||
| But it's like, most of people who like to read have, like, a job that really occupies them. | ||
| And they get home at night, maybe, and they don't have all that much energy. | ||
| They just want to read, you know, for enjoyment. | ||
| You know, and why look down on that? | ||
| Yeah, and any time you're concerned about image so much so that you're ignoring great works like Stephen King. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Stephen King wrote some really fun stuff. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And deeply psychologically thrilling as well. | ||
| You can't dismiss The Stand. | ||
| No. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| Or It. | ||
| Yeah, or It. | ||
| Salem's Lot. | ||
| And one thing that I noticed too, like... | ||
| Trying to write a horror book is... | ||
| I think it's really difficult to scare people in this day and age, right? | ||
| Like, it's... | ||
| And so, you would probably... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe you can answer this a little bit in terms of, like, in comedy. | ||
| Like, I read Stephen King when I was 12. And I just read him... | ||
| First of all, he's the writer that got boys to read of our generation, you know? | ||
| I mean, there's nothing else other than maybe Choose Your Own Adventure books that I was reading back then until I sort of graduated to Stephen King. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And so first you read it just because you love Stephen King. | ||
| And then second, you know, I went back as a writer myself and you sort of treat the book as like an engine. | ||
| The way a mechanic treats an engine, you're trying to break it down and see what is working. | ||
| How does this work? | ||
| How does he scare you? | ||
| And that's where you realize his genius because it's like... | ||
| You know, I'm working on like a Model T Ford, and he's got like this, he's working on the DeLorean engine from Back to the Future. | ||
| That's how much he's above, you know, a lot of us in terms of like, he works at a level, I think, of like Conjuring Fear that is so difficult to, first of all, see how it works, break it down, and then try and do it yourself. | ||
| And so when you have people looking down on him for that, I just don't think they've really interacted with his work as closely as I have. | ||
| Because first of all, if you're saying he sucks, I'm like, I can't even touch him in some ways. | ||
| And so what are you saying about me? | ||
| Well, I just think it's one of those things where it becomes... | ||
| It's trendy to say he sucks. | ||
| It puts you in this sort of elevated category of intellectual. | ||
| I think that's horseshit because fiction, like when you start talking about monsters or vampires, you're automatically a fool or you're doing foolish work. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| Whereas if you're talking about depression and suicide and, you know, abortion... | ||
| Stop! | ||
| I'm done with you. | ||
| When it comes to fictional movies especially, like if someone says, oh my god, it was an amazing movie. | ||
| I cried my eyes out. | ||
| It was so horrible. | ||
| Not me. | ||
| I'm not going to see your piece of shit where you make me cry. | ||
| I don't want to cry. | ||
| There's plenty of opportunity to cry. | ||
| You want to cry, watch a documentary on Rwanda, okay? | ||
| Don't fucking cry because some fake asshole made some stupid movie where some people are pretending terrible things happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not going to learn from that. | ||
| You're just not. | ||
| I like to be elevated by my fiction, or at least thrilled. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| I don't want to cry. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I mean, and I completely agree. | ||
| And so, and what another thing Stephen King does really well is childhood. | ||
| I don't think there's another writer, to my mind, really, who writes about childhood as well as Stephen King captures it in a book like It or the movie The Body that became Stand By Me. | ||
| He captures that time in a boy's life especially. | ||
| It's just remarkable, you know what I mean? | ||
| And so I think now, too, I know Patton Oswalt did like, I think it was, I forget where he did it, but he did like a long article based on his admiration, really, for Stephen King. | ||
| So I think now there's a renaissance, finally, Stephen King has got to be close to 70 now, where people are finally like, okay, this guy's pretty good. | ||
| Well, again, it's just one of those things. | ||
| People love calling someone out or they love shaming someone. | ||
| They love diminishing someone's work. | ||
| They just enjoy it. | ||
| Especially if it elevates them. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| Or it's like a hipstery thing. | ||
| It's like, well, too many people like this. | ||
| It can't be good because too many people like it. | ||
| And I have to like these sort of offbeat... | ||
| Well, haven't you read The Offbeat Peruvian Poet? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure he or she is awesome, maybe, but... | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| Maybe not, exactly. | ||
| How many times have someone tried to turn you on to a band and they tell you it's amazing and it's shit? | ||
| Yeah, you've got to go down to a basement somewhere and they'll be playing to five people. | ||
| Or they send you... | ||
| All the time people send me a YouTube clip and it's... | ||
| Dog shit. | ||
| Dog shit music. | ||
| And they're like, this is amazing, this band. | ||
| They're so nuanced. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And if you don't get it, then... | ||
| You're out. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that's sort of like your lapse in judgment or ability to really recognize how good this is. | ||
| And that's what separates them from you. | ||
| You're just not complex enough. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| A.K.A. Craig Davidson. | ||
| Yeah, I am lacking in some serious way. | ||
| You know, Stephen King, it's an interesting comparison that you said that Stephen King captures childhood really well. | ||
| Because I think that's something you did really well in this book as well. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You captured this sort of Lord of the Flies type scenario. | ||
| I don't want to give away too much of the script. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| But when things go awry in the beginning, you sort of see this social hierarchy that's going on and you see shifts. | ||
| In this social hierarchy based on the events that take place. | ||
| And it's quite fascinating. | ||
| I really wish that you did it under your own name. | ||
| And I hope that like Richard Bachman. | ||
| Why did Stephen King do that? | ||
| Why did he go with Bachman? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why he did it is because he was too prolific. | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| His agent just said, listen, man, first of all, like, I don't get it, man. | ||
| Because he's probably got, because he's still, to this day, he's still pumping out books at an enormous rate and big, like, slobber knocking books. | ||
| He's not, you know, little tiny. | ||
| So I think he probably writes, like, me on a good day, I can write, like, maybe 3,000 words. | ||
| That's if, like, the pistons are firing really well. | ||
| And I try and write 1,000 words every day. | ||
| You know, that's sort of my limit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But he must write like 5,000 words a day, consistently, and it's strong, strong stuff. | ||
| So that was why Bachman came to be, because his agent was like, listen, we just can't be flooding the market with Stephen King. | ||
| We gotta, let's separate you out, let's just put some of these stuff out under a different name, and then, you know, you still have your book out every year, which is still at an astronomical rate. | ||
| So yeah, it was just, for him it was totally a sense of he just had too much to say. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And he eventually took those Bachman books and put them under Stephen King. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It became like an open secret, really. | ||
| And you're right, then he republished them under his own name, basically. | ||
| What was the movie that they did? | ||
| The Dark Half? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Was that a Bachman book? | ||
| I'm not sure, but it was based on really, it was based, Richard Stark or George Stark was his pseudonym, and that's when his pseudonym started stalking him, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That was definitely based on his experience having written under a pseudonym. | ||
| That might have been a Bachman book. | ||
| But that was another example of his ability to sort of not just be so prolific, but also be prolific under some really established territory as far as his work. | ||
| He was always a writer. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How many times did he do a book about a writer? | ||
| A writer character. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I know. | ||
| I think it's because the narrative is easier to write from that perspective, you know, even the voice that you find, I think, because it's like, oh, I'm a writer, this voice is... | ||
| Because I was reading, rereading The Body lately, made into Stand By Me, and that's, again, that's a writer character who's writing that, and... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| He does have a lot of writer characters, which is something I've avoided up to this point, but, you know... | ||
| A lot of writers in Maine. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| A lot of writers in Maine. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| It's almost all set in Maine. | ||
| He sort of staked out that territory. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Have you ever been to Maine? | ||
| Yeah, many times. | ||
| I've never. | ||
| I used to live in New Brunswick, which is sort of right above Maine. | ||
| But I never crossed the border and went down into Stephen King territory. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| I should have. | ||
| There's some beautiful parts of Maine, but the... | ||
| I want to be kind, if I can. | ||
| They're some of the dumbest human beings that live there on the face of the planet. | ||
| I'm being kind when I say that. | ||
| No one will take disrespect at that. | ||
| Yeah, if I was being unkind, I would call them a bunch of kid fucking weirdos that live in the woods. | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| There's great parts of Maine. | ||
| Bangor's a great city. | ||
| The real problem with Maine is there's some areas where there's nothing. | ||
| Like, there's an area between Portland, Maine, and Bangor, when you're driving up from Boston, where you go at least an hour without seeing anything, driving 70 miles an hour, and no radio. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| Oh, you can't even catch a station? | ||
| We won't get anything. | ||
| That is desolate. | ||
| You hit scan and your fucking radio starts smoking. | ||
| It just keeps going. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how it is now. | ||
| There's no gas stations, man. | ||
| There's just a straight shot of like 70 miles. | ||
| Of just arid pine trees or whatever. | ||
| If you run out of gas, you're fucksville. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| And if it's snowing out, you're fucked, though. | ||
| You're really fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We used to do that drive all the time, because we used to do gigs up in Bangor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| And if you made fun of Maine, even at all, I mean, even slightly, people would get up and scream at you. | ||
| You'd call them maniacs. | ||
| If you called them maniacs, you'd get up and get fucking nutty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maine! | |
| They love it. | ||
| They love it up there. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| I mean, it's an absolutely beautiful country. | ||
| And, you know, they have everything up there. | ||
| Deer and moose. | ||
| Yeah, it's like great that way. | ||
| So if you want to get back to nature, I feel like that's probably the place you might start. | ||
| You want to be a survivalist. | ||
| Maine might be a place to get your crew started. | ||
| It's probably one of the least populated states in the Union. | ||
| Yeah, it's way out there, you know, because for us too, New Brunswick is pretty, you know, you're well east at that point. | ||
| But what's odd is Montreal is north of Maine, yet completely cosmopolitan. | ||
| Totally, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Very modern in every respect. | ||
| The people are fantastic and educated. | ||
| You've been up there, I guess, for MMA events and comedy events as well, both... | ||
| For both. | ||
| I've been going to Montreal since the early 90s, probably since 1990 itself is when I first started going up there. | ||
| I love Montreal. | ||
| Yeah, I do too. | ||
| We've never had an opportunity to live there. | ||
| I've lived well across the country, but of course there's the Francophone influence there, which I don't know. | ||
| I guess you going up there as an American... | ||
| I don't know how much interaction you have with that necessarily. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot, yeah. | |
| Do you really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, of course, yeah. | ||
| I mean, a lot of great MMA fighters, or at least a couple, are Francophone GSP and Patrick Cote and Loiseau, David Loiseau. | ||
| David Loiseau, Francis Carmon. | ||
| The TriStar Gym from Montreal is one of the best MMA gyms in the world. | ||
| Which I don't know how that happened, you know, because MMA, like I used to live in Calgary, and that's actually another odd MMA hotbed. | ||
| There's a lot of interest. | ||
| I don't know if there's a lot of great fighters yet who have come out of Calgary. | ||
| There's quite a few. | ||
| Are there now? | ||
| Good fighters, very good fighters. | ||
| Good fighters coming up, and I did a magazine article on one guy who... | ||
| You know, I just followed him to his first professional fight, actually, which was an interesting sort of thing to follow. | ||
| And he actually, he hurt himself really badly in that fight. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| That was his career. | ||
| But I know the gym that he was working out of had, it was, I mean, it was, I've rarely been and felt that level of like, camaraderie, but also competition, sort of in such a tight, small area. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| That's how you build great fighters. | ||
| Yeah, I had that pressure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I don't know what it is about Canada and producing mixed martial arts fighters, but also mixed martial arts fans. | ||
| I think there's more MMA fans per capita in Canada than anywhere. | ||
| Yeah, you blow out the Toronto, what is it, the Air Canada Centre. | ||
| We sell that place out, I think. | ||
| They sold out the Rogers Centre, too. | ||
| Yeah, the Rogers Centre, yeah. | ||
| That gigantic, huge place that used to have a different name, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Skydome. | |
| Skydome. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that's amazing. | ||
| 60,000 people. | ||
| 60,000 to what? | ||
| And it was GSP's fight, I think. | ||
| Yeah, versus Jake Shields. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, we are. | ||
| We're a great supporting nation. | ||
| You know, we just had the Raptors just got bounced out of the playoffs like the basketball team. | ||
| And... | ||
| You know, selling out, and then they had like 20,000 fans clustered outside of the arena watching. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it is. | ||
| It's great that you guys in the UFC come up, and I think for a while there, it was mostly you guys were down in Las Vegas and a few other places, but then you decided to come up to Canada, and it's been good for you guys, it's been great for us too. | ||
| Well, Canada just has a love of all things manly. | ||
| Yes, we do have that, I think. | ||
| They're not embarrassed by it. | ||
| No. | ||
| Whereas there's a lot of embarrassment in America about things manly. | ||
| Or like a push it away or like, oh, that's a little too testosterone-y kind of a thing. | ||
| Yeah, I have a friend who was talking about a sitcom that he was working on. | ||
| And he was talking about, there's a woman that was one of the leads that was trying to introduce, she was also one of the writers, and she was trying to introduce these male characters that were like the type of guys that she likes. | ||
| And they were like, oh, he's too jockey. | ||
| He's too much of a meathead. | ||
| They didn't want anybody who was interested in other women other than the girl that they were with. | ||
| They didn't want that dilemma. | ||
| They didn't want anyone who was dominant over the woman in the relationship. | ||
| They didn't want anybody who was obsessed with their body or working out. | ||
| Those are like all verboten. | ||
| We just can't go near those things. | ||
| You can't have those things. | ||
| And it was the writers themselves because they felt threatened by those types of men. | ||
| So they were rejecting those characters. | ||
| Girls don't like that. | ||
| Those guys are jerky. | ||
| They're like tweety guys who wear scarves and stuff like that. | ||
| She was getting angry. | ||
| She was like, this is what I like. | ||
| You're telling me that the type of guys I like, women don't like these guys. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And whether you like him or not, that's kind of like a, that's an element of our society, too. | ||
| Like, why purposely sort of ignore them and, oh no, that wouldn't screen test well, or we don't want to. | ||
| It's embarrassing to people. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think, I was thinking, too, about before coming here, like, you, your career has sort of had, I think you must have run up against that a lot. | ||
| Because, like, I remember when Fear Factor came out, there was a sense, you know, there were these hyperbolic newspaper articles like, ah, society's collapsing, you know, it's Fear Factor, like, you know what I mean? | ||
| People are doing things that, like, why are we getting people to eat bugs or stuff? | ||
| And I thought... | ||
| I love that show, you know what I mean? | ||
| And then the UFC comes along and it's the same kind of like, what was one of your politicians had the human cockfight? | ||
| A bunch of them used that term. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, yeah. | |
| And so you've been situated along that line, I think. | ||
| And so I'd be sensitized to it if I were you at this point. | ||
| It's like, come on, screw off. | ||
| Well, if I was doing things from a public relations standpoint, I've made nothing but poor choices. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you looked at it that way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I was first starting to work for the UFC, it was in 1997, and the people that I was on, I was on news radio, the sitcom. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| People were talking to me like I was doing porn. | ||
| They're like, what the fuck? | ||
| What the fuck are you doing? | ||
| You're going to ruin your career. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You're involved in cage fighting? | ||
| Like, what's wrong with you? | ||
| And I was like, it's martial arts. | ||
| It takes place in a cage. | ||
| It could take place in a high school gymnasium. | ||
| Would that be okay with you? | ||
| Yeah, would that make it more sanitized for you? | ||
| If it was in a field, would that be alright? | ||
| What difference does it make where it takes place? | ||
| It's martial arts. | ||
| But the rejection of things manly... | ||
| I mean, it has its roots in... | ||
| Some pretty disgusting behavior. | ||
| You know, when you see like the Steubenville rape case and the jocks conspired along with people that worked at the school to hide. | ||
| To sort of, yeah, cover that shit up. | ||
| That kind of, you know, misogynistic supported thing. | ||
| Thinking the group think, you know, fuck these bitches, you know, all the men together. | ||
| But those are just weak humans. | ||
| Those are pathetic humans. | ||
| It has nothing to do with embracing masculinity. | ||
| Yeah, no, I completely agree. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| It was like masculinity gets tied into all the reprehensible aspects of male behavior against women. | ||
| Not just a celebration of things that men love. | ||
| Men love certain things that don't harm other people. | ||
| Like, men love cars that are loud and fast. | ||
| Men love a lot of things. | ||
| Men love shooting guns. | ||
| It doesn't mean they want to kill people. | ||
| It's like, there's something fun about shooting a gun. | ||
| And if you bring that up and you say that, oh, I don't have guns. | ||
| I don't own guns. | ||
| I don't believe in guns. | ||
| They need to take away all the guns. | ||
| I mean, I've had these conversations with people, whenever there's a school shooting, they need to take away all the guns. | ||
| Maybe they need to stop giving people these fucking drugs that make them psychotic. | ||
| You ever think about that? | ||
| You're talking sort of the over-medication of some of these kids? | ||
| 90% of all school shooters, 90 plus, Are either on SSRIs or are recovering from SSRIs. | ||
| They're in withdrawal from antidepressants. | ||
| And it doesn't necessarily mean that the antidepressants cause that. | ||
| But I do believe there's, without a doubt, an over-prescription of medication. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| You go to a doctor, the doctor's not going to look at a holistic approach to your life and say, Hey, you know, maybe you were raised by shitty human beings. | ||
| Maybe you need counseling for a decade. | ||
| We'll just put this beta blocker and all the bad thoughts will be walled off. | ||
| Not only that, all your inhibitions are going to be lessened. | ||
| Your ability to understand the consequences of your actions will be lessened. | ||
| Your ability to be depressed and to feel terrible about bad actions has also been removed. | ||
| There's a lot of things that happen when you put people on drugs that change your neurochemistry. | ||
| Doesn't mean that those drugs are bad. | ||
| I get these fucking tweets from these people that can't understand a complex argument or a nuanced conversation. | ||
| I have friends personally that have benefited greatly from antidepressants. | ||
| It's not that I deny them or don't support them. | ||
| I think there's definitely a place for them. | ||
| But I think when you look at all these people that have killed mass groups of people and you find this one common denominator over and over and over again, To ignore that but concentrate entirely on the tool itself is ridiculous. | ||
| Most human beings are absolutely incapable of walking to a school and shooting a bunch of children. | ||
| Most human beings. | ||
| What is it about some human beings that are capable? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But that's not being discussed. | ||
| Gun control is being discussed. | ||
| The raising of children is not being discussed. | ||
| It's gun control that's being discussed. | ||
| I find that ridiculous. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| And I think that That sort of gets lumped in with this rejection of manliness, this support of anything that's anti-male, or this denial of these base male instincts that don't necessarily have to be harmful to other people, like competition. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's so much about... | ||
| I mean, my career is, in a way, you know, again, my early stuff was all about men doing men things, which some of it is silly and self-harming, but also it's like something that I think built into our genome we need to express in a certain way, you know what I mean? | ||
| So, but I know... | ||
| That a certain segment of readers were turned off immediately in the same way that these TV writers were just like, no. | ||
| But they're just the wrong people for your stuff. | ||
| No, you need to find a receptive audience. | ||
| I think your career has been a lot of that. | ||
| It's about finding the right... | ||
| I think also for both of us, it's about making people realize that I'm not a meathead. | ||
| You're not a meathead. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But I feel like people think that. | ||
| They read this book and they assume that I am a meathead. | ||
| Right, you wrote a book called The Fighter. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You had amateur boxing matches. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And would be the same... | ||
