Greg Fitzsimmons and Joe Rogan expose capitalism’s exploitation of underpaid Chinese workers, comparing it to historical slavery while questioning NAFTA/WTO’s role in enabling corporate labor abuses. They contrast Foxconn’s dormitory-suicide rates with the psychological toll of loneliness, linking stand-up comedy’s rise to community over rugged individualism. The discussion pivots to animal ethics—coyotes’ deceptive attacks, hamster captivity absurdities—and parallels human aggression reduction via selective breeding, like Radiolab’s fox experiment. Rogan critiques unions for inefficiency and fragmentation, citing UFC’s Culinary Union disputes and Writers Guild’s digital residuals. They debate psychedelics’ potential for healing trauma, with Harvard/Yale studies showing 70% of terminal patients report lasting mystical experiences, while TM offers non-judgmental mental relief. Fitzsimmons’s lost Mad comics and Rogan’s childhood comic obsession highlight nostalgia for unfiltered subcultures, clashing with modern political correctness. The episode ends questioning whether art’s provocative edge or systemic suppression better serves societal growth. [Automatically generated summary]
Isn't there a funny metaphor that he's got all these little elves working to make children's toys for no money, and then you think about our toys do come from China?
The whole idea of getting a bunch of people to work for way less than they would ever make here is kind of a weird accepted thing that we have as far as our items, our electronics, and the things that we love.
Almost all of them are made by people in another country working for shit money.
Yeah, it's basically, you know, there used to be slavery, and with slavery, you paid the help nothing, or very little, and you had to house them, and you had to feed them, and you had to heal them.
You go to a third world country, it's slavery, but you don't have to deal with any of the overhead.
I'm not super wealthy, but if I was, I would really be thinking about a different agenda than making more.
You really look at the people that create an economy within their own country, within their own community, and at the same time, live the life that they'll never fucking eat that money up anyway.
I mean, look at you.
You got your own little economy.
You got a little podcast coming off of yours and you got people that work for you and comedians that you bring on the road and, you know, it's everywhere.
But because we know that these people are poor, not we, we don't have any iPhone factories, but because they know these people are poor, they can continue doing that.
You know, they'll somehow or another come up with some justification for what Kind of damage tapping an oil well do or oil spills or this kind of shit.
But this guy said to me, he goes, well, you know, if you look at the numbers, it's actually very similar to the number of people that commit suicide in an overall population.
Because you got to look at it.
There's like 500,000 people working at this factory.
You know, I've talked to quite a few people now with what you would call depression or have had depression and overcome it or have had any sort of mental issues and had to take medication for it and overcome it.
And I just think we vary so much, man.
I think our minds and what we can do, our norm, what makes us happy, whatever your state is, what you need to achieve to get out of the muck, the down feeling, and what another person needs to achieve could be very different.
You know, it's just like everything else, like people that are tall, people that are short, freckles, whatever the fuck it is, we vary so much that we gotta be really careful when we, like, look at, like, how could he do that?
He had such a good life.
Like, yeah, might have been a good life for you on the outside.
But that guy was in, like, some sort of chemical hell all the time.
Yeah, the exterior maybe doesn't have much to do with the interior.
I mean, if you talk about the statistics of people committing suicide, I wonder if it's not about the same in the lower class as it is in the upper class.
You know, I mean, I don't I don't I don't know if that's really the factor because I think there's quite a few people like they said Mexico is one of the happiest countries on Earth.
Yeah, I think there's there's a benefit to that that we don't recognize because we're so wrapped up in the idea of accumulating money accumulating dollars that we forget like that's only part of wealth The really intelligent wealth is keeping the vibe good as long as possible.
Whether it's happiness with friends, happiness with co-workers, happiness with what you do for a living, pride in your accomplishments, whatever the fuck it is that it takes to keep it.
And I would rarely quote a commercial, I think, when it's funny.
But it's like this chick and she's saying goodbye to a guy and it's an insurance commercial.
And she's in like a big prairie dress with a bonnet and he's the real cowboy and he's putting his hat on and he's like, I gotta go off into the sunset.
And she's pulling his leg, no, no.
And then he rides off towards the sunset and then he just falls off his horse.
Being loners, it's an important thing, I think, as comedians, obviously.
That's a solo craft.
Podcasting is, you know, a solo craft.
But at the same time, to feel part of a group.
And I think, like, you and I have both gone to the comedy store.
It's become part of our lives.
Mine for the first time, yours for the second act.
And It's like a great feeling to be doing your solo thing, but you're surrounded by other people that have the same background and are following the same path.
It's a way better vibe than it was the first time I was there.
I really believe it's the internet.
I think the internet has inspired more people to try stand-up.
That we're on, like, maybe the right frequency to become a comic.
They're recognizing their own personality, all the shit that we talk about that's wrong with us.
Like, oh, maybe I'm just a comic.
Like, maybe, like, I might be able to do that.
I make people laugh at work.
I might literally be able to do that.
I think more people were inspired by that.
And then also, when you hear a bunch of comics doing these podcasts, talking about comedy, like, as an art form, and...
What's involved in it and you kind of get a sense like this guy described it to me and he became an open miker And now he's actually a working comic he started out doing it from hearing us talk about it on the podcast He's been doing comedy like I think he said like two and a half years now But he said it's like taking a master's class in comedy He listened to Bill Burr talk about how he writes jokes.
He listened to Greg Fitzsimmons talk about the differences between his act now and his act then, where the errors are.
You get Joey Diaz talking about, like, how he learned to let go and how he had fear when he was on stage and always worried about people accepting him.
And one day he was like, fuck you.
