Joe Rogan and evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Ryan, PhD, debate orcas’ housing challenges, critiquing Peter Singer’s ethics by comparing chimpanzee intelligence to brainless infants. Ryan shares his wife’s psychiatric humor techniques and stories of trauma-driven creativity, like Keith Richards’ flamenco advice to Olivia Wilde’s husband. Rogan links modern societal movements—Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ rights—to evolutionary progress, arguing that insulation from danger breeds dissatisfaction. Their conversation ends with Ryan’s book Sex at Dawn, questioning how civilization’s safety paradoxically dulls life’s vitality. [Automatically generated summary]
I had an ex-girlfriend who was really into fashion, and I remember one time her saying, we lived in San Francisco for a while, and I remember her saying, yeah, I want to go for a hippie look, and I'm going to buy the fringe.
And I just remember thinking, that is so antithetical to what a hippie is, to go buy expensive hippie outfits.
It's like a lot of white guys who are into Asian women will go to Asian countries, like China, for instance, because there's no white men there, or not as many, rather.
I can remember the minute I experienced that, thinking like, You know, first everyone's looking at me, okay, I'm a foreigner, whatever, but these women are smiling and flirting, and what's going on?
And, you know, eventually someone explained to me, like, dude, you're white.
They love, and I've always, the one thing about my body that I would complain about is my skin.
I've never liked my skin.
Like, I've got as much melanin as anyone else, but it's all in my teeth.
So I've got yellow teeth and super pale skin, you know?
Do you get burnt real easy when you go to the sun?
Well, maybe because of the novelty, and also there's a reputation among redheads for being sort of temperamental, and everybody knows a temperamental woman's a lot of fun in bed, right?
Well, I know a guy who's got pancreatic cancer who's fighting it, and they gave him a very short window to live, and he's pushed way past that, and everybody's completely shocked.
But he has this amazing attitude, and he's positive and enjoying life.
And I think his point of view is not, instead of rage against the dying of the light, enjoy the moment and live your life...
And I think because of that, he's actually living longer.
There was a guy, his name was Bill Hoyler, who I became friends with from the internet, from my own message board.
He was a young kid who got pancreatic cancer, and he lived for years.
And we became friends from online.
He had a screen name.
I think his screen name was called Pan Can Fighter, like pancreatic cancer fighter.
I believe that was his screen name.
And I would get him tickets to the UFC and get him tickets to a comedy show.
And one time he came to visit me in Florida, and...
He came to the show.
I got him tickets to the show.
He told me he was going to go sleep in his car.
I was like, you drove all the way down here.
Are you going to sleep in your car?
He goes, yeah, I just wanted to see the show.
I got him a hotel room.
This guy's got cancer.
You can't let him sleep in his fucking car.
Your immune system is super important when you have cancer.
Sleep is super important for your immune system.
But he was always so thankful and never weird and like for a kid a young kid who was facing this horrible Disease that almost nobody escapes from it's like the percentage of people that survive one of the worst very very bad But his attitude was always like I'm gonna fucking fight this and I'm gonna he would post these tweets on the messages on the message board like Three years later.
I'm still alive motherfucker like that kind of shit and you know he had tubes in his stomach when I saw him once we saw him Eddie Bravo and I Became friends with this kid.
We saw him maybe six or seven times over the years.
And, you know, one time we saw him, his head, he'd lost all his hair, his eyebrows were gone, he had tubes coming out of his stomach because, you know, some surgery that he had.
And he was still alive and he still had a good attitude.
It was amazing what an attitude he had.
And I think that that attitude is probably what allowed him to live for so long.
Like, who the fuck has ever looked like that at 69?
Is it good or is it bad?
You know, I don't think it would be too terrible if people could live to be a thousand years if I knew that we had the resources to support it.
Because I would think, like, man, what kind of amazing philosophy and insight would you get from a thousand-year-old woman who's lived hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and...
And seeing culture shift and change and remembers as much as she could and tells you about life in a way that only a person has lived a thousand years.
And we are a little blips.
You talk to a guy that lived a hundred years, you're going to be fascinated if he has his faculties.
I think that we're gonna see a great advance in our lifetime of lifespans.
But the real issue is do we have the resources for that?
Because one of the things that is going on with our world, as everybody knows, is there's a lot more people today than there's ever been in recorded human history by a giant number.
And when you see places like India that are in dire poverty, it's one third of the size of the United States.
It has three times as many people plus.
It's like, wow, I mean, you're dealing with a lot of poverty and a lot of suffering.
And, you know, maybe it's a perspective issue.
And maybe what I consider poverty, they consider life, and that if I lived that life, I would be accustomed to it, it would be normalized.
But I've got to think that most people don't want to sleep on dirt, and most people don't want to eat food that's bad, or struggle to survive in any way, and dealing with rampant diseases and That you're dealing with in impoverished nations, you know, when they don't have enough medicine to take care of people.
I don't know.
But if we did have the resources, man, it would be amazing to talk to a thousand-year-old person who knew everything about the...
But seriously, I mean, if you think about, you know, just how much things have changed since you and I were kids, you know, if you're talking to a guy that's 500 years old, it's like, holy shit, man.
Well, yeah, the other thing is, a thousand years from now, I mean, if we really could live to be a thousand years old, a thousand years from now, people might not be necessary.
I mean, we might have evolved past this state in some sort of a gigantic technological leap.
I really believe that when you're looking at the iconic image of an alien, you know, the big heads, the big eyes, and no genitals, I think we're looking at what holds us back as organisms and the things that...
If you look at our wars and our greed and all the crazy fucking larceny and crazy shit that people do, it's all attached to the primate body.
It's all attached to sex and breeding and greed and guilt and fear and the worry about being mortal.
If we can move past that in some genetic engineering leap or if it goes Kurzweil on us, And they develop some insane artificial body that you transfer your consciousness into that is just way more preferable.
