Jim Norton and Joe Rogan dissect SiriusXM’s firing of Anthony Cumia after a viral altercation, where Cumia’s tweets overshadowed the assault itself—Norton argues the media ignored key details like his lack of a police report. They contrast podcasting’s creative freedom with corporate backlash, citing Cumia’s restricted but profitable Live from the Compound studio setup and Norton’s new Vice show (July 23 debut). Rogan defends Cumia’s past remarks as out-of-context humor while critiquing media bias, including the Washington Post’s sensationalism, and warns of patent troll threats via the Podcast Legal Defense Fund. The episode blends sharp industry critiques with personal anecdotes—from Norton’s 2000 stand-up flop to Rogan’s early comedy tapes—highlighting how unfiltered speech thrives in podcasting despite corporate risks. [Automatically generated summary]
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If you're listening to this, if it's sometime in the future, because these recordings will be saved forever, today's date is July 17th, 2014, approximately a week ago.
Anthony Cumia was taking photographs.
Anthony of the Opie and Anthony show, which our pal Jim Norton is also a part of, he was downtown in New York taking some photographs, and from there on it's a bunch of what he says, and I'm sure the woman who beat the shit out of him would have a different story, but he was taking and I'm sure the woman who beat the shit out of him One of the photographs was of this, what are those things called?
It looked like he was just taking a bunch of cool photos of New York.
There's a bunch of them that he put up on his Instagram.
Anyway, this woman got upset that he was taking a photo of her.
Probably thought that he was perving.
Got mad at him.
Violence ensued.
She hit him.
And he went on Twitter and went on this rant about violence, about the black community and their propensity for violence, about this woman calling her an animal, which she did.
And Sirius fired him, which left a fucking huge hole in my entertainment world.
The Opie and Anthony show is my all-time favorite radio show.
Yeah, the thing about Ant is he's developed this sort of style of communicating on the show, where he goes on these long, hilarious, entertaining, profanity-filled rants.
And there's one thing about hearing it, but there's another thing of seeing it in a text form.
It looks – things don't look good in print, certain things.
And I think what happened was is in the middle of – like when you have a contextual conversation, it's like you have people, there's inflection, there's another guy next to you going, well, hey, what do you mean by that?
And then you're clarifying it or – it's just – it's a different – When you're tweeting and you're that mad...
Any type of an assault, even if it's a woman hitting you and it's not life-threatening, is still like an hour later.
And so he went on, and when I looked at the flow of things, like, I know Anthony, and I know what he's saying.
He was not calling all black people animals.
He wasn't, because he's never said that.
He's talking about a behavior of this woman, and I think that what happened was he was so mad, and when you're tweeting that aggressively, and you're just, you're fucking dealing with this in your head, that sometimes things come out jumbled and muddied, and, like, if you know Anthony, you know what he's saying.
People who don't know him are reading this going, what does he mean he's saying that there's violence in black people and their animal, like...
People are putting these pieces of a puzzle together and they're making a picture and it was like – I know him well enough to know that in a conversation, If someone said, are you trying to say black people are animals?
He would go, no, not at all.
It's a behavioral-based thing.
You know what I mean?
Because he said that about white people, too.
So, I mean, it was just one of those things where once it was in print, even in context, we lie as a country.
Like, you know, like when Council Colbert came out, the activist knew the context that he was making those Asian jokes in and didn't give a fuck.
She still wanted to sink him.
She's like, no, no, I get it.
He was trying to, you know, show the difference between the same thing between this and Native Americans and how ridiculous it is, but I don't care.
We've gotten to a point now where we don't even pretend to not understand the context anymore.
We admit that we understand the context and we go after people anyway.
Something like this is bound to sink you because it can be taken both ways unless you actually sit there and talk to the guy.
Each tweet has to come out like a film.
Each tweet has to be a beginning, middle, and end with no explanation needed around it in order to To be survivable, if that makes sense.
Well, it only sinks you if you work for a company.
And in my opinion, that's unnecessary.
In this day and age, it's unnecessary.
And I think you guys, and I think Anthony for sure, would be far better off with a podcast.
Anybody can get a podcast and put it on their phone now.
Everybody's phone has a little jack that sticks into your car, and you play your phone through your car.
Everybody has that now.
I mean, it's not an uncommon thing.
It's more common to have that jack than it is to have satellite radio.
Most people have to get a satellite radio thing installed in their car.
Most people already have that jack.
Right.
You know, it's just so goddamn easy.
And I bet you could get all the same sponsors.
I bet you could get all the same sponsors and you would have no middleman.
And you know, look at the studio.
It doesn't take much to put something together.
You know, a little bit of time, a little bit of effort.
You know, you gotta know someone who's an engineer, know someone who knows how to put the stuff together and set up the microphones.
But other than that, what's the difference between this and satellite radio?
I'll tell you what the difference is.
Nobody can fucking fire you.
You can go on some cunt rampage, that fucking animal cunt, and no one, you know, people might say, I'm not downloading your podcast anymore.
But at least you have the opportunity to communicate, to explain yourself, and if the people decide that they don't like your character based on one thing that you said or one rant that you went on, that is their decision.
But it's not the decision of a company.
And when things get, you know, companies are squirrely, man.
They have fucking shareholders and stocks and they have responsibilities.
And all you need is a few slacktivists that start webpages.
She was talking about Anthony saying that these guys came around, and she was saying like, you know, oh, well, I guess if a bunch of African-American, or however she said, a bunch of gentlemen want to defend someone from defaming an African-American woman, it's okay.
Like, that's what was happening.
She wasn't acknowledging that Anthony was being hit.
She acted like these guys had read his Twitter feed and not liked it.
But the company, these guys just get, all of a sudden they're home and they're getting phone calls in the office the day before vacation.
So what are your comments?
And they probably weren't even that familiar with it until they're getting calls from the paper and they're like, what do we do with this?
And then this is what the press does and this is why you gotta hate it.
Because I think Sirius was gonna try to write it out.
That's my opinion because they knew a holiday weekend was coming and this is purely a guess because no one was saying anything.
And then all of a sudden the press starts going, we have not had a comment from Sirius Satellite Radio, so we're assuming that they agree with Mr. Koumiya's opinions.