| I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but I don't know if you've had the same experience as yourself. | ||
| And it's sort of like... | ||
| Um, you know, I wasn't raised that way. | ||
| I, I don't, I don't consider myself a typical, and whatever, if you're a jock, that's fine. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Uh, not, you know, you're a Steubenville type, you know, if you have that kind of jock mentality. | ||
| But that's not even a jock. | ||
| It's not, I wouldn't say that's a jock. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a... | ||
| What would you call that? | ||
| I'd say a bro, but I don't think so. | ||
| I think bros are more like... | ||
| It's a rapist. | ||
| Yeah, it's straight up a rapist. | ||
| You're a piece of shit. | ||
| You're a shitty human being. | ||
| And most likely you have a bad relationship with your mother or your sisters or someone in your family who just did a terrible job of expressing to you the responsibility of being the physically stronger sex. | ||
| And the one that... | ||
| Is the penetrator, not the penetratee. | ||
| This whole relationship between men and women, I think a huge part of it is how they're raised. | ||
| How human beings are raised and what kind of a relationship they have with their family. | ||
| I had a really good relationship with my mother. | ||
| I'm really lucky in that respect. | ||
| I've never had any hate towards women, but I have friends that genuinely don't like women. | ||
| And that came from their upbringing, either because their father, maybe they had a divorce or something, and the father was like, she's awful. | ||
| Bad moms. | ||
| Or bad moms, straight out. | ||
| Bad moms, bad relationships with women, and they just don't like women. | ||
| I mean, I don't have good friends that are like that, but I know people that will say, fucking cunts, they're all the same. | ||
| They'll say shit like that around you, and you're like... | ||
| Come on. | ||
| You're missing out. | ||
| There's a lot of great chicks out there. | ||
| Just like there's a lot of dudes that I would... | ||
| There's some people that if I was alone with them in the woods, I would seriously think about killing them if I get away with it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Hypothetically, yeah. | ||
| If you were around... | ||
| Here's a perfect example. | ||
| If you were around that fucking... | ||
| Not Joe Paterno. | ||
| Who was the other guy? | ||
| The guy that raped the... | ||
| Sandusky. | ||
| Oh, Sandusky, right. | ||
| If I was around, if I was in the woods, and it was just me and Sandusky... | ||
| And there's sort of a grave, maybe just sitting there. | ||
| There's no one around, and I look to the left, and there's just miles and miles of woods. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
| Fuck yeah, I'd kill that guy. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| If I knew he raped kids, 100% I'd kill him if I could get away with it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because I don't believe that all lives are created equal. | ||
| I think that there's a yin and a yang to the world. | ||
| There's good and bad. | ||
| There's positive and negative. | ||
| There's give and take. | ||
| And you gotta trim weeds. | ||
| You gotta shoot dogs that have rabies. | ||
| There's a lot of things that happen in this world. | ||
| That are uncomfortable, that people don't like, they're unfortunate, but that they need to be done. | ||
| And when you find some guy who likes to rape children, you should remove him from the earth. | ||
| This is a mess. | ||
| You can't clean this up. | ||
| No, and I feel like it's... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm probably getting out of my depth here in terms of my real understanding of it. | ||
| But I feel like... | ||
| It's such a built, like it's something deep in your DNA helix, in your genome, like you're not going to root it out. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| The best you can do is hope that you don't, aren't in a situation or you're somehow away from the source of what your, you know, issue is basically. | ||
| But I mean, if you're out in society, I mean, of course, you're going to be sort of up against it. | ||
| I don't think you get cured from something like that. | ||
| I mean, I don't, again, I don't know for sure, but I feel like, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think there may be a time in the future where we can understand and get to the root of these behaviors and perhaps access whatever it is that's wrong in a person's mind that makes them either have a desire to victimize children or have the ability to victimize children and not feel remorse for it or be attracted to it. | ||
| Do you, as a writer, do you, because as a comic, I watch a lot of things that I don't agree with. | ||
| You mean other comedians doing things? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I watch religious programs. | ||
| Ah, okay, yeah. | ||
| I watch conservative right-wing propaganda shows. | ||
| And just be seething and every muscle tensed when you're watching it sometimes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Oh, no, just easy. | ||
| I try to get empty when I do those things, because I don't want to get angry. | ||
| What I want to do is try to find the patterns in their thinking. | ||
| And you see a lot of commonality in these sort of groupthink things. | ||
| Mindsets, whether it's Republicans, or I see it in feminists a lot. | ||
| I see it in male feminists. | ||
| I see it in people, they choose sides, and then there's a massive amount of confirmation bias. | ||
| And you see it both ways. | ||
| But as a writer, do you like to study certain mindsets or certain people that are just completely alien to your way of thinking to try to... | ||
| Grab pieces of the way they interact. | ||
| Sort of jump into their head and see if you could trace a narrative through their eyes. | ||
| I have tried that. | ||
| I think that's... | ||
| You know, I know writers and I certainly know comedians who... | ||
| I mean, it's sort of like the rage-based comedian. | ||
| Like, you really want to sort of confront these things, you know, and really go on a good harangue about it. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| It's sometimes not even funny with a comedian, but it's really true and it's really honest and you're actually getting more of a social commentary at that point. | ||
| Like Hicks. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You're getting a really strong, distilled, powerful medicine. | ||
| And there's some writers who sort of work in this satirist vein, I guess, who sort of do the same thing over the length of a book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I've tried that. | ||
| I've never found as much success with it, at least not yet. | ||
| Because the same thing, of course, we have a strong conservative base. | ||
| Conservative radio always gets on my nerves. | ||
| It's funny because right now we have Rob Ford, our mayor in Toronto, who's doing all sorts of hilarious things. | ||
| is in rehab now. | ||
| Uh, you know, and he's like, he's no end of, of fun. | ||
| You know, I was sitting at the bar yesterday when I, I got in and I was talking to some exact defense contractor actually. | ||
| And he was like, he, you know, he sounds like, he seems like a pretty good guy. | ||
| At least he's straight out honest. | ||
| I'm like, he is a, he is a guy you could probably go out and feel like you'd have a beer with. | ||
| And I don't think he'd look down at you for sure. | ||
| But, um, he's also the mayor of our city and he's, he's a, I mean, he's a bit of a goof and he's a bit of a bully I find as well. | ||
| But it's funny to listen to the conservative pundits because they've got to turn themselves into paroxysms and back twists to try and defend his behavior basically. | ||
| And it gets more and more difficult to kind of defend the behavior of a man who keeps doing more and more... | ||
| Interesting, kind of... | ||
| Who's trying to defend him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| Really? | ||
| Once you've planted your... | ||
| Well, conservatives, I feel like I am more liberal, so quite liberal. | ||
| So once... | ||
| I think once a conservative or a liberal, but once you plant your stick in the dirt, you just gotta keep... | ||
| You gotta keep holding onto that stick, even though the wind is blowing you, like, straight back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And one of them was like, well, I mean, you know, he's getting videotaped all the time by... | ||
| You'd think he'd be hanging around, you know, I can't believe his friends are videotaping you. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| He's hanging around with drug dealers. | ||
| You can't really expect a drug dealer not to do something that may or may not profit them in some way. | ||
| So anyways, but you know, and of course, you know, the one talking head says that and the other one, yeah, that's true. | ||
| I never looked at it that way. | ||
| So then suddenly that becomes an arguable point that they can be like, yeah, he's getting victimized again. | ||
| That was the argument about Donald Sterling, the owner of the Clippers. | ||
| That was the argument. | ||
| Like, hey, the guy's getting illegally wiretapped. | ||
| You know, well, give him a break. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| He didn't know. | ||
| He's just an old doddering old man, which, yeah, true enough. | ||
| I feel I heard some argument that he was actually asking her to tape him because he felt like his head was going to tapioca and he couldn't remember anything anymore. | ||
| So he's like, please tape me so that I remember all the things that I say. | ||
| Apparently that's the truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That it was actually part of her job. | ||
| So he wiretapped himself, basically. | ||
| Yeah, and her job was to tape their conversations so that he would remember what they talked about. | ||
| So there were certain issues that he had to clear up and certain things that he had to do. | ||
| She was apparently employed by him in some sort of a PR sense. | ||
| In some capacity, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, it's funny because even discussing it, like, does this guy have a right to privacy? | ||
| People are like, I can't believe you're supporting him! | ||
| There's so many fucking morons out there that have the ability to comment on anything that gets discussed. | ||
| Like, you can't think of the guys thinking as reprehensible, but yet think, hey, why is it okay to just... | ||
| Listen to a private conversation that this guy's having because somebody recorded it and then fine him for that private conversation. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| I don't think it's fair. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I mean, I... These are one of, you know, you've heard this a lot of times, and of course you have to separate what he said and the reprehensible, clearly the long-standing, reprehensible nature of this man as he's, you know, sort of proven to be over like 20 years span. | ||
| And then of course the question is, and it's been asked already, why? | ||
| Why is he still in that position where everyone knows he was a racist dirtbag? | ||
| But no one was doing anything about it. | ||
| And I think at this point, the players basically pushed it. | ||
| They said, listen, if you don't get rid of this guy, we will not come out and play anymore. | ||
| And apparently it got to that point. | ||
| He also represents a very unsavory aspect of our culture. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And so it's important to take a stand and say, hey, this guy's got to go. | ||
| What I didn't get, the thing that puzzled me the most, is that they fined him $2.5 million for a conversation that he had in his house. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't see that standing up in court. | ||
| Yeah, and he is. | ||
| He's a litigious dude. | ||
| Oh, he's going to sue the fuck out of that. | ||
| Yeah, he is. | ||
| They're going to lose so much money. | ||
| They're going to lose millions of dollars because they tried to fine him $2.5 million to make a point. | ||
| They're going to lose so much money. | ||
| I wondered a conversation too, because now the value of that team is up in the air. | ||
| What is it worth? | ||
| I think it's going to be worth more if they make him sell it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because then it's almost like tabula rasa. | ||
| We can redo it. | ||
| It's like we're getting rid of this old troglodyte. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| It might be like black ownership who comes in. | ||
| Magic Johnson. | ||
| Magic Johnson. | ||
| I think Oprah Winfrey was sort of in talks. | ||
| She wasn't. | ||
| Oh, she was? | ||
| That was all just nonsense? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But yeah, Magic Johnson would be the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Perfect. | |
| Because he was one of the ones who was actually insulted deeply. | ||
| Plus he has HIV. It's even better. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Everything's good. | ||
| He loves Jesus. | ||
| Get him in there. | ||
| He's an ex-Laker. | ||
| Yeah, he's perfect. | ||
| Great basketball player. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he was one of the ones that I think she was in trouble for taking photos with. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And that's what Sterling brought it up. | ||
| He was like, do we really have to have you taking pictures with Magic Johnson? | ||
| Fucking shithead. | ||
| What a dumb shithead. | ||
| But it's an interesting... | ||
| And it's amazing how quick it blew up to me. | ||
| Like, I just saw it on some website and I thought, well, there's just an old dumb white guy saying old dumb white guy things. | ||
| But it was clearly much bigger than that. | ||
| Well, if it was something else, like say if he was... | ||
| Say if he was the president of a company, a big company, General Electric or something like that, and he had a little piece on the side, and he was like, hey, stop taking pictures with black eyes. | ||
| It wouldn't get nearly the response as someone who has benefited tremendously from black athletes. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The amount of money that that guy has made directly because of the work of black athletes. | ||
| It's got that whole slave owner type quality to it. | ||
| And there were rumors that back a couple years ago he'd gone into the dressing room and all the basketball players have been in various stages of undress and he's like, I like seeing all this black... | ||
| Black flesh, you know what I mean? | ||
| Sort of a thing. | ||
| Well, he said to a woman. | ||
| He brought a woman backstage to the locker room. | ||
| Oh, is that how it was? | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And he was saying, look at all these beautiful black bodies. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's the exact quote. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Yeah, I think things like that are going to spiral in all sorts of direction. | ||
| And you can quote things that he may or may not have actually said. | ||
| At a certain point, it's like, you've opened Pandora's box, my friend. | ||
| Well, he didn't even mean to. | ||
| It's just so dumb and old that he can't remember shit. | ||
| So Pandora's box sort of opened itself. | ||
| On its own, that's right. | ||
| Do you think, though, that as a writer, studying guys like that, do you actively do that? | ||
| Do you actively watch how a guy thinks and sort of absorb his stupid thinking? | ||
| I've done it more in magazine articles I've wrote, like profiles of people, but I've used that to move into my fictional work too. | ||
| So if it was a basketball player, say that you were following around, you would try to climb into their mindset? | ||
| Yeah, and shadow them really. | ||
| You physically shadow them and what is your day? | ||
| Can I follow you? | ||
| And of course that's up to the level of how much they're willing to have you basically dog their heels for as long as they're there. | ||
| But I mean, the more you can do that, the better it's, the better the actual article is going to be depending on if they want that or not. | ||
| But like the, um, the MMA fighter I followed, obviously he was just an amateur. | ||
| Which guy is it? | ||
| His name was Ryan Stiles. | ||
| Uh, and, and he actually only had one fight and it was up in Red Deer. | ||
| So like Calgary and then Red Deer is about two or three hours away. | ||
| And it was like in a, a civic center sort of a thing. | ||
| And, uh. | ||
| But he was really... | ||
| His father... | ||
| It's a great story, man. | ||
| I find the best stories sometimes are where you don't quite make it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, athletically, it's like you put your heart and your guts and your soul into it and you're just not quite good enough. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There's something about you. | ||
| You just can't quite get over the hump. | ||
| You know, I think I find those are the stories that are the most... | ||
| It hit my heart the strongest. | ||
| And his father is on the Calgary SWAT team now, but he had played forever in the junior leagues of hockey. | ||
| And he made it up for a cup of coffee with the Leafs for like two games. | ||
| But he played professional hockey for two games. | ||
| And his son was like an incredible wrestler. | ||
| Sort of had the classic sort of MMA pedigree. | ||
| And, uh, but he drove a, uh, like a sandwich truck. | ||
| Do you know those things? | ||
| They go around to work sites, you know, uh, like a catering truck. | ||
| And so I followed him for like three or four days on that job. | ||
| And, um, he actually said that he, he let people take things on credit, you know, and so people would build up like a hundred, couple hundred bucks before they paid it off finally. | ||
| And one guy, I guess like just... | ||
| You know, we went to a mechanic shop and he was like, is so-and-so here? | ||
| He needs to settle his bill. | ||
| He's like, no, he went up. | ||
| He's like a wildcatter now up in Fort McMurray, like 10 hours away. | ||
| He just bailed. | ||
| He just left in the middle of the night. | ||
| So Tony, you know, who has had a wife and a young kid, got in the car, went up and found him and got his money back, you know? | ||
| So, I mean... | ||
| This is the sort of mentality that this guy had. | ||
| So, and I think I got a pretty strong story out of that just by being able to stay with him long enough. | ||
| He was really nice to speak to me, talk to me, and you got him burrowed inside of his head. | ||
| And I think the strongest work comes from as close as you can get to those people, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't it fascinating that we have this deep, deep connection towards people that really are never going to realize their goals. | ||
| It's a painful... | ||
| I feel the same way myself, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like I've always felt like the mountain goes up and up and up. | ||
| You're going to hit your point on it at some point and you've got to be happy with that spot where you are on the mountain whenever you reach that spot. | ||
| I think that's the biggest part in life really is just accepting your spot on the mountain wherever it happens to be. | ||
| Well, it's also the... | ||
| The real issue with putting all of your eggs in one basket in life and that basket being athletics. | ||
| Especially athletics. | ||
| Especially combat athletics. | ||
| The idea that you're going to have some sort of a long and successful, fruitful career by throwing your bones at another person, trying to separate themselves from their consciousness, that's quite ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because just the very act of doing it and preparing for that very act, the amount of damage that your body and your brain even endures is... | ||
| But we have this idea in our heads that a guy has to be an undefeated champion. | ||
| My son's going to be a champion someday. | ||
| Man, if you're really lucky, your son won't be a champion. | ||
| If you're really lucky, your son will learn the valuable lessons of martial arts as far as character development and as far as your ability to overcome what seem to be insurmountable obstacles. | ||
| But... | ||
| To become a champion, you have to be a crazy person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to be a crazy person who's obsessed with nothing but that and that will take over your life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I feel like having worked obviously with people like that, you know, shadowed them and recognizing that mindset. | ||
| You know, and I find too like there's just some point at which Like, there's some gifts that are just bestowed by genetics or something. | ||
| And it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're not going to quite get to maybe that level that separates the real... | ||
| And you won't know that until you hit it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| You're not going to know that wall until you run into it. | ||
| And I feel like for some people, like I was talking to one guy, just a guy at the gym, and he said something more or less like the best that he ever felt in a fight was when he was up against someone he knew was better than him. | ||
| And he knew he was going to lose. | ||
| And if they fought a hundred times, he'd lose a hundred times. | ||
| But he, that guy, he made that guy see something about himself. | ||
| He got that close to him that the other guys sort of recognize I'm a frail. | ||
| I'm made out of the same crumbling stuff that he's made out of. | ||
| And so, you know, sort of pierced that Teflon armor that, that I think some fighters carry around with themselves. | ||
| And he's like, that's, that's all I could do. | ||
| That for me is the victory. | ||
| I still lost. | ||
| But I made that guy discover something about himself that he hadn't discovered up until that point because he'd never been tested to the point that I was able to test him. | ||
| And I thought, that's another part about just recognizing what you're able to do. | ||
| And it may not be beating him, but you find some other measure of success. | ||
| That's fascinating because to me, if you say that someone can get so close they could test someone, that means that they could beat them. | ||
| They just have to figure out what it is they did wrong and work harder. | ||
| That's where the madness lies. | ||
| Yeah, maybe that's it, isn't it? | ||
| The madness lies in the preparation. | ||
| The madness lies in the trying to... | ||
| What separates a champion from someone who is just very good? | ||
| From my personal experience involved in martial arts competition, there's a level that some people are just not willing to push themselves. | ||
| Is that it really? | ||
| Yeah, it's a big part of it. | ||
| And then outside of that, the other variables are genetics. | ||
| Some people have a different psychology. | ||
| What's really interesting is people that have been bullied, and especially people that have larger brothers that bullied them in the house their whole life, those are the scariest fuckers on the planet. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like GSP, I think, was bullied. | ||
| Sounds shocking now, but yeah, he was bullied. | ||
| Chris Weidman was bullied. | ||
| Oh, is that so? | ||
| John Jones has a good relationship with his brothers, but he has a giant brother who's way bigger than him. | ||
| His brother Arthur's a beast. | ||
| He's a pro football player, and he fucks John up all the time. | ||
| Whenever they wrestle today, he still fucks John up. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he's huge. | ||
| So because of that, I think that John grew up with this just super athlete brother, and he ain't afraid of shit. | ||
| Doesn't seem like it, yeah. | ||
| Because his fucking brother's a monster! | ||
| And he was sort of imprinted on him at such a young age, too, you know? | ||
| I mean, I think that's it, too. | ||
| You get these things impressed on your flesh at a young age, and you don't forget those lessons. | ||
| Yeah, brothers are a big one, man. | ||
| And it's usually, for whatever reason, the younger brother that's the real beast. | ||
| Because the younger brother endures the beatings that the older brother gives him, and because of that he develops this sort of steely determination that's quite frightening. | ||
| Yeah, I could totally see that. | ||
| That totally makes sense, both on a physical level, but on an emotional kind of... | ||
| You know, you're getting that adamantium kind of mindset about things and just got to keep prevailing. | ||
| I've always thought too, like, because I do watch a lot of MMA and I love it both as a sport and boxing as well, but also like the psychological aspect of it really fascinates me and I've always felt like how... | ||
| Painful it must be to come up. | ||