You know, you got all the buttons you can push for orgasm, all the buttons you can push for adventure.
All those exist inside your head and they can access them at any moment.
But you're looking at the world.
In some crazy 3D, you know, minority report fashion where everything you see, you're interacting with the world in a very different way, you might get a bunch of people to jump ship, and the models might get better, and then the next model might be so pleasurable, so much better than being a human being that it just fucking, people just start jumping ship.
I think they're like motion detectors, you know, whatever, antenna.
But when two sea slugs...
Now, sea slugs contain both male and female reproductive organs inside their bodies.
So they've got sperm and eggs.
And when two sea slugs meet each other, they sort of rear up and with those horns, these horns come out of their heads and they start slamming each other with these horns, like a couple of mountain goats or something.
And eventually, one of them will break through the skin of the other with his horn.
And at that point, he injects sperm into the other, and so the other becomes female, because now the eggs have been fertilized, and that one's male.
It's amazing when you see all the different varieties of life, when you see all the different forms that it can take, and then you stop to consider that that's just in our Earth's environment.
Imagine what they're going to find if they can chip through Europa and get to those oceans.
It's very possible there's something alive under there that's being fueled from the heat of the volcanic vents.
Most likely nothing.
We've never seen anything in the ocean other than like, you know, we see like hermit crabs.
They'll use other people's, you know, as a shell.
We've never seen anything like build a structure other than that, I don't think.
Like nothing you could consider like, look, there's a house.
You know, like a beaver.
A beaver has a beaver den.
You know, even it's crude as fuck, but damn, they're building their own little house.
It's kind of crazy.
And we obviously have...
Insects in the world above ground that build incredible structures.
And this is in the Kalahari Desert, right, which is dry and the temperature changes a lot night to day.
And so they build these things and they've got this chamber and then below the chamber are cooling fins that hang down perfectly spaced and the air circulates through them so that it keeps the temperature exactly the same all the time.
Wow.
It's like, how does...
I mean, there are things in evolution that...
Are not understood.
There are things where it's like, well, there's no gradual way to get from point A to point B here.
How do termites know to do that?
How do you encode that in DNA? That doesn't seem possible based on what we know of DNA. Especially since it's not an isolated incidence.
I think there's a, you know, you're talking about like quantum leaps and thinking and stuff.
I feel like in a strange way, and I'm even hesitant to say this publicly because it's an example of what I'm talking about, like it's really hard to talk about The areas where Darwinian notions of evolution don't quite make it because you immediately get lumped in with the religious lunatics.
Or the woo-woo people.
Yeah, so it sort of shut down an important conversation, you know, much like the Nazis.
I mean, the Nazis were doing all this interesting science that you can't talk about, you know, or you can't talk about eugenics.
I agree with that, but man, I don't think you should be able to tell anybody that they can or can't breed.
I think education is important with all aspects of breeding, but we all know that people make terrible decisions when it comes to breeding.
Because they want to get that nut, son.
And then they're like, oh no, I made a person.
Alright, now I've got to deal with it.
I don't think we should take that away from people just because they have diseases or force them to get an abortion.
Also, one valid point that people who have illnesses...
I don't want anyone else to have the illness that I have, but I'm alive, and I'm okay, and I have cerebral palsy, and I have whatever I have, and I can still enjoy life.
It might not be perfect, but you're telling me that this experience, my experience in life, because I have cerebral palsy or because I have something else, is not valid.
And I'm saying that's wrong.
I'm hampered.
I'm hindered.
I certainly can't move the way a regular person moves.
However, my experience is my experience, and I can make the most of it, and I enjoy it.
And I'm not necessarily trying to give a child this, but I'm not trying to invalidate.
We're not comparing it to, you know, you should die, you should be, you know, we're saying nothing.
Now, how do you compare it to nothing?
A kid who isn't born isn't suffering, right?
So, I mean, I think that the assumption...
I've got a cousin, this really smart little kid, he's like five or something, and the other day he was talking about how he, before he was born, he was saying that all fetuses should have...
He also wrote a book about hallucinogens, hallucinations, which was very interesting because it was the first, this came out maybe five years ago, and it was, it struck me as the first, like, mainstream A sort of non-apologetic discussion of the use of hallucinogens by a very mainstream doctor who's written all these bestsellers.
And he talks about when he lived in Topanga in the 60s and he took some acid.
I lived in Newton from the time I was 14 to the time I was 17. Well, that was high school, you know, 14 to 17. And then like a year and a half, two years after that, I stayed there.
But before that, I lived in a place called Jamaica Plain.
Jamaica Plain was rough.
We only lived there for about a year and a half, maybe two years at the most.
But I went to high school or grammar school in this, I think it was Curly, I think that was the name of the grammar school.
But it was bad, man.
It was real bad.
Jamaica Plain has become more gentrified now.
But when I lived there in 1979, 1980, I guess it was, somewhere around then.
I think my first year of high school was 81. It was really bad.
There was a lot of, like, bad shit going down.
There were 17-year-old kids that were in the seventh grade.
You know, they would like never graduated and like you'd be in, you know, I was like a little kid and I was going to class and it was just fucking full grown adults that are in my class.
You know, there's guys and girls making out the back of the class was all these like inner city kids like they were so I come from Florida where I lived before that in a college community in Gainesville, Florida and we moved to like the only place in Boston that my parents could afford.
It was this Jamaica Plain place and they worked really hard to get us out of there and moved us to Newton and Newton was like way more urban way more relaxed but Jamaica Plain was fucking sketchy It was sketchy.
There's a lot of crime like there's breaking and enterings in our in our neighborhood all the time You know like we got a dog just to bark to let us know if someone's trying to get into the house It was very weird.
It was a weird place to live and then Newton was a total different place That's cool.