And I remember that turnaround for Joey.
There's this, like, radical turnaround where he was always really funny offstage, but he had a hard time being funny onstage.
We were living in Boston, and we could go in any direction.
There was probably 200 or 300 rooms between Boston Comedy.
Between Sherry Hirsch, between Norm LaFoe, Billy Downs, Paul Barkley, they all had like Boston Comedy, Barry Katz's organization had many, many, many rooms.
And if you were a good comic and you were reliable, and again, if you had a car and you would pick up the headliner, You would literally call a guy like Mike Clark and he would fill seven weekends on the spot in one phone call.
And then you'd call Barry Katz and he'd fill seven weekends.
And like, you know, in a week you talk to five agents and your year is booked six nights a week.
And then all you got to do is play softball, go to the movies and drive to the gig at night.
It says, a disposable tampon pad user produces a dump truck of menstrual waste in their lifetime, and it's showing you this giant fucking dump truck, which probably doesn't have only tampons in it, but...
Well, we were down in Florida one time, me and, you know, Mike Gibbons, my buddy Mike, and this other guy, the guy whose girlfriend became a hooker, as a matter of fact.
And there was a water slide park, and it was locked.
And we got through the chain link fence, and we went in, and my buddy turned the water on.
It was like a real rudimentary roadside water park.
And we started going down the slide in the middle of the night.
It's like fucking, you know, midnight.
And I remember thinking, like, I would not have had that much fun during the day.
What if they figure out a way to manipulate genetics to the point where you could become your wife and your wife could become you, like literally become you, and then fuck you?
There's so many little secrets that women have, and there's things you wonder about their soul, and what they're really thinking when you're talking, and all those little subtle things.
And psychologically, if I had to analyze, with all due respect, and this is, again, just my opinion, I think the reason why those like savage type sexual scenarios like savage lustful crazy things, ball gags and spitting in your mouth and you know like a lot of the crazy shit that seems to excite people unexpectedly you know when you talk about like the average American woman And then you talk about them.
I don't know exactly what Fifty Shades of Grey is.
I've told this story, but just in the nature of this discussion, I got the first job that I ever did in Hollywood, that stupid hardball show.
I had this situation where...
I came out here, didn't have any friends, and I was out here filming it for like two weeks, and didn't have a girlfriend in LA, didn't know anybody, so I'd just go to the comedy store and go home.
And we had this scene that we were doing with me and this girl, and she gave me a hug.
And she didn't even give me a hug, like a sexual hug.
It wasn't like I was attracted.
I mean, she was very attractive, but it wasn't like that.
She was like, aww!
She came over and gave me a hug, and my whole body just tangled.
And I realized, like, right there immediately, I was like, I need this in my life.
This is something, like, if you don't have, you feel dull.
Your life feels dulled down.
And unfortunately, whether it's because of genetics, or because of diet, or because of fucking fill in the blank, where some people just aren't That attractive to other people.
And that's not a politically correct thing to say, but that's exactly what it is.
And so they're super excited about someone being excited about them.
It's just the problem is there's a lot of, like, overly needy people out there, a lot of crazy people out there, a lot of mean people out there, a lot of insult people that will insult you just to get a rise out of you.
And girls have to deal with that way more than we do.
It's the worst thing in the world when you see a guy hit on a girl and then the girl refutes him and you're like, fuck you bitch, I didn't like you anyway.
That is disgusting.
You realize guys like that are the reason why chicks are fucking weirded out by dudes.
Someone who hits on you and then when you say no, they get angry at you.
All of a sudden, from I want to fuck you to I want to hit you.
That's something, fortunately, we don't have to deal with.
I mean, certainly, I think there's a lot of factors.
I think that's a big part of it, though, definitely.
I think the other part of it is that, like, I think for a lot of men, it's, like, very frustrating to try to figure out how to get someone to choose you over, you know, X guys, X number of guys.
It's crazy that guys will, some guys will go, like, all out, like, with diamonds and shit, and, like, giant watches with crusted and diamonds, and they know, like, look, I am only gonna attract dumb hoes.
You walk out there like a long path through this thick wire mesh, and you sleep in the middle of the lion sanctuary.
Periodically, throughout the day, they release animals for the lions to chase and kill in front of you.
You're brushing your teeth, and you see some poor giraffe stumble out, look left, look right, and you see them run towards it and take it down like, fucking Christ!
You hear bones snap, and one of them's got the neck, and the thing's flopping around, it's trying to kick, and they're tearing its guts apart, and you're 20 feet away.
Anyway, I had this feral cat, and when it was time, like, most of the time I could pet him, but there was occasionally times when you try to pick him up, he'll fight you to the death.
Her and her boyfriend were living in this apartment and underneath it there was like a cat that had given birth to a bunch of kittens.
And so like she kind of freaked out like, oh my God, these poor little things, they're wild and they're hissing at people.
So they set traps for them because they were like, you know, they would go out to their car and there's like this litter of kittens like living under your house.
It was really depressing to her.
So her and her boyfriend decided to trap them, trap the cats, and you know, they were little demons, man.
You know, it reminded me of when you talked about grabbing him in the laundry basket.
Do you remember back in Boston, you were out one night with Jennifer, and I was home, and I swear to God, on my father's grave this happened.
I rented Batman at the Blockbuster, and I put it in, and I'm sitting at home, and I'm watching it, and then all of a sudden I see this shadow.
And then I turn my head and I see another shadow.
And I look up and there's a bat flying around the apartment.
And I'm like, what?
And I'm scared shitless of bats.
Like, it's like my thing.