| I always think about like Michael Jordan and who were, you know, we would think differently of Dominique Wilkins if Michael Jordan ever existed. | ||
| And I think we'd think differently of so many fighters if GSP hadn't existed or Silva or, you know, John Jones, these sort of long reigning sort of champions. | ||
| And you would know better having been through it, but there's, you know what I mean? | ||
| There's that next level who can't quite, you know, they have their one shot, they can't quite clear it. | ||
| And some are lucky to have another opportunity to sort of go back at it and can still make a good career for themselves. | ||
| I find that MMA, especially in the UFC right now, is there's some long-reigning champions, and that's what people love. | ||
| You know, they sort of love, but all the focus is on them, and then these people, the guys underneath who could be awesome were it not for a GSP. But that's the whole purpose of being a champion. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| To be dominant over other savages. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing about being the second best guy who could have been a champion in any other era. | ||
| That's got to be so maddening. | ||
| Wouldn't it be? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Junior Dos Santos is a good example of that. | ||
| People always compare Junior Dos Santos. | ||
| Because Junior Dos Santos was the champion. | ||
| He knocked out Cain Velasquez. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But it was at a time where Cain Velasquez was injured. | ||
| He tore a ligament in his knee. | ||
| His knee was all fucked up. | ||
| He didn't have good mobility. | ||
| And Junior caught him with a big punch. | ||
| Then they fought two more times and Cain destroyed him. | ||
| Yeah, it was not pretty. | ||
| Just beat him from pillar to post. | ||
| Probably took... | ||
| Years off of his life with those beatings. | ||
| I had friends who were martial artists and fighters and either former pro fighters or guys who had been involved in fighting their whole life who universally texted me and emailed me and said, dude, that fight took years off that guy's life. | ||
| They just felt it. | ||
| You can watch it through the TV screen. | ||
| Especially the second one. | ||
| The third one, rather. | ||
| The last one. | ||
| The second rematch. | ||
| Just an unbelievable beating that Kane put on him. | ||
| And that's sort of Kane's thing. | ||
| He doesn't knock you out. | ||
| He just mauls you and really just reduces you in some terrible way. | ||
| Well, he keeps a pace that's almost inhuman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a heavyweight? | ||
| For a heavyweight, yeah. | ||
| For a 240-pound man to keep up with him, good fucking luck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's probably not going to happen. | ||
| No. | ||
| And a lot of that's genetic. | ||
| Like, I talked to Bob Cook, who's his trainer. | ||
| He said, that guy could go a couple of months outside of training, like, get injured, be out for a couple months, then come back in and outwork everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Just doesn't get out of shape. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Mexicans are kind of known for that. | ||
| Yeah, there's some tough fight boxers, too. | ||
| It seems like a tough culture. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know what I mean? | |
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| Mexicans, I think, are some of the grittiest, toughest fighters of all time. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| MMA or boxing. | ||
| And their endurance, too. | ||
| Their stamina is just shocking. | ||
| They don't stop. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| They're sort of just like... | ||
| You're going to have to hit me with a house. | ||
| Like Julio Cesar Chavez. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Remember when that guy used to fight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He would just ding, the bell would ring, and he'd just start moving forward, throwing a barrage of punches that will never end until you drop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he fought, like, didn't he have an enormous record in terms of, like, I thought, like, 100 fights or something? | ||
| More than that. | ||
| More than 100 fights. | ||
| He had 97 fights before he ever suffered a loss. | ||
| Yeah, that's how it was. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 97-0. | ||
| And that's like four careers of some other fighters, you know, in terms of overall records. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Yeah, yeah, so. | ||
| Yeah, that's, I mean, a lot of fighters today in this day and age don't fight nearly as many times as they used to back in the day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| But like a guy like Floyd Mayweather, who's like 45-0, 46-0 I think now. | ||
| 46-0 after the last one, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's unbelievable. | ||
| Like, but 97-0? | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's so insane. | ||
| Just 97 fights, period. | ||
| And that's right before he hit a loss. | ||
| And then, I feel like, I could be wrong, but I feel the wheels fell off. | ||
| One of the quotes is, on a long enough timeline, any fighting stories usually can be a tragic one. | ||
| And I find that happens less in MMA. I feel like guys know when to retire better in MMA than in boxing. | ||
| I feel like people hang onto the rope a little too long in boxing. | ||
| I wish that was true. | ||
| I wish that was true, but I don't think it is. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, Chuck Liddell definitely didn't. | ||
| Oh, he didn't because I was almost going to mention Chuck Liddell because he did get rocked his last couple fights and that it's made some... | ||
| Yeah, well, not just that. | ||
| The only reason why he stopped fighting was Dana White. | ||
| Because Dana just said that's it. | ||
| Yeah, Dana's very close with him and said, I see what's going on here and maybe you don't because you're the fighter and you've got to stop. | ||
| The thing about fighters is they have this belief in themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's just... | ||
| It's never-ending and unflappable, especially the champions. | ||
| They always think, I know everybody's counting me out, but I'm going to figure out a way to beat this motherfucker. | ||
| And they go into that ring with that determination. | ||
| And that's what made them a champion in the first place. | ||
| But that's also what fails them. | ||
| When it comes down to objective thinking and being introspective about your abilities and how much you've diminished, it's that... | ||
| Sort of bulletproof belief in themselves that winds up fucking them over. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I think it's also too, they're young, right? | ||
| I mean, comparatively, I know when my dad retired, it was like a trap door opened under his life in a way because he was like used to having this routine to his life and you look forward to it. | ||
| But I think, you know, the first week you're like, oh, this is great. | ||
| And then the second week it's like... | ||
| What the hell am I doing? | ||
| I feel like my... | ||
| And then if you're looking down the barrel of that when you're at 60, 65, well that's one thing. | ||
| When you're looking down the barrel of that when you're 32, 33, something like that, it's got to be a different... | ||
| This is what I was... | ||
| This is what I'm good at. | ||
| This is all I'm good at, I think some of them might think. | ||
| And then it's like, God, I've got a long existence ahead of me doing what? | ||
| What am I doing next? | ||
| And nothing is ever going to match the thrill that fighting... | ||
| No, we'll never feel that or I'll never feel something like that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I feel like that must be... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You've talked to fighters. | ||
| Are they good at describing what that feeling is like? | ||
| Well, I think the only person that's ever going to truly understand what it's like to say, like, beat Jon Jones and enter into a world championship fight with the whole world watching, the cage door shuts and the Bruce buffer, it's time! | ||
| They're the only ones that'll ever understand that. | ||
| I will never understand it. | ||
| I've watched... | ||
| And I've done commentary on more than a thousand fights. | ||
| And you're right in the ring. | ||
| When the endorphins are still there. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck's going on. | ||
| I'm completely outside. | ||
| And I've competed. | ||
| I've kickboxed. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| I've fought probably a hundred Taekwondo matches. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| I just don't know what's going on when that's happening. | ||
| I just can't imagine. | ||
| I literally can't imagine. | ||
| Do you think it's a different level then? | ||
| Because I mean, it's a different level in some way in the crowd response and the idea of how many eyes are on you. | ||
| But I mean, when you step in, or even when I've done fighting, it's still you and another guy. | ||
| So I wonder how far removed is our experience from... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Pretty far. | ||
| Yeah, I assume it is, certainly in terms of, but I mean, I felt like I was amped up to the point where every one of my synapses was screaming. | ||
| I'm just not built to do that, you know? | ||
| Maybe they have, maybe there's a calmness. | ||
| I feel like sometimes you look and the top fighters are able to kind of establish a certain calmness that I've never really found in those situations in my life, whether it's a playground scuffle or, you know, an amateur boxing match. | ||
| Well, the calmness, a lot of it comes with the experience itself being something that you recognize and you've been there before and you know how to deal with it. | ||
| Whereas someone who has never... | ||
| Like, if you took a guy who has never competed at all before and you threw him in a UFC fight, they would fucking shit their pants. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially if they didn't know how to fight at all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's so many things to deal with, it would be overwhelming. | ||
| They'd probably have a heart attack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But if you take a guy like a Jon Jones, because we keep talking about him... | ||
| He trains his whole life in wrestling, so he's wrestled for many, many years, competed at a very high level in wrestling, then started competing in MMA, trains every day, constantly in the gym, constantly working out with these really high-level guys. | ||
| You have a comfort level with just the recognition of what this is. | ||
| You understand it, you get in there, you know what you can do, you're very aware of what you're capable of because you have literally pushed yourself to your limits in training. | ||
| And you get in there and you're much calmer than a person who's completely alien to the experience. | ||
| So I think for you, like, doing it a couple of times, like, you didn't have a chance to get used to it. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| But there's a lot of guys who do, who are probably similarly gifted, you know, or not gifted. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| Not gifted is the way. | ||
| But there's a lot of not gifted guys go very far, just through hard work and determination. | ||
| And just determination, and yeah, yeah. | ||
| What they don't ever do is beat the great ones. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| The not gifted guys can have great careers. | ||
| They can get a lot out of the competition. | ||
| They can become coaches. | ||
| They can train fighters. | ||
| They can become commentators. | ||
| They can do a lot of things, but they can never figure out a way to beat the great ones. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| I feel like that's, in my experience watching as well, there's that kind of... | ||
| That's a separation level. | ||
| It's as much as your heart and your talent. | ||
| And there is, you know, heart is something that is one of these ephemeral qualities that no one... | ||
| But I mean, there are fighters that you know that's what they have. | ||
| That's what's getting them through. | ||
| It's not necessarily their talent, it's their... | ||
| I think heart is a combination of a lot of things that are kind of impossible to quantify, but you can see it in different athletes. | ||
| It doesn't have to be a fighter. | ||
| That seems to be where it's most obvious to notice it, but there's lots of athletes that I like, and usually it's because they have some quality of heart that distinguishes them in my eyes, and they're not the best. | ||
| But they've taken their skills as far as they can go. | ||
| Well, that's why everybody loved Arturo Gotti and Mickey Ward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Of course. | ||
| That's a classic two heart guys going up against each other. | ||
| They would just never quit. | ||
| You could beat them up. | ||
| You could knock them out. | ||
| You could stop them. | ||
| But their will was never what faltered. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| And had they had more talent, who knows what their limit would have been necessarily. | ||
| Or had they have trained more intelligently or competed more intelligently. | ||
| I mean, a lot of that... | ||
| What is talent? | ||
| It's the approach that you take. | ||
| If you look at the way Arturo Gatti moved and punched, he was very talented. | ||
| Yeah, he was, wasn't he? | ||
| Most likely that he probably just wasn't trained correctly or to the best of his ability. | ||
| If you've got a guy like Emmanuel Stewart who gets a hold of a boxer from the time that he first starts and teaches him just incredibly perfect technique, perfect strategy, the mindset, like a custom auto, what he did with Mike Tyson, molds his mindset. | ||
| You can do something that if the guy grows up with some Midwest boxing club in the middle of nowhere with a guy who doesn't really know how to box, and that's the guy who's teaching him. | ||
| And that's the guy who brings it through his amateur career, and that's the guy who turns him into a pro. | ||
| That guy might be lacking in just giant chunks of knowledge that a guy like, say, a Freddie Roach has. | ||
| You never know what would create a champion out of a contender. | ||
| Sometimes it's just the mentor he runs into. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's... | ||
| And I feel like that's true. | ||
| Yeah, and also even mid-fight, you know, because Gaddy was someone who used to get himself drawn into firefights when he didn't need to, you know, and whether he's really listening to his trainer at that point or not, I don't know. | ||
| But I know for me, too, even the amateur things that I did, what I really took away from it and what I really enjoyed was the training part of it. | ||
| You know, I trained... | ||
| I was living in Iowa at the time, and... | ||
| There was a boxing club at the bottom of, like a really sort of, it was at the bottom of a Gold's Gym in Coralville, which is sort of like just outside of Iowa City. | ||
| And it was run by a coach and two girls, two female fighters, the Kleinfelter sisters. | ||
| And they were like 130, one of them was maybe 130, one of them was like 115. Tough as nails, fast, and you'd spar. | ||
| I knew I was going to have to get in this amateur boxing match. | ||
| And so I was like, well, you better not be easy on me, and I'm not going to be able to really punch a girl, I didn't think. | ||
| Ultimately, I wasn't able to. | ||
| But even if I wanted to punch them, I don't think I would have really been able to lay leather on them because they were fast and they were mean. | ||
| And even if I did touch them, they'd be like, you know, you punch like a softie. | ||
| Like, this is weak, weak-ass shit. | ||
| But what I really took away from it is really enjoying the... | ||
| The discipline, you know, with nutrition and with the road work. | ||
| I mean, I did all that stuff. | ||
| I loved doing that. | ||
| And I felt like that was the only thing that I could actually take into my own hands and that I had some sort of agency in. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I can run as hard and as far and I can hit the bag until my arms feel like noodles. | ||
| That's all that I can do. | ||
| And you can see a direct improvement of your skills. | ||
| Yes, but also there was a limit. | ||
| And the one thing that I noticed, and I've said it before, is like... | ||
| And I feel like other people have noticed this because I've gotten a lot of fights when I was young, but I don't think I ever won one. | ||
| And I feel like I must exude this kind of waft of something that like, I just am not a fighter. | ||
| But every time I've gotten in a fight, it's been more that someone is, I feel like is taking, trying to take advantage of me or has been picking on me for a long period of time. | ||
| And it's the only way that this is going to stop or been, or been picking on someone that I cared about. | ||
| And I always got the sense afterwards that the person who beat me up, basically, knew that. | ||
| They're like, I can draw Davidson into a fight, and he'll willingly go in. | ||
| He'll go into the bear trap, and then I'll just be able to beat him up. | ||
| And the only good thing about it, ultimately, is that the picking on stuff stopped. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But I had to take a beating in order to sort of affect that, you know? | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird psychological sort of a relationship between the bully and the person who gets picked on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But I feel like, and I feel like the real true fighters wouldn't even do something like that. | ||
| They would recognize, well, you know, this guy. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| I'm not going to bother with this guy. | ||
| For the most part. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| There's a few fighters who like to beat the shit out of people. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I notice in fights sometimes, I feel like, that guy looks like he probably might have... | ||
| Would be happy to be beating up someone with far less skill. | ||
| He'd be taking as much delight in it as he is. | ||
| Usually they've been abused. | ||
| Is that so? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I believe that's a big part of a lot of what constitutes a bully is physical abuse. | ||
| You know, that they've been abused either at home or they've been abused by other kids and they're trying to lash out and get theirs now. | ||
| They've sort of taken on the role of the bully because they've been bullied so much. | ||
| That happens a lot. | ||
| I could see that. | ||
| I actually... | ||
| Here's a sort of a story of one of my worst beatings. | ||
| I was at the YMCA. Me and my brother were playing basketball. | ||
| I was probably like 16, 17, 18. That was my last year of high school, probably. | ||
| And these two guys come and say, let's play two-on-two. | ||
| So we did. | ||
| And back then, I probably weighed like 240. I was a big... | ||
| I'm a fat dude. | ||
| 240 in high school? | ||
| Yeah, maybe 230. I was enormous, but it was not a healthy weight, obviously. | ||
| What do you weigh now? | ||
| 175, 180, something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow, that's crazy. | |
| So that's partly the whole boxing stuff, and we do tree planting a lot up in Canada. | ||
| That's sort of like what you do at university. | ||
| You just go up to the woods and plant trees, and I shed a lot of weight that way during university. | ||
| So I was a big beast, and I sort of knew how to use my body, and the guy that I was playing against was maybe 160. Yeah. | ||
| So we're getting close to beating him, and I turn around, and I see the ball. | ||
| It's whipping right at my face. | ||
| He'd thrown it at me. | ||
| And I turn my head, and it sort of goes by the side of my head and just, you know, gives me a scalp burn, basically. | ||
| And then he's charging right at me, like, to get into a fight. | ||
| And there was no prior provocation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| None at all! | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I mean, this guy... | ||
| Just a basketball game? | ||
| Just a basketball game. | ||
| And okay, it's in the Y. So I'm like, okay, well, we're not going to have a fight right in the middle of the Y. I think I'm going to be okay. | ||
| I mean, I didn't really want to get into a fight. | ||
| But again, this guy's throwing a basketball at me. | ||
| It's a pretty shitty move. | ||
| So anyways, this guy comes out. | ||
| He's got to be like 80 years old. | ||
| He's like one of those guys at the Y that was like a retired gym teacher. | ||
| And they sort of said, okay, Bill... | ||
| You can just hang out around here and keep order. | ||
| That'd be nice of you to do that. | ||
| So he comes out and he's got a whistle around, like an old P whistle around his neck. | ||
| And he says, take it outside. | ||
| I'm like, I don't, the last thing I want to do is take this outside. | ||
| But, and he says, that's it guys, you take this outside. | ||
| So I'm like, oh, I'm sort of like being shoehorned into going out to having a fight with this guy. | ||
| So I'm going down the hallway and my brother is massaging my shoulders because I guess he thinks that's what he should be doing. | ||
| You know, that's how little we know about fighting. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| My brother's like, well, I guess I've seen this in Rocky. | ||
| I should keep him limber. | ||
| And, you know, he's like, you're going to be fine. | ||
| But I had a chance to look in his eyes. | ||
| He'd be like, you are. | ||
| You are fucked. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And I think I knew that too. | ||
| So we ended up outside. | ||
| It's winter in Canada. | ||
| And there's ice on the sidewalk. | ||
| And I face up in what I assume is somewhat of a fighting posture. | ||
| And he kicks me in the head. | ||
| It's the first thing he does. | ||
| Just like kicks me right in the head. | ||
| And I'm not even sure what the hell happened. | ||
| I'm still standing, you know, and then he does it again. | ||
| And then I'm like, oh God, this is not, this is not good. | ||
| So he had martial arts training, obviously. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, definitely. | ||
| And then, you know, there was a bike rack and I remember he like rang my head off of it and I'd get him in a, you know, sort of a headlock and... | ||
| And I remember being like face down and there's like ice melt on the street, you know, those blue crystals they put down, you know, and my face is pressed into it. | ||
| And thankfully, it goes on for a while. | ||
| Clearly I'm beat. | ||
| And he's like, are we had enough here? | ||
| I'm like, yeah, I mean, I've had enough. | ||
| That's enough. | ||
| So he goes back inside chuckling with his buddy. | ||
| I'm sitting out there on the street bleeding. | ||
| I don't even want to go back into the Y, you know what I mean? | ||
| I'm going to have the people inside going, what the hell happened? | ||
| Do you need help? | ||
| And I'm like, I just want to crawl into a hole and, you know, not see humanity for about a month. | ||
| So my brother goes inside, gets my clothes, we go. | ||
| I find out later this guy, we, lacrosse is a big sport in our country. | ||
| And he was like the enforcer on the lacrosse team, like the AAA lacrosse team. | ||
| So he was a tough guy. | ||
| Like I didn't have a chance, you know, right from the get-go I didn't have a chance. | ||
| And then, you know, I discover his name because we lived in a small town and you sort of, these things sort of come to you as time goes by. | ||
| And then my buddy calls me up a couple years later, he's, He says, did you hear about so-and-so? | ||
| I said, no. | ||
| I was away at university at this point. | ||
| He's like, they went camping in the woods. | ||
| And him and his dad, and this word gets back to your idea of abuse. | ||
| He stabbed his dad 44 times. | ||
| Killed him. | ||
| Killed him in the woods and they caught him just walking down the street with the knife in his hand. | ||
| And, uh, and, you know, later on they interview his mom and his mom was like, yeah, he was, uh, you know, he basically would sit out on the porch saying that he, George Bush was going to come in Air Force One anytime, pick him up for some top secret mission. | ||
| So he clearly had some, some mental instabilities that didn't present themselves at the age at which at least they were maybe emerging, but I thought later... | ||
| Did his dad abuse him? | ||
| I mean, that part had never been into. | ||
| I can't really comment on that, but I mean... | ||
