Trevor Moore and Joe Rogan dive into bizarre vaping tech, debating nicotine’s cognitive benefits (like Alzheimer’s risk reduction) while mocking fringe theories like Lady Gaga as JonBenet Ramsey. They critique invasive medical procedures, comparing them to a fraudulent cancer-diagnosing doctor, then pivot to social media’s performative outrage culture. The conversation spirals into political dynasties, furry subculture controversies, and the ethics of exploitative reality TV—like I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant—before linking urbanization, delayed parenthood, and rising autism rates to modern societal shifts. Moore’s conservative upbringing fuels his comedic take on taboos, culminating in a sharp critique of how media, medicine, and politics distort truth for profit or spectacle. [Automatically generated summary]
And so you take, it's tobacco, and you press the button, the bottom has a button, and you take a, it doesn't even look like you're supposed to be sucking on that thing.
But when I started, you had to get them from England.
Really?
Yeah, you would order it.
My friend was a comic who was like, you know, I was smoking too much, and he was like, I just quit, I started doing this stuff, and you order it from England, and they would send it in vials of the nicotine liquid, and they had all these gloves that would come with it, and it would say, they had this book that was like, if you get this on your hands, and it absorbs in, it can give you a heart attack.
Fuck, man!
So, yeah, I don't know if they were just being, like, you know, overcautious or whatever, but I was like, you know, every time I had to fill it, I was in the bathroom, like, making sure there was people in my house, like, alright, if I get this on my hands, run me to the hospital or something.
It's Stephen King's sort of like, I think he calls it a memoir of the craft or something along those lines.
But it's basically like talking all about his writing habits and just the discipline of writing.
You know what what you should and shouldn't do and you know how he Started out writing and it's really really inspiring a great book But one of the things in the book he talks about cigarettes and he just thought when he's quit smoking cigarettes It had a an adverse effect on his writing.
Yeah, like you felt like a synapses didn't fire up as well And I thought that was really interesting So I started reading up on nicotine and nicotine's effect on the brain and it's kind of a bit of a cognitive enhancer You know, it's a bit of a stimulant Well, yeah, and it's one of the things, like, one of the good things about nicotine that they don't really talk about that much is that they think that it staves off Alzheimer's.
Yeah, there's all these weird, bizarre studies that they're doing now, or tests, where they're injecting, like, tumors and different, you know, really fucked up parts of your body with other diseases.
And the other diseases are attacking the fucked up parts of your body.
I don't think it's a death sentence at all anymore.
I mean, it's a testament to science.
These protease inhibitors and all these different things that they figured out how to stunt the progress of HIV. It's super controversial because there's been a lot of weird correlations between the crushing of the immune system.
Obviously, everyone's in agreement that HIV or most people are in agreement that HIV causes AIDS, but there's a bunch of people that say, well, it's that, maybe, but there's also this thing about partying.
That like in the gay community, especially, there's rampant drug abuse.
And for whatever reason, people don't want to factor that in.
And there was this guy that I had on the podcast that I think had a faulty connection.
And he's actually a biologist at the University of Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley.
His name is Peter Dewsburg.
And he's super controversial.
Because he doesn't believe that HIV causes AIDS. He thinks that AIDS is, you know, AIDS being immune deficiency syndrome, acquired immune, acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
And he believes that it is directly correlated with partying, directly correlated with use of crystal meth, with poppers, amyl nitrate, crushing the immune system.
No other scientists support him.
No credible scientists support him.
So we had him on the podcast.
He was pretty convincing to an idiot like me.
Zero medical or biological studying.
But the more I talk to people who understand...
No one wanted to debate him, which is really interesting.
But I think it's kind of like debating a Holocaust denier.
But that doesn't, it doesn't get factored in very often.
And I think that's where Duesberg, because he kind of brings that up, I think, you know, it kind of gives, the whole thing is a little bit cloudy because of that.
I don't believe that, but it's a fascinating conspiracy theory where people are just like, it was a huge problem.
It was a problem in inner cities, and he was the biggest guy at the time.
He was kind of like this huge role model, and for somebody like him to come out and say, I have HIV, then it could be like a big kind of get awareness out kind of thing.