I mean, I got used to eating alone in the lunchroom.
You know, like, reading a book.
Like, I got my book.
I'll ignore the rest of you fuckers.
I mean, I made friends, but...
The point was that I wasn't reaching out.
And then that worked great in the rest of my life, traveling all the time, living overseas, all that.
I don't have a home, and you're like this too, right?
You move enough, it's like, well, okay, I lived here for a couple years, I lived here for a couple years, but when people say, don't you miss your home, all your friends, the people you grew up with?
I don't know the people I grew up with, you know, they were stages.
He'd bring this shit into the country, and he was in this frat, and I knew someone who was in the frat, and I was never a frat boy at all, but they would invite me, and these yellow rocks of coke, you know?
I mean, I went to this dumbass college where everybody was rich, so the drug scene there was off the charts.
And I've done the best Coke there is, right?
I mean, I know the guy who invented MDMA. You know, it's like I've had these really good connections for drugs.
Well, you're a self-deprecating guy, and you joke around a lot, and you're also introspective.
And I think that one of the things that people don't like about people that are coked up is that they want to talk about themselves.
They want to tell you how fucking badass they are.
They want to brag.
They want to talk about, like, making money.
We're going to buy this forest.
We're going to fucking...
You know what I mean?
Mike Young used to always talk about how people on coke always want to start a business with you.
And it's really kind of true.
It's like they always have these crazy grand plans.
I've never been interested in it.
I got lucky and I ducked it.
When I was a kid, I've told this story a hundred times, but I had a friend, my friend that I'm still friends with in high school, his cousin used to sell it.
And his life went down the toilet, and I watched him wither away, lost like a shitload of weight, became weird.
You know, just always on coke.
And when he wasn't on coke, he was just exhausted.
You know, it's just like, Jesus, that looks like knowing someone who got bit by a vampire.
You know, I was not curious enough to want to do it, but listening to her, you know, she knew it was bad, knew she shouldn't do it, didn't want to do it anymore.
But she'd tell you, Goddamn, what I'm doing, I love doing coke.
That totally makes sense in this case because this woman her mother was like really overbearing and her mother was like super alpha successful.
Her mother was a single mom and was like like no man's gonna fucking run me and so she was a lawyer and she ran successful business.
She had a law firm and she was like super like Intense with her daughter about achievement, about pursuing things, about, you know, don't eat the wrong foods and, you know, eat, you know, it was like really like overbearing and gave her a hard time about her weight.
Like you're too fat.
You're never going to be a model.
And like, oh, and so I guess the Coke was like, oh, free.
If you ever want to have him on the show, let me know.
He's a friend of mine.
He's a very interesting guy.
He's a doctor who works with addicts.
He's been working with addicts in Vancouver, in the slum part of Vancouver for a long time.
A lot of real down-and-out people.
And he also is very interested in alternative approaches to addiction.
He's written about ayahuasca as a way of dealing with addiction, treating addicts and all that.
But anyway, his theory is that all addiction is due to trauma.
It has nothing to do with the substance or the activity.
That's just how it manifests, right?
But it's all about psychological trauma.
It's all trying to alleviate suffering of some point, of some kind.
And it's interesting, his research sort of meshes very well with this experiment that was done, also in British Columbia.
I can't remember.
Williamson, I think, was the scientist's name.
You know those famous studies where they give rats, like, they've got a water bottle that's just water and then another one that's got coke in it?
And the rats will just keep doing the coke and they'll forget to eat and then they, you know, like, die.
Like, these people you're talking about lost all this weight and just, like, completely focused.
This guy looked at that.
He was a professor, a scientist.
He looked at that and he's like, okay, well, that's the sort of main study that everybody cites that shows that Coke is addictive and it's Coke that causes the problem and it's the substance and molecular problems.
But what if we took those rats, same kind of rats, but instead of just being in a cage where there's nothing to do, put them in a really interesting environment where there are lots of other options.
There are lots of other rats.
There are tubes to go through and things to climb and things to hide under and lots of stimulation, right?
And then let's try it.
They try it.
What happens?
The rats do the coke once or twice and then walk away from it.
Never go back.
Right.
So there's an argument to be made, a strong argument, that it's not about substances.
Like I was saying, it's about the way this substance intersects with whatever your particular suffering is.
Imagine being a rat, being stuck in a fucking fluorescent lighting room, and the fucking metal cage, and the little water bottle you gotta suck on, big tooth, ugh, the fucking life they live is dog shit.
He opened the first mountain bike shop in the country.
He's a very good businessman.
Then he went to Portland because he wanted to be in a place where you could get all your supplies for a restaurant, all the food, within a hundred mile radius.
And he studied all over the country, and he said Portland's a place where everything can be grown within 100 miles.
He sort of was ahead of the mountain biking craze, then he was ahead of the sort of farm-to-table thing, and he opened a chain called Laughing Planet, which there were like 15 or 20 of these vegetarian burrito shops in Portland.
Sold that because he had quintuple bypass surgery.
So now he's shifted to paleo, and now he's got this expanding business of paleo restaurants.
Anyway, what am I talking about?
Oh, so he would go back with these chimps.
And he told this hilarious story where he's with this chimp, and he'd go back there and smoke a joint at the end of the day, and the chimps are wandering around.
And one day this chimp comes over and sits down next to him, and he's smoking a joint, and the chimp reaches out.
Not, you know, me personally, my personal life, but being at the zoo stoned made me, like, especially edibles.
You know, I had eaten a pot something or another cookie or something like that, and I was, like, really fucked up about this.
I'm like, this is just not fair.
It's cruel.
It's cruel, and it's cruel in a way we're insensitive to.
And the joke was like, hey, man...
I watched the chimps.
They were playing with the tires, swinging around.
Looks like they're having a good time.
I'm like, yeah.