| I don't know, but I think, I feel like he stabbed the man 44 times. | ||
| It would have to be a really heated argument. | ||
| And if they had no prior sort of history with one another, I don't really know. | ||
| But first of all, that he stabbed him and then he stabbed him that many times. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I thought later, like, man, as bad as I got it, I mean, I could have got a lot worse. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| At least he like let me off at the end. | ||
| He's like, all right. | ||
| Well, I always try to explain that to someone who gives people the finger in a car. | ||
| Like, you never know who you're giving the finger to. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| My wife has a bad habit of honking the horn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, baby, I love you, but don't do it. | |
| You don't know who the hell's stepping out of that freaking car. | ||
| Not only that, you never know what state they're in. | ||
| They could be in the worst state of mind ever. | ||
| At the moment you lay on that horn, you could have caught them at the breaking point. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what puts them... | ||
| Yeah, you fucking people, especially in this day and age... | ||
| When you're dealing with cities and traffic and the unnatural stress of slamming 200 fucking million people together like this, they've done these studies on population density just with rats, and they've shown how bizarre rat behavior gets when you get too many rats in a contained environment, and it mirrors human beings' behavior. | ||
| As far as human beings, when you have a small amount of them, everybody seems to get along fine. | ||
| But when you jam them together, you start getting all these mental illnesses. | ||
| Well, that's what they do with rats. | ||
| If you have a certain amount of rats and you jam them into a box, A certain amount of them will just sit in a corner and start nodding their heads up and down and back and forth, and it gets really weird. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I found the same thing. | ||
| I used to work at a place called Marineland in Niagara Falls, which is like a SeaWorld kind of an idea. | ||
| Yeah, we had a guy that worked at Marineland. | ||
| Oh, is that so? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was involved in this fucking horrible situation with dolphins, and he had a... | ||
| What the fuck is his name? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bill. | |
| Phil DeMores. | ||
| Oh shit, you had him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Phil DeMores. | |
| I interviewed him for an article I did. | ||
| Phil DeMores. | ||
| Yeah, okay, of course. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, okay. | ||
| Yeah, and he was explaining to us how intelligent. | ||
| It was Smooshy the Walrus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly, the Walrus. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was also explaining to us how intelligent these dolphins are, and the dolphins go on hunger strikes, they have to force feed them, and they take them away from their mothers, and they buy them from Russians. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or really ruthless, the way they capture them. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I know it's rough. | ||
| It's rough stuff. | ||
| Yeah, so anyway, you got all that already from Phil, and Phil was an insider. | ||
| Phil was there after I was there, and I think things got... | ||
| I mean, I was never a trainer either, but some of the things that those guys saw, the animal control guys saw, was pretty rough. | ||
| But the same thing is, you have so many animals, and if you did the same to people, of course, there's going to be like... | ||
| Mania, disturbing, you know, depression, all sorts of stuff that we can sort of emote. | ||
| You know, animals can only sort of just do it through their behavior. | ||
| You get a sense of like, this is not right. | ||
| This rat is not in a good state. | ||
| Well, the zoo. | ||
| You ever go to the zoo and watch an animal just pace back and forth in their small little container? | ||
| And you're like, this is nuts. | ||
| I watched this bear once, and he would just walk to one area, turn around, walk to the other area, turn around, and go back and forth. | ||
| Like, that animal is going mad. | ||
| They're going mad. | ||
| They're... | ||
| Animals like bears, they roam over miles and miles of countryside. | ||
| And that's how their genes are sort of adopted. | ||
| They're adapted, rather. | ||
| Their whole being is adapted to this idea of nature, providing them with food. | ||
| They go out and forage for the food. | ||
| When they're just stuck in this box and the food comes sliding under the door in a tray every day, all their reward systems are being... | ||
| Screwed up. | ||
| Just ignored or contained in some strange sort of a way and madness. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they find other ways, you know, when you baffle all of those primal instincts. | ||
| And I think, you know, it's true. | ||
| You know, we have a son and will we take him to the Toronto Zoo? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| We might have to. | ||
| Where else can you see all of those creatures? | ||
| You can't just go out searching the forest until you find a bear. | ||
| I mean, you could. | ||
| But you do it with the understanding that no matter how nice the bear pen is or the gorilla enclosure, it can't do all the things that that gorilla... | ||
| You just have to hope that they have a mind that is a bit more... | ||
| Able to embrace their new situation. | ||
| And some animals maybe can, but other animals just, like, I ain't built for this. | ||
| Same with some men who are imprisoned. | ||
| Like, I'm not, you know, the cool hand Luke sort of a thing. | ||
| I'm not built for this. | ||
| Yeah, it ain't happening. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| And I have children, and I take them to the zoo, but it is that feeling. | ||
| Like, I do it just because my kids, I want them to explore everything, see as many things as possible. | ||
| But there's part of me that feels like a big hypocrite, because I don't want to support containing these animals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fucking penguin and it's 90 degrees out in LA. Like, what's that fucking penguin thinking? | ||
| Penguin's gotta be like, what am I doing here? | ||
| How did I get here anyways? | ||
| Why is it so hot? | ||
| Lights went out and suddenly I'm, yeah, who's this guy in this blue suit feeding me fish? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the fish are dead already? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| Well, even getting them to learn to do that. | ||
| Like, I think a lot of animals just end up starving because they just won't learn to eat an animal that's not, you know, that they're normally used to catching in some way. | ||
| So you can't fake their enclosure. | ||
| They can't embrace that much of a change. | ||
| Well, also, the reality of zoo life is completely alien to the reality of an animal existing in an ecosphere or in an ecosystem. | ||
| So when an animal is in a zoo, that animal is separated from every other species, which never happens. | ||
| No, no, absolutely. | ||
| Just so bizarre. | ||
| And not only that, there's nothing trying to kill them so they don't learn anything. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| All of their natural instincts to avoid predators just sort of like sit there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| They don't experience predators. | ||
| Every monkey experiences predators. | ||
| Every ape experiences predators. | ||
| experience is cats in the wild. | ||
| There's no apes that live anywhere where there's not something that might fuck them up, whether it's a spider or a snake that they should avoid or something. | ||
| And they have to learn. | ||
| They have to learn to keep away from that snake. | ||
| That snake will fuck you up. | ||
| Yeah, but that's what keeps them sharp. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| That's what gives them their lives purpose, really, even if it's just surviving. | ||
| Well, it makes sure that the good genes pass on. | ||
| And in the zoo, it's just dumb monkeys fucking each other. | ||
| No one learns anything. | ||
| They get free peanuts. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's what they're breeding. | ||
| It's the weirdest form of animal prison ever. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| No, yeah, I mean, I agree. | ||
| But again, you got kids. | ||
| I mean, you do all sorts of weird things for your kids. | ||
| I think sometimes zoos exist but for the benevolence of kids or the needs of kids so that parents feel like, well, shit, you're not going to see this any other way. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| I want you to see them. | ||
| I'll gloss over. | ||
| I'll say, oh, look at the happy monkeys. | ||
| Even though in some part of you knows these are not happy monkeys. | ||
| This is not natural either. | ||
| But you know you're not going to take them to Borneo either. | ||
| Yeah, fuck that. | ||
| And show them natural monkeys. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Monkeys will steal your kid. | ||
| They will eat your kid. | ||
| There's been stories of chimps stealing babies. | ||
| Oh, there was an awful article in Esquire where these two people People couldn't have kids. | ||
| So they get a chimp, you know, and the chimp, they raise the chimp like it's their kid. | ||
| And then they probably had the chimp for like 20 years. | ||
| One day the chimp goes nuts, tears her face off, basically. | ||
| Like chimps are incredibly strong, powerful creatures. | ||
| And, you know, basically, I mean, she survives, but just barely sort of a thing. | ||
| And you don't recognize those sort of things. | ||
| I think when I think of chimps, I think of that movie with Clint Eastwood, whatever, and orangutan. | ||
| And those are probably even tougher, you know? | ||
| I mean, they're bigger creatures, but... | ||
| They're less violent, though. | ||
| Are they? | ||
| They're more subdued sort of a thing? | ||
| Well, they'll still fuck you up. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Don't dot your I's and cross your T's. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But they don't actively seek out... | ||
| Fucking up other animals the way chimps do. | ||
| Chimps have an instinct to go out and kill things. | ||
| Is that so? | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| Chimps are not herbivores. | ||
| A lot of people have this misconception of chimps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would. | |
| I had that up until this very moment. | ||
| Chimps are predators. | ||
| They eat monkeys. | ||
| They eat monkeys alive. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Never seen that? | ||
| Never. | ||
| Dude, it's dark. | ||
| That would be dark, because that's like eating a little version of themselves, basically. | ||
| God damn. | ||
| Well, they cannibalize as well. | ||
| Oh, do they really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They murder other chimps, and they cannibalize other chimps. | ||
| They cannibalize chimp babies. | ||
| Chimps are the worst aspects of human beings, like in animal form, with intelligence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think that is what makes people want to adopt them because it's the closest thing to us that's not us. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| What's weird is that bonobos are close cousins and they don't exhibit any of that behavior. | ||
| But what they do is they fuck each other like crazy. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Everybody fucks. | ||
| They fuck everybody. | ||
| The fathers fuck the daughters. | ||
| The brothers fuck their other brother. | ||
| They fuck their sons. | ||
| Everybody fucks. | ||
| Really, just like a big clan of, yeah, just sort of incest all over the place. | ||
| Well, so much so that it's kind of clever on their part. | ||
| They've avoided captivity because of it. | ||
| Because you can't have them in the zoo because they just fuck all the time. | ||
| Ah, that's right. | ||
| People are like, we can't show our kids these fucking apes. | ||
| See, we're going at it all the time. | ||
| Which is so weird. | ||
| It's so ironic that you can have these animals doing everything in the wild except breeding. | ||
| We can't tolerate that. | ||
| We can't show our children breeding. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Although, like, the pandas, they want that. | ||
| Or what is it? | ||
| There's one group that they're desperate to find them to have. | ||
| Pandas, they're trying to get them to breed. | ||
| The only thing that they do avoid is the mothers will not have sex with their sons. | ||
| That's the only one where it's verboten. | ||
| Yeah, the bonobos have that one rule. | ||
| For whatever reason, the mother does not want to have sex with her son. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| But everything else is fair game. | ||
| Everything else is on the table. | ||
| And you won't ever see that in a zoo because they just are like, you guys just exist in the wild. | ||
| We're okay with our chimps and our gorillas. | ||
| It's how they resolve conflict. | ||
| By fucking. | ||
| So that's how they express dominance kind of an idea that way? | ||
| Or even like, we argued here, but let's fuck around here. | ||
| Everything's alright. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I would probably have to study it a lot more. | ||
| But they do do a lot of chimp-like things where they pick up branches and smack branches around. | ||
| They'll pick up a large branch and they drag it on the ground to show dominance. | ||
| Chimps do a lot of that. | ||
| They do a lot of posturing with picking up large things, shaking trees. | ||
| They'll shake things to show how strong they are. | ||
| But chimps will engage in some serious violence. | ||
| Not bonobos. | ||
| Not bonobos, yeah. | ||
| Well, maybe if you want to... | ||
| I mean, I guess if you were into adopting it, the one part of that story, like you understand, like you have kids, you know, I have kids. | ||
| I think if you don't have kids and you've tried to have kids, I think people might feel that there's a loss in their life and something that needs to be filled, you know, and often you fill it with an animal of, you get really into dog breeding or you have 17 cats or something like that. | ||
| These guys decided a chimp was the way to go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I guess I would have thought totally innocently that, yeah, okay, a chimp, whatever, you dress it up in a tuxedo and do whatever. | ||
| It's a little weird, but I get why you're doing it. | ||
| I know it's a replacement for the fact that you can't have kids, but then when this kid goes feral on you, basically, and attacks you in a way that... | ||
| There's a documentary about people that keep scary animals. | ||
| It's called The Elephant in the Living Room. | ||
| And it's supposed to be really good. | ||
| I got 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. | ||
| I need to watch it. | ||
| But it's a documentary about the raising of exotic pets in homes and how many knuckleheads in America. | ||
| Wind up doing that. | ||
| There was this thing the other day, I was watching this piece on this guy who has a pet mountain lion. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He's bottle fed it since it was a baby. | ||
| And is he at least in sort of a remote area? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I didn't pay attention long enough, but he's got this cat, he's had it since it was a baby, and now it's a full grown 200 pound female cat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I hope that works out. | ||
| I think you are juggling dynamite right here, my friend. | ||
| It might not be. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Some animals are cool with it, as long as you feed them and you're sweet with them. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The bottom line is it's always going to have that instinct to chase shit. | ||
| If you roll a bowl of yarn in front of a... | ||
| Take a ball of yarn and toss it in front of a house cat. | ||
| They fucking dive on that shit. | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah, totally. | ||
| They can't help it. | ||
| No, no, exactly. | ||
| Or like a laser pointer on the wall. | ||
| Yeah, they're bananas. | ||
| You can't, that's their instinct, you know? | ||
| And we have one who comes home with all manner of like cats are, you can't beat cats for like sort of just like sadism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, they're worse. | |
| They came home once, it was night, and I was like, what do you got there in your mouth? | ||
| And she opens her mouth, and it was a baby mouse alive. | ||
| She just cradled it in her mouth. | ||
| But I realized if I'd come five, she was just going to play with it until it either died of fright or... | ||
| Punctual. | ||
| Yeah, she chewed it up, basically. | ||
| So I think, like a dog, a dog just goes and gets what it wants, eats it. | ||
| Most animals do, but man, a house cat especially, because all their needs are covered. | ||
| So it's like, this is all just fun for me. | ||
| My cat threw up a mouse once. | ||
| Ugh! | ||
| He had eaten it and then just puked it in the living room. | ||
| Oh, that's rough. | ||
| She actually. | ||
| Yeah, ours are females too. | ||
| I had a male cat too, but it wasn't the male cat that did it, it was the female. | ||
| She just barfed it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Little mouse wrapped up in cat food, puke, hair, hairballs and shit. | |
| I'm like, oh, you disgusting monster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's fucking weird, because they're looking at you like they're purring and everything, rubbing up against you like they're so sweet. | ||
| But you think, man, if I was an inch tall, you would make sport out of me, you would make mincemeat out of me, and you would have not a goddamn care in the world about that. | ||
| No, no remorse. | ||
| No, no remorse at all. | ||
| I enjoy reading, I just got into this last week, reading vegan forums on how to feed their cats. | ||
| And they almost all reluctantly have to admit that their cats need meat. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Because cats have very high protein requirements. | ||
| Much different than a human being's and much different even than a dog. | ||
| You can feed dogs like a certain amount of vegan food and keep them alive. | ||
| And do vegans do that? | ||
| Would they say this is a vegan household and that counts on our dogs and cats as well? | ||
| They do with their dogs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| People get away with it with their dogs. | ||
| They don't get away with it with their cats. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cats just... | ||
| They just wouldn't be healthy. | ||
| They're really unhealthy. | ||
| It'd be like mistreatment, animal mistreatment. | ||
| Cats like this all day. | ||
| I need some protein. | ||
| Mangy looking fur falling out. | ||
| No, he's fine. | ||
| He's just going through a stage. | ||
| Just reading the torment that these people have gone through before they make the decision to feed their cat meat. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I can imagine. | ||
| I can only imagine, you know. | ||
| I had one... | ||
| I was trying to do an article on... | ||
| On pit bulls, which I thought would have been really interesting, because one thing I noticed in research was, like, people in different parts of this country breed pit bulls differently based on where they are from. | ||
| Like, Kentucky, Arkansas, they breed, like, a really lean... | ||
| It's almost like fighters, like a really lean, fast version of a dog, whereas in California... | ||
| Or, sorry, Florida and Miami area, they breed, like, really big... | ||
| Bulky, kind of. | ||
| That's sort of what the genes that they want to put together. | ||
| And yeah, for the purposes of fighting these creatures. | ||
| And I mean, I like pit bulls. | ||
| I've met, you know, nice pit bulls, you know. | ||
| But I do know, from what I've researched anyways, that they're like bred into... | ||
| They're built to be fighting creatures. | ||
| That's sort of what they were bred for. | ||
| And not sort of what, that's exactly what they were bred for. | ||
| And so that sort of thing is always in their DNA helix. | ||
| It's sort of sunk in there. | ||
| And, you know, you go onto these Pitbull forums and you experience, in the same way with V, like a very strong emotional kind of like, you don't understand, you don't get it. | ||
| And I wasn't even coming from a perspective of like intolerance or hatred. | ||
| I was just coming from a perspective of I just would like to talk about it. | ||
| Where do you go to a Pitbull fighting forum? | ||
| I wasn't fighting. | ||
| This was what they do with this one was they, sort of like tractor pulls. | ||
| For dogs. | ||
| So they hook them up to sledges and they see how many bricks they can carry. | ||
| And that's sort of like, I mean, I'd much rather that, right? | ||
| Just like strength events, basically, for these dogs. | ||
| But I sort of had the temerity, I guess, to say... | ||
| I can see why you're doing this. | ||
| You're sort of doing this because these dogs have these instincts and it's better to have them pulling a sledge than fighting one another or fighting other dogs. | ||
| And you're just sort of assaulted by these people who are like, you don't get it at all. | ||
| These are the nicest creatures ever. | ||
| And I wasn't even coming from saying they're not nice. | ||
| You know, I, I, again, I feel like a lot of it with animal ownership is the owner. | ||
| It's really not the dog always, you know, a dog when it's born can go any number of different ways. | ||
| But when you see a pit bull owned by a guy who's driving around like a jacked up pickup truck and his dog's got like a spiked collar on and he's carrying around by a length of, you know, chain, you're like, that dog might potentially have been raised with a certain higher, you You know, the aggression might have been brought out of them more than this dog that had grown up with a family with three kids in it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, they can be good pets, but they're always dangerous around other dogs. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Almost always. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very rare that you get a pit bull that doesn't have animal aggression. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Just thousands of years of genetics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They've raised them to be aggressive and to fight other dogs. | ||
| I love pit bulls as pets, but I won't have them just because it's a drag. | ||
| Like, your friend brings their dog over, and your dogs don't play. | ||
| They go to war. | ||
| You know, it's just fucked. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If it's two pit bulls, it's one thing. | ||
| But if your friend brings over his black lab, it ain't a fight. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a fight. | ||
| And I went into the SPCA, and they just busted a ring, and they had like 40 fighting dogs. | ||
| And they were so nice around the SPCA workers, but they ended up having to destroy most of them, or maybe all of them even, because... | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's like having a stick of dynamite with a fuse of indeterminate link that could blow up at any time. | ||
| And they just felt like you had been bred to this sort of utility. | ||
| And this is what you're good for. | ||
| And it's not your fault. | ||
| But you're not safe out in general population anymore. | ||
| They also, if they're not trained properly, can be very dangerous around children because they don't recognize children as adults. | ||
| They'll acquiesce to an adult's demands and requests. | ||
| They look at adults as being the ones that are in control. | ||
| They don't look at children along the same lines. | ||
| They see something their height and they just attack it. | ||
| It's fucking really dangerous. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And I mean, again, there's going to be people listening to this who are Pitbull fanciers and they're going to... | ||
| I've had a bunch of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Who have had words about this? | ||
| No, I've had pit bulls. | ||
| Oh, you've had pit bulls yourself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay, okay. | |
| I came home once and my dog had killed my dog in the living room. | ||
| You're kidding. | ||
| No, they went to war when I was gone. | ||
| Two pit bulls? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, believe me, man. | ||
| I love them as animals. | ||