And it's like, ever since I was a kid, my aunt had this bar near her, and they had bats, and they would be telling me they were fruit bats, and if they bite you, you'll get rabies, and you'll die.
And we would always be outside playing tag at night, and the fucking bats would fly by, and I'd freak out.
And so, I'm alone in the apartment, and there's a bat flying around, and Batman is on TV. And so, all I knew is they go in your hair, which I think is, like, not even true.
And he says, the coyote comes out, and the dog starts wagging its tail.
Like, look, my friend is here.
But meanwhile, that coyote will eat that beagle.
The beagle thinks everybody's like him.
You know, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, the food gets put into a bowl, and his tail wags, and he waddles his little fucking chubby body over to the bowl, and he eats.
And meanwhile, outside, it's this thing.
His ribs are showing, and it's getting...
Big, long face just designed for snatching shit up.
I mean, you know, when you leave the eggs there, some of them they'll, like, I guess, like, some of them sometimes they'll peck away at their eggs and they'll eat them.
And you have to, like, make sure that they don't do that.
But when they get broody, when they get broody is when they think that somehow or another one of these eggs, even though there's no rooster, is going to become a baby.
So they sit on it and they don't want to get off of it.
And then they start pecking at their belly and fluffing it up and it gets ugly.
But you can fix it as long as you catch it early.
You catch it early, you just put them on a perch.
So it was a smaller box and the coyote got under it and smashed the bottom of it and stole the chicken.
Well, it's almost like we've got this hamster that's in a cage in our house, which is really, to me, the saddest thing in the world because he's alone and nobody holds him.
My daughter picks him up like once a week for about 20 minutes, tops.
There's a park in North Hollywood that you could go to, and these squirrels, apparently people have been feeding them forever.
So they come up to you and they see you and they're like, you?
You got something for me?
You got something for me?
And I watched this one dude, this old Chinese guy, he laid down on a blanket and he had a bag of peanuts and he would just slowly like reach his hand out and the squirrels would come over and just take it from him.
They were so confident.
I mean, he's holding the peanut, they're just taking it from him, and they just step back just a little bit and they would eat it.
Wolf liked the man because he was giving him food, but it weeded out the vicious ones until they got smaller and cuter, and we crafted them to be the little lapdogs that we wanted.
The crazy thing is how short of a time it takes to do that, to change these animals.
Like, we don't know how long it took before wolves became dogs, but...
They did this experiment.
They did a...
I was listening to this podcast on Radiolab.
I forget the name of it, but it was about wolves.
And they did this experiment on...
Oh, it was about dogs.
Dogs and their wild nature, whatever the fuck it was.
But they did this experiment with foxes, where this guy was raising foxes.
And whenever he would go towards the cage where the fox were...
If the foxes were scared of him, if they, like, feared him, if there was any, like, aggression towards him, he'd kill those foxes.
So the only foxes that he let stay alive were the foxes that were actually, like, happy to see people.
And then over time, they did this over a period of, like, ten years, they literally changed the way the foxes looked.
They changed the way their face looked.
Their face became smaller.
Their bones became more petite.
They became different colors.
Their colors changed.
Their overall, even the males, their bodies became much more feminine.
And they became domesticated like in 10 years to the point where you would go near the fox cage and they would wag their tail and like whimper to be near you.
It was something about the reaction to adrenaline.
That some of these animals didn't have the same reaction to adrenaline, the same response to seeing strangers.
And that those, by favoring those...
You sort of domesticated this animal like very quickly and the idea behind it was they were trying to make an analogy towards people like that we're kind of doing that with society if you look at the way people used to be like there was some study recently about hunter-gatherers and the difference between their bones and our bones that their bones were much more dense and because these people were working from the time they were babies I mean they just never stopped like picking things up and Climbing
hills and like they were constantly at work.
But we're becoming like more and more fragile as we sit at desks all day and sit in our car to get to our desk and sit on the couch to watch TV after you're done and then read a book in bed.
I mean fucking we're falling apart.
We're like mush.
And that, you know, when you really think about that, like that's kind of very similar to what is happening with those foxes.
It's just a matter of preferring one type of behavior, not breeding with the other ones.
And I think their premise was about like the best way to eliminate like war.
And eliminate all these different negative aspects of our culture would be for, and people have said this, for people like that to just, people to stop fucking them.
Well, if you think about it, and stay with me on this because it's a little dark, but if the people that are natural soldiers, they are going to war, and they are dying without breeding as much as the guys that are afraid to go to war.
People are taking those Land Cruisers, the old ones that look like Jeeps, and even the newer ones, like after that, and they're fixing them up and selling them for over $100,000.
There's a company called Icon, and they make incredible cars, man.
I mean, it's like you're talking about very, very expensive shit, and I agree.
I mean, it's not necessarily something that I would buy, because it is a lot of fucking money.
But they take these, like, Broncos, and they take an old Bronco, they take the shell, and they completely redo it with the highest-end components, like the best suspension possible, a completely modern engine, you know, with, like, 400 horsepower.
They take a Coyote engine from the 5.0 Mustang.
So it's a Mustang GT engine, like this crate engine.
It's a beautiful engine.
They stick it in an old Bronco, those really cool old ones.
Yeah, like when you think about a regular truck, like regular trucks are cool, you know, hey, you know, you got kids, you want to pile them into an Escalade, that's cool.
But if you see that thing driving down the street, I mean, that's like some Mad Max, Apocalypto, Wonder Ride.
Well, that's what I think about, is when the shit hits the fan, and it's going to in L.A., obviously, there's going to be some type of a terrorist strike, or there's going to be a poisoning of the water.