Well, you can go to prison, and you'll see dudes playing basketball.
It doesn't mean it's awesome.
People do what they have to do, and they're in prison to have fun, but they don't want to be there.
And that's the same thing with these animals.
The idea that somehow or another they're being saved...
I guess we're supposed to accept that they're doing conservation work, for sure, and that some of these animals can only exist in captivity in this day and age, or at least we have to have some of them in captivity to ensure their survival, because humans are pushing in on their area.
Where they live, but fuck man, that's, especially with intelligent animals, that's depressing as shit.
I've got a friend, I just did a podcast with him the other day, he's sort of been hired by the whole marine mammal consortium To try to help them deal with their image problem from blackfish and blah blah blah, right?
So we were talking about this and he's been working a lot in this place in Florida where the dolphins are used for therapeutic, you know, with like vets with PTSD and kids who are autistic and stuff and the dolphins seem to have a real sensitivity and there's an interaction.
And a lot of them are born in captivity.
If you let them loose, they'd be dead within hours.
You know, they don't know how to survive and stuff.
But anyway, we're talking about this.
And, you know, I said, like, okay, you know, what are you going to do about the...
I understand he has good arguments about the dolphins and the smaller animals.
But, like, what are you going to do about the orcas, man?
You know, how do you fix that?
And he said, there's no way to fix that.
Like, they just should not be there.
Because you can't build an enclosure that is even arguably big enough and interesting enough for them.
Isn't it possible that they could take an area in a bay, like a very large area, and take all the world's captive orcas and transport them to this large bay?
Like take a large area in a part of the world that we don't go, but it's habitable.
He wrote Animal Liberation, which sort of started the whole animal rights frenzy in the 70s, whenever it was.
Really interesting philosopher teaches at Princeton now, I think.
And he made a really interesting argument about using primates in drug testing.
Because, you know, the argument there is, well, they're close to humans, so their responses to pharmaceuticals and things is as close as we're going to get for our own testing.
And what he said, he's one of these guys who just thinks really clearly wherever it goes, and he doesn't give a shit.
And so his argument was...
Okay, a chimpanzee has the intelligence and sort of demonstrable awareness of a three or four-year-old kid.
So they're beings.
They're thinking.
They're experiencing.
They've got emotions.
They've got relationships.
There's no question, right?
They're not fish.
They're not, you know...
And every year, thousands of babies are born with no brain.
I forget the medical term for it, but their brain never developed in the fetus and they're born.
And really, no one deserves to be the person who decides this group of people dies, so this group of people lives, or that this monkey gets a battery cable attached to his dick.
I think sociopaths don't feel empathy, and psychopaths are prone to more violent behavior, if that makes any sense.
I think sociopaths, from what has been explained to me, and I might be butchering this, probably should look, but I think the idea being that they're not feeling empathy, like the rest of us are.
If by their actions they get ahead, but somebody else suffers, it doesn't bother them.
Whereas for you, you would do something that would hurt someone's feelings.
Here's an article in Psychology Today that explains it in a way.
Many forensic psychologists, psychiatrists, and criminologists use the terms sociopathy and psychopathy interchangeably.
Leading experts disagree on whether there are meaningful differences between the two conditions.
I contend that there are clear and significant distinctions.
Okay.
Sociopaths and psychopaths share.
This is what they share.
A disregard for the laws and social norms, a disregard for the rights of others, a failure to feel remorse or guilt, a tendency to display violent behavior.
In addition to their commonalities, sociopaths and psychopaths also have their own unique behavioral characteristics as well.
Sociopaths tend to be nervous and easily agitated.
They are volatile and prone to emotional outbursts, including fits of rage.
Psychopaths, on the other hand, are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities.
Interesting.
That's what I would think of as sociopaths.
Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people's trust.
They learn to mimic emotions.
Now, I've met people that do that, despite their inability to actually feel them and will appeal normal to unsuspecting people.
I've seen that.
I've seen that where I've had conversations with people and I realize that they're like mimicking emotions.
Like, oh yeah, man, it's horrible that that happened to him.
Like, oh, you don't care at all.
Like you're feeling like no, you know, there's like certain feelings that people have where you feel, you see it in them that they feel remorse or they feel sad or they feel empathy.
And then there's other people that are like faking that where it's like, They're doing bad acting on a soap opera.
I mean, I was on a TV show here two weeks ago or something, and it struck me how there are concentric circles of bullshit that get more intense the closer you get to the cameras.
That's so true.
You check into the hotel, and they're like, Hey, Dr. Ryan, nice to meet you.
Kind of light, but friendly, but they don't give a fuck, right?
And then you got the driver who's like, hey, is everything good?
Can I help you with that, sir?
And then you get the assistant producer who greets you at the door.
Oh, we're so thrilled you're here, Dr. Ryan!
And then you're actually on stage in front of the cameras and the shit is just like up to your fucking neck.
For a guy like that, who's probably a thousand times more famous than my level of fame, he's probably legitimately a thousand times more famous than me.
That's pretty intense fame.
He can't go anywhere.
When George Clooney shows up, helicopters will start circling the restaurant that he's at, and people will just jump out of buses with cameras and try to touch him.
And he spent some time with Johnny Depp in England.
And he said it was the most ridiculous scene you've ever seen in your life.
The guy can't go anywhere.
Everywhere he goes, there's people with earpieces in and suits.
And they follow him everywhere.
They're peripheral.
And you try to go outside.
He was going outside to have a cigarette.
And they swarm on him.
We got your ride somewhere.
Do you need something like you're always a cater to?
Yeah, so he lives in this weird insulated world We like runs from restaurant to restaurant and has chefs come over his house and cook He can't go to stores everywhere he goes.
He's being swarmed upon and for him Apparently it happened after the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that like took things to this critical nuclear place Where is that right now where he said just like he's a story and He's an object of attention everywhere he goes.