They do this sneaky shit to push you into defending yourself.
So now the company with shareholders, like you said, has to go, well, how do we tell people that we don't agree?
It's not like the press made them do it, but the press understands how to corner you into giving a statement, a definitive statement, because they know that you're not used to this.
They know that these guys coming to work in management positions are not used to getting phone calls going, how do you feel about this statement and that statement?
It was really...
It was a very frustrating thing when I saw what the press did with it.
That, to me, is always who my biggest complaint is with.
There's no nuance to the way they report on certain things like this.
Because there's nuance to this.
Especially if you look into it in character.
In context, rather.
If you understand that guy and you look at him...
Look, there is a problem with violence in the black community.
To pretend there's not a problem with violence in the black community...
Is to pretend that there are insane amounts of murders going on in Chicago.
To pretend that there's not issues with the amount of black people that are in jail, the percentage of the population.
Now, are those economic problems?
Are those problems related to upbringing?
Are those problems?
Yes.
Education?
Yes.
Absolutely.
There's a lot of fucking disparity.
There's a lot of problems with poverty.
There's a lot of problems with the structure of our culture itself.
And that you could attribute a lot of those problems to racism, to racism in the way that funds are allocated, the way that, you know, the attention that society puts on impoverished communities.
Whenever you talk about race, or a million other things, whether it's religion, It's so hard to make your point without stepping in shit and then having to go off on 50 digressions.
Like, no, no, that's not what I meant.
No, no, that's not what I meant.
That's the worst part of discussing stuff is that people jump in on the side.
What are you saying that all people do, all black people?
No, I'm not.
So in order to be able to get your point across, you have to walk a narrow...
You almost have to close people's argument doors like a Get Smart episode as you're walking.
This way your point gets through.
And Anthony is a genius at doing that.
A genius at it.
Because we've debated race so many times on the show.
And him and Patrice would go back and forth.
And Patrice loved Anthony.
Because he said Anthony's an adorable racist.
Patrice was so funny with it.
He never was upset by Anthony's opinions.
Because Anthony would listen to him and they would go back and forth.
Half the time, Patrice was right and half the time, Anthony was right.
But on Twitter, I think in that emotion, when you're saying X, Y, and Z, I don't think he did as good a job as he should have done of closing those doors behind him.
Almost like sealing off things that people can get to you on because he was so upset because he had a physical assault.
And I know it sounds like I'm talking in circles and just defending my friend, but I've been with him for 10 years in this medium of totally uncensored.
And I'm telling you, I know him well enough to know that he's like, he's got weird things where he'll talk about race and people misinterpret him, and I've talked to him privately, and the guy does not hate black people, and I know that that's just all his friends defending him, but I'm telling you that he does not, because I know him well.
And then to hear people going, he hates black people, it's like...
And again, I hate to keep going back to the press, but they didn't focus on the fact He handled himself properly.
I don't know if I would have pulled the gun in that moment, but I'm a panicky Pete.
When other guys were coming over, I would have at least brandished it.
He acted physically responsible.
As a fucking guy with a pistol on him.
People get shot all the time for dumb arguments and dumb things.
He handled himself absolutely right and lost his cool once he got home.
And the press didn't take that into account.
They harped on the fact that he didn't get a police report.
And I wished he had now in hindsight because they're all going, Mr. Coombe, you did not get a police report.
But here's the deal.
Had he gotten a police report, they would have just ignored it.
They wouldn't have said, well, at least he got a police report.
They would have glanced over the fact and then said, yeah, well, anyone can get a police report.
So they were just using that as a reason to kind of ignore the fact that he got hit.
hit, they're like, "We didn't see a police report." All the press harped on the fact that he didn't get a police report.
But the answer response was, "Look, man, I know enough cops to know that me getting hit by some lady in Times Square is not a fucking priority for NYPD who's worried about terrorists." Yeah, especially if he's fine.
lady in Times Square is not a fucking priority for NYPD who's worried about terrorists.
I think there's a real issue also with the press, with a lot of people in the press.
I'll clarify that.
What they're trying to do is they're trying to close those get smart doors as they write a piece as well.
And as they're writing a piece, they are also trying to placate all the people that are going to be up in arms about their opinions.
If they could possibly be supporting a racist, if they could possibly be taking his side, agreeing with him, seeing his point of view, they could be misinterpreted or they could be interpreted as being racist as well.
So they have to worry about that as well, especially if you're with a liberal rag.
You know, if you have a very liberal newspaper that you work for and they have a clear agenda, which a lot of them do.
The Washington Times does, right?
Washington Post does.
There's a lot of them that have a liberal slant.
And if you are reporting for them, you know, and it's something like this that's very controversial and something where there's a bunch of things that automatically have like a knee-jerk reaction to them.
If Big John McCarthy saw that kid walking in the neighborhood, he probably would have said, How you doing, man?
Everything cool?
You know, had a conversation with him.
Everything would have been fine.
Like, even if the kid, like, got up in arms or got mouthy with him, he would have probably calmed him down.
You know, without having to get into some physical altercation.
Not only that, the kid wouldn't have been able to mount him and bash his fucking head off the ground because he's physically incompetent.
If you're gonna fucking patrol a neighborhood, you can't do it just with a gun.
You can't have the only, the last resort is your only resort.
He can't physically defend himself.
He's out of shape, he's soft and doughy, and he's not physically able to hold that guy off, but yet he's put himself in this position where he's like a security.
He's the force of the truth of the law.
You can't do that.
You're not qualified for that job.
He's just not.
So when that kid's on top of him, bouncing his fucking head off the curb, Look, I don't see any way out for him other than using a weapon.
Like when Jonah Hill was apologizing recently, and he's obviously not a homophobe.
He just got mad and said, suck my dick, faggot.
It was a stupid thing in a moment.
And he's on The Tonight Show.
And again, he's just apologizing.
I think he never had to deal with something like this.
And he said something.
He goes, man, the intent doesn't matter.
It's the words.
The words are...
And it was like, again, I know you're on the spot in that moment.
I'm not going to crucify the guy.
But I wish I was there so I could just appear on the seat next to him like in that Woody Allen scene when the guy walks out to correct the guy online and go, no, the intent is everything.