It's going to be a real problem until they figure out how to get the power back on.
And, you know, there's been situations in other parts of the world where power in a modern city has been off for weeks.
Like Toronto apparently had some crazy ice storm in the 90s.
And, you know, it was like fucking zero below, you know, 10 below zero, something like that.
Horrible, horrible weather.
You know Celsius whatever they do up there and These people have no power for like two fucking weeks and in Toronto Wow in the middle of the winter So that it could happen in LA man if it happened in LA in the summer if you get ugly quick So that would be one that's like one kind of apocalypse.
I am, because the way the bay is shaped, you know, you've got, you know, from the Palisades down to whatever, Manhattan Beach is all one half circle, basically.
And Venice is in the center of that half circle.
So as the water is rushing in from a tsunami, it's all getting channeled into one opening, which is Venice Beach.
That shit's going to come straight down Venice Boulevard.
Well, any times you have bureaucracy, any time you have a large number of people that are involved in something that really only needs a couple people.
I mean, how many people really need to be involved in going over your construction plans?
Or how many people really need...
I mean, once you establish environmental parameters, things like people trying to fix their house up or something like that.
How many people really need to be involved in this?
Unless you're doing something dangerous, we're just going to assume that everyone's doing something dangerous?
No, there's a lot of people getting paid off, too.
I have a friend who is trying to get a house built, and they're dealing with this commission in this area, this particular area, they're trying to develop a house.
And they've literally been told, you have to grease wheels.
You have to get things moving, to get things approved.
You have to get on people's good side.
They're saying things to these people to indicate that...
Like, hey, you might want to buy these people something.
You might want to bribe them.
You might want to be friends with them.
The closer you can get to these people, the easier they'll lube this process.
Like, this is so bizarre.
They have power over you.
This is not like there's real clear parameters.
This is how we operate, regardless of whether or not we like you or don't like you.
No, there's like this little wiggle room going on.
I mean, that's essentially what corruption really is, right?
I mean, you should be able to hire whoever the fuck you want if it's your money and your job.
But when you're talking about something like, you know, a union that's involved in construction or a union that's involved in, you know, coastal commissions, those type of things, you know, where people are deciding whether or not, the groups of people that decide whether or not this happens to you or that doesn't happen to you.
10 times as much as it should have been and then the train started crashing because they were trying to save so much money they're putting inferior parts in yeah that's where the argument for unions come in right because it's not a um it's not a black and white issue like i definitely think look we're talking about foxconn and all those people that are being forced to work for such a horrible wage they're jumping off roofs you gotta you gotta establish like a living wage you gotta
If people are working for you, and this is a valuable thing they're doing for you, you have to pay them enough so they can feed themselves and clothe themselves.
Healthcare and all the different...
Things that are going to come up mean you're a piece of their organization and they're demanding to be recognized as a valuable piece of the organization.
You can't have all the money.
That's what it is.
You have people working for you.
You need to pay them.
That makes sense.
But it's like whenever you get a group that is exploiting these laws that are in place to protect people, that's when shit gets weird.
My buddy was in the automotive industry in Detroit.
He was in the Auto Workers Union.
And he was telling me how crazy some of the contracts were and some of the gigs were.
They had this thing where you would both work.
You would have a two-man contract, meaning that this was not a two-man contract, a two-man job.
This job to run this machine, it really only took one guy.
I think unions, if used correctly, are a nice sort of insurance to people getting paid a fair wage and getting treated ethically and having money distributed in an ethical and fair way.
The problem with anything is things don't always go the way they should, best case scenario.
No, I was thinking about this one woman, though, that works at my kid's school, and she had liquor on her breath, and she was, like, you know, just ignoring the class and reading the paper, and, like, they couldn't get rid of her.
Having groups of people that are all behaving in an ethical way, having them in a large number, like whether it's a big group like the Actors' Union or whether it's a Carpenter's Union, it's fucking really hard.
It's really hard to get people all together in a group like that to act ethically, to just always be cool.
There was the Writers Guild East and the Writers Guild West.
Which effectively, you know, destroyed the power of either one.
There was AFTRA and SAG, which are both actors' unions.
They're finally combined now, but it should have been...
Right now, it should be the DGA, which is the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Actors' Union should all be under the same...
And IATSE, which is like the technical guys.
It should all be one union because what they do is the studios will line it up so that the contract for the actors' union comes up in January every two years.
But then they set up the Writers Guild to renew in February every two years.
But they make them off years.
So that way you've never got everybody lining up against you on a union contract at the same time.
Because everybody wants to brand whatever it is that they're putting into the project.
You know, if you're the hairstylist, you want the hair to look perfect.
If you're, you know, the set guy, you need an extra 20 minutes to do this.
As opposed to if there's penalties, it's like, no, we got to fucking go, get it done, and then we're going to move on.
So I think with cable, there's usually not a strong hand on the wheel as much as there is in network shows where there's somebody that's a showrunner that really has to answer the studio and say, no, we are done at 6 p.m.
That's it.
Maybe they go an hour long.
But I work on cable shows where I worked on one, and it was T.I.'s wife, Tiny, and her ghetto fabulous friends.
If they did do it, the culinary union would make some insane amount of money every year, millions of dollars every year.
So what they do is they have this like smear campaign, like constant smear campaign about the UFC and they hired politicians and one of them actually just got busted.
This is one of the main guys in New York that they had supposedly that had been a roadblock to getting the UFC legalized in New York.
The reason being because of corrupt politicians and all goes back to the culinary union trying to keep the UFC, like trying to turn the station casinos into union casinos.