It's got to be really hard to keep your shit together when you're like that.
He was married to Olivia Wilde for seven years, you know?
So he's sort of like, he's like in this world, a strange world.
And he was talking, his father was this crazy Italian prince who hung out with Fellini and Brigitte Bardot and Salvador Dali.
And, you know, he sort of started the Dolce Vita in Italy in the 50s and squandered this huge family fortune, like in his lifetime on women and boats and parties and all this shit, you know?
Anyway, Tao is a great flamenco guitarist, and we were talking about, like, how do you get in, you know, when did you start playing guitar?
And he said, well, when I was 13, the Rolling Stones came to, like, Rome or wherever they were playing, and my dad is an old friend of Keith Richards, and he took me to the hotel where the Stones were staying, and Keith had, like, a whole floor to himself, right?
And we went in and there were all these people and all this scene.
And actually Keith Richards' father was there, he mentioned.
And my dad mentioned to Keith, like, hey, Tao's learning guitar.
And Keith had a flamenco guitar there.
And he picked it up and he did a few, like, riffs.
And he said to him, if you want to learn to play guitar, learn flamenco.
Because if you can play flamenco, you can play anything.
Now, obsession is defined, you know, in the psychological terms as a pathology, right?
Obsessive-compulsive disorder.
And, you know, this is a very subversive kind of thought, but it's like, in our society, this relates back to the psychopaths who attain great success.
I mean, are most really successful people responding to some deep trauma?
You know what I mean?
Like they say, comedians, you know, there's some need for approval and, you know, make people laugh, make people love you, you know, because whatever your family structure...
I don't know as many comedians as you do, but, you know, you always hear that, right?
You know, because I needed the attention in actors.
Like, they need people looking at them.
They need to be on stage.
They're, like, drinking that up because there's some need.
I think you probably wouldn't be as good as if you guys were like, man, look, the Stones were our age when they got together.
Let's just fucking do this, guys.
If you really had this desire to produce something that people love.
That's what you kind of have to do.
I think to get to be a Keith Richards, you have to have this desire to produce something that people are going to love.
Because when you listen to his guitar riffs, or any great guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughan, anyone, they have to have this deep desire to connect with just the correct sounds that's coming out of their mind, their imagination, their Their skill, their interpretation of the moment.
That's why people like when someone does a guitar solo, the idea being that this guy's just feeling it.
It's not the exact same solo every time.
Every time they're doing it, if a guy just starts riffing and everybody starts cheering and going along with it, you want to see what's in that guy right at that moment.
Expresses itself through all the discipline and all the years that he's practiced guitar and then the finger coordination that it's able to achieve.
And you know, there's some shit that's like, you could tell they're just kind of, they're just going fast.
And when you see Stevie Ray Vaughan's version of Little Wing, you see a great guitarist Inhabiting and loving another great guitarist, you know, there's something really beautiful about that.
There's a thing that like the whole song builds to this fucking wild guitar lead near the end.
And like if I'm working out or running or something, I always have that on my playlist because I just there's like energy comes out of the ether, you know, it's amazing.
Well, I often wonder if what we're seeing when we see great resonating forms of expression, whether it's art or whether it's comedy or any music...
I always wonder if what we're looking at is a mathematical equation, if we're looking at like a yin and a yang, an ebb and a pull, and that the ebb, you know, whatever it was that created this great deficit responds, the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit responds with this incredible work of art to sort of make up for all the trauma that it experienced when it was young,
which is why It's really tough to find someone who had this really ultra-privileged life, who was accepted and loved and nurtured in every way, who becomes this really fascinating, great artist.
What you usually find is these people that are in pain and torn up.
Exactly.
Yeah, and I often wonder if we're looking at it in a cultural context, and we sort of, oh, that guy's an asshole, or his life sucked, or she was abused, or he was neglected.
And we're looking at it in terms of like these definitions that we've already categorized in our mind.
We're looking at a Jimi Hendrix, this young black man in this incredibly racist world who comes along right at the moment of this psychedelic acceptance where the whole world, especially young people, are turning on in a way that they never have before.
We had this thing we did at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
He got a star earlier this year.
And Stephen Root and Candy Alexander and I were joking around about how Phil had these notes.
Like, he would have, uh, his script would be, he would have tabs for each scene, and, like, these different color tabs for every scene that he was in, and everything would be highlighted, and he would have notes and stickums, and everything was, like, super organized, and we were always like, shh, can I borrow your script?
You know, like, nobody could find their fucking script, but Phil had his shit in a binder, he would take his thing, he would punch holes in them, stick them in a binder, you know, he was super-duper organized and anal about that kind of shit, but one of his greatest moments, you know, When we were friends, somewhere along the line he started smoking weed.
Like, all the time.
This was before I actually smoked weed.
And he did it because he had a lot of problems.
There's a lot of marital issues, obviously, that led to his wife killing him.
But he enjoyed, like, after work was done, not while he was there, but after work was done, he enjoyed getting high.
He loved getting high and going on a boat.
And he had a boat, and he would take his boat out, and he would just love being high, sailing.
And he was telling me one time, we were hanging out in his room, it was after filming, and he was high.
And he was telling me that story about him working at this club and holding the speakers for Hendrix.
And to this day, it's like one of my favorite memories of him.
You know, because I could see him as this young guy.
It's like he was so fascinated by everything.
He's the only guy that I've ever met that I went to a strip club with and it didn't feel creepy.
Because he sat down.
He sat down.
I could say this now because he's dead.
If he was alive, I'd probably not tell you this story.
But he used to love to go to this place called Bob's Classy Lady.
TV shows, especially news radio, was one of the easiest jobs I've ever had in my life, in terms of the actual performance of it.
I mean, you would be a little nervous before, make sure you knew your lines, make sure you get it right, but the cast was so fucking good that, like, you were working with these people that were so funny, all you had to do was just do your thing.