Sam Kinison had a bit about it, you know, because he made fun of AIDS and they say, Sam, you know, AIDS is a communicable disease.
Heterosexuals die, too.
He goes, name one!
Name one fucking guy!
It's not our dance!
But really, there's not that many.
When I was a kid, and I heard about Magic Johnson getting HIV, I remember thinking, oh my god, everyone's going to have AIDS. And maybe a year or two later, I got health insurance And I had to get an AIDS test.
And I was fucking terrified.
Just thinking of all the drunken, poor choices with no condom.
And oh my goodness, it's going to happen.
I have AIDS! I'm only 25!
I have AIDS! Shit!
And then I didn't have AIDS. So I was super psyched.
It's almost like very, very few heterosexual people that aren't intravenous drug users that get AIDS. Yeah, I mean, I remember when I was a kid, they treated it like it was, you know, you have sex without a condom once you're going to get it.
I think it's way more easy for a woman, because obviously the woman takes sperm into her body, and her body absorbs it, or gay men, because in a gay man, even, you're taking it in your ass, and you're not supposed to have cum in your ass.
We were in Dallas, and we were doing the improv, and the hotel that we were staying at was the exact same hotel where they were having one of these pageants.
And we, it was me and I think Duncan and Joey, and we were walking around the hotel going, what?
What the fuck is this?
It was all little tiny kids, like five.
Like, I have a four-year-old and I have a six-year-old, so they were like my kid's age, but they were wearing high heels where they could barely walk, and they were fully dolled up.
I mean, eyelashes, full makeup, war paint, teased up Texas-style hair, like little dresses.
My daughter was playing softball, or soccer rather, for a while, and her nickname was Bruiser, because my youngest one is like super aggressive.
She's crazy.
But she's really like, she's a sweetie, but when it comes to things, she's like, ah!
She loves like teenage mutant ninja turtles, and she has a superman lunchbox.
She's probably a lesbian.
But uh, I love her to death, but she's she's really athletic and so she's only four and so they had her in soccer and She's just scoring goals like crazy.
This is the game starts.
Boom.
She scores the first goal.
She runs on the ball.
Boom scores the second goal I mean she's like a little animal and then the other team scored and she started crying and Because the other team was cheering.
She started crying.
The family on the other side, the families, were cheering.
And then she's like, I don't want to play anymore.
And the coach was like, you got to go back out there and play.
I'm like, you don't have to play.
I go, it's just stupid.
It's a ball going into the net.
I go, if you're not enjoying it, don't do it.
I go, but you shouldn't worry about the other team scoring.
But I knew that she couldn't kind of internalize that.
So I said, this is no big deal.
Like, I don't want to make it a big deal.
Because I think that sports, a lot of times parents, they fuck their kids up because they make, like, winning and losing this, like, huge deal or playing.
You've got to get out there and you've got to fucking play.
Because sometimes we have these fight companion podcasts where we have a bunch of guys in here and we watch fights and people start eating snacks and they're eating right into the microphone and if you're listening, if you have headphones on, it's fucking maddening.
But it's hard.
You're drinking and smoking pot and people forget and they start chewing.
Anyway, JonBenet Ramsey, not a good place to buy a house.
I don't know of anyone that's ever faked their own death successfully.
I know some people have tried.
There was a guy that I remember, it was some business guy who apparently got busted swindling or something like that, and he faked his own death, but they caught him a few years later.
I heard, and I don't remember where I heard it, so this could just be nonsense, but that what his plan was to do is when he was going to get old and die, he was going to go out into the desert, dig a hole, and just basically kill himself in the hole so they never find him.
I went out sailing once in New York, and we went out a little far, and then it got dark, and we were trying to come back, and all of a sudden the waves got bigger, and it was actually...
It's like a sailboat, so really kind of with the old wheel and everything, and actually feeling the strength of the waves trying to get back, and it was really fucking terrifying trying to get back to New York.
You're trying to scramble and hope the boat stays afloat sideways and the water's cold.
My kitchen was getting fixed.
There was some shit wrong with my kitchen.
So we decided to rent a house on the water.
Rent a house on the beach for a couple months.
And I got...