Because if the words matter, the next time somebody said the fucking Giants killed the Jets, well, we better call the police.
Oh, that's right.
It's the intent.
We understand every single interaction or phrase has an intent behind it, which...
Which doesn't always come through in the written words.
I'm going to stab my son because he's gay as a statement of fact or at the end of a political rally is a pretty awful thing to say.
But if you've opened up with, I'm going to get you pregnant and I'm going to mold shit and make a hat out of it, it's kind of hard to take any one statement and go, well, that's the serious one.
But that's, again, that's that purposely ignoring context or even when you can't ignore it, saying, yeah, we understand the context and we don't fucking care.
Those targets, look, they're all ganging up on Anthony, too.
That's the other thing.
I'm not saying boo-hoo Anthony, but let's pay attention to what's really going on.
If you're writing an article out of the blue for no reason about Jim Norton, you're the only guy, I think Jim Norton is a despicable person, and you write this article, you have the option to respond to that.
And you can go, well, who are you, Mr. Reporter Dickwad?
Let's take a look at you, and then other people can take a look at him, too.
But when everybody's piling on, it's a free-for-all.
Louis C.K. actually raised a really good point about that.
When something was happening, he goes, you know, you have to remember, too, everybody's not Googling you.
Everyone is not Googling Joe Rogan or Jim Norton or Anthony Cumia.
So you're seeing every result about yourself and it appears overwhelming.
But the reality is people may be reading Newsday or The Post or The Gawker or Vice or whatever they're reading, but they're not reading every single article on Anthony Cumia or on Jim Norton.
So that's where the overwhelming thing is sometimes misleading because people are all reading little snippets of it.
But when the company's getting calls from, again, five or six different outlets, to them it feels overwhelming.
And like, what the fuck do we do with this?
Because this wasn't on the air.
So I think that's what...
And again, they haven't discussed this with me.
I'm purely speculating because to them, if it was on the air, I'm guessing they would have said, well, that's what he does on the air.
But they're not looking at it like, well, he was reacting to being hit.
I think they just were like, oh, okay, we got to fire him.
Because people think that we're like a bunch of teenagers hanging out and they're like, you guys should walk in support!
And it's like, first of all, you dumb motherfuckers that say that.
Anthony, I've talked to, he wouldn't walk.
And he told me, dude, you got to make your money.
And B, I'm under contract.
I can't just walk.
I have three more months under contract.
And Obi tried to clear this up on the air.
Like, if we just walk out, if they don't fire us and we just walk, and say a bunch more subs leave because they realize, like, wow, the show really is gone.
Then all of a sudden Sirius wants to take action on us for breach.
It's a whole fucking legal – people just don't get that part of it and they think that we're fucking Anthony.
It's just more advertising, more people paying attention.
More entertainment.
It's going to get more people.
That's what people are realizing about the internet.
I remember when Lars Ehrlich got all upset at Metallica fans for downloading his shit and it created this huge shitstorm where everybody was like, dude, don't you have enough fucking money?
You're worried about people downloading your shit?
More people are going to come see you in concert.
And that's what it really has turned out to be for all musical artists.
Yeah, you're not selling as many records, but you're gonna get more fans, and there's more people gonna see you in concert, and guess what?
That's all your money.
When you can set that up and have people just come out and see you in concert, that's actually better.
It's a very frustrating process because you realize the legal process is not free.
Even if you think you're in the right, But in a way, it saved me, I think, in the long run, that experience, because now I have it for everything I do.
My books, DVDs, CDs, I get everything vetted, and I have like $3 million worth of insurance, which is probably a panicky overkill on my part, but I do that because...
You want to protect yourself even from a...
What's the word?
Not frugal...
Frivolous?
Frivolous litigation.
I don't know who's going to come after me.
Somebody may hear something and it may cause them to bang their fucking head into the wall and then say, I caused an autistic reaction or I caused a fucking...
By the way, everything that we deal with that's annoying, everything is because of lawsuits.
So we kind of have brought it on ourselves too.
Like people are like, why do they have to – companies have to be so – like I'll get annoyed at Syria sometimes.
Like what the fuck?
And then I'm like, oh yeah.
They have a shitload of people working for them and every one of them has access.
To human resources.
And any one of those people could just go to human resources and say, this is a hostile work environment because of something – because people are like, why can't we look at a girl's ass in the hallway?
Pinch your ass like it's 1950. And then when they sue the company – The company's like, what the fuck?
We got to pay to defend this because you couldn't keep your hands off her?
So as much as companies can drive me nuts sometimes, all of these protective barriers that have been put in place have been because citizens have filed lawsuits, some that were very legitimate, like sexual harassment.
Guys are kind of pieces of shit with that.
That was probably a bad example because most guys, you know...
Women tell me horror stories about what they've got to deal with at work.
There's real scenarios where people are getting sexually harassed, and that is uber fucked up.
You know, could you imagine being a chick in an office and some guy you don't want to have anything to do with consistently hits on you and tells dirty jokes and fucks with you and asks you if you're gaining weight, if you ignore them?
Or just the energy, like the things that you can't prove in court, but the energy of the guy who wants to fuck you comes over with his dumb dick up against the fucking top of your desk.
Yeah, but it's also like that's the social environment of the office.
There's always going to be weirdness in the office.
And then if you have those fucking office parties where people get a little liquored up and it all comes out, you start dancing and shit and a little nuttiness.
Next thing you know, people are getting fucking sued.
I'm fucking, as Florentine would say, I'm Pete professional with the interns.
I don't fucking...
I'll joke with them on the air.
I don't fucking look at their asses in the hallway.
I don't flirt with them.
Because A, the most of them are 21 and 22. I don't want one of them misinterpreting something and going to human resources and going, this 45-year-old piece of garbage is hitting on me, and then I'm going to sue you.
And then the company's like, we're going to get sued.
Because companies have lost a lot of money with that.
They've lost, in legit cases, but they don't want to take a chance.
So then they're going to fucking look at me and go, one more time, whatever.
Another aspect of this crazy litigious society that we live in is patent trolls.
That's the thing that Adam Carolla is going through right now, and we're all a part of it, and we're trying to help him raise money for his legal funds.