It was me in a scene with Andy Dick.
All I had to do was just go, Andy, what are you talking about, man?
What are you talking about?
And then he would do his wackiness, and then I would do whatever I had to say.
And the hard part was not laughing.
It was remembering your lines first, and then not laughing.
The people who came in, you know, Fox didn't think they were strong enough to run a show, so they fucked up their pilot, they fucked up all the episodes, and they tanked a great idea.
You know, they were baseball fans, and they wanted to make a hilarious sitcom about baseball akin to Married with Children for Baseball.
My comedy got me to the MTV thing, but the sitcom, they had already written it.
They just cast me.
I met them, and they said, you could be that guy.
And so, boom, all of a sudden, I'm in Hollywood, and they're putting makeup on me.
Is that when you moved out here?
I did the pilot first, so I came out here to visit.
I got one of those Oakwood apartments in Burbank that everybody automatically goes to.
They have these rented furnished apartments.
They have cable.
It's beautiful.
You just move right in.
Sleep in some bed that some dude before he's been farting and jerking off into.
And I did that, and then it got picked up, and then I got an apartment.
I signed a lease because I figured, oh, this is going to stay.
I had the Oakwood for a couple of weeks, and I go, oh, this show's doing well, and they thought it was going to get picked up, and then it got canceled.
One of the things about sitcoms, about auditioning for them, it's so unnatural.
You're in this room, there's a table, there's these people that you don't know, and you're supposed to pretend that, you know, we're on a tropical island and we're trying to find where the first aid cabin is.
You know, it's fake.
And a lot of times people are like, oh my god, my life depends on this, my bills...
And some people have never had to perform under pressure before.
But being a stand-up helps that tremendously because you're accustomed to being nervous.
And then fighting helps that tremendously because you're accustomed to being nervous.
So those two things, you know, I performed under pressure more than the average person even though I didn't have...
A lot of people that come from that environment do, because I think it's really hostile, and they're all competing to get their stuff in the air.
And there's a lot of backstabbing.
There's people doing favors for writers and trying to get their stuff in.
And there's a lot of...
There's a lot of greatness that comes from that, too.
I mean, Saturday Night Live, if you look at the overall body of work and you just cherry-pick greatness, my God, I mean, you have this incredible bouquet of John Belushi and Phil Hartman and Adam Sandler and Chris Rock.
Yeah, that's way better than if you're a Beverly Hills housewife.
You're going to write some shit that's only based on what's going to sell.
You know what I mean?
They'll create these things like, okay, how is this going to work the best?
I don't mean to single them out, but just like some people that write some books where it's pretty obvious as they're writing the book, they're kind of bullshitting who they are and what they're projecting.
You know, you're talking earlier about that whole ebb and flow idea, the mathematical sort of it all equals out at the end.
I've thought about that a lot, not so much in terms of individuals, though it makes sense, but I've thought about that a lot in terms of historical moments, historical periods.
You know, like Vietnam, the late 60s, right?
Like 65 to 71. That's when more Americans are dying in Vietnam than any other period earlier than that.
Before they ramped up, it wasn't as many.
So you've got all this conflict, all these riots in the streets.
You've got Selma and Martin Luther King and all this agitation.
And at the same time, you've got Jimi Hendrix.
You've got the Beatles.
You've got all this music we're talking about.
Amazing literature coming out of that.
Fashion, craziness, tie-dyes and afros.
It's like...
When the shit hits the fan, it's really interesting, you know?
And interesting people rise to the top, whereas when things are stable, the interesting people just, you know, they don't get anywhere, because the structures are rigid and controlling, you know?
Well, sometimes there's a need for reform and change that makes these interesting things blossom almost out of pressure, almost out of like two rocks pushing together in the Creator.
There's this effect that happens because people are pushed into a certain way.
And in that sense, there's always been the argument that we need a certain amount of evil to appreciate love, to appreciate happiness.
And good times.
We almost need a certain amount.
This is in certainly no way supporting war, but people who look at war, like people in this country especially, as just something, and they don't think about it deeply, they don't think about it...
In a way where they comprehend the loss of lives and the sadness and the sorrow.
They just look at it as those are our heroes.
They got to do what they got to do over there so we could do what we do over here.
For someone who goes over there and experiences it, it's probably got to be really weird to see that sort of cookie-cutter version of it being expressed by people.
I have quite a few friends that have been overseas and been involved in the war, and you talk to them, and man, they have sorrow.
They have some horrible stories.
They have some shit they don't like to remember.
They have some really difficult things.
You know this Brian Williams thing that happened in the news?
One of the things that I took from it, especially hard, was not that Brian Williams was not telling the truth, because I think he's a fucking Hollywood guy.
He's an actor that reads the prompter instead of a script.
He acts like a standard actor.
I mean, like, they have the tie and they talk like most of them do.
I made a mistake.
You know, like, come on, man.
You're fucking lying.
You lied.
You lied about some shit that went down.
But what hit me harder was the pilot that was involved.
Because there was a pilot involved that gave his version of the story and did some interviews.
And he said...
That they were in a helicopter, and the helicopter took small arms fire, and that the helicopter in front of them was the one that got hit with the RPG. And it wasn't the one that Brian Williams was in.
But he was telling his story about this, and then people started questioning, no, you weren't in the helicopter with Brian Williams.
This guy was in the helicopter with Brian Williams.
And so the guy says, man, you know what?
I don't really completely remember, but it's hard for me to go over this.
I had put it aside.
But now that I'm being forced to remember it, the nightmares are coming back and I'm having a really hard time sleeping.
Oh, really?
And he was talking about it.
He said, I don't really want to talk about it anymore.
You know, I said what I had to say.
This guy is certainly not lying.
He certainly did serve.
He certainly did get shot at.