| I will never have them as pets. | ||
| Not anymore, yeah. | ||
| You've got kids now too, of course. | ||
| Even if I didn't have kids, I just would never deal with it. | ||
| Yeah, they would get out and attack the neighbor's dog or something. | ||
| That happened to my dog's dad. | ||
| Got out of his yard, crawled into the neighbor's yard, attacked the neighbor's dog, and the animal control guys came over and killed it. | ||
| It's just, it's fucked. | ||
| It's like, first of all, it's fucked for the neighbor. | ||
| You know, the dog's barking, like dogs bark at each other, and they're thinking, you know, hey, I'm just talking shit. | ||
| Yeah, whatever, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And the dog's like, oh, for real? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to fight to the death? | |
| Like, no, we're not fighting to the death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck are you talking about, man? | |
| It's like, I'm already in your yard. | ||
| It is to the death. | ||
| That's the only way I know. | ||
| You with the guy in the basketball court. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very similar. | |
| You realize you're like, holy shit, I'm up against a different breed of humanity right now. | ||
| Yeah, the guy's kicking me in the head out of nowhere, and, you know, you're just trying to play basketball, and you're... | ||
| Brothers rubbing your shoulders. | ||
| Neither one of you know what the fuck you're doing. | ||
| No, we're totally neophytes. | ||
| And there was something, you know, this is probably way too like writerly, but there is something about the eyes of a guy like that. | ||
| You're just like, oh, I'm, you know, you know, you're done before you're done. | ||
| I've met hundreds of those dudes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's just something clock working around in their eyes. | ||
| Like, and you're just like, oh no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not built to this standard. | ||
| This is not going to work out too well for me. | ||
| Yeah, there's guys that enjoy beating the fuck out of people. | ||
| Like I said, a lot of them have had the fuck beaten out of them and it becomes... | ||
| And that's one of the things that they say that's the most horrific thing about sexual abuse is that a lot of the abused become abusers when they get older. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's sort of like a repetitive of the son re-expresses the sins of the father. | ||
| So dark. | ||
| It's such a weird thing. | ||
| It makes you realize, too, just how fortunate. | ||
| Like, again, I know you spoke about your mom and you have a good relationship with your mom. | ||
| A good relationship with your father as well? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| I don't know him. | ||
| He was a horrible guy. | ||
| But my experience up until I was five years old was just him being really violent and scary. | ||
| To both you and your mother? | ||
| Mostly to my mother. | ||
| Not really to me, but enough so that it's just a scary thing to watch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, so you know, I mean, I was very fortunate. | ||
| You realize how luck is based on so many things that just who your parents are, where you're born in the world. | ||
| And yeah, I've been very fortunate that way, but I know friends who have had, you know, different situations. | ||
| So, but anyways, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's just, you get your hand in life. | ||
| You do with it what you can, but some people's hand is just unmanageable. | ||
| And that is just the reality of being a human being. | ||
| There are certain people that are just abused to the point of no return before they ever get a chance to try to sort their life out. | ||
| I wouldn't even begin to know how to manage that. | ||
| I wouldn't know what to do. | ||
| I know people that have adopted abused kids, and they've had the kids since the kid was three, and the kid's now in kindergarten, and fucked. | ||
| The kid's fucked. | ||
| No. | ||
| And my wife is a child services social worker, which I mean, it's tough. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| And she told me this one story. | ||
| I can repeat it. | ||
| And she goes over with this other, with a cop actually, to apprehend these kids. | ||
| Opens the door, dirtbag father answers, my kids aren't here. | ||
| Kids haven't been here for days. | ||
| She's like, well, we have reports that your wife said that They are here because they're certainly not with your ex. | ||
| And, you know, basically they had a warrant. | ||
| They got inside. | ||
| Room's empty. | ||
| Apartments empty, as far as they could tell. | ||
| Closets open. | ||
| Closets open ajar. | ||
| So they open it up. | ||
| Two kids in there, in the closet. | ||
| And the one thing that my wife noticed was that the wallpaper, I don't know who wallpaper is inside of the closet, but whatever, it was ripped in rags. | ||
| eggs and the kids had been eating it because they had been in there for so long that, uh, that that was sort of how it, how it came that way they got to the point where they were, they were eating the wallpaper. | ||
| I was listening to this, uh, podcast recently. | ||
| There's this podcast that I really enjoy called radio lab. | ||
| And, uh, one of the episodes of radio lab dealt with this guy. | ||
| Um, the, the episodes called escape and dealt with this guy who had spent his entire life in and out of jail. | ||
| And it was about his, uh, his childhood and how he was sort of abandoned. | ||
| He was raised by, I forget what relative, but they didn't feed them. | ||
| And so him and his daughter, his sister would eat paper at night just to fill their stomachs because they were in agony from hunger pains. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you read about shit like that, and this guy goes on this horrific cycle of childhood abuse and becomes this criminal, and he winds up meeting this woman and falling in love and actually having a family, but still keeps fucking up and can't figure out a way to stop. | ||
| And you hear it from the woman, like the woman who married him, her point of view of, like, what could he do? | ||
| The guy grew up, like, in this horrific state, and he's broken. | ||
| He's a broken man. | ||
| It's fucked. | ||
| Yeah, it's like before he even had a chance, really, to make his own decision about some of these things. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I know, I don't mean to be a downer about any of this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it is. | ||
| As a writer, what I was going to ask earlier about watching things that you, you know, watching humans that you don't agree with or watching things... | ||
| You're studying human behavior. | ||
| When you do that, do you try to put yourself in the mind of the abused or the mind of the abuser? | ||
| Like, do you try to put yourself into these people's heads to try to see what was... | ||
| Like this guy who, you know, they found him and, you know, he's saying like, no, my kids aren't here. | ||
| And then they find the kids in the closet. | ||
| Do you try to put yourself in that guy's mind? | ||
| No, I mean, in that case, I put myself in the mind of the social worker. | ||
| Because, you know, it was easier for me to put myself in the mind of my wife rather than put myself in the mind of someone like that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But even in the troupe, there's a character, Shelley, who is... | ||
| You know, has some very serious things wrong with him. | ||
| And so, yeah, I think part of it is trying to put yourself as closely into that mindset as you can while recognizing that you can never quite bridge that gap. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because... | ||
| I mean, that's just a leap that I can't quite make, you know? | ||
| So you just have to hope that you're getting close enough that the reader is... | ||
| I've always said as a writer, you just need to be one step ahead of your reader. | ||
| It means you have to have done that little bit more research or just spent more time thinking about these things that a reader hopefully is going to read really quickly and it's going to be like, okay, okay. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| Nothing is really sticking out that is enough that's going to make them sort of check up, which all people do in a book or a movie. | ||
| They're like, okay, you've just... | ||
| This is too far. | ||
| Suddenly you've sort of crossed some sort of boundary that I'm no longer quite with you in the way that I was before. | ||
| And you never know what it is. | ||
| I was having dinner yesterday at the hotel bar and I ended up next to this guy talking to him and he was like a big Tom Clancy reader. | ||
| And I said, oh, I've had people, like, I had a guy get in touch with me once, because I wrote some sort of book that had some military stuff in it, and he sort of said, well, you know, not to be a nitpick or anything, but the clip capacity of an M16 is actually 16 rounds and not 17, as you said. | ||
| And I'm like, I get it. | ||
| I mean, I get it. | ||
| I get that's wrong. | ||
| That's a mistake. | ||
| But I think probably what I'm trying to do is not really having... | ||
| It'd be great if I could have caught that and it was more scrupulous to fact. | ||
| But really, you're trying to weave a narrative in fiction. | ||
| But some readers, that's what they want. | ||
| What takes them out of it if you don't get the facts right? | ||
| It does, exactly. | ||
| If you don't get the facts right, if you're doing something about medical stuff and you haven't been scrupulous about it, then yeah, then you're going to get... | ||
| But I mean, the guy mentioned, he's like, that's why I can't read Stephen King, because he gets apparently too many things wrong. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| I am so deep into most Stephen King narratives that I don't... | ||
| I wonder what he gets wrong. | ||
| I wonder that too. | ||
| I sort of asked him and he wasn't able to say anything. | ||
| It was just a generalized sentiment that now he gets things wrong. | ||
| He might just be a dickhead. | ||
| He might have been. | ||
| He was a defense contractor. | ||
| He sounds like a dickhead. | ||
| If he can't tell you the exact things that Stephen King got wrong, like any particular examples, he's got to be a dickhead. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And sometimes you just find yourself faced up against someone. | ||
| He said something like, well, you know, fracking. | ||
| You know fracking? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And he's like, well, I've done research and there's absolutely not a damn thing wrong with fracking and it's a myth, just like global warming is a myth. | ||
| And I was like, okay, I think we're probably on different sides of this and I'm not going to get into an argument with you about it, but... | ||
| That's where you just tune out of a conversation. | ||
| You're just like, okay, I'm out of this right now. | ||
| The dangers of fracking are not a myth. | ||
| No! | ||
| I mean, people light up their tap water. | ||
| I don't know if you've seen that. | ||
| People have been able to do that. | ||
| I've looked pretty deeply into it. | ||
| People have been able to light up their tap water long before there was fracking. | ||
| It is possible that well water is getting contaminated. | ||
| But the reality of contaminated well water is directly related to fracking is undeniable. | ||
| Yeah, because they're blowing out the earth and then it's seeping through into the well. | ||
| And they're getting better at fracking. | ||
| They're figuring out a way to do it that's more efficient. | ||
| But the reality is, you know, you've got to break some eggs to make an omelet. | ||
| These guys don't give a fuck. | ||
| They're trying to get natural resources out of the ground. | ||
| And they're not trying to not pollute. | ||
| They're just doing their best to confirm... | ||
| To conform to whatever regulations that get established that allow them to make money. | ||
| And those regulations are directly influenced by the very companies that make fucking trillions of dollars. | ||
| They own the politicians. | ||
| They buy all the regulations. | ||
| They make sure that everything is in place so that they can make money. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I mean, there's definitely some damage that fracking has done. | ||
| The question becomes, is it okay? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it okay that this damage is done because there's a plus side? | ||
| People are employed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a lot of natural gases and a lot of natural resources that we can harvest. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's a different question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the idea that it's a myth and there's nothing wrong with fracking, that guy's a dick. | ||
| Those fucking right wing chatterboxes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it just come right out with it too. | ||
| It's been like two minutes of us talking. | ||
| I'm like, well, now suddenly I'm not getting into this with you. | ||
| He's an idiot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's an idiot. | ||
| And the idea that global warming is a myth too. | ||
| He's an idiot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I feel like, come on. | ||
| It's pretty well established. | ||
| And whether or not it's human influenced, that's a debate that most scientists almost, I think it's some insane number. | ||
| It's like 99% now. | ||
| Think that it's human influenced. | ||
| And since he's not a fucking scientist, maybe he should shut his dirty hole. | ||
| Yeah, and I feel, I felt almost like a, fuck, I hate to say it, Joe, but like a bit of a fraud that I didn't go up against him, you know? | ||
| I would have walked away. | ||
| Yeah, you can't fight every battle, but there's a sense of like, because that's the conservative thing, is like to come right at you, and I feel like, well, fuck, if I don't come back and say something, I've sort of just like let him believe that his point is valid from my perspective. | ||
| You're a Canadian, you're a liberal, you wear glasses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| He fucking hates you already. | ||
| It was amazing you even spoke to me in the first place. | ||
| He only spoke to you to correct you. | ||
| He wanted to correct you and Stephen King and these fucking pussies that are scared of fracking. | ||
| You're worried about global warming. | ||
| I'm going to buy land up in your country. | ||
| Meanwhile, they don't understand that global warming, it changes both the cold and the warm. | ||
| The cold gets colder, the warm gets warmer. | ||
| Yeah, that's one of the big arguments is like, well, look at how cold it is now. | ||
| We had a hell of a winter. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| It's the fluctuations that are the things you need to be looking at. | ||
| But whatever, it's a worthless sort of thing to get into, especially with this guy. | ||
| I had to be like... | ||
| Donald Sterling's age. | ||
| It ain't worth fighting it. | ||
| It ain't worth fighting it at that point. | ||
| He's an old dickwad. | ||
| You should have scared him and see if you could give him a hard time. | ||
| See if he could get his little fucking shit ticker to give out on him. | ||
| Enough of you with your defense contracting and your global warming denying. | ||
| Ah, yeah, I know. | ||
| You just sort of feel like, well, at least I don't think... | ||
| I think you're too old to have too much of a sway in this other than your vote still counts as much as mine does. | ||
| I like talking to guys like that just to find out what makes them draw those conclusions. | ||
| But what I'm always fascinated by is... | ||
| Because you've done that on this show. | ||
| You've had people who... | ||
| You know, have contrary positions to what... | ||
| But you're able to engage with them, I think, in a really interesting way that's not terribly... | ||
| It's confrontational, but it's not... | ||
| I don't know how to describe it right, but I've seen you do it, and it's a skill, obviously, yeah. | ||
| Well, I like to talk to people that have strong beliefs in systems, in things rather, to find out how their belief systems are formed. | ||
| I want to know, is there a logical, rational sort of basis to their belief systems, or is it just that they've sort of adopted this predetermined pattern, which is very common. | ||
| Very much so, yeah. | ||
| I had a conversation with a guy in jujitsu class about global warming where he was talking and he's 24 years old, he's a military kid. | ||
| Someone else brought up global warming and the kid goes, "It's a natural cycle. | ||
| It's always happened. | ||
| It's a natural cycle." I go, "You're not a scientist." I go, "Are you a scientist? | ||
| You're not a scientist, right?" Yeah, are you sure? | ||
| You can show me your PhD. | ||
| Are you a scientist? | ||
| You're not a scientist, right? | ||
| I started mocking him. | ||
| I go, listen, man, you're being silly. | ||
| You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. | ||
| And where'd you get it? | ||
| Just tell me where you got that mindset. | ||
| Where did it come from? | ||
| It's that no-nonsense right-wing mentality. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, don't even question it. | ||
| It's clearly... | ||
| What's really fascinating about it is that they're always supporting big business, but yet no one gets fucked over more than blue-collar folks when it comes to big business. | ||
| No one gets fucked over more. | ||
| I've always felt that too. | ||
| It's like sometimes this outlook is actually the one that's most injurious to you in a way of your own life and your own, you know, sort of happiness in a way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you think about it, the people that are less educated... | ||
| to work for a company or need a company to employ them. | ||
| Those are more likely people that are going to get lower paying jobs. | ||
| Those are more likely people that are going to need some form of public assistance or if it's possible. | ||
| But yet those are the people that have this pull yourself up by your own bootstraps mentality and that these fucking welfare rats, they have all these crazy ideas in their head. | ||
| Whereas the educated people who are more likely to be able to fend for themselves or more likely at least to have the possibility to have a higher paying job because of the fact they're educated, at least in theory, are more likely to support public assistance or more likely to be are more likely to support public assistance or more likely to be against some of the environmentally destroying policies of It's real weird how people just sort of form these patterns that they lock into. | ||
| And that, as you said, can be really against their own self-interest and self-benefit going forward. | ||
| But I don't know about you, but I found like as I've gotten older, like when I was in school, I was a total like lib, like almost as left as you could go, as piecey as you could go. | ||
| And as I get older, I feel like I come to some sort of, not the center, I'll always be to the left. | ||
| But you know what I mean? | ||
| There's certain things about liberal, you know, that get on my nerves as well. | ||
| Like, I mean, and that's just, I feel like any fully rounded human being is not going to always be in one camp entirely. | ||
| Yeah, that's a healthy approach, I think. | ||
| I'm very much a conglomeration of liberal and conservative ideas. | ||
| Yeah, I found like more and more. | ||
| Well, there's an old saying, show me a young man who is not liberal and I'll show you a man with no heart. | ||
| Show me an old man who's not conservative and I'll show you a man with no brain. | ||
| And it's that somewhere along the line you realize that people need a certain amount of difficulty in life. | ||
| life. | ||
| They need a certain amount of hardship and they need a certain amount of, they need obstacles and they need to overcome those obstacles. | ||
| And when you set it up so that they never have to overcome obstacles and you give them a consistent series of safety nets, they get lazy. | ||
| And that is true. | ||
| And that doesn't mean that all people on welfare are lazy or that welfare is only for the lazy. | ||
| That's ridiculous as well. | ||
| But there's some lazy fucking people out there and not just lazy, lazy thinkers. | ||
| There's just, there's a lot of weakness. | ||
| When you give people the lottery ticket, what happens? | ||
| They lose all their money and they fall apart. | ||
| People need to accomplish things. | ||
| It's a part of the whole genetic sequence that has been sort of ingrained in the human species from all of our past behaviors. | ||
| All of our human reward systems of accomplishing things and feeling good about accomplishing things and building up self-confidence. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| So the pull yourself by your bootstraps, in a lot of ways, that's good advice. | ||
| Unfortunately, it gets conglomerated and attached to... | ||
| This hatred towards homosexuals, this weird fucking pro-war stance. | ||
| A strong religion, religious kind of context and flavor to things as well, which kind of has a... | ||
| You talk about things happening when you're a kid. | ||
| I've always felt that that's one of the things... | ||
| That really influences your thinking and the way that you have an outlook on the world. | ||
| And I think that's a part of what religion does, is they want to get you young and they want to get you indoctrinated and they want to sort of have a good soldier for the battle going forward kind of a thing. | ||
| And I never grew up that way. | ||
| I don't know about you, but I... We're not a very religious household, but I've certainly come across a lot of religious... | ||
| And some of whom are totally awesome and really nice and really... | ||
| My wife actually came up really Baptist. | ||
| And there was some point around when she was 18 or 19, I was just like, I can't do this anymore. | ||
| I'm tired of feeling bad about myself for X, Y, Z. And so she sort of left the fold. | ||
| But she said that was one of the most difficult things she ever did, peeling away from really all of her friends, all of... | ||
| All of that, you know, because of the entire, it was a nice little safe bubble that she was in. | ||
| And she still likes a lot of those people to this day. | ||
| But overall, it was something she felt she had to do in order to sort of grow, I guess, or make some sort of separation from that time in her life. | ||
| Well, there's a disconnect. | ||
| If you subscribe to religion and all of its principles by the book, there's just a massive disconnect you have to have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| With just reality itself. | ||
| You're believing in Adam and Eve and resurrections and miracles and no evidence whatsoever to support any of these things that are completely contrary to anything that you've ever experienced and then all the evidence that you see of science. | ||
| Oh, Earth is only 6,000 years old according to this book. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Didn't they just find some hundred-million-year-old shit lies, propaganda by the liberal media? | ||
| They were planted down there by, you know, by Barack. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, the homosexuals are not condoned by the Bible. | ||
| They're very good diggers, I'll have you know, and they went down and they buried those bones. | ||
| And they sort of acid-dated them somehow so that they seem older than they are. | ||
| Well, you know, carbon dating is not an exact science. | ||
| No. | ||
| Fracking is a myth. | ||
| Meanwhile, they'll talk bad about homosexuals while they're eating a shrimp cocktail. | ||
| And they're like, yo, dude, you've got to read the whole book. | ||
| Because there's more shit about not eating shellfish than there is about being gay. | ||
| You're not supposed to eat shrimp. | ||
| You're not supposed to eat pigs. | ||
| There's a lot of shit that you're doing wrong. | ||
| You're not supposed to work on Saturday. | ||
| Oh, that's right, yeah. | ||
| You're not supposed to have religious tattoos, you fuckhead. | ||
| Oh, is that so? | ||
| Fuck yeah, you're not supposed to tattoo your body. | ||
| That's in the Bible. | ||
| People have religious tattoos. | ||
| It's like, talk about not reading the whole book. | ||
| Yeah, oh, exactly. | ||
| I think, and you just pick and choose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And one of the funniest things is, you know, really hardcore Christians will make fun of, you know, Scientology, which, fair enough, go ahead, I'm perfectly fine if you want to make fun of Scientology, but to obligate their own kind of weird stories that their book presents as well, | ||