It's going to cost him a million dollars, a million dollars to defend against this patent troll.
And they already had a hearing, and during the hearing, or they had whatever it is, when they meet down and they discuss The merits of the case.
The case is essentially thought to be frivolous, but they're still going forward with it.
My guess will be the next step, or they can go for summary judgment, maybe where they process all the facts and they say, should we go into depositions or whatever?
And again, it might be different in this kind of case, but there's a lot of...
That's a patent troll-friendly area where they're from.
Which is why I think that a lot of these people set up offices in that part of Texas.
But fucking the Supreme Court just shot down...
They really hurt patent trolls.
Saying something that you can't patent ID... Like you can patent...
A method of delivering an idea, but you can't patent the idea of just episodic things on the internet or whatever it was that they said you can't do.
So far, they have raised $425,000 for their defense.
Their most recent bill.
This is incredible.
They have been running at $100,000 a month.
$100,000 a month for the last three months in legal bills.
So they're now at a deficit of $20,000.
Personal audio has shown no signs of backing down from their litigation posture despite a discovery process that has revealed a completely weak connection to be drawn between their purported patent apparatus and the dissemination of media files that we do as podcasters.
So what they're hoping for Is that Adam somehow or another taps out, and if he does, then they try to hit everybody who podcast with, you know, hey, give us $20 a month or whatever the fuck it is.
So they're going to have to raise another $500,000 to $750,000 to continue with the litigation.
Yeah, and it's very, I forget what it's called when they give them money.
It's really rare.
And in London, in England, in London, in fucking England, I think they're much more likely to, because a lot of people are less likely to sue for something that they might be frivolous.
Although you may not be able to recover on a frivolous lawsuit because there may be legal merits to this lawsuit even if they lose.
What are the personal audio they're called?
It may not be a frivolous suit like in the legal system's eyes.
The legal system may see this as a legit suit that they win or lose as opposed to a frivolous one.
So Adam may not be able to get his money back even if he wins.
And he gave it to me to check out, and I ordered one from Roots, and then I contacted Roots, and I had them design mine with the Higher Primate logo on it.
It's got to be a tough gig to be a flight attendant.
Sure.
But that's just creating issues.
There's no need to do that.
I'm friendly.
If you're with me, I've never gotten an issue.
I mean, I didn't even argue with her.
I said, really?
I got to take this off?
And she goes, yes, sir, that's a bag.
I'm like, all right, just put it in my bag.
I'm done.
I don't need to...
But that's just creating an issue for no reason.
I saw a man and another man get in a mild dispute about something, and this woman, who was the flight attendant, treated both of them like they were fucking children, and just rode it into the ground, didn't let it go, brought out the pilot, made the pilot talk to both men.
A guy had more than one thing in an overhead, and another guy went to put something in.
He opened up the thing, and there was no space in there.
And I think he said something like, you know, you've got, you know, why do you have two things in there?
And the guy said, hey, first comes, first serve.
And the other guy says, bullshit.
And he sits down.
That's it!
One guy's got two bags.
He puts it in there.
And he goes, there's no room for other people.
He goes, hey, first come, first serve.
The other guy goes, bullshit.
And he sits down.
That's the whole dispute.
The woman wouldn't let the guy have a drink.
The guy asked for a drink.
She goes, no, you're not going to have a drink.
If I decide to let you have a drink later, I'll let you have a drink.
She brought out the pilots.
And she even talked to me.
She was like, if things go crazy, if either one of these guys gets out of line, I'm looking to you to take care of this.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, these guys aren't...
No one's getting out of...
You're creating something out of nothing.
But she kept harping on it and pestering.
You know how there's some people that if they get in an argument about something, like whatever it is, if there's something that winds them up, even if it's minor, they will beat it into the ground until it becomes major.
They'll just ride you, ride you, ride you until you're like, can you shut the fuck up?
It's almost like she was trying to get these guys to blow up so she could justify...
Her whatever internal strife, her internal anger that she was projecting onto the situation.
If I see people getting into dispute on an airplane, I do look at it like it's a potential...
I mean, I don't look at it as like a terrorist situation, but I do look at it as a potential like, well, you know...
People do bad shit to each other sometimes.
Bad shit can go down.
And people are still allowed to carry a lot of fucking dangerous shit on planes.
They took away pool cues, and they took away knives and a few things, and they were going to bring back pocket knives and pool cues, but then they changed it.
Because what happened?
Someone did something.
Oh, that guy showed up in LAX and shot a bunch of TSA workers.
Remember that?
He killed that one TSA worker.
That guy, they pulled back this regulation change that they were going to have because of this guy.
We've seen too many videos of guys yelling and screaming or that one fucking...
Bipolar cunt, wherever they're from, trying to open the door.
I'll tell you a big part of it, and we've seen so much more in the last 20-something years because there's no more smoking on planes.
And I'm glad, but I think a lot of what you see in rageful situations is people jonesing for cigarettes because there were times where I couldn't have a cigarette Best thing I ever did was quit smoking in 2001. But when I'd be on a flight, if we were going, when I was opening for Dice, if we were going to Dallas and say there was an hour delay, fuck, that's another hour.
I can't smoke.
And you start, your body, you start to feel that fucking, that withdrawal.
And a lot of people are probably going through that On planes and freaking out that they can't smoke.
But then I'm like, Colin Quinn a long time ago reminded me, many, many years, when I first started going to an opiate athlete, I was dating a British girl.
And she was a real pervert.
I drove a Saturn back then.
I still lived in Jersey.
And I used to fucking park outside of Dangerfield.
And she would blow me.
She liked me to trap her head under my steering wheel.
And she would go like, I want you to bite me.
I want you to bite me.
She would repeat this mantra of me biting her on her back.
She liked to be bitten and brutalized.
So I would bite her back and she would be like, I want you to make me suck it.
And I would hold her head under the wheel and she would be trapped under my Saturn steering wheel.
And fucking she would suck my dick and lick my balls and whatever.
And, you know, the UFC sent out a memo, or they told us, I forget what it was, was it official or non-official, a few years back, two people got sued for taking photos with people where they were choking them in the picture as a joke.