He certainly did see some horrific things.
There's no doubt about that.
No one questions that.
They're just questioning his version of events versus a couple other people have their version of the events.
And it's just so much trauma involved in this guy's experiences over there that he's like, I had tried my best to forget about it.
This was what I can remember.
When people ask me about my experience with Brian Williams, this is what happened.
And he gave a very logical account of it.
The reason why we were an hour late, he said, is because we had to drop off a payload.
We dropped off our payload, and then it took us about an hour, and then we went to the site where the guys landed, and then we all...
Had huddled down together in a sandstorm, and it was an incredibly traumatic event for all involved.
So, I'm not giving Brian Williams a free pass, because he remembered this in a fucked up way, because I do think he bullshitted it.
I think he added a bunch of shit to his version of it, and put himself in more danger, because he didn't think that anybody had put the pieces together.
And when it came out...
Look, his story as itself would have been just as good if he said the helicopter in front of us got hit with an RPG. It doesn't make you better because you almost died.
You definitely almost died anyway.
Like his version, the real version, he almost died.
The real version, he still was in a convoy that got shot at.
His helicopter didn't.
They were all forced to land and endure a sandstorm for two days.
I mean, that version is amazing.
You don't have to...
But it's indicative of the kind of bullshit artists that we have that are reading off the news that he didn't like that version.
But it is, as we started this conversation, talking about how unreliable memory is, right?
And Milan Kundera said, memory is not the opposite of forgetting, it's a way of forgetting, right?
Because we do, we remember things, you know, based on emotions, and over time it changes, and especially a story like that.
I know a guy who's a compulsive liar.
I mean, within 15 minutes of meeting this guy, he told me he had trained with the SEALs, he had played semi-professional basketball in Europe, and he owned this amazing apartment that we were in that I knew he didn't own, his boss owned, who was this billionaire guy.
And he was the private pilot of this billionaire guy, this friend of mine, right?
And so I knew this guy was full of shit, but I also knew he flies a fucking Learjet for a living.
He's like on standby to fly this guy wherever around the world.
Like, dude, that's a good story in itself.
You don't need to lie, you know?
The guy who's working at Starbucks, okay, you make up some shit.
Nope, just ego and alcohol and a bunch of craziness, but smoking cigarettes tell me about how he's just sparring eight rounds with a world champion, which isn't totally impossible.
I had this guy in Joe Schilling recently, he's one of the best kickboxers in the world, and he admitted on the podcast he smokes cigarettes on a regular basis.
It's fucking crazy!
But he's also, outside of that, very dedicated as an athlete.
It's ridiculous that he smokes cigarettes in an endurance sport.
But he's a bad motherfucker.
I mean, bonafide, legit, trains all day.
This guy wasn't training.
This guy's drinking all the time.
I know he wasn't kickboxing.
He's nuts.
But he almost can't help himself.
He starts talking, and he just comes out, and then he gets away.
And he tells me some Latin word for a star system somewhere.
And he said, like, again, within 15 minutes, he said that he was the highest paid artist in the world because he had designed that Atlas thing in front of Rockefeller Center, which was the highest, like, most expensive piece of art, any whatever, like, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
And I was fascinated.
And the guy was a super good-looking dude.
He had a little beard, and he was big and dark.
He looked like Satan, like the Mephistopheles kind of thing.
And I thought he was bullshitting me.
I thought that my friend had put him up to it, because I was high, and I was just like...
Well, she's worked with all sorts of people, but her sort of specialization is...
I remember going in with her the first time I visited her at work.
She was running a mental hospital with like double doors and bars over the windows.
These criminally insane people who had killed their kids and, you know, like crazy shit, right?
And we went in there.
I wasn't prepared, man.
We went in and it was just like lunatics.
And there was this woman, like must have been in her mid-50s, lying on her back in a little nightgown, no underwear, with her like arms and legs, you know, like a crab, doing a crab thing.
And we walk in, and it's like this, you know, pussy, and the whole scene just scared the shit out of me.
And Casilda just started laughing, like, you crazy old lady, what are you doing?
Get up from there!
She just, like, laughs.
And the thing that I didn't understand until I hung out with her is that people who are psychotic know they're psychotic.
And so they kind of know how ridiculous they are.
And as a doctor, when she laughs, she laughs in such a loving, accepting, I get you kind of way that it creates this instant rapport and they start laughing.
I imagine you'd be really good in that kind of an environment, not just martial arts, but kids in general, because there's sort of an immediate respect.
You know, interesting enough, teaching was one of the things that really helped me on Fear Factor.
Which Fear Factor seems like it's such a stupid show.
And it was kind of dumb.
But...
It was some people that were really freaked out and didn't know how to deal with the stress of competition.
And I was so used to it.
I was so used to not just teaching, but coaching.
Even when I retired, my friend Dimitri was fighting in this big national tournament and I was in his corner.
And I pumped him up.
It was one of his best performances ever.
I'm good at getting inside of people's heads, especially people that I know, and telling them what they need to hear to get them to go out there and fire them the fuck up.
And telling them what you're really good at, man.
You can do this.
And it's all about not having any doubt.
It's all about knowing how to stay intense and focused and go out there and do what needs to be done.
And giving them this sort of technical advice as well as this emotional pick-me-up.
Some people have a knack for that, and I developed it by teaching kids.
Because kids are always freaked out, man.
I took a lot of kids to tournaments.
And they'd be fighting other little kids, and most likely they wouldn't get hurt.
But when you've got a little seven-year-old in front of you, and you're putting pads on his head to protect him from kicks, and you're like, listen, you've just got to stay focused and don't be afraid.
All you need to think about is what you're doing.
Don't think about what happens if it goes wrong.
Never think of that.
Always think about what are you trying to do.
And if things go wrong, reset and think about it again.
What is my objective?