Barbecued one night the first night we went there I got super duper high and in the daytime It was beautiful like that like you look out the window where you're eating breakfast and would just be ocean Just like right there in the ocean like wow so pretty but at nighttime that same view is Horrifying because the sky is black and the waters black and you keep hearing whoosh And it's like it reveals itself to you.
Like, oh, you thought that this was like your playground, some beautiful thing.
No, this is a fucking monster that could swallow up the whole city and not even know it.
Like the ocean could just swallow Los Angeles one day with one burp slash fart of the tectonic plates.
Can you imagine if you did if you if you were right and you like a tsunami came and you survived and like a thousand people dead Trevor Moore, how did you survive?
No just be like you know what I kind of always deep down felt like I could do it and you know it just turned out God told me I would be fine and the water is just water.
But that moment when you have to make that decision, do I risk my life to try to save some person?
Because you might get to a point where you're like, oh my god, I'm going to have to punch this chick in the face and swim by myself because she's going to drag me under.
There's those weird moments that actually happen to people when they're trying to save someone.
They realize, I'm going to die too because this person's an idiot.
Or maybe not an idiot, but they don't know how to deal with stress.
Some people...
Given the exact same circumstance, just know how to stay calm and they'll be fine.
And other people, they're just...
And they can't breathe.
Like, you're like, breathe, breathe.
They can't breathe.
And they're like, oh, fucking Christ.
Like, I can't teach you how to breathe here while we're both trying to swim for our lives.
Fuck.
And then his wife and his kids were watching this whole thing happen.
And, you know, he kind of figured out how to grab her and swim to the shore with her.
No, he was just kind of tubing, but it was like a river.
It was a river.
And so it got to the ocean, and it was the same kind of thing where this river just shoots stuff, you know, shoots the water out into the ocean really far.
So he went all of a sudden way out, and we're all back on the beach, and we're like, oh wait, holy shit, Chris can't swim.
Oh God!
So we're like going and we see that he's panicking and in his panic, what he did was he jumped off of the raft.
My friend Remy, Remy Warren, he was on a river once.
He was right next to a river.
And some stuff started...
He talked about it on the podcast, for folks listening to this.
His version's gonna be way better than mine.
But he saw some stuff floating down the river.
And then a guy, face down, body...
Floating down the river and then he realized holy shit like this is like a capsized boat It's freezing cold water and then a woman Hanging on for dear life screaming and he said holy shit here We go and he just jumped in the river and it was freezing cold water and he realized like as he was jumping He's like okay.
I'm probably gonna die because you know you get hypothermia really quickly yeah those means essentially those rivers They're glaciers.
It's glaciers melting.
And they create this river.
And it's fucking freezing cold water in the mountain.
And he's in this water.
And it's not warm out either.
It's cold out.
And so he just dove in.
And he's trying to save this woman.
And he got lucky.
They both got lucky.
And they figured out a way to grab a hold of something.
But he got a hold of her and then dragged her to shore.
And just start telling people, hey man, don't raft.
Shit's dangerous as fuck.
Yeah, of all the ways to die, you know, that's a...
River rafting is a really terrifying one.
If you see, like, when people...
There was a reality show.
I forget what reality show it was, but it never went to air because as they were filming, like, one of the first episodes, someone, they overturned their canoe and got trapped under a rock.
Like, the canoe overturned and the waves, or the current rather, wedged them under a rock and they drowned.
Yeah, I don't I don't I don't I mean some people like I've done it once the river rafting kind of thing like the whitewater kind of stuff again This is not fun to me like it's it's it's very bumpy.
It's scary.
There's Potential death everywhere People love thrills, man.
Because I feel like if you do die skydiving, it's, you know, it's always sad when people die, but it's like, you know, it's kind of, you don't get that.
I mean, people will be like, well, he jumped out of an airplane, you know.
And the stories were crazy because there's this one guy who was an old guy that they interviewed who, I guess, was in World War II. And his plane just exploded before he had jumped out, kind of thing.
And he fell.
And they say that the way to do it is, and it's not, like, foolproof, but, like, the people who have survived, they kind of try to hit a tree.
And you try to hit a tree as close to the middle as possible, but not the exact middle, because that'll impale you.
But you want to hit close to the trunk, where the branches are the thickest.
And you basically want to have all the branches break your fall on the way down.