| it's like, Yeah, it's, there's a certain, are you not spotting the irony here that there's a certain similarity between their weird Thetan-run sort of stories and your weird, you know, died and reborn after three days, kind of, and all the sort of, you know, stories that we sort of beggar reality as well. | ||
| Well, I think compartmentalized thinking is very dangerous. | ||
| And I think once you just sort of make your mind up that your way is the only way, and you stop being objective, and you cease all introspective thought, you get sort of locked into this mindset, and you put these blinders on. | ||
| They don't allow you to see yourself. | ||
| It's how ridiculous you are. | ||
| And that's how people get caught doing dumb shit, like Ted Haggerty, the guy who was... | ||
| Oh, God, yeah. | ||
| Running this giant religious church, huge stadium filled with people. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Super church. | ||
| Meanwhile, he's smoking crystal meth and banging gay prostitutes. | ||
| And there's this recent guy who's an anti-gay marriage proponent who turns out he would run a female drag strip show. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| What is homeboy's name, Jamie? | ||
| This guy, it just came out the other day. | ||
| He's a North Carolina politician. | ||
| And he was a fucking, he's a drag queen. | ||
| It's so obvious that you see that. | ||
| There was that other one recently where that KKK guy shot like, and then they find out he'd had sex with a black male prostitute dressed as a woman or something like that. | ||
| Of course he did. | ||
| It's like, it doesn't take long before you somehow dig into these guys' history and you're like... | ||
| It's not even surprising anymore, really. | ||
| It's like, I knew that little skeleton was in your closet somewhere. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, Craig. | ||
| See, that's the liberal media. | ||
| This man is in jail. | ||
| He can't talk for himself. | ||
| So the man's in jail. | ||
| They planted that information. | ||
| Just now have the information that he had sex with a gay male prostitute? | ||
| How about, where were you a year ago? | ||
| Do you know how easy it is to doctor macro fish so that they could go back and look through it and it would be there? | ||
| Pretty easy. | ||
| Pretty easy. | ||
| The government, they're watching what you're doing right now. | ||
| Here's homeboy. | ||
| That's what he used to look like when he was on track. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| His name's Steve Wild. | ||
| Just a rough number of cocks in his mouth. | ||
| How many do you say? | ||
| A thousand lifetime? | ||
| I would say that probably is a... | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| That's a face you just want to fuck with. | ||
| Big fat chubby cheeks. | ||
| He probably knows how to take a dick like a champ. | ||
| Especially when he's got the earrings on. | ||
| Those are just handles. | ||
| Big grips. | ||
| Big grippy earrings. | ||
| Look at them. | ||
| Silly bitch. | ||
| Dummy. | ||
| And by the way, there's nothing wrong with dressing up like a woman. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| Nothing wrong with sucking a thousand cocks. | ||
| No, but it's when you're sort of... | ||
| when you're when you espouse a certain viewpoint that's totally against all of that you know and is really mean-spirited and hateful towards that kind of a thing that really gets on your nerves Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But people love to do that. | ||
| They love to point the finger. | ||
| It's like no one loves to criticize women for being promiscuous more than sluts. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Sluts love to shit on other sluts. | ||
| Is that so? | ||
| Oh, good googly moogly Nick Cutter, a.k.a. | ||
| Craig. | ||
| They do, man. | ||
| It's like a big thing with girls. | ||
| Girls who are promiscuous love to shit on other girls who are promiscuous. | ||
| Oh, is that fucking bitch? | ||
| She's a whore. | ||
| She's a fucking everybody. | ||
| Meanwhile, you're fucking everybody. | ||
| You know, and men do the same thing. | ||
| Guys who sleep around are constantly shitting on guys who sleep around. | ||
| Who sleep around too much. | ||
| Of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a common thing. | ||
| It's like people try to throw people off the case. | ||
| Oh, it's like, yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's like that self-hatred thing almost sometimes that sort of, yeah. | ||
| There's definitely a lot of that, you know. | ||
| You used to see that about guys who used to steal jokes would sometimes, like, accuse other people of stealing their jokes. | ||
| To throw them off the case. | ||
| And other comedians would be like, is this motherfucking serious? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, everybody knows you steal everything you do on stage. | |
| And Mencia would constantly accuse people of stealing his material. | ||
| Because he was the biggest. | ||
| And everybody would be like, what the fuck? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| But when you think about, like, the most obvious defense, that's the one. | ||
| If I'm getting accused of something, I'll just accuse other people of the same thing that I'm running up into. | ||
| I was wondering that, too. | ||
| Like, for you, you know, I talked about earlier about, like, when I read Stephen King the second time as an adult, as a writer myself and trying to break it apart. | ||
| Do you do that with other comedians? | ||
| Do you, like, listen to them the first time and just, like, fuck, that's so good. | ||
| And then the second time you sort of try and... | ||
| Just see what they're doing. | ||
| Not to copy it or steal anything, but just see how are they forensically almost putting together these jokes and how are they... | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| What I really do is I like to go back and listen to really old stuff to try to understand the time period. | ||
| Because I think that a lot of... | ||
| Comedy is a weird thing. | ||
| Like a lot of old movies... | ||
| They still hold up today. | ||
| Like if you go back and watch The Hustler with Jackie Gleason. | ||
| Such a good movie, yeah. | ||
| Great movie. | ||
| Paul Newman. | ||
| Holds up completely today. | ||
| It's still a great movie. | ||
| But any comedy from 1962, very tough to listen to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It changes. | ||
| Comedy changes so fast. | ||
| I think something like horror or something like The Hustler, like The Thing is as good now, the Kirk Russell one, as it was when it was made. | ||
| But comedy, there's a certain shelf life. | ||
| It evolves a lot faster, I think. | ||
| And something that was really edgy at one point becomes stale dated, I think, at some point. | ||
| That's sort of my feeling about guys like Lenny Bruce, who, in my opinion, is probably the most important comedian ever. | ||
| And he was the guy who got arrested the most, and he was the guy who pushed the boundaries of understanding language and content, and what's the intent of what you're trying to say, and what are we doing when we're suppressing this intent? | ||
| And he was a brilliant, brilliant guy, who ultimately went mad. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| I never followed him towards the end of his... | ||
| He went mad and he would go on stage and just read transcripts of his legal proceedings. | ||
| I mean, it was really, really boring stuff. | ||
| So like Kaufman-esque kind of stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no. | |
| Not even like that. | ||
| Because Kaufman was doing it ironically. | ||
| Like he would stand on stage and play Mighty Mouse theme song and go, Here I come to save the day! | ||
| And he would just freak people out because they expected him to do comedy. | ||
| He would just do weird shit. | ||
| But Lenny was going nuts. | ||
| And towards the end of his life, he would go on stage and read directly out of the transcripts and try to explain why the judge was wrong. | ||
| But there was no humor in it at all. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Just more like... | ||
| He was going crazy. | ||
| And he was doing heroin all the time. | ||
| There was a lot going on there. | ||
| But I will listen to his comedy and try to put myself into this sort of... | ||
| Almost innocent mindset of the people that were living in the 1960s listening to this kind of comedy, trying to wrap my head around what kind of an impact this guy would have had. | ||
| I don't necessarily try to deconstruct their comedy. | ||
| Comedy is different in a lot of ways than fiction. | ||
| And I think in fiction, when you're reading a great novel, like you're reading Moby Dick or something like that, it still holds true. | ||
| It holds the test of time. | ||
| When you read that, you can kind of get a feeling for the way the narrative is driven and the way the use of words shapes the environment that you're imagining and Comedy is very different in that. | ||
| It's just, I guess I certainly did when I was first starting out, but I don't really do that anymore. | ||
| If I watch comedy now, I watch it just to enjoy it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I try to watch it as a fan. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I do the same thing with reading. | ||
| And there's some stuff that you realize, this is awesome, this is outside of what I could possibly do anyways. | ||
| I imagine you listen to some comedians and it's the same. | ||
| It's like, what they're doing is fabulous, but it's so far afield from the stuff. | ||
| It allows you actually just to enjoy it totally as a fan, because there's no worry about, well, this is going to influence me in some way that would be problematical. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, because it's just so different, but... | ||
| Who's an example like that for you as a writer? | ||
| Is just so different? | ||
| Well, yeah, like Margaret Atwood, for example, the Canadian writer. | ||
| She did like The Handmaid's Tale, was made into a movie. | ||
| You don't remember that yet? | ||
| Sounds like vomit. | ||
| If someone had to say... | ||
| Well, that's the problem with me. | ||
| Sorry, go ahead. | ||
| Want to do a week in prison? | ||
| Or read The Handmaid's Tale? | ||
| Read all of the Margaret Atwood books. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Read one a week for the rest of your life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll be like... | |
| I'll do my week. | ||
| I'd rather take the prison term. | ||
| I'll take my prison term. | ||
| But you don't understand. | ||
| It's going to enrich you and grow you as a person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, come on. | ||
| Not the kind of person I want to grow to be. | ||
| You know, if you take a fucking pineapple tree and you grow it in the same place where you grow grapes, it's not the same environment, you fuckhead. | ||
| I don't know if that's a good analogy. | ||
| You know, I worry about that too because I am a little bit of a chameleon. | ||
| So if I start reading too many, say like noir books, suddenly that becomes, or westerns, you know, I think I want my next book wants to be sort of like a horror western sort of a thing. | ||
| So first of all, I need to read a lot of those things just to situate myself, I think, in that time and sort of get the feel for it. | ||
| But you do worry that you're going to be like... | ||
| You know, you don't want to be derivative. | ||
| I guess that's the thing, right? | ||
| And that, you know, because in comedy, it's joke-stealing, but it's all plagiarism. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| And there's some writers who probably get too close to their source material, and then they find out later that, like, this is so close that it's almost copying what this other person is, who I really admire. | ||
| I see why I did it, but fuck, I'm not my own self here. | ||
| I'm more like just this person, yeah. | ||
| That's very common in comedy in the beginning. | ||
| Yeah, where you're looking for your voice, right? | ||
| Your style. | ||
| Like, eventually, I feel it's like a thumbprint. | ||
| And initially, your thumbprint is, there's nothing on it. | ||
| But slowly, the worlds start developing, and you get something that's distinctively your own. | ||
| But it comes with time. | ||
| You don't really know what you're doing yet, and you want to be like this guy that you admire. | ||
| So you start doing comedy that's similar to this guy. | ||
| For me, in the beginning, it was Richard Jenney. | ||
| Do you know Richard Jenney? | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| Yeah, in The Mask. | ||
| I remember him in one of his one movie appearances. | ||
| Oh, outstanding. | ||
| That was so much better than his movie stuff. | ||
| But I remember being a big admirer of his and then on stage hearing myself going, oh my god, I'm ripping off his cadence. | ||
| There's so many guys who they start out. | ||
| I mean, this is like I was... | ||
| Essentially an open mic girl. | ||
| It was like a year into my comedy career or somewhere around there. | ||
| And I realized it, but I see it all the time. | ||
| There's a lot of Dave Attell clones out there. | ||
| And there was a few Dane Cook clones for a while. | ||
| And there's probably some Louis C.K. clones. | ||
| By now, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just a thing where someone admires a style of comedy and they start to imitate. | ||
| I've seen my own... | ||
| Yeah, it's got to feel weird. | ||
| And you're parsing it out. | ||
| You're sort of like, that is... | ||
| And it's not necessarily the actual joke that they've taken, but they've taken more your... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| The essence of the way that you present yourself on stage. | ||
| The way you deliver things and also your subject matter. | ||
| They'll just twist around your subject matter. | ||
| And so it's not like your material they're taking... | ||
| But god damn, it's close. | ||
| It's just like you can see the road that got them there. | ||
| It's only a couple blocks away from the source. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can't really claim originality because the real problem with originality is there's no such thing. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| Yeah, and publishers want that. | ||
| They're like, what is... | ||
| It's like everything's been done already, I hate to say, you know? | ||
| You can have unique viewpoints. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They can be unique. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But ultimately original? | ||
| Boy, the whole language is an original. | ||
| If you're going to write about murder, monsters, air, water, the elements, I mean, all those things have been covered. | ||
| They've been done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Any description that you have of any of these various aspects is going to resonate with people because they directly have either literary experience in it, some film experience in it, an actual real life experience. | ||
| So there is no real truly original thought anymore. | ||
| No, but I found, I don't know about you with comedy or with some of the other things you've done, but one of the biggest leaps I made is recognizing that my own life has value. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There are interesting moments in my life, interesting scenes, things that I've experienced, and you bring them in in the service of a character. | ||
| It's transported and you're telling it through a character's eyes. | ||
| And I've always felt like there you don't have to make anything up. | ||
| You're just going back and remembering as deeply as possible. | ||
| And those things are original, even if it's within a story that itself might have been told a thousand times. | ||
| The one thing that you can go back and you can stake a claim on is like, this comes from some element of my own life and I know it has to be original. | ||
| I mean, even that's not original because other human beings have experienced it and that's your hope is that you're actually going to be able to reach into their I think the word isn't original. | ||
| The real word is derivative. | ||
| And the real problem that people have is when they're intentionally derivative. | ||
| And what that does is it stifles creativity. | ||
| Because someone, like, say if someone... | ||
| I don't want to give away the story of your book, The Troop... | ||
| But if someone read your book and decided, you know what, I'm going to make my own story about this exact scenario, and then they kept going back to your book, and they started adding elements to it with different dialogue, but the same elements, and here's the fucking guy. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| That's gross. | ||
| And it upsets us. | ||
| When we find out that your originality, what we conceive to be, or perceive to be originality, is really just you copying and twisting around the original work of someone else. | ||
| It's very upsetting. | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| And you feel like that's a... | ||
| Why would you get into it in the first place? | ||
| But I know in publishing, say when the Da Vinci Code came out, publishers were like, we need the next... | ||
| Da Vinci Code. | ||
| And there were a lot of sort of knockoffs of it with the same kind of ideas. | ||
| But they were actually, you know, the writers, whether they wanted to write them or not. | ||
| Sometimes money, you know, has an influence there. | ||
| You know, if someone's going to offer you a nice amount of money to write what you know is sort of a bit of a knockoff. | ||
| You know, people may be enticed into sort of doing that. | ||
| You know, whether that's why they got into writing in the first place, you have to assume not, you know? | ||
| But, yeah, I found like there's some element of that and there's some element of... | ||
| Publishers sort of don't want originality sometimes. | ||
| Sometimes they're like, this is a known commodity. | ||
| This is working really well. | ||
| We would like you to do stuff like this. | ||
| And sometimes they're even scared of originality. | ||
| Same as Lenny Bruce. | ||
| People who are that original, it's not an easy road to hoe. | ||
| Whereas if you do sort of do maybe a rip-off of a Dane Cook act, I think you might initially get a better pop than you would if you're really charting sort of really original territory. | ||
| Depends. | ||
| Depends on how well you're doing it. | ||
| If you're an idiot and you're ripping off someone, yeah, you might get a little reaction. | ||
| There's a few of those guys out there right now. | ||
| But I think that what we appreciate in someone is we appreciate artistic expression, meaning that We're all influenced by music and movies and literature and things that we've experienced in life. | ||
| There's influences that are just undeniable. | ||
| But what is your intent when you sit down to create something? | ||
| Is your intent to express yourself in your own unique language, your own unique experiences, in your own creativity? | ||
| Or are you just copying shit? | ||
| And when you're just copying shit, that makes us angry. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| There's like a certain amount of like hate that Nickelback gets. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That I'm not sure why they get that hate, but I think that some of it has to do with the fact that... | ||
| It seems like they concocted it. | ||
| Like they went and put together these songs based on... | ||
| Some algorithm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know if it's fair. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| I don't know why the hate exists, but boy, if you want to fucking make an audience laugh, just talk about how shitty Nickelback is. | ||
| And people go, yeah! | ||
| They do suck. | ||
| But there's certain bands that probably suck equally, or worse, that get a free pass. | ||
| Or suck in a totally different way. | ||
| I think what bothers me more is... | ||
| Mumford& Sons. | ||
| Yeah, they're... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I said it. | |
| I said it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even, I mean, I hate to throw these guys under the bus, but Arcade Fire a little bit, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know who the fuck they are. | |
| Oh, you don't know? | ||
| Well, they're a Canadian band. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's like, you know, it's like... | |
| If you're being super original, that's almost in a way a fake originality. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I've noticed that as well. | ||
| You're not really as original as you think you are, but you've convinced other people that you're really original, and that's a double delusion, whereas Nickelback is what they are. | ||
| Well, when someone's affected, what I get about Mumford and Son is I like a lot of their songs. | ||
| I think some of their songs are very good, especially their early songs. | ||
| But now I feel like they're in this groove of doing that certain kind of music, and so they dress a certain kind of way, and I'm like, you're wearing a costume. | ||
| You might as well be dressed up as a fucking clown, okay? | ||
| Because you're dressed up like a guy. | ||
| You look like a pioneer or something. | ||
| You're out there with a mason jar in your hand, you're playing a fucking homemade fiddle. | ||
| What are you doing, dude? | ||
| Piano in the middle of the field. | ||
| What's that wheat field and the fucking piano? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| This is an affectation. | ||
| And you wonder if they started that way or if they got engineered, like some producer came and said, listen, we need more wheat fields. | ||
| You guys need the mason jar thing. | ||
| What the fuck is going on there? | ||
| Yeah, whether they started that way or whether that's... | ||
| What's up with those boots? | ||
| The big hoedown boots going on. | ||
| Are you working in the field and then you took some time off to sing? | ||
| Or are you a multi-millionaire rock star? | ||
| Because I get confused. | ||
| With your fucking, your goofy beard. | ||
| Fucking stop. | ||
| What's up with the fake trees behind you too? | ||
| That's even more offensive. | ||
| We're down home. | ||
| We're country. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| In a fucking hotel lobby in Beverly Hills. | ||
| Doing a photo shoot with makeup on. | ||
| Fuck yourself. | ||
| Well, I think that you also become a prisoner to your success if you get a certain amount of success doing a certain thing. | ||
| I was talking about this yesterday, but I had a friend who was a fat guy whose agent told him, don't lose weight. | ||
| You lose weight, you're losing roles. | ||
| You're losing parts if you lose weight. | ||
| He was trapped in this thing that he had created, this overweight, bumbling character. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that does seem to be like, I'm sure you've talked about it before, but it's not as funny. | ||
| Like Joe Piscopo, even getting ripped, you know what I mean? | ||
| You managed to do it, but Joe Piscopo couldn't go from the sort of weedy guy to the big, bulky guy of dead heat and maintain being as funny as he was. | ||
| And the same thing with fat. | ||
| If you lose the weight, suddenly people are just like, oh, you're not as funny. | ||
| And why is that? | ||
| I'm not really sure, but there's the physical comedy of just being a big guy. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what happened with Joe Piscopo, but I've heard the comparisons. | ||
| Have you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| And you don't welcome it, I imagine. | ||
| Well, I don't give a fuck. | ||
| Oh, good, good. | ||
| Maybe that's why it didn't work, because I didn't give a fuck if I... And plus, you came on the scene, you were already big. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You never understood as in some other body position. | ||
| You know, you were always a big guy back in news radio when I first saw you. | ||
| I wasn't as big. | ||
| I didn't really lift as much weights back then. | ||
| I was just kickboxing. | ||
| But I had been a black belt in martial arts since I was 17. So I had come from this physical background from the beginning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where I kind of was really... | ||
| Self-conscious about it. | ||
| When I first used to do comedy, it would kind of hide my body a little bit. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wear really bulky clothes to sort of hide my shape because I felt like people wouldn't understand. | ||
| And I'd seen guys on stage who were muscular, too, and I'd be like, that's really distracting. | ||
| That's not going over as well. | ||
| It's not smart. | ||
| People don't want to see that. | ||
| Come up in sort of a ripped up shirt or whatever really showing. | ||
| People don't want to see that. | ||
| They'd rather see you out of shape. | ||