Matt Hughes got sued, and Chuck Liddell got sued.
Both frivolous lawsuits where a guy, I get it all the time, guys either say, can I choke you out in a picture?
Which I say no, and then they say, well, can you choke me out in a picture?
He enjoyed it, because he punched me hard, and then he was choking me, and I was like, alright, alright, tap, tap, tap, and he did it again, and he smiled, and he did it again.
He's a fucking...
He's a really brutal Russian, yeah.
Velasquez choked me.
I think it was a guillotine choke, standing guillotine, I think.
Brutal.
And I mean, Ronda fucking armbarred me.
I never did anything with Liddell or Rampage.
It's funny because they were before.
Silva kicked me.
Jon Jones hurt me the worst.
He fucking...
Jon Jones put his knee...
In my...
John Jones' thing, he's punched me before, choked me, fucking Uriah made me go, ah!
And he put something into it but not enough to do any type of real damage.
It was just where it was.
I couldn't believe I reacted that way like my system was like you know that light-headed tingly feeling you get like I'm gonna vomit I'm gonna vomit and then I was like I'm gonna pass out I had to go to the bathroom put water on my face like a fucking like an old lady but that's a that's a really painful technique yes it certainly is it doesn't it's a weird thing because those guys they're so used to fighting off of pain and dealing with the pain and the adrenaline of the fight that a lot of people underestimate the impact of leg kicks I've learned, like, you know, everyone knows UFC hurts and mixed martial arts is painful.
But after doing that, I've been like, it makes you watch the sport differently.
Like, to watch, like, I'll watch it.
My favorite fighters are those fucking Brazilian, like, you know, those leg kickers, man.
After experiencing that, I'm like, the fact the guy can stand there and still fight after having his leg kicked like that, it never ceases to amaze me if they don't immediately collapse and just go home.
Yeah, it's every one of those moves hurt a lot, and when you feel the grip that a guy like that puts on you, like a cane is a fucking monster, but anyone who puts a grip on you, it is simply...
An unbreakable situation I'm in.
Like, I am only alive and not fucked in the ass because he's choosing not to do those things.
It's a really weird feeling to be...
It makes you...
Maybe the older you get, the more aware you are that bad shit can happen, but it makes you very cautious in life.
Like, these are the guys that are walking around and, like, You try not to start confrontations with people for no reason because you don't know who has a pistol.
That woman who assaulted Anthony had no idea that he's a guy with a gun.
Have you seen that fucking new revelation that came out today that Edward Snowden was saying that they were passing, the NSA guys were passing back and forth naked photographs that they got through searches?
They would also do searches on their ex-girlfriends because they had access.
I mean, it's literally everything that Alex Jones has been saying for years.
Everybody's been calling him crazy.
He's vindicated.
I mean, he's been saying that the propaganda machine...
They're using government propaganda and all sorts of hacking tools.
It's really a fascinating thing.
A collection of hacking tools, some of which are specifically suited for spreading disinformation, were exposed in a leaked 2012 document provided by Snowden to The Intercept.
This is an online publication led by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, I mean, they underpass a tool that lets government...
Change the outcome of online polls.
They can change the outcome of online polls.
Bombay, it can increase website hits and rankings.
So they can increase website hits, change online polls.
Amplification of a given message, normally video on a popular multimedia website, gateway, which will artificially increase traffic to a website, slipstream, which will infiltrate page views on a website.
So what they could do is they could put up a website, make that website look super popular, make it look like it's gone viral.
He said something about just in passing, Mike was talking about these websites and boosting the hits up.
And he goes, people don't understand that we really are still engaged in it.
He goes, I know it's not popular to say that there's a bad guy, but there is.
And he goes, then you build these fucking sites because you build them because you want to develop relationships.
And that hadn't occurred to me.
Certain sites are made to look more popular that the government is running and then the people that come to them who are actually involved in that type of shit, you now see who's coming to these sites and then where they're going and you develop relationships with these people and you get to know them that way.
It's not always just about… A lot of it is stuff that we'll never find out about.
But he would explain it much better.
Just in that little moment, it made me see something that I hadn't considered.
I'm sure they're doing dirty shit with it too, like those photos.
And again, I know the government's propaganda-driven, but there's also legit uses for it.
There's definitely legit uses for it, but what Snowden's point was that you're having these 18 to 22-year-old kids, and you're giving them this massive amount of responsibility, and that it's just not cool, and there's very little oversight.
He's like, it's very little oversight in these offices.
Yeah, I mean, what was Baker's, what was his argument against Snowden, what Snowden did?
I've only seen, he's on Red Eye a lot, and he hates him, so I only saw a little piece of it on the episode we did together, but Mike's a really logical, you'd love him.
Like, he's a great talker, he's funny, he's like, he's not some, you know, he's not some...
Propaganda spewing asshole.
He's got his talking points, but he's a really smart dude.
I would love to hear what the argument against Snowden is.
Because in my opinion, what he was doing was something...
What he released was information that let the American people know that the government was doing something that's unconstitutional.
And they were doing it, and they were doing it like they had the right to do it.
And they're going to continue to have the right to do it.
And if they catch him, they're going to lock him in jail.
For exposing, in a way, everything that Obama said when he was running for office.
He said that they were going to have greater protection of whistleblowers, anybody that was showing that they were doing something, that someone was doing something that was illegal, he was going to protect them.
Meanwhile, they had to delete that off of his website because they kept it up until like a year and a half ago.
And then finally, you know, people started pointing it out when all the Snowden shit was going down, the Hope and Change website, and they finally redacted it all.
Yeah, it's a very weird – because I agree with you.
I think that what he did to a certain degree is really good.
I don't want the government having that ability.
My point of view on it is I'm so disgusted with the public and I'm so disgusted with what voyeurs we are and how we refuse to acknowledge that and how we sit there and judge people.
Like Donald Sterling.
The guy is a twat, obviously.
But the way everyone sits there and fucking self-righteously judges this guy, and I love the fact that he's a fucking miserable, parrot-voiced 81-year-old who now wants to fucking hire private investigators to go after every NBA owner and uncover shit.
It's like none of them stood tall and said, look, this guy's a piece of garbage, but you know what?
I've said a lot of ugly things in my private life, too.