And you're going to be fucked up when, like, you hit the ground.
But the people who have lived, a lot of them hit trees.
Well, you know, my friend Steve Rinella said it best.
He said there's things that are fun that are fun while you're doing them, but they're not fun later.
And I think skydiving is one of those, and roller coasters are one of those as well.
They're fun while you're doing them, but they're not fun later.
And then there's things that you do...
Like crazy arduous hikes over mountains and you get to the top and you this insanely beautiful view and like you earn that view and you know you're camping it's freezing and you know you're fucking hoofing it but when it's all over when you get together like weeks later and talk about that trip like wow you have these amazing memories like it was really cool yeah but at the time it was kind of brutal and arduous would you ever do Everest fuck that Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's like what the suicide, basically.
Well, you have to watch this new, it's out right now.
I'm glad you brought this up.
There's a Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel that's out right now.
It's amazing.
And it's on the Sherpas.
Those fucking guys who have to do all the work?
Yeah.
They had all these experienced climbers who had summited at Everest like years and years ago, and they were talking about what it used to be like.
You know, you used to carry your own stuff, you had a minimal amount of things, and now they have these companies that set it up like these luxury tours Where these Sherpas, they carry, like, virtually anything you want.
Like, whatever you want, whatever you need.
So they have all these prepped meals, they have these tents, and inside these tents they have, you know, gourmet food and cots and all this stuff.
And these Sherpas have to carry all this stuff.
It was sort of highlighting how insanely dangerous it is like there's only you know a few hundred Sherpas and over the last couple years 25 of them have died in Avalanches and icefalls and the path that they take from base camp up through the mountains like within the first you know hundred yards or so you're in dangerous territory and Well, there's dead bodies all along the trail that they can't get them.
If you die on the mountain, you're part of the mountain from then on.
There's pictures of the bodies online, and there's one guy that just looks like he's slumped over taking a nap, and that's what happened.
He's still in his parka and everything like that, but when you get up that high, you get tired, so you're like, I'm just going to rest for a second, and then you're there for the next 100, 200 years.
That was the fucked up thing about this real sports thing.
As this guy was doing it, he was talking about how crowded the summit is now.
When you go up there, you can barely stand because so many people have summited.
There's so many people out there with you, and then they showed the video of him doing it and all the people making it on the way up, and there was over a hundred people on their way up the mountain.
I'm not sure, but they, you know, people die all the time doing it, and so these companies have sort of capitalized, as one of the things they were highlighting, they've capitalized on two things.
One, this desire of all these rich douchebags to, you know, like, I'm an adventurer, I'm a summited Everest.
Like, I lived in Colorado for a while, and we were living at 8,500 feet above sea level, which is like 3,000 feet above Boulder, and it was, just going upstairs was rough.
We did a show in Aspen, like the Aspen Comedy Festival, and there's just like a, you know, it was a sketch show, a lot of running around on the thing.
But I had to have an oxygen tank backstage, just because, like, from the amount of, like, running around, like, after the first show, I was like, I can't breathe.
You've probably seen a lot of their stuff online, a lot of sketches online.
But we were doing the Aspen Comedy Festival.
I want to say it was like 2003. Three or something like that it was way back in the day and it was with I was with Lewis black we're on a show together and they they they had oxygen waiting for him when he got on stage like they have a tank right there a little mask like you're sucking oxygen like right after you get off you know because Lewis does that thing where he gets his fingers going and he gets very excited You know, you got no air.
Well, they have to bust everybody, like, because there's a McDonald's there, and everyone who works there, anyone who works in any of those shops has to be bust in from, like, an hour down the mountain, like, to work there.
So when I was up there, I remember thinking, this is very different from the Montreal Comedy Festival, where the Montreal Comedy Festival, it really did seem like it was all about the shows.
Blue's pretty, like, I was in Park City, Utah, this year, and blue's not easy.
Like, blue gets weird.
Like, there's some spots where, like, whoa, this is, and I think green is, like, Maybe blue is harder than green, or green is harder than blue, but whatever it is.
I got to the one right before black, and I was like, whoa, this is kind of crazy.
You kind of figure it out.
You just got to take steep turns left and right to try to regulate your speed.