| That's kind of funny to have a go on stage with a big beer gut, slapping your gut while you're telling your punchline. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's kind of funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it doesn't mean that you can't be funny and be fit. | ||
| It's like we have these ideas that we know what's funny and what's not, but you don't know until you see it. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why someone can't really teach you how to be funny. | ||
| Because you can never teach Mitch Hedberg. | ||
| Like, you can never have a class in how to be Mitch Hedberg. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because it doesn't fit any rules. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's his own entity entirely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you can't fit Joey Diaz. | ||
| There's guys you just... | ||
| You can't fit them into a mold. | ||
| It doesn't... | ||
| And then you realize somewhere along the line... | ||
| If it's funny to you, it's about trying to figure out a way to get inside people's heads and get them to relate. | ||
| Yeah, same as fiction. | ||
| Yeah, but it has to be funny to you. | ||
| And a lot of bad comedy is it's not even funny to them. | ||
| There's a certain stage of comedy. | ||
| There's two stages in the beginning. | ||
| Stage number one is you just do anything that works. | ||
| There's like... | ||
| Hammers and saws and you're just using tools. | ||
| Each joke is like a tool. | ||
| Once you get a certain amount of proficiency and confidence and a certain amount of stage time, then you start doing things that you think are funny. | ||
| And then that's the shift. | ||
| The shift that goes from doing things that you think will work and then I say... | ||
| And you look around, please laugh. | ||
| And they laugh and you're like... | ||
| Oh, thank God. | ||
| And then, two, you get a guy who goes on stage with like a half a grin. | ||
| He's like, why is this going on? | ||
| Because I see that. | ||
| And I'm like, who the fuck are you talking... | ||
| And the audience starts laughing, yes! | ||
| Because they relate to the way this guy's thinking. | ||
| Because he actually does see humor in what he's saying. | ||
| It's an honest vision of humor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those two stages are very distinct. | ||
| And there's a huge difference. | ||
| And the thing about Joke Thieves... | ||
| And people who are derivative is they never get out of that first stage. | ||
| Even though as popular as they can get. | ||
| That's why there's a lot of guys who started out stealing jokes and then they stopped. | ||
| I could name names, I will not. | ||
| But they stopped stealing and they started writing original material and their original material is dogshit. | ||
| Oh really? | ||
| And the reason why is they never really learned how to do comedy. | ||
| They never really understand the language of comedy because A big part of comedy has to deal with honesty. | ||
| Both honesty with the environment that you live in and honesty with yourself and how you interface with all the people around you. | ||
| And if you're pretending you're this comedic genius and really just a plagiarist, you're dealing with a lot of demons. | ||
| You're dealing with a lot of walls you've built up in your psyche. | ||
| And those walls just trip you up when you try to write original stuff. | ||
| I would imagine that's the same way with literature as well. | ||
| Very much. | ||
| Very much. | ||
| And I think that second stage is right. | ||
| The first stage is you're sort of... | ||
| You're almost emulating the people that you love. | ||
| And the second stage is you want to do something on your own. | ||
| And that second stage, I think, with you is dealing with The idea that you're confident enough that this joke means a lot to me, whether it's going to go over, I can actually deal with that. | ||
| Whereas in the first stage, you couldn't possibly deal with a reaction that didn't feed some sort of sense of accomplishment or get them to laugh or that. | ||
| I think sometimes with comedians that I've watched, obviously, I rarely watch them through the early stages of their career. | ||
| But the comfortability there, and it's the same with writers, they're like... | ||
| If I fail, that's fine. | ||
| I want to fail doing something really interesting, really original to me, and that really is an expression of what the hell I got into this in the first place for. | ||
| You know, a good example of that is Hunter Thompson in the early days used to take F. Scott Fitzgerald and just retype it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He would retype The Great Gatsby over and over and over again. | ||
| And the idea was that, I think he did it with Hemingway as well. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And the idea was that he was learning the rhythm of great writing. | ||
| And that there was in writing down the great writing of other people, you sort of develop a sense of the rhythm. | ||
| Yeah, I could see that. | ||
| And in a way, that's how I got into comedy because I would see an HBO special and then I would tell my friends, holy shit, did you see Sam Kinison last night? | ||
| He had this joke and then I would tell them the joke and they would laugh at me telling them the joke and I would sort of realize through the rhythm of doing Sam's material in his voice. | ||
| I was married for two fucking years! | ||
| Oh, oh! | ||
| It would be like club bed! | ||
| And your friends are laughing, and you kind of get the rhythm of this thing, which is very similar to what Hunter did. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Did you ever do that? | ||
| Did you ever try to, like... | ||
| Picture yourself writing a great piece that someone else had written and just like go over it. | ||
| I did a lot of, not quite like that, but similarly, like you'd read a... | ||
| There are some writers, probably the same as some comedians, whose style seems so easy to imitate. | ||
| Who's an example? | ||
| Well, Ray Carver, the short story writer, the American short story writer, would be an example of a style that you look at and you're like, I could do this. | ||
| But you can't. | ||
| Once you really set your mind to like, I'll try and write a Carver type story... | ||
| That's what makes the genius there, I think, is that it seems easy, it seems that something you can do, but the genius is not only in the genius of him, but in the genius of his deceptively simple style. | ||
| So I tried to write, say, a Carver story, and it was a total nightmare and a failure. | ||
| You know, we have things in the writing. | ||
| We call them trunk stories, basically stories that you write. | ||
| You throw them in a trunk. | ||
| You're never going to see them again. | ||
| And my trunk is full of stories like that. | ||
| And I imagine your trunk, similarly, is full of stuff. | ||
| And these are all things that, like, you need to go through. | ||
| I mean, I probably was rejected... | ||
| 200 times at magazines before I finally placed a story. | ||
| I could literally have filled a shopping bag or a pillowcase with rejection slips. | ||
| When you have an idea for a story, how many of those ideas actually wind up being stories that you will turn into a book or a short story? | ||
| Well... | ||
| It's a pretty small percentage in terms of the ones that, you know, I always think of it's like, you know, the way a pearl gets created. | ||
| You've got like an oyster and a little bit of sand gets in it. | ||
| And then if enough like, nacre or whatever goes around it, then I'm like, okay, that's enough. | ||
| It feels like the characters are strong enough. | ||
| I've got an idea of the plot and where I want to send these characters. | ||
| Then you sort of harvest that pearl and it becomes a short story. | ||
| It becomes a novel. | ||
| But there's several that just are imperfect. | ||
| You can tell just in their conception they're imperfect. | ||
| I don't have a, you know, it's different, right? | ||
| See, I would write a story. | ||
| I'd send it out. | ||
| If it's not working, you don't really know until you get enough rejections that it's clearly okay. | ||
| That's This fucking thing ain't working. | ||
| You guys get up on stage. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| How many times do you tell a joke that you really feel strong about or work on a piece of material before you have to say, this isn't meeting my expectation of what I thought? | ||
| Or do you just keep telling it anyway and just say, fuck it. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| It depends on how much I really enjoy it. | ||
| There are certain ones that just fucking never work and I do them just for me. | ||
| There's certain ones that I write, and I go, I know this has got something, but I can't figure out what it is. | ||
| And then there's certain bits that, as I write them, they come out in fully finished form. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's brilliant when that happens. | ||
| I got one of my favorite bits that I'm doing right now that is in... | ||
| I wrote it on a plane, and I wrote it... | ||
| It's like a 10-minute piece. | ||
| And I wrote it in its full form on a plane, and I did it on stage that Monday, and it just... | ||
| Destroyed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| It was done. | ||
| From the moment it came out. | ||
| It resonated with me and I was so angry when I wrote it. | ||
| It was about a certain particular group of people that are so incredibly hypocritical and ridiculous. | ||
| I caught someone lying about something and it was in this group of people and I was like, I have had enough of this. | ||
| Went on a screed. | ||
| It came out as a chunk. | ||
| It was done. | ||
| Then there's other bits like I know there's something there, but I don't know what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And sometimes those bits will last for years, and I'll throw them in like every third or fourth set when I'm killing in the middle. | ||
| I'll throw it in there, and then the audience will be like, what the fuck is that? | ||
| And I'm like, all right, this has got to die. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes it's like you feel the energy of the room and maybe I can slip this in. | ||
| With me too, I think it's a matter of I've had some stories that constantly got rejected and then I think you get a bit of a name for yourself and then those will find acceptance because they're like, okay, well he's done this and this and this. | ||
| But I find to me like speed is something. | ||
| I wrote The Troop probably in about six weeks, which is the fastest I've ever written anything. | ||
| But it was fun. | ||
| I'd come out of wherever the room where I write and my wife would be like, you look... | ||
| You don't look like all bedraggard and haggard like you do when you stumble out after working on your other books like a vampire's been sucking your blood out for eight hours. | ||
| And I'm like, that's sort of what has told me that I hope I'm able to write a lot more books in the horror genre because I just enjoy the writing of it. | ||
| It's more fun to me. | ||
| It's more... | ||
| It comes... | ||
| Like that. | ||
| And I mean... | ||
| The reason I think that came to you so fast, first of all, because you're passionate about it, but second of all, because you've been working at it a long time, and when those things come, you know how to deal with them. | ||
| And I think now I know better, okay, if the idea comes to me, I'm ready to make hay with it. | ||
| Well, I think you should really write a lot more horror, man. | ||
| But just because of what you said and because of the book being really fun. | ||
| I love that genre and I love when a book like that comes out. | ||
| And so you saying that this is something that thrilled you and energized you as you write, I really hope you keep doing that, man. | ||
| Yeah, I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We're sort of in between contracts right now, so I don't know. | ||
| I might be selling oranges on the side of the freeway for all that I know when I next see you. | ||
| I see you come to Massey Hall, right? | ||
| I will have to come out. | ||
| You were at Massey Hall once in Toronto. | ||
| I've been a couple times in the Sony Center recently. | ||
| I'd love to go and check that out. | ||
| Anyways, we're sort of in that weird space where I don't really know what's going to happen exactly, so hopefully I'll have good news soon. | ||
| Listen, man, you could self-publish. | ||
| This is a new era. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Yeah, there is a lot more of that going on, and some huge successful people doing it that way. | ||
| Unbelievable success. | ||
| People have had unknowns that have put out something just through word of mouth, through Amazon and what have you, e-books. | ||
| It's incredible, isn't it? | ||
| And there are gaps in publishers who you wonder, like, I read this book, Wool, by a writer called Hugh Howey, and it's sort of sci-fi, really, really damn good, and you find out his history as he's been rejected by X number of publishers, and you're like... | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But it does. | ||
| It does happen. | ||
| And it's great that there's that opportunity now that like, okay, well, listen, that's fine. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You guys have whatever agenda that you're pursuing. | ||
| This is what I want to write. | ||
| And I have a way to get it out to my hopefully readership and build it that way. | ||
| Now, is this book, The Troop, is it out now? | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| When did it come out? | ||
| Because I got a pre-release copy. | ||
| Yeah, you got an arc of it. | ||
| Yeah, it came out a couple months ago. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| There's a new cover, too. | ||
| They totally changed the cover. | ||
| Why'd they change the cover? | ||
| It looks darker. | ||
| It's just something that they do in publishing from time to time. | ||
| I'm not sure why either, but yeah, they made a big change of it. | ||
| So now it's just an isolated guy on a hilltop or something. | ||
| Well, I got the best one. | ||
| I like that one, too, with the... | ||
| That's the UK cover looks that way. | ||
| Oh, does it? | ||
| Yeah, with the birds and the lightning flashes. | ||
| I like it too. | ||
| God damn it, America! | ||
| I like the American cover, but yeah, it's totally different for sure. | ||
| Have you started writing a new one? | ||
| Yeah, the follow-up is, we did do that one for sure. | ||
| It's called The Deep, so it takes... | ||
| I love undersea stuff, man. | ||
| I love the ocean. | ||
| So it takes place at the bottom of the Marianne... | ||
| You know when James Cameron went down in that? | ||
| So, eight miles below the surface. | ||
| What a crazy fuck he is, huh? | ||
| I know! | ||
| He's a nut! | ||
| He's out of his mind. | ||
| He is out of his mind. | ||
| He's got billions of dollars. | ||
| Canadian, too, yeah. | ||
| Gets to the bottom of the ocean on a fucking boat. | ||
| Yeah, and just, you know, picks up. | ||
| There's nothing down there, either. | ||
| Isn't he like the first guy to ever do that too? | ||
| Yeah, he is. | ||
| He is. | ||
| And I don't know if you, I don't know about you, like claustrophobia is one thing that I'm not good with in tight spaces. | ||
| And if you saw what he went down in, it was basically like he had, you know, metal down this side to this side. | ||
| He basically went down in a coffin. | ||
| Yeah, I don't have a problem with tight spaces. | ||
| I do have a problem with tight spaces at the bottom of the fucking ocean, though. | ||
| How many miles deep is that? | ||
| Well, Challenger Deep is below the Marianas Trench, so that's eight miles. | ||
| And the pressure is something like seven jumbo jets pressing down on you per square foot. | ||
| So... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I feel like that... | ||
| See, I don't know about you. | ||
| What are you scared of? | ||
| That's interesting, are you? | ||
| Yeah, like... | ||
| Heights, animals. | ||
| A lot of it is animals. | ||
| I find with a kid now, I'm afraid of shit happening to my son or something. | ||
| That's a new thing. | ||
| That's the... | ||
| Look at this image that Jamie just pulled up. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Jesus fucking Christ. | ||
| So there's Mount Everest. | ||
| That's the height of Mount Everest compared to the deepness of Challenger Deep. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Eight miles down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eight miles down. | |
| That's the deepest part of the ocean that we're aware of? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| That we're aware of. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| There might be a spot somewhere that they haven't charted yet. | ||
| Oh, there could very well be. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But that's the deepest known depth. | ||
| Damn, that's deep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is so ridiculous. | ||
| But I figured, okay, well, I don't like tight spaces. | ||
| I don't like that pressure. | ||
| I don't like the dark. | ||
| Like, down there, darkness is. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it's like the darkness between the stars. | ||
| It's that dark. | ||
| It's probably a darkness that I don't know if I've ever grappled with. | ||
| So, yeah, for a horror book, it sort of has a lot of potential of things that scare the shit out of me. | ||
| And that's sort of where I got to start with. | ||
| Is it like a monster book? | ||
| No, not, no. | ||
| It's, uh... | ||
| Ghosts? | ||
| Aliens? | ||
| They're billing it as sort of like the abyss meets the shining. | ||
| So there is kind of that, you know, the shining being like... | ||
| It's almost like a haunted... | ||
| They've set up a research station down there, and it's another crew going down to figure out what the hell happened to the crew beforehand. | ||
| Ooh, I like it already. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| How deep are you in? | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| It's all done. | ||
| When do I get it? | ||
| I will make sure you get a priority when the ARC comes out. | ||
| I'll get one shipped in to you guys. | ||
| When do you think it'll be done? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I feel like they probably are going to do a few soon. | ||
| It's the year after, so basically it's January of next year. | ||
| But the ARCs will be out soon. | ||
| But do they, when you do something like that, like do you bring it to the publisher and the publisher gives notes? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Basically, I got a two-book contract. | ||
| So I had already written the troupe, gave it to my agent. | ||
| My agent sent it in to the publisher. | ||
| They accepted it. | ||
| They say, well, we want another book too. | ||
| What's your idea? | ||
| I said, well, that's something to do with Down in the Ocean. | ||
| They said, good, sold. | ||
| So you write that one, and then you just send it to your editor, and he in this case, yeah, gave me all sorts of notes. | ||
| And you work on that, and you go back and forth, and then eventually at some point we say, we're fucking sick of this. | ||
| Are we done? | ||
| Yes, we're done. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Now, who's qualified to give you notes like that? | ||
| How do you distinguish whether or not someone's qualified to give you notes, and do you often disagree with their notes? | ||
| Yes, because I guess you wouldn't have that, really. | ||
| I mean, you might have trusted people that you would deal with and say, well, what do you think of this bit? | ||
| I don't even do that. | ||
| No, no? | ||
| The audience does it. | ||
| Ah, that's right. | ||
| They're the most serious arbiter of things. | ||
| Yeah, they're the grand judge. | ||
| I do myself. | ||
| The beautiful thing about material is that you get to listen to it. | ||
| Like on my iPhone or my Note, my Galaxy Note 3 has... | ||
| I have it for like... | ||
| Maybe four or five months, and it might have... | ||
| 150 sets on it. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I can listen to all those sets. | ||
| And then sort of the audience reaction and gauge how it's worked. | ||
| So that's, yeah, that's a similar idea to an editor. | ||
| I mean, an editor relationship with a writer is pretty important, obviously, because the one thing is you can't go snatch your book off the shelves once it's there. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| You got to live with how it is. | ||
| So you got to work as hard as you can in this stage to make it as, I mean, it's never going to be perfect. | ||
| There's going to be things about it that you'll look at five years later and just go, what? | ||
| Why did I do that? | ||
| But each book, I think each book, probably just like each maybe one of your comedy CDs, is an expression of that time in your life, too. | ||
| And you've got to let it be that. | ||
| Well, there is that. | ||
| You know, out of the 150 sets, maybe 100 of them are from like a year ago that I've got stored. | ||
| Like I take the MP3s and I save them. | ||
| And then maybe 50 of them or so are over the last 50. I'll have four or five months. | ||
| And then what I'll do is never listen to the old ones, but always think that I'm going to, like a pack wrap, like a hold on to them. | ||
| But the most recent ones are the really important ones. | ||
| Like on this phone, this is a new phone. | ||
| It only has Santa Barbara. | ||
| It only has Friday night show in Santa Barbara. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But eventually, you know, over the course of a few months, it'll have again, like a Wednesday night, I'm at the Ice House. | ||
| I'll have that set on it. | ||
| I'll listen to that. | ||
| Thursday, and I'll break out the notebook, and I'll listen to it with the headphones on, and then my next set, I'll add the notes, and then I'll try to figure out what I did differently, and then it'll grow. | ||
| But the beautiful thing about comedy is it has built-in editors, and it's the audience. | ||
| And also, you can. | ||
| There's no sense of it being on a shelf. | ||
| It evolves as you work the act over, and you work the act over, and it sort of becomes... | ||
| And we do that as much as we can. | ||
| That book probably went through seven or eight edits. | ||
| But at some point, you've got to just say, well, that's it. | ||
| We're on a schedule. | ||
| You can over-edit it, too. | ||
| You can sort of rip sort of the rawness, and I'm sure you can probably do that in a comedy act as well. | ||
| You can rip some of the stuff that is really most important. | ||
| If you take the rawness out of the rough edges, and you make it sort of smooth it over, and you listen to too many editors, then... | ||
| You can't please everybody. | ||
| I think that's another thing, too, I've recognized. | ||
| Do you lose it yourself? | ||
| Like, you lose your vision of what is good and what's bad? | ||
| Because I know as a comic, you certainly can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You listen to a joke so many times, it means it's just a bunch of gobbledygook to you. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| And that's, I guess that's a danger that we both face in our separate, you know, but very close, closely related kind of careers. | ||
| So it's about listening to the right. | ||
| And ultimately, it's like listening, because, especially with horror, you have someone, you know, I've had plenty of emails, and I know you have too, like, what kind of a person are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What kind? | |
| I'm kind of an awful creature. | ||
| What sort of primordial swamp pit did you crawl out of to, you know, become who you are? | ||
|
unidentified
|
To come up with these ideas? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Did people get mad at you for your ideas? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You know, not nearly. | ||
| I mean, I'm not nearly in the public eye, say, as you are. | ||
| I wouldn't have to face that level of scrutiny, but certainly in my small way, yeah, of course. | ||
| I can make a tweet. | ||
| Just a joke. | ||
| Oh, and people will be bombarding you. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure, yeah. | ||
| Deep, long blogs. | ||
| Searching and... | ||
| Trying to find psychological cracks in your armor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I wrote something. | ||
| I thought it was funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go fuck yourself. | |
| Yeah, you didn't think about it for more than like... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But at the same point, also, you don't recant and be like, oh, well, geez, I better change things because... | ||
| I wrote... | ||
| I watched this woman. | ||
| She was on a date. | ||
| She was talking about how much she hates children. | ||
| And I wrote on Twitter that I view women who don't like kids the same way I view dogs that like to eat their own shit. | ||