And even if he was being a creepy racist, even if he was, the fact that it was in private, and they got the, I think in California, there's only two states, one party notification states.
I'm thinking they're New York and Vegas.
Nevada is one, yeah.
And I think that the fact that it was illegally obtained information.
And again, I think the guy, Abdul Jabbar wrote a fucking genius article on why this guy should have been gone after before for a lot of the housing discrimination stuff, but not for this.
And no one gave a fuck when it was that, but now that it's language, they're going after him.
Have you ever heard what sociologists say about that when it comes to gossip and things along those lines?
They believe that we no longer have communities like we used to have when we were tribal organizations, when we were groups of 50 to 150, 200 people, small groups.
And then we used to know each other's business because we had to be aware.
We had to know who was a good guy, who was a bad guy.
We had to talk and exchange.
And we also had to figure out what other people liked and tolerated, what was accepted in our community.
And now we don't really have these sort of relationships with our neighbors anymore.
And so celebrity gossip, gossip that's in the news, whenever someone is doing something, it becomes extra juicy to us.
Because we don't have this normal communication amongst the people that we have in our local community.
He knows he's smart, but he doesn't like the way Dr. Steve will...
I mean, Dr. Kaku will kind of...
I guess they look at him like we would look at a comedian doing girl fart jokes on TV. He's a hack.
Like, oh no, look, he's got the puppet.
The puppet's saying naughty things.
Oh boy, he's great.
Is there anything worse than when people will come up to you and go like, oh, and I love this comedian, and you're like, I want to just bite your fucking nose off.
It's oddly humiliating and exposing when you see that stuff.
Like, I wonder if other performers look at their old shit.
Like, we did a thing on ONA where we, I'm sure you maybe heard some of it, where we brought in our old tapes and got killed for it.
This is back on IDW. And I brought in a tape of me from 1993 where I had like 20 minutes of material and I was a fucking please-love-me, happy-go-lucky, high-energy fraud.
How we doing?
It's humiliating in a weird level.
I had like purple pants.
I was a dog.
Yeah, exactly.
They were like those workout pants from the 80s.
Whatever they were with the Velcro front.
And I would bring an enema in a bag on stage and talk about it because enemas were addicting.
You wouldn't even be friends.
Colin Quinn told me, he's like, it's hard for me to look at you listening to this.
I can't acknowledge it.
And we did this in 2000, so it was 17 years after I had done it.
Yeah, I don't know what it is, man, but those monster energy drinks, whatever it is in those, taurine or whatever the fuck, the caffeinated aspect of them.
I was dating this chick, and her roommate had sex with her boyfriend, and he fucked her in the ass, and her sphincter must have relaxed, and she shit on him while they were sleeping.
This is not a subject I'm really into, but there is a woman, this German woman, who does shit porn, where people shit on her, and she's like the queen of shit porn.
Don't ask me how I know this.
Somebody posted it on my message board and I followed a fucking link hole.
I went from link to link to link till I got to her site and watched some of her videos.
Well, the funny thing is, too, that when you think, like, the fact that she smokes on top of it, like, if there's anything that can make your breath worse than fucking eating some fucking Nazi's logs and fucking having a cigarette afterwards.
It was a video, and a buddy had it, and we went over to his house and watched it, and, like, one of us had to watch the door, because it was in the basement.
We were hovering over the...
Like, one person had to watch the door to let us know if anybody was coming, and then we were standing in front of this VCR, this TV with a VCR attached to it, watching this really grainy video of this chick, like, you know, very mild.
I saw some hardcore porn pictures, the dirty movie, but if you're seeing a beheading video or legitimate car crash stuff where hardcore fucking is just the normalist thing you're going to see online.
I think that's why maybe school shooting, I'm not blaming video games, but people do become a certain desensitized to things.
I probably sound like I'm criticizing every message I've ever given, but I do think that that has something to do with desensitizing you.
You can't say that that's the cause for someone doing something horrible and violent, but you see so much violence and it becomes an option.
If you didn't know what a gun was, you didn't know what a school shooting was, if it didn't exist, if it wasn't on the table, it wouldn't be something that people considered.
But because of the fact we have guns, we know about guns, because of the fact that we know about school shootings, people think, you know what?
My fucking life is terrible.
I'm I'm all fucked up on antidepressants.
I'm going to go shoot up my school.
All those things do factor into the possibility of someone doing something, but you can't blame those things.
It's like, I've said that I think that we have a gun problem, a mental health problem, rather, disguised as a gun problem.
That's what I think it is, more than anything.
Because you can give a lot of people guns and they would never do anything wrong.
Because Alonzo, whatever the fuck his name was, his mother had the gun around the house, you know.
So even if you're not the crazy person, even if your kid is the fucking wide-eyed, you know, me, me, me shitbag that he was, the fucking, I hate the pupil in the middle of the eye with white all around it.
I know some people get mad at me, that's the real condition.
Well, being wide-eyed, being accelerated, being on amphetamines.
When you're putting kids on Ritalin, you're putting kids on Adderall and all these different...
Those are stimulants.
One of the things that they use to treat ADHD and ADD, those are stimulants.
You know, you're jacking kids up on all kinds of crazy shit.
And that's just those things.
What about the things they put them on that are antidepressants?
And all these things that don't have a long history.
You're radically altering human neurochemistry.
Radically altering it on a daily basis with really hardcore chemicals.
That's the one thing that nobody likes to talk about when it comes to school shootings.
You know, the causation, you know, correlation of causation or whatever the fuck that term is.
That you can't necessarily connect them.
You can necessarily connect them.
You can't say it's the 100% of the cause, but when 90% of all the people that are school shooters are on antidepressants or are coming off of antidepressants, suffering withdrawal of antidepressants, at what point in time do they start looking at these chemicals that radically alter the way people react to stress, the way people react to life itself, the way people react to negative influences?
I had a friend that was on Zoloft, and she said that when she was on it, she didn't care about anything.
Like, she was gonna write a book called, I Lost a Year of My Life, about being on Zoloft.
Because for a year, nothing bothered her.
Nothing bothered her.
And you would think that someone who's a fucking psycho, that you put them on that shit, it's also not gonna bother them to kill people.