But while I was doing it, there were some motherfuckers that were just experts that were flying by me, just...
Because people that are just speed demons, they just really know how to do it.
And if they fuck up, ooh...
You know, some of those guys are going, they're probably going like 50 miles an hour or something.
I mean, don't jump too high because you're kind of going back and forth.
But we were going over it in the lift, and we were watching these people just go left and right and just hopping up and bouncing.
And the actual ground gets etched in this crisscross, crosshatching pattern from people just going left and right and left and right over these crazy fucking bumps.
And you're like, man, there's not a lot of room for error there.
That's an artificial piece of meniscus that is a pad in between the ball and socket, those caps of his knees where, you know, normally you have cartilage.
The cartilage is so worn away That he has these, it looks like they're chrome, like steel, steel caps that cover over the top of the bone.
And then, you know, it just sort of rolls steel to steel.
And that's a knee replacement.
He doesn't have that.
No, he just has his knee, because knee replacement is like for people that have like their ligaments destroyed.
It was just kind of wear and tear That's one of the reasons why I don't trust certain doctors because there's other ways to handle that First of all, they're doing these stem cell injections now on in people's knees where they're regenerating cartilage You know, obviously that's not That's not an option once they chop your fucking legs off and put a fake knee in right but doctors love doing that They love doing surgery, you know I had a back injury and I talked to a doctor and he's like well, I'm gonna fruit fuse your discs, you know
There's no other way.
This and that.
We're going to chop it out.
Now I'm fine.
I sought out a bunch of alternative methods, and I did this thing called Regenikine, this blood-spinning procedure that reduces inflammation.
I did a lot of stretching and yoga and a lot of strengthening.
It's fine now.
I could have listened to this asshole, and I'd have my discs fused right now.
Your spinal column is a series of bones, and in between those bones are discs, which is sort of like a tough bag of jelly.
And that bag of jelly a lot of times gets herniated.
Where it pokes out and because of trauma, it'll start sticking into the nerve and it causes pain.
That's where sciatic comes from.
You know that term like sciatica?
People go, oh, I have a sciatic issue.
Well, you know what that really means?
That really means you have a bulging disc.
It means your bulging disc is poking into a very specific area of your spinal column, a specific area of your nerves that affects where your leg is.
And so it can cause atrophy in your leg, which I've had friends that have had that issue.
It can cause some pretty severe lower back pain and leg pain, like through your butt, down your hamstring, all the way down, like shooting down your leg.
So what they want to do is cut that meat out, that soft, cushy part, and then they drop it down and screw the bones together.
So now you have one part of your spine that just doesn't move.
Now, they've developed the same guy that invented...
Well, not the same guy, in the same country, rather, in Germany.
They're doing things in Europe that they're just not doing in America yet, for whatever reason.
And one of the things they're doing is they're replacing the discs with artificial discs that articulate.
They move around, much like the actual stuff that's in between your bones do.
So instead of fusing it and having this one stiff, rigid area, which actually can be really problematic because it puts additional mechanical pressure on the above disc and the below disc.
So oftentimes people wind up having multiple discs fused and you got like one stiff fucking back and you're walking around like this and you're shorter like it makes you shorter and makes you have all sorts of problems like mechanical problems the way your body because your body's like going what the fuck is going why are we built different now yeah like well how come I can't move my neck anymore why is it all But it's really common.
People get it done all the time.
They fuse the discs.
And you don't always have to.
There's other ways around it.
But a lot of doctors just want to start cutting you.
They just don't want to start doing...
I mean, there's very ethical doctors, and there's sometimes Where they have to do it.
There's sometimes when you're like, you know, you're really fucked up, man.
We have to do surgery to open up your nerve pathway because your arms are atrophying, which is really common with people that have neck injuries.
They'll have one arm that like shrivels up, like it's not getting any nerves.
The nerves aren't firing anymore because they're being impinged by this disc, this bulging disc.
wow yeah that's uh man yeah intentionally misdiagnosing people and then giving them chemotherapy how do they catch them i don't know someone got a second a bunch of people got a second opinion and that kind of maybe right yeah like what can't what you don't have cancer you're not even fat That's gotta be a weird turn when you're a doctor and you're just like, you know, you're like, I'm just gonna be a bad doctor.