| That's going to get a reaction, Joe. | ||
| It leaves a lot of room for interpretation. | ||
| But this guy wrote a whole blog about that I only view women as being there to have children. | ||
| I'm like, where are you fucking getting this, man? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I fucked up. | ||
| I should have said hate instead of don't like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was trying to be nice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You should have been more definitive. | ||
| It was just based on one particular... | ||
| And just this weird thing that I... Women who don't like kids, like, oh, get that kid away. | ||
| There's something gross about them. | ||
| It's a weird thing. | ||
| I find it very... | ||
| Not just distasteful. | ||
| It's a weird way. | ||
| It's disturbing. | ||
| It repels me. | ||
| When people, especially for whatever reason, women hate... | ||
| Well, men too now that I have kids. | ||
| I see a man who doesn't like kids, who hates kids. | ||
| And you think about all the abuse that some children suffer a lot of times because of people like that, that hate kids. | ||
| It becomes very disturbing to you. | ||
| Especially when you have kids of your own. | ||
| I'm totally fine with, like, I have friends who just don't want to have kids. | ||
| That's a different thing entirely. | ||
| Oh, totally different. | ||
| They're just like, we want to be able to travel. | ||
| I encourage that. | ||
| I mean, yeah, so do I. I love my son, and I know you love your kids too, but, you know, there's some points where me and my wife look at each other where, you know, I mean, I don't know if you had good sleepers, but me, like, our kid's a toddler now, and he still doesn't sleep well, but... | ||
| Man, there were times like four o'clock in the morning when he hadn't slept. | ||
| And I feel like I was just like, there was some hellish fourth dimension that had opened up that I was staring straight into. | ||
| And I just think, I think, but then that's part of the rites of passage of, of you, of you being a parent. | ||
| But, but if there's someone said, I want anything to do with that. | ||
| I'm like, I don't, I don't blame you, man. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Take a pass on this one. | ||
| We definitely went through periods where you didn't sleep, but. | ||
| I just don't think there's anything cool about shaming people that don't want to have children. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And there's people that feel like that if they have children, you know, there's something special above and beyond a person who doesn't have children. | ||
| Like, you're never going to get it. | ||
| You didn't even grow up. | ||
| Yeah, there's that belittling side of it. | ||
| Like, oh, you really couldn't possibly understand what we're talking about here. | ||
| So it's like, oh, please. | ||
| This guy said this to me once. | ||
| This guy who was a... | ||
| But he had kids. | ||
| They were all grown. | ||
| And one of them had been in and out of jail. | ||
| The other one smoked crack. | ||
| And he was mocking this guy who was this musician friend of mine who was in his 50s. | ||
| And he's like, I feel bad for him. | ||
| He's never had children. | ||
| I said, why do you feel bad for him? | ||
| He goes, because he never figured out what life is all about. | ||
| Life's all procreating. | ||
| I'm like, you made criminals. | ||
| One of your kids in and out of jail. | ||
| The other one smokes crack. | ||
| You have criminals. | ||
| You have two criminals. | ||
| Your sons are fucking dangerous. | ||
| They are in the room. | ||
| I leave. | ||
| They haven't contributed anything to the forwarding of our species. | ||
| But in his mind, he was better. | ||
| He was better because he shot a live round to a woman and she shit out a kid. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Amazing, isn't it? | ||
| No. | ||
| But there's that holier-than-thou moral high ground that some people take when they have children. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| You can contribute an amazing amount to society without ever having a child. | ||
| I think just as much. | ||
| It's a different sort of contribution. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with it. | ||
| And I have a lot of friends that don't ever want to have kids, and they're great people, and I love them dearly. | ||
| And they love my kids. | ||
| They love your... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They love kids. | ||
| I think that's your thing. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| People who just... | ||
| I hate kids. | ||
| I hate the idea of kids. | ||
| I don't like seeing them on airplanes. | ||
| I don't like them in my airspace in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| Those people are creeps. | ||
| First of all, it's like, go live under a rock because I'm not taking my kid out into the sunlight because you don't like them nearby. | ||
| Well, are you a person? | ||
| Do you like people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How do you think they came from? | ||
| They come from seeds, you fuck? | ||
| Somebody make them in a garden? | ||
| They just sort of pop into existence as, you know, 18-year-olds or something? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just... | ||
| For whatever reason, I just think that there's some people out there that... | ||
| I can't make that connection, that like, oh, it's a baby and a baby becomes an adult. | ||
| I certainly get it a lot more now that I've had kids. | ||
| Like, I like babies. | ||
| Like, I see babies, I think they're cute. | ||
| When I used to see babies before, I had kids, I was like, oh, that fucking thing's gonna start screaming, I gotta get out of here. | ||
| But I never hated them. | ||
| No, no, exactly. | ||
| People that do hate them, I find them very disturbing. | ||
| And you've actually had people, I'm wondering if I've ever run into someone who, like, basically has said, point blank, I hate kids. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was a girl I dated who used to say that. | ||
| Just, I hate kids. | ||
| I can't stand them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hate kids. | |
| I don't like to be around them. | ||
| They always want too much attention. | ||
| I was like, wow. | ||
| I mean, I didn't date her for long. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| But she was angry about a lot of shit. | ||
| I think her parents were alcoholics, too. | ||
| I think it might have been a little bit of that. | ||
| She just, I don't know. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who does know? | ||
| Yeah, but I've never heard it, but I've had people who are pretty close to intolerant on that level as well, you know? | ||
| And I don't get it either, and I certainly, before I had kids, yeah, I'm more comfortable with them now, and I'm more, like, sympathetic towards other people who are struggling with their kid out in public. | ||
| I'm like, oh... | ||
| Don't you find too that as you're more comfortable just as a human being in life, you have some success under your belt, you're not... | ||
| I mean, even though there's no ultimate comfort because look, we're finite creatures on a finite planet and a finite solar system. | ||
| If you don't live in the moment, you're a fool because there really is no tomorrow. | ||
| Our crumbling edifice is, you know, it's only as good as it is today and it's not going to be as good tomorrow as it was today. | ||
| Apollo Creed in Rocky 2 nailed it. | ||
| Or 3. Yeah. | ||
| Three? | ||
| Four? | ||
| Which one was it? | ||
| There is no tomorrow. | ||
| I think he's gone by three. | ||
| Mr. T. Yeah. | ||
| No, he dies in four. | ||
| Oh, is it four? | ||
| The Russian knocks him out and kills him. | ||
| Remember? | ||
| Yes, that's the one. | ||
| In Rocky III, he doesn't want to train. | ||
| He's like, we'll train tomorrow. | ||
| There is no tomorrow! | ||
| There is no tomorrow! | ||
| And he teaches them how to fight like a black guy. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I do remember that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But he's right. | ||
| There is no tomorrow. | ||
| There's now. | ||
| And now goes on for a long time, but it doesn't go on forever. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And the only reason why you think it's tomorrow is because the earth is spinning. | ||
| You can market us tomorrow if you're really into that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The winter definitely does come, but there's no tomorrow. | ||
| There's just time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| I mean, we have a way of measuring it, but it's really ultimately quite fruitless. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But there's something about it where it becomes completely overwhelming for some people. | ||
| It defines their very existence. | ||
| The passage of time. | ||
| I mean, I wrote an article for Esquire and it was about, and you would have some knowledge of this basically because it's in MMA, is hormone replacement therapy or testosterone, TRT. And there's this study, it's called negligible senescence. | ||
| Senescence? | ||
| Senescence, great word. | ||
| Senescence is what we're talking about. | ||
| Negligible senescence. | ||
| Yeah, S-E-N-E-S-C-E-N-C-E, I think. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Negligible senescence. | ||
| And senescence is what you're talking about. | ||
| It's like our bodies just getting older and things sort of slowly, slowly crumbling. | ||
| And negligible senescence is the study of creatures who don't age the way that humans do. | ||
| Like tortoises. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Negligible senescence. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| If you look up negligible senescence, you see a turtle. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| But look at the life they live. | ||
| It's shit. | ||
| It is quite shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wander around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fucking birds pick their babies up and fly off with them. | |
| It's perfect for a tortoise. | ||
| A tortoise doesn't know any different, I guess. | ||
| If they did, they'd hate it. | ||
| Yeah, they would probably be committing suicide. | ||
| So they would be cutting their life strings short that way. | ||
| But I think whales, certain whales have it. | ||
| Seagulls of all creatures. | ||
| Muscles. | ||
| Muscles. | ||
| Freshwater pearl muscles live to be 250 years old. | ||
| And they don't show this. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like a five-year-old mussel acts the same as a 200-year-old mussel. | ||
| How about a quahog, a clam? | ||
| Do you know how old they get? | ||
| No. | ||
| 507 years old is the oldest one they've found. | ||
| They can get that old. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That'd be an enormous... | ||
| Tortoise, 255 years. | ||
| Lobsters, 100 plus years, assumably. | ||
| They don't really know. | ||
| Until they get, yeah, harvested. | ||
| How about a hydra? | ||
| You know what a hydra is? | ||
| No, it's kind of snake. | ||
| Biologically immortal. | ||
| Biologically immortal? | ||
| Immortal. | ||
| It's a genus of small, simple freshwater animals that possess radial symmetry. | ||
| A hydra, they're predatory animals belonging to the phylum... | ||
| Wow, spell this. | ||
| C-N? I don't know why you'd put a C and then an N together. | ||
| Yeah, that does not work well. | ||
| Did you run out of vowels, you fuck? | ||
| C-N-I-D-A-R-I-A. Oh, God. | ||
| And the class Hydrosa. | ||
| They can be found in most unpolluted freshwater ponds, lakes, and streams. | ||
| In the temperate and tropical regions and can be found gently sweeping a collecting net through weedy areas. | ||
| They are multicellular organisms which are usually a few meters long and are best studied with a microscope, but they are immortal. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| What an interesting, yeah, phenomenon. | ||
| I never would have thought that any creature... | ||
| Because they're alive shit. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| They just squiggle around in the weeds. | ||
| Yeah, that's the punishment. | ||
| That would actually sort of be like, hell, yeah. | ||
| It's like reconstituted shitty child molesters become hydras in their next life. | ||
| They just get swooped up by fucking dirty fish. | ||
| Not immortal if a fish eats you. | ||
| But that's sort of the idea of TRT, is that the proponents say that, you know, you're not going to live forever. | ||
| Of course, that's not the body that we've been gifted by, you know, by nature. | ||
| But, you know, most, when you talk to guys, and I talk to guys, I use my father as, you know, my dad's 65, now 66. And he's like, I don't want to live forever, of course. | ||
| I just want to be able to be, to carry groceries up to my house when I'm 80. Yeah. | ||
| I want to have that sort of quality of life for as long as I can. | ||
| And then when that whole house comes down, let it come down immediately. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Well, that's wishful thinking. | ||
| It is wishful thinking. | ||
| Quite honestly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you certainly can manipulate your hormones to give you a decided advantage over non-manipulated people. | ||
| It becomes a real issue in mixed martial arts because... | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Brendan Schaub, who is on the podcast, The Fighter and the Kid, with my friend Brian Callan, he's a fighter in the UFC. And he said it best. | ||
| And he said, what's wrong with TRT when it comes to competitive sports is that there's an advantage of youth and there's an advantage of wisdom. | ||
| And wisdom comes with age and with experience and with years and years of study and practice. | ||
| And that advantage... | ||
| Sort of, in some way, there's sort of a point of diminishing returns where it cancels out youth and experience. | ||
| Whether it's at 35 or whether it's at 37. When does it tip back towards youth again? | ||
| Well, when you start supplementing the hormones with testosterone, it doesn't. | ||
| And then you get guys like Vitor Belfort who are 36, 37 years old fucking everybody up because they've got muscles in their teeth now. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| Because he's taking testosterone. | ||
| But what about like Dan Henderson? | ||
| See, I feel like that's one where he's, like, forced to go into, like, wars with guys who are 15, even 20 years younger than him, and I feel like, you know what I mean? | ||
| But then, you know, the people that I grew up watching as boxers didn't, you know, you just had to keep throwing yourself into that fray, and if your body's collapsing around you, that's the choice that you've made. | ||
| Well, he's not on testosterone anymore. | ||
| Oh, he was? | ||
| Okay, yeah, yeah, okay. | ||
| They've abolished it. | ||
| It's no longer allowed in the UFC? No longer allowed. | ||
| And most athletic commissions, even worldwide, have ceased the use of it. | ||
| Brazil stopped it. | ||
| So it becomes really fucking interesting, especially in Brazil, because in Brazil you can buy steroids in a lot of stores. | ||
| You can buy them over-the-counter like you can in Mexico. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You don't have to have prescriptions. | ||
| I don't know if they've changed that in Brazil. | ||
| I know they have it in Mexico. | ||
| In Mexico, people go and buy, like, fucking Viagra. | ||
| They go buy Percocets. | ||
| They go buy all kinds of shit. | ||
| It's the Wild West down there, for sure. | ||
| In a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But they just have different regulations when it comes to pharmaceutical drugs and steroids. | ||
| But in the UFC, you cannot have testosterone replacement. | ||
| No one can have it anymore. | ||
| So it's really interesting also because these people that have been taking it for X amount of years, they've depleted their system. | ||
| They've sort of shut their own endogenous production down. | ||
| I think there's too many negatives to it. | ||
| There's too many negatives to it as far as for athletic competition. | ||
| And one of the big ones is I have Dr. Mark Gordon, who's a friend of mine, who is an expert on traumatic brain injury. | ||
| And he says one of the big issues is you have to find out what is it that's causing this depletion of their natural source of testosterone. | ||
| Is it just old age? | ||
| Which is one possibility. | ||
| Another possibility is traumatic brain injury. | ||
| And that's cutting their testosterone production? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, he scared the fuck out of me, man. | ||
| His take on traumatic brain injury is so studied, and he's been involved in assisting football players and athletes of- Concussions. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of them who have had really dramatic changes because of head trauma. | ||
| And the way he describes it, it's like, you never know what it's going to be that does it. | ||
| It could be, you go jet skiing one day, and you know, just the bouncing on the water, and something's wrong in your brain, and then your body shuts down its testosterone, your libido drops, you feel depressed. | ||
| And you're not aware of it, you just feel like... | ||
| You feel depressed. | ||
| The bottom dropped out of me here somehow. | ||
| Yeah, and you go to the doctor, I'm depressed, they put you on antidepressants. | ||
| I mean, it's like, And what he's finding is that the pituitary gland is incredibly sensitive to trauma. | ||
| And so, obviously, when you're dealing with a sport that one of the big goals is to shut the brain down with impacts, with a strike, Giving them testosterone so that it negates the effects of brain trauma sort of just masks the real issue that's going on. | ||
| So it's not as simple as their body getting older and they need testosterone to live a nice quality of life. | ||
| It's a matter of medication that sort of overrides this issue where they're getting their brain fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I think, and I also think there's too much possibility of cheating. | ||
| Yeah, I think there's that too. | ||
| I mean, I interviewed, what's it, Keith Kaiser? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he basically said the same thing. | ||
| It's just not... | ||
| And so, you know, of course, my editor wanted me to look at the sports side of a thing, and I did, and I think there was some really interesting stuff to be found on that side of it. | ||
| And I come down on your side too. | ||
| I mean, just like, we've been having combat sport events since... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, of course, you don't want to... | ||
| Some people would say, well, listen, we also fix MCLs and ACLs and we're able to do great things with medicine. | ||
| So, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, why not take the advancement, these benefits that we have... | ||
| do think there's there's the fairness to the sport but when i just before i left the hotel i saw a commercial where it's like an underarm now you just go in the morning you swipe it on and you head about your day so like just for not sports taken out of it just generally um from my what i've the research that i've done which was just in service of that article um you know i i wouldn't i like i'm more or less said if my dad wanted to use it i would be like listen if it works uh and if you try it you know what i mean uh | ||
| You know, when it makes some benefit to your life, you know, I'd be like, of course, I'd be all for it. | ||
| It's really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to manipulating the human body. | ||
| It's essentially a low-level form of genetic engineering. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And what you're going to be able to do instead of introducing these synthetic hormones into your system, what you're going to be able to do is they're going to have nanobots that repair tissue. | ||
| They're going to have your body's ability to recuperate. | ||
| A lot of people don't understand what hormones do and the various different roles that they play in your body, but a hormone doesn't necessarily make you bigger. | ||
| What makes you bigger is it makes you, when you take testosterone, it makes you recover quicker. | ||
| And one of the ways guys can cheat is that they can work harder and they can put in more time because their recovery is shorter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| insane sessions in the gym and they'll be fresh as a daisy in the morning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas the other person has to sort of will themselves to get up and through hard work and determination can really put in the time and get better the traditional way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's considered cheating. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| But one day they're going to have fucking mailmen who are on these nanobots. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Some form of genetic engineering. | ||
| It's like the same mailman for 300 years. | ||
| That's another thing I did. | ||
| There's a guy, Aubrey de Grey. | ||
| Yes, I know that guy. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| So he basically just says that your whole body can be replaced. | ||
| He says, look at it like a car. | ||
| But I feel like there was some part of me that thought, just as a fiction writer, like... | ||
| I don't know if I'd want to see a 2,000-year-old person. | ||
| What would they smell like? | ||
| What would they smell like? | ||
| They had like old, papery flesh. | ||
| What if they were hot as fuck? | ||
| What if they looked like Jenna Jameson in their prime, but they smelled like Barbara Walters? | ||
| Just like you couldn't get rid of the smell. | ||
| That sensory kind of would just be too weird, yeah. | ||
| We're running out of time here. | ||
| That would be something that you would really have to think about, man. | ||
| If we get to a point where people are immortal, there's going to be that thing where they're like... | ||
| They go, is there a next? | ||
| Should I just let this die off? | ||
| And there's going to be people that do decide to just... | ||
| To just keep going and going. | ||
| But I feel like you'd lose all your family and friends. | ||
| Maybe, unless they're honest. | ||
| Yeah, you're all 2,000-year-old. | ||
| You get annoyed with each other for eternity. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Listen, man, this is a fascinating conversation. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me, Joe. | ||
| Let me know when your new book comes out. | ||
| What is it called again? | ||
| The Deep. | ||
| The Deep. | ||
| It's just like that movie with Nick Nolte. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| The title's been used before, but it's a different thing. | ||
| Well, not entirely, but there's differences. | ||
| And when can I get a copy of that? | ||
| I will make sure you... | ||
| Let's say six months at the most. | ||
| Six months from now. | ||
| Mark it down. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
| No, my pleasure. | ||
| Thank you very much, Joe. | ||
| And the book is called The Troop, and his name is not really Nick Cutter. | ||
| His name is Craig Davidson. | ||
| So if you like Nick Cutter's work... | ||
| Two Ts. | ||
| Why'd you go with two Ts? | ||
| You didn't want to be cuter? | ||
| Oh, because my agent... | ||
| That's the only way. | ||
| Nick Cuter, yeah. | ||
| That worked in a different way, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Your agent came up with Nick Cutter? | ||
| We both came up with it. | ||
| He thought like, oh, they need to have like a hard driving kind of like Nick, you know. | ||
| Nick Cutter. | ||
| Bob Slasher. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| My name's Nick Cutter. | ||
| I'm Nick Cutter. | ||
| Smoked Marlboros, no filters. | ||
| I cut them off and I spit them at liberals. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, dude. | ||
| A lot of fun. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Buy the book, folks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate it. | |
| It's available right now on Amazon.com, but you will not get this cover. | ||
| Yeah, it's actually on sale now. | ||
| Do you have an audiobook version? | ||
| Yeah, an audiobook version as well. | ||
| Aha! | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Go get it, you fucks. | ||
| And thanks to our sponsors. | ||
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| That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| Tomorrow we'll be back with Tim Kennedy, mixed martial arts superstar and fascinating individual. | ||
| And then we've got a lot of podcasts coming up, folks. | ||
| A lot of good shit. | ||
| Alright, much love. | ||
| See you soon. | ||
| Big kiss. |
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