It comes out the 23rd and there's going to be one a week for four weeks and hopefully people like the different shows and You know, the monologues, I'm allowed to kind of say what I want to say.
He was texting me, trying to get me to go to Africa with him.
I was like, bitch, are you out of your fucking mind?
He wants me to go to some new island, some island, rather, that they have where they've taken all these monkeys and apes that they experimented with and shot up with diseases and AIDS and all this stuff, and they've dropped them off when they're done with their experiment, and they bring them to some island.
So there's an island, like a Planet of the Apes island, that's filled with all these monkeys and apes that have gone through all these medical experiments.
And he wanted me to go there with him.
I'm like, bitch, that is the last place I'm going, man!
If you want me to go to the Bahamas and drink Mai Tais with Anthony Bourdain, I'm in.
And it's like, you know how you're married to your stuffed man when you're performing or whatever, and it's like, there's people that can just see things, like, detach from the emotion of it, and go clearly, like, no, no, this is the way to start.
Like, I was wrong about that, and he was right.
And it's like, it's really hard for me to think in those terms, that I don't know what the fuck I'm always talking about.
We had to edit the interview with Dana and Mike, and I loved all of it because it was honest and funny and free-flowing, and Tyson was hilarious, and Dana was fucking great.
And it was like we had to chop it just because I went 40 minutes over.
So if I'm going long, I should have said, alright, it's about X amount of time, we'll be right back, or go to the next, whatever the fuck I should have said, and then done it that way, but I just didn't know to do that, so...
They know what gets the views, the part ones, the part twos.
They tried explaining it to me, how it works as a business model.
And, you know, I'm looking at it from like, like you just said, I want to have the conversation.
And they were like, things don't normally go because my set's very plain.
I like the Dick Cavett, Mike Douglas, like those fucking guys.
So I did it because, you know, they're not going to just, I should have just said, hey, look, we'll be right back or maybe done it in post.
But I just didn't think to do that at the moment.
They're like, we just got to get a couple of pickups.
That was the stage manager.
I'm like, okay, like, Right.
Maybe I could have said to him, now do it in post, and he might have been fine with it, but again, it was such a learning, and I hate to say it because he sounded like such a douche, but they gave me so much ability to do what I want.
Without fucking with me that I might have, you know, made a couple of like, oh, yeah, I should have done this instead of that.
I want to have my own thing too because you feel like a more complete performer when you're not always with Opie and Anthony or Colin Quinn or Louis CK or Amy Schumer's put me on her show.
I don't always want to be on somebody else's thing.
Right.
So I love the idea of performing on the radio.
I love doing it with Opie.
I love doing it with Opie and Anthony more.
And I would say the same thing if Opie left.
I honestly do love being a part of that radio show.
Being without Anthony is difficult.
And Opie would tell you the same thing.
It's just...
It's hard to realize how much space a person fills in your life until they're not there.
Like, I mean, we all know Anthony's a comic gene.
That's easy to say.
But it's like the little moments, like when there's that chair...
And it's really hard to get used to that empty seat, whether he's saying something funny, or whether he's just doing a stupid E-rock joke, or a little aside, or just...
It's like this whole fucking vacuum of this great, powerful brain that used to be, you know, a foot away from me.
He can talk about anything for any length of time.
Anything he can be...
And we've said that like...
And I've said this before, but Patrice said that Anthony can access funny faster than anybody he'd ever known.
Like, he just had the ability to access being funny immediately...
On any subject.
He was a tin knocker.
He would put in air conditioning vents.
And he can walk you through that in a fascinating way and be funny about it and be captivating with it.
I just die telling a story.
I lose people.
It's a joke I've done, but I meant the sincerity of it that if I was on 9-11, if I made it out of the first tower, I would lose people halfway through the story.
I just have no ability to go from the beginning to the middle to the end and keep people locked in.
Somebody played for me recently, or they sent me a link to, Jim Norton's laugh compilation.
There's just times where people have made me laugh on the show.
And I listen to part one and two, because the point is not me laughing.
It's the things.
And most of those laughs have come from Anthony, more than any guest or anybody.
And some of the things that have...
He did a thing recently, or years ago, that I heard two days ago, where we were talking about people who have shot themselves in the head and survived.
And Anthony did the voice of the guy who survived.
It was an immediate.
He became the guy who shot himself in the fucking head and survived.
He was talking about how he just has a more positive outlook.
And I'm howling listening to it in the clip.
And I'm listening to it two days ago.
And I'm laughing all over again.
I'm like, I forgot that bit ever existed.
But God, this cocksucker made me fucking laugh.
I'm not talking about him like he's dead, but that's how valuable a thing he is.
I think they made a big mistake for a couple reasons.
One, I think they made a big mistake because I think it's going to open the door more to the internet because people are going to look at that as the last remaining true free speech option.
Because that's what it is.
Look, you can say you don't like this podcast.
You can decide that I'm offensive.
But you can't stop it.
I mean, the host might say, we don't want to host you anymore.
I'll find another host.
The sponsors might say, we don't want to be your sponsor anymore.
Well, guess what?
I'll do it with no sponsors.
We did it with no sponsors for years.
This is the only real option, where you're your own producer, your own director, you're the whole thing.
You're the performer, you're the whole thing.
That's where it's at, because just like a stand-up is entirely responsible for your act you put on stage, If you had some producer hovering over your fucking shoulder every time you wrote a bit, every time you were thinking about putting together a set list, every time you were going up and doing a show, they would review it afterwards, that would be gross.
Sirius had a different approach when they first came out.
They've slowly but surely clamped down.
From that Condoleezza Rice incident, that's where it was like, ooh, you could get in trouble for something that someone says on a radio show that isn't even, like, a guest.
Yeah, I mean, I get almost all my shit from iTunes.
I don't ever listen to music in my car anymore unless it's coming off of my phone.
I just...
It's just, I don't need to.
You don't need to anymore.
You don't need them anymore.
And the last thing that's exciting is things like Stern and things like Opie and Anthony, where you can have a guy who is just freewheeling, saying whatever he wants, doesn't have to worry about language restrictions, doesn't have to worry about anything.