Getting people upset about the UFC and making all these nutty websites.
And anytime anybody says anything fucked up, anytime anything goes wrong, the Culinary Union just jumps all over it.
And they're just trying to muscle the UFC into relinquishing control of these casinos.
It's hilarious.
That's allegedly the story.
Obviously, I don't know all the details, so I should probably say for legal purposes, this is how it's been told to me.
But ultimately, you know that if there's a lot of money to be made, and you've got some organization that relies on keeping strong numbers of members, they're going to be financially motivated to try to make some things happen.
I know a dude who broke his toe really bad, and they told him he couldn't do jujitsu for six months if they were going to fix the toe, or they could amputate it.
You also gotta make sure you don't get athlete's foot.
Athlete's foot is when you get those cracks underneath your toes, like at the base where the ball of your foot reaches the bottom of your toe, that gets all dry and fucked up and cracks and it hurts.
And a lot of that comes from your toes being dirty.
It comes from weird fungus getting in there.
Apparently this is the same as ringworm.
Athlete's foot is kind of the same fungus as ringworm.
You take them into your body and it literally strengthens your immune system.
Like acidophilus?
I was reading this thing where they were saying that acidophilus, they believe, can discourage when you touch things, like say if you touch something and it's got some sort of funk on it, and then you accidentally touch your face.
Well, if you're taking healthy doses of acidophilus, apparently acidophilus will resist the introduction of new bacteria.
They're like, whoa, whoa, bitch, what are you doing here?
What the fuck are you doing here?
Whereas if you have that antibacterial soap, your skin is like devoid of even healthy bacteria.
Yeah, somebody told me, I was reading an article about bacteria, and it's like, there's a pretty big percentage of your body that's made up of bacteria.
Healthy stomach bacteria is very important for digestion.
That's what you're getting when you're absorbing these kombuchas and shit like that.
You're changing your gut bacteria.
And there's a lot of studies that are trying to link that to autism.
And they think that autism and poor gut bacteria, intestinal tract bacteria, it might be an issue.
The inflammation factor, that inflammation might cause all sorts of distress throughout the entire body, like the symbiosis of your stomach, your digestive tract, your circulatory system, and your brain, all of them together, being affected equally, that this digestive disorder might also fuck with people's heads.
And I went on, like, three different cycles of, I forget it was tetracycline or something, to the point where the doctor was like, you can't keep taking this, and it should just, it should equal out.
I did fart in an elevator recently, and someone did the running, like, hand in, open the doors, and I came in, and I just looked at them like, hey, it's an asshole move.
Mine was an asshole move, but you don't open up elevator doors on somebody.
Unless it's like, if you're in a parking structure in Santa Monica that's six stories and there's like one elevator, so it comes every 12 minutes, you can stick your hand in that.
But if I'm in an office complex and there's like six banks of elevators or a hotel, you don't stick your hand in the door.
I mean, I'm not asking you personally, but what is it about, like, why would a guy give a shit about a girl if a girl's toes took a hook turn and her feet are all...
Like, what does it even affect us?
Like, why is it more desirable to see, like, perfect toes?
Like, what if you did a project for, you know, name X production company, and in the project was they can tweet anything they want from your social media sites?
Well, you get a sense of someone who they are when you read just their posts on a message board or you read their Twitter feed.
You don't get it all, but if you're reading 140 characters a day over a long period of time, 140 characters a tweet, rather, over a long period of time, you kind of get a sense of the terrain.
You kind of get a sense of the way people phrase things and say things.
Yeah, because I think some days I don't have shit to say.
I think taking days off, you know, I was talking about this the other day, we were talking about stand-up in this way, that taking days off stand-up, taking weeks off stand-up, I think it was Cal I was talking to, we were talking about how if you go and go and go, your act gets really tight, everything feels really good, but when you take like a week off and then jump back in, the enthusiasm just cranks back up again.
You know, I think that's the case with pretty much everything in life.
If you do things too much, you lose your perspective.
Like, you lose, like, what it is about that thing that you really enjoy.
Well, that's what's nice about when you go to a club and you work there for three nights is you got two afternoons where you can tape your set and listen to it the next day and think about it and then give yourself some time to write new shit.
And, you know, you really have nothing to do except focus on your stand-up for, you know, two straight days.
Then you come back to L.A. and you go on to the improv or somewhere and people are like, wow, you got like fucking a lot of new material there that's good.
And like you wouldn't have that if you were just working in town.
I guess when I was in like ninth grade, I fooled around with this girl that was a senior.
But it was like, you know, she wasn't doing it because she was turned on by me.
It was just like, I hung around her a lot, and she was like throwing me a bone, so she'd let me see her tits and stuff.
But then when I was like 19, I dated a woman who was turning 40 that summer.
It was like a whole summer-long romance.
She was this big corporate lawyer, very successful.
And I was living out in the Hamptons with my brother and another guy in this shitty...
It was a one-bedroom, just flea-ridden.
You woke up every day covered in bites.
And they had a two-bedroom next to us, her and her sister, the Palumbo sisters.
And they had this beautiful two-bedroom with top-shelf liquor, and they were Italian from Queens.
And so they'd come out and they would cook...
Pasta, chicken cutlets, everything, all weekend.
And we would just move over there.
My brother was hooking up with one sister, and I was hooking up with the other one.
And then we would just, like, fuck around and eat and drink, and then we'd go dancing with them at night, and then they'd leave on Sunday night, and they'd give us, like, all this Tupperware with all the leftovers in it that we'd survive on for a couple more days.