What am I trying to do?
Stay defensive, keep moving, never stand in one place, never stand put, always keep fainting, always keep the opponent guessing, and I'd go over all the most important things to them and then pump them up and tell them, you can do this.
When you get through this, you're going to feel so good.
I know you feel terrible now, but as terrible as you feel now, when it's over, you're going to feel so good.
And when they would do it and they would compete, even if they would lose, they'd be so relieved.
I'm like, see?
Now you feel good.
And this experience, this harrowing, stressful experience, can give birth to this new appreciation of peace.
I read a book recently, a fascinating book called Paradise Made in Hell.
Rebecca Solnit, and it's about disaster sociology, right?
So it's studying people's behavior in disasters, right?
And so it's fascinating because the idea we have is, like, that's when people get really crazy and they loot and pillage and, you know, oh, now I can rape and nobody will catch me and there are no cops.
And in fact, what happens is the opposite.
That's when people are most generous, most kind.
They form communities.
They meet the neighbors they never said a fucking word to for 10 years.
They're, like, taking care of each other.
And people, and it sort of relates to war, too, you know.
People look back on it, and they say, yeah, there was a lot of horrible shit.
And the main guy, there's this really moving passage where this guy who sort of started the field, who's no hippie, he teaches at Nebraska or something, he's like a very straight-up scientist, but he said, the best way to think about disasters is not as a disaster, but as relief from the disaster that is normal life.
Because in normal life, we're all isolated, we're all suffering alone.
And he's like, man, when the shit hits the fan, that's when things get really wonderful.
And I think one of the things that people miss in their lives that leads people to become very...
Stagnant and disappointed in their existence is that there's no thrills.
I think that's what leads people to get divorced or to become drug addicts or to be self-destructive.
it's almost like people need thrills and when you get stuck in a really secure job where you know all right chris ryan for the next 40 hours you know you're going to be stuck in this spot or you know eight hours a day for the next you know seven days five days whatever it is you're going to be stuck in this spot and you're going to be at this desk and you're going to be dealing with all these cases that come your way and you're going to have to file them and then you're going to have to write a report and it's going to suck and you're going to just be lumped in to this group of people that are all doing the same thing
and you're going to do it every week and at the end of the week you know when when the day is done then you can go home and you can relax But there's going to be no thrills.
The biggest thrill would be merging onto the highway.
Oh my god, here we go!
Like, other than that, there's nothing.
There's no ups.
It's all just steady and normal.
And I think that's one of the reasons why people have so much road rage and stress, and there's no real experience.
I often say in Spanish, the word aislar means both to insulate and to isolate.
So we, you know, and this gets into this whole book I'm writing, like civilization is largely an attempt to insulate ourselves from danger, from strangers, from any sort of predators, you know, from anything that could be a danger to us.
We try to insulate ourselves from it.
And then at the end, we're isolated, right?
Because we're surrounded by this margin, this moat that protects us from what?
From life, right?
From the thing that makes you feel alive.
Like, okay, you want to be completely safe?
You know, get inside this coffin.
You know, and, you know, take some anesthetics and you won't feel a goddamn thing.
It seems like we're all doing our part in this existence and we're moving past what we used to be from single-celled organisms to higher primates to some weird thing right now that's a combination of conscious being and physical animal.
And we're moving in this sort of advancing direction and it's not done.
We're a part of a great process.
The stage that you and I are in, they're going to look back at us and laugh the way we look back at Isaac Newton wearing a powdered wig or any of the...
Weirdos that figured out all sorts of incredible things back in history, but also believed a bunch of stupid shit as well.
You look back at Copernicus and the things that he discovered, and it's unbelievable and amazing.
But today, it's like, duh.
Everybody already knows that.
Look at the life that you live.
Imagine being Darwin and trying to express these ideas that you formulated over the course of your life's work to a bunch of Christian scientists, which is what he was dealing with.
It's hilarious.
If you go back and think about it today, his challenges of this idea of this monotheistic world that the scientist pretty much universally existed in at that time and tries to push forth these crazy theories that he's coming up with, Uniquely, on his own.
I mean, the resistance that he must have experienced to something that today is instantaneously accepted by everyone that's in academia, in science, I mean, almost across the board, his ideas are accepted.
So we look back at those times and we go, God, they're fucking so stupid back then.
Well, they're going to do that to us.
And it's not going to be that long.
I mean, with Darwin, you're talking about a few hundred years.
We're in the middle of this weird process of human beings changing and becoming more aware of all the flaws and the folly in our civilization and our existence.
And all the shit we're fighting for today, all the protests like Black Lives Matter and, you know, people fighting for rights of, you know, everyone across the board from women to gays to this to that.
What we're doing is we're trying to patch up the holes in this crazy system with agitation and anger and loud voices and social media campaigns and it's essentially all just trying to make this thing into a more coherent, more advanced version of what it is now and then that in turn will find the inherent problems in its existence and it will move just like the monkeys from You know,
200,000 years ago that became human beings were fighting off all these different creatures and realized, like, yo, we gotta make houses.
It's like yeah, it's always always in process always in process But amazing to think that right now we are at the pinnacle of human knowledge We are at the peak the tip of the spear as far as like everything that people have learned and figured out up until now We have this database we've accumulated from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of records and then you know after that it gets a little sketchy and You go a few thousand years, things get real weird in different languages.
Things get even weirder and it gets more vague and more strange, more difficult to decipher.
But all that data that we've accumulated and the access to it that we have today, unprecedented as far as we know in people.
It's amazing.
It's amazing to be at that time.
When you have a question, you just like with a psychology, psychopathy thing, we just bang, we just Google it and we didn't have to go to a library, we didn't have to order a book, we didn't have to Go to a bookstore or go to a class.
You just instantaneously get that information.
And I think that that is accelerating us in a way that we can't even comprehend.