And the fact that he can get fired for saying the same things that he's always said on his show, Just saying them in a text message.
They're so ignorant that they can't recognize that this is...
You're taking it out of context.
You're taking it from a guy who's just recently been assaulted.
You're taking it from a guy who probably had a couple of drinks in him when he said it.
And he shouldn't have done it.
He fucked up.
He definitely shouldn't have gone on that Twitter rampage.
I think if they gave it some time, he definitely can come back.
In the context of what he said, it wasn't that bad.
You know, I wouldn't have been happy if it was my company and I had shareholders and all that jazz.
But obviously, I would never be that guy anyway.
I would never be a fucking head of a big company.
I'm just not built for it.
You've got to recognize the entertainment quality, the entertainment aspect of that guy, the entertainment possibilities of keeping the show together.
It's because without that, all you have is Stern.
Obviously, you guys are still together and it'll still be a great show, but it's not the same show.
It's not.
You leave open the door for Anthony starting his own thing, some wildly successful thing on the internet, which also, look, if someone comes along and they put together some sort of an advertising budget and they say, "Hey, listen, we would like to host the Opie and Anthony podcast on the internet.
We'll take X percentage of the advertisers.
We've already got it lined up.
We have a big launch.
We're going to do it around Thanksgiving.
Someone's going to fuck a turkey live on the air." You know, whatever.
You come up with some idea to do something completely free and wild on the internet.
A big advertising push, buy billboards, Times Square, you know, fuck Sirius, we're doing it on the internet, you know, ONA is back and it's free.
Download it online.
You don't need to pay for a subscription anymore.
Anybody can get it on your phone.
I mean, you can do it the way we do it.
We're available online as an MP3. We're available from iTunes.
We're available on Stitcher, on YouTube, on Ustream, on Vimeo.
If you just did something like that, it would be gigantic.
And we honestly don't know What we do from here, like again, Opie and I are doing the show, bringing guests in and just performing, and it's like we both feel the fucking loss of it.
Like that promo, I was out in the parking lot with my luggage talking to my fucking manager on the phone.
I'm like, I don't know why.
No one's going to like that one.
I'm just having a fucking panic attack.
And moments like that though, they say Tarantino would fight his editor who passed away.
But they said that she was such a big piece of his great success because she was so good at editing his stuff.
And I heard they would have screaming matches because he didn't agree with her.
But she, in a detached way, could see what worked from the outside.
And I certainly didn't have a yelling match with anyone, but a lot of times I'm too close to it to see what works, and I would have been totally wrong about this, and I would have thrown that promo out and not used it, because I'm mostly in it.
Well, with me, I'm just real lucky that I found a bunch of things that I like doing.
All the things that I'm interested in, whether it's the links that I put up on Twitter, whether it's the articles I read, documentaries I watch, martial arts I do, whatever I'm doing, bow hunting, whatever I'm doing.
I'm interested in it.
It's all just things I'm interested in.
I think that's a big part of what keeps life fun, is just be interested in a bunch of different things and pursue those things.
With most people, you can't pursue your real interest because you have a job that's usually not your real interest.
I've been there too.
When I was doing Fear Factor, and no woe is me, it was a great gig, paid a lot of money, used a lot of exposure and all that good stuff, but I didn't want to do it.
I only did it because they wanted to pay me.
You know?
And there's a big difference between living like that and living like I live now.
Whereas everything I do, I enjoy doing.
Whether I do the UFC, whether I do a podcast or stand-up or anything.
I enjoy all my things.
So in that way, I figured out a way to harmoniously manage my life.
I mean, it's not that I love everything I do, and there's always...
You know, even with podcasts, there's podcasts that don't go well, or I don't like moments in them, and they will fuck with me, and I'll try to...
But they fuck with me because I care, because I'm trying to make it better, and, you know, I'm trying...
When you're doing anything where it's a flowing, sort of living thing, you're ad-libbing, and maybe I added too much, or maybe I didn't add enough, or maybe I was too low-energy, or maybe I was too high-energy...
It's just because you care and if you care and if you're constantly trying to improve things and you're also taking chances and you're also Trying to innovate and trying to, you know, trying to be as loose and as open as possible.
And if you're doing too many different things at the same time, like I do a lot of different things, it's a matter of making sure that you have enough.
I did two podcasts with him, so I did like six hours worth of talking to him.
The first one, though, I think we really got to the heart of everything because it was three hours long and he told everything, the whole CIA connection to the Iran-Contra affair.
Notice I said Contra.
I know how to speak.
I'm very eloquent.
He was a fascinating guy and a very positive guy, man, for a guy who spent that much time in jail and very peaceful and a very interesting dude and really Earnestly working to help people not make the same mistakes that he made.
It was hard for me to picture that guy in the role of Kingpin.
And then as we were editing, we weren't chopping content on this one, it was just camera angles because of the way that I demanded the audience be set up.
We couldn't just get a two shot because I didn't know that because I'm a fucking novice cunt.
So we had to just fix a couple of camera angles.
And there's a couple of moments where Rick's talking and I just saw his face and he was being pleasant.
But how hard must it be when you've made $900 million selling drugs to not go back to selling drugs, to not go, I've got to figure out a way to do this and not get caught?
Like, he was spending, like, ungodly amounts of money to, like, refurbish this house, and then they had to stop halfway through it because he ran out of money.
But it was just some insane thing.
Like, the marble alone was like $8 million worth of Italian marble or something fucking crazy.
That's the thing, especially unscrupulous contractors.
Sometimes it's just hidden costs they don't see coming, but some of them, they get you hooked, and then once they got you hooked, they just keep the bills coming.
They do that with car builds, too.
When you're getting a car built, they did that to me when I was on that show, Rides, where I had that Barracuda built.
Like, this is a car that you're paying for, and this guy's telling me, hey, look, if you don't want to spend X amount of money, we'll sell it, and we'll give you your money back.
I know, I didn't even mean to add those things in that way.
It wasn't meant to be a double entendre, but it fell into place correctly.
But yeah, I'm in the middle of a thing with my house that's going great, and when you have something fixed in your house, And someone's doing it and they're doing a great job and it's all on time.
It's beautiful.
It's like, the guy did what he said he was going to do and everything's working out well.