If you thought about the difference between you as a 12-year-old or 11-year-old, and then puberty, and then riding the furious waves of puberty, which is what I call 16, 17, 18. Those years, into 19 even, by the time you figure out how to stay on the wave, the wave of hormones that your body starts producing and how different your observations on life are.
When you're 10, you don't give a fuck about ass or tits or Feet or high heels or the way a girl puts her lipstick on but when you're 17 you're jerking off to magazines like you're taking magazines you're beating off on the girls pictures on magazines like look at naked bodies you're beating off like yeah And I can just remember going into a white noise space where nothing else mattered.
Basically, you know, all the testing that they did on mushrooms and LSD back in the 60s, I mean, starting, I think they started in what, like the 40s, right?
And what they're doing is, they're doing controlled testing.
And they're giving it to people specifically that have terminal illnesses and helping them deal with their mortality, literally, that they're going to die.
And how do you wrap your head around that?
How do you deal with the depression that comes with that?
And they're giving them the mushrooms, and 70% of them are having mystical experiences, like godlike experiences.
And then they are holding on to it.
It doesn't go away.
They are walking through the rest of their lives.
Realizing that all is love.
They said that's the common thread that runs through all of them is that it's all about love.
And they get that in their head and they die with it.
Whenever, you know, if they last another year, two years, they don't need another experience on the mushrooms to get back to that place.
Well, I think if you're at a real transformative period of your life...
I mean, that's the biggest transformation ever, right?
Going from life to death, the ultimate last trip that we all take, you're probably like super emotional and very engaged.
And I would imagine that under that kind of stress and that kind of like uncertainty, a mushroom trip would be even more profound.
If you have a real powerful psychedelic trip and it doesn't change your complete total view of reality, you probably just didn't get a high enough dose.
That's all it is.
I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who've done mushrooms and they loved it.
They had a great time.
They're like, oh my God, we were on the beach.
We were so silly.
We laughed for hours.
It was so beautiful.
It was this amazing experience.
Opened me up to the way the world was and made me feel like they probably had that wonderful experience.
They really probably did.
But the difference between that kind of experience and like what they're giving these people in these trials, like you give people like five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms, that's like a big breakthrough dose.
And you have this overwhelming, like, incredible, visionary, like, transformative experience that most people don't get to.
Like, the DMT experience is supposedly the most intense out of all the psychedelics, out of all what McKenna used to call, like, the center of the mandala.
All psychedelic experiences vary, whether it's peyote or mushrooms or...
Sage, which is that fucking one that everybody gets at grocery stores.
It's still available.
Salvia.
Salvia divinorum.
It's essentially like a sage plant.
They all reach some different psychedelic state.
But the center of the mandala, the craziest one, is the dimethyltryptamine experience.
And if you have the dimethyltryptamine experience, it's impossible to look at the rest of reality the same way again, because you always know that that's in your head.
It depends on how much you entrench yourself in the common threads and themes and pathways of everyday life.
You can jump right back into everyday life and it doesn't last very long at all.
It's like this unbelievably profound loving experience where when it's happening, you just feel overwhelmed, first of all, by the truth in these entities that you're encountering, like how much they know about you.
Like, how much they know about who you are.
And then the reality of, like, that might not even be entities.
It might be you.
It might be there are many you's that encompass you.
Just like there's billions of E. coli living in your gut.
There might be, like, various streams of consciousness that are almost like entities that exist in your mind at any given time.
And you might be tapping into these and turning these to eleven when you're on a psychedelic.
It might be what the psychedelic is really doing is introducing you the potential of all the chemicals in your mind if like optimized in this one brief burst of love and color and just geometric objects and patterns just representing imagination at its fullest, wildest, most open flower.
And then that might be what's happening when you're doing these things.
But regardless of what the actual, you know, whether it's both or neither one, The experiences themselves, they change the way you view the world because you know that that's possible now.
Or you never knew that that was possible.
You always felt like everything in my life, you know, if there was a scale from the worst experiences I've ever had to the best experiences I've ever had, everything is sort of categorized.
So I was like, well, I know what it's like to be scared.
Well, I know what it's like to be in a car accident.
Well, I know what it's like to get a blowjob.
I know what it's like to play football.
You know, you have all these things and you say, well, I have a pretty good idea of what life is.
And And then you take three hits off of this little vaporizer pipe You hear this like crackling, like burning plastic.
And you see this chrysanthemum looking sort of like the flower of life.
You know that flower of life that's described?
Like you see it in a lot of like ancient Hindu art.
And this flower of life, you see this flower of life.
This is on DMT. Oh yeah, for sure.
Almost everybody sees it.
You see some version of it, but...
The things that you're seeing are happening so fast, and they're never the same thing.
You look at something and it becomes something else, like instantly, constantly, always changing.
So you never can really lock onto anything.
Everything is constantly moving and morphing and looking at you, and sometimes it's like jesters and they're giving you the finger, and then they disappear behind these fractal cyclones of geometric patterns that turn into flowers, that turn into grass.
They're turning to babies coming out of vaginas.
They're turning to you.
They're turning to handshakes and hugs and love.
It is insane.
And it happens for about 15 minutes.
And when it's over, just knowing that that can ever happen, it's just a matter of whether or not you remember it.
And I think that by giving you that intense of a good positive experience, it makes you go, oh yeah, I'm supposed to try.
I'm supposed to, you know, achieve that in whatever means I can, you know, whether it's exercise or, you know, sex or whatever it is that you've just stopped doing because you're so depressed.
It gives you the inspiration to try to get back there.
I think you should be able to do whatever you want to do as far as if you want to run around and you want to have a good time and do mushrooms or drink whiskey or whatever it is.
Someone, I don't know who was responsible for it all, but there was this sweeping...
Illegalization or, you know, sweeping Prohibition Act that covered shit that's not even psychoactive.
They just started marking things illegal.
They didn't know exactly what was legal, what wasn't legal, but they lumped shit in like everything that was Schedule 1. There's all non-toxic, non-lethal drugs that are Schedule 1, like a giant percentage of them, which is crazy because that just shows you that there's a giant problem with the way they're classifying drugs still in 2015. Marijuana federally is still a Schedule 1 drug.
It's fucking completely ridiculous.
Same as crack.
Yes.
Same as cocaine.
Well, cocaine and then heroin is scheduled too, right?
Because I think they have medicinal uses, you know, because opiates they use for painkillers and there's medical cocaine.
I'm going to make sure that I'm right about that because I think they might have changed that.
If you get that close to the abyss, I mean, the experiences that you have in those things, if you have a weak heart, it would probably be incredibly taxing because a lot of people feel like they're going to die.
They relive their entire life.
They look at themselves through this really intense introspective vision that freaks them out.
The harsh introspective aspects of a lot of these psychedelics really bother some people.
And if you're barely hanging on, if you're on the verge of a heart attack, it could push you over the top.
They did a special on 60 Minutes last night about that they think they have a cure for the Ebola virus.
I mean, it worked.
They only had like seven batches of it, and they gave it to seven people, and they were all cured.
But they knew about it since the 70s, but it's taken them this many years to develop it because none of the pharmaceutical companies can make a profit off of it.
Because the government wasn't buying it.
They weren't really, you know, actively, you know, they were looking for a cure but not really putting any money behind it.
And so, but in order to make this cure, they have to like take fucking thousands of acres of this special kind of tobacco and they have to soak it in this chemical and all to come up with like a dozen doses.
When you think about what these indigenous tribes have been able to do with these plants, that's when it gets really strange.
Think about the fact that they've figured out a big percentage of the pharmaceutical drugs that we use today, a big percentage of them come from rainforests.
Really?
Yeah, they find a lot of plants.
They're constantly searching the rainforests for different medicinal properties of plants.
They think that one day they're going to come up with some plant that cures cancer, they're going to find it.
And the Amazon, they use them for a lot of different purposes.
Which is, you know, weird.
These people figured out some of them on their own.
You know, the ayahuasca thing, they figured that thing on their own.
They figured out how to blend plants and make a drug out of it.
They figured out how to boil it and the whole thing.
Because you're not going to jot it down while you're doing it.
It'd be great if they come up with a technology where they can videotape what your imagination is going through while you're tripping on something, and then show it in major theaters around the country.
That's one of the things that someone, it might have been McKenna again, was speculating that one of the best ways to deliver a psychedelic trip to someone was virtual reality and figuring out a way through CGI imagery to reproduce the effects of the trip, to reproduce what you're seeing.
If they could get the technology to that point, where someone could go trip, do mushrooms or do DMT, trip, and then figure out a way to reproduce that.
Yeah, that it could be possible, that it could be done that way.
He was totally believing it could be done that way.
There's people that say they could do it with yoga, man.
There's people that say they can have full-blown psychedelic experiences, hallucinations, visuals, you know, transported to the center of the universe and dancing with angels, the whole deal.
And that's probably the chief reason I started is that I'd read a lot about it and it said that that's one of the main things.
You know, anxiety and depression can be tied hand in hand.
I don't think I experience anxiety as much as just anxiety.
You know, my family has depression.
You know, everybody in my family's got it.
And it's just something that, you know, you can medicate it, you can exercise it out, or you can, you know, there's a lot of different ways to go at it.
You introduce a cleaning agent for 20 minutes and you nip all the buds and parse all the problems and settle it all down.
That makes sense because me at my worst in my life, when I've felt most out of control in my life or doing the wrong shit or least in control of my emotions, I've always felt like I was on...
Like I couldn't stop like I was like the momentum of all my past acts was like overwhelming me and I was just running to keep from getting run over and like something like TM or for me it became martial arts and then later the tank.
The tank helps a lot to just get into that space where you just let it all go and once you do let it all go you could start fresh.
But when you don't get a chance to do that, it seems like you're constantly dealing with this phone call, what's connected to that thing that you've got to take care of, you didn't clean out that thing, and fuck, and this guy wants to meet you because you're supposed to do that thing, and it's all like, ah!
It all builds up to the point where the anxiety is oftentimes just the data, the sheer data that you're dealing with every day in life.
I mean, not to be Freudian, because I'm not Freudian, but there are aberrations in your thoughts in terms of how we perceive ourselves and what external events...
How we identify ourselves based on external events like, I didn't get this job.
That means...
Well, you can...
You can control what that means.
There's ways of having cognitive changes where you stop yourself from thinking what you thought from being a child and having a father that beat you or even something more subtle.
Things that affected over time the way you connected external events to how you felt about yourself.
And you can go in and you can just, by repeating, you know, no, that doesn't mean that, you know, that just means that this happened, like power of now.
It's like you don't, you know, a thought is not a reality.
It's just something that is flowing through you and you can notice it and you can comment on it without internalizing it and going for the full ride.
You say that's one of the things that people have the hardest time with when it comes to sufferers, people that are trying to overcome the Abuse that they had when they were in childhood because that abuse oftentimes defines them.
They feel like they're a shitty person for being abused.
You're damaged because you've been abused.
And you sort of define yourself by this abuse that you've suffered.
Where you can't look at the bright side of things.
Bad things are always going to happen to you.
It's like you've defined yourself in some way because of the abuse that you've suffered.
It makes you think if this psychedelic legislation of the 1970s, if it never had been passed, and if these 35 years since that happened, if people had been allowed to explore These things and come to these conclusions and try to figure out what are the beneficial aspects of the way we behave and the way we think and the way we sort of qualify and quantify life's meaning.
Whether it's financial or whether it's family.
What's really smart about this?
And how much more could we have done if people were doing mushrooms?
Doing acid.
So much more thinking would have taken place on these really, people could say they're frivolous, these are distractions, but they're not.
These ideas and concepts that you develop when you're either doing psychedelics or meditating or Anything where you're involved in sort of an active assessment and resetting of your consciousness, whether it's yoga, meditation, whatever the fuck it is, tanks, isolation tanks, what you're doing is you're allowing yourself time to reflect on what you're doing and whether or not it's beneficial and what could be changed.
And if you don't have that reflection time, you oftentimes don't change unless you fall completely apart and you're forced to rebuild.
Like Britney Spears when she was really going down the rails.
It was like, hasn't she hit bottom yet?
Nope.
Not even close.
And then there's other people like me.
I had a pretty shallow bottom.
I quit drinking when I was, like, I don't know, 24?
And I started drinking when I was probably 12, so I drank for, you know, a decent period of time.
But, like, I wasn't blowing guys for a sandwich.
I was just feeling like it was controlling my life.
I was feeling like this is something I'm going to when I'm feeling bad.
sad or I'm going to when I'm feeling stressed or whatever.
It was definitely the relationship to alcohol I had was bad because my father was an alcoholic.
You know, he died at 51.
And so I just knew I didn't want to go down that path.
So I had what you'd call a shallow bottom.
But, you know, to see other people where it just can get it can get so extreme, but that's the only time you really change.
And so for me, I think changing it with a shallow bottom meant that there was so much more baggage that went with it, you know, that I was bottoming out with feeling that I was dependent on something and I wasn't I couldn't be myself fully because there was a part of my psyche that was locked up in this thing.
And that was enough for me to go, I got to change.
The people that used it and it worked for them, that's fantastic.
But for some of them, it became like two meetings a day and, you know, you got three sponsors and it's like, you know, that's great, but, you know, move along a little bit here.
But it was in Worcester and the AA community gets together and they do these conventions where they had like, you know, a thousand people coming from all over New England staying in this hotel and just having meetings.
You know, there's a 9 a.m.
There's a 12 o'clock step meeting and they'd all go and apparently...
Everybody's fucking everybody because they got all this energy to channel and burn off.
And so it's just hypersexual.
Obviously very social.
I mean, what's more social than you sit down in a meeting and the person next to you go, how you doing?
12 years sober.
How you doing?
I'm great.
10 years sober.
Somebody does a motivational talk.
You clap.
You laugh.
Everybody has a coffee halfway through.
What a fucking great way to meet people.
And now you're just like, normally you would go get drunk and pass out and instead you're awake.
Like, watching this weird fucking guy with glasses, R. Crumb, like his version of himself that he would do, like, Riding on top of these women with these enormous asses and high heels.
Insight into a really extremely creative artist and all the weird demons that flow through his brain or angels, whatever it is, that make him create his very strange art.
I'm going to say that if you got in touch with him and you said, I'll come to you, I want to talk to you, I'm a big fan, he wouldn't give a shit if it was a podcast or whatever.
I remember my sister used to work at an art gallery in New York, the Alexander Gallery, and they had an Art Crumb exhibit, and I remember asking her, and she said, no, he didn't come.
R. Crumb was really essentially like punk rock comic books.
Yeah.
A lot of the racist stuff that he did, he wasn't necessarily being racist as he was highlighting how a racist would view something and doing it in a very shocking way.
I don't think I've ever read anything, I might be wrong, but I don't think I've ever read anything that indicated that he was actually racist.
Well, also, I guess what he was doing with a lot of his images, there were racist pop culture images from the 1940s.
So he was reviving this very specific type of imagery that was really racist.
And so the real question, the argument in this article on hoodedutilitarian.com, the argument was whether or not it was ironic and or parody And, like, whether it's enough to absolve him of doing, you know, these images, of re-enacting them or recreating them.
Hmm.
It's interesting.
It's interesting because it's kind of...
It's revealing, like, a very specific style of racist cartoons that they used to do.
Yeah, you don't become racist by looking at racist shit, right?
The idea is affecting developing minds, developing personalities, children.
Adolescents, showing them racist stuff and letting them know it's okay, that can plant racist seeds.
But once you're an adult, no one's going to make you racist.
If you're Greg Fitzsimmons in 2015 and you see some fucking ridiculous racist imagery, you're not going to automatically become racist, right?
So the real concern is like, are we protecting people from these satire images because we're worried about the impact of them or because it's offensive?
It's offensive to some people.
And it's only going to be offensive to some people until things even out.
Like if you do ridiculous, racist versions of white people, I think it's hilarious.
And I'm white.
You know why?
Because white people are ahead of the curve.
And if it evens out to the point where black people and white people and Chinese people and everyone is on such a fucking even ground.
and that racism is completely preposterous.
The racial differences of each nationality is allowed to be highlighted in brutal fashion, and nobody cares.
Yeah.
Like Richard Pryor sold to white people the idea of mocking white people.
Hey there, fella.
You know, the white motherfuckers at work would, you know, like...
They use abbreviations or whatever it is for all these different types of people.
Suppressive people.
They have all these different things that they call upon when they define various aspects of negative people that you encounter in your life that disbelieve the tenets of Scientology.