Like, you know, because you can't, I mean, you have to know you're a bad doctor at that point.
You know, there's a book called Dead Doctors Don't Lie.
This guy, Dr. Joel Wallach, who's kind of an eccentric character, and basically the premise of a lot of...
What his book is about is about how few doctors really understand nutrition and they understand the impact of nutrition on the body and mineral deficiencies that people have that you would treat in like livestock like in animals a lot of times when animals develop issues they change the diet and give them minerals and that they don't do that with people and he found that particularly fascinating because I think he started out as a veterinarian and And one of the things he was talking about is how many doctors abuse
drugs because they can get them.
It's really easy for doctors to get drugs.
And he details this one story of this guy who was in the middle of an operation and stepped away and shot cocaine into his body.
Had a fucking heart attack and died so he was in like a storage room dead while this person was cut open In the middle of surgery and they had to try to go look for him and they found him But you would think that you know when you're a doctor you have access to you know Prescriptions and you can get a hold of some medicine and I'm sure it's probably more tightly regulated today than it was in years past Yeah,
And they had like all these strategies like very similar to the way you would hunt a deer.
Like, okay, this is the path a deer goes into.
We're going to do is get, you know, upwind of them or downwind of them so that when the wind comes to us, they can't smell us and all this crazy shit they were doing to try to avoid being seen and really similar to hunting an animal.
Take a bunch of people, when you're doing a television show, you take a bunch of people that don't want to be there, they're getting paid, and then you play a show for them.
So they find that, you know, that you can kind of get people from Iowa, you can get people from Florida, and this one, like, city, so you get, like, a good cross-sheet of what people are gonna think of a show.
Let the comedians or the writers or whoever, you know, whatever kind of show it is, let them come up with it, put it together, and go, okay, we like it, let's put this thing on TV. Yeah.
And find, you know, trust your instincts on shit.
You don't have to bring it to some, well, we brought it to a random group of people, and they'd like a wacky neighbor.
I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia when I grew up, which is where Dave Matthews was from.
And it was like when Dave Matthews was huge.
And so it was like a big thing in my town.
And like one thing that he did to like give back to the community that he wanted to do was he did this thing where he got a whole bunch of bicycles.
And they painted them, like, orange, and they put them all around town, and they're like, Dave Matthews is putting all these bikes around, and they're free, you can get one, ride it to where you need to go, leave it there, and then, you know, it's just a community bicycle kind of thing.
And then for years, because I was in 1920, you go to house parties, and every house party you would go to, there'd be one of the Dave Matthews bikes on the wall, and they're like, I got one of Dave's bikes!
You can only have what the people will let you have, and that's why they won't have the Amazon drones, because people are going to steal them.
Imagine if you died because you were trying to hit a fucking drone and you slipped and fell off your roof and broke your neck.
That would be a sad funeral.
This stupid fuck.
He died trying to hit a home run off a drone.
God.
I don't know what we're going to be doing in a few years, but I have a feeling that within the next couple of decades, it's not even going to involve things being delivered.
Like you have a subscription to like Apple or something like that and then you have their account and then they just make your iPod in your living room kind of thing.
When the 3D printing takes off, it's like, you know what happened with music and entertainment, where all of a sudden people could bit-torrent everything?
You're going to have that happen to every single industry.
Because all of a sudden, you can bit-torrent an iPhone.
You wouldn't download a car, would you?
And you're like, well, if it was possible, yes, a lot of people would.
Like, it's not really stealing, you know, but he's used to being rich, and he wants to stay rich, and he wants to keep making millions of dollars, but he was talking about how the industry just disappeared.
And I was like, well, it's kind of, but...
See, my argument was like, yeah, but...
The radio always existed, and you always had radio.
And you play the music on radio, and that's what made the music famous.
And then people would go out and buy the CD, and you'd make millions.
And then they would go out and tour, and you'd make more millions.
Like, you know, these people tour, and they, you know...
I mean like back in like the old Sun Records days and everything they were on the road all the time You know putting out these singles and then making all their money touring I just gotta go go back to that.
Well, I think the record companies are fucked way more than the artists Yeah, because that's why the record companies they're creating these like really fucking like strange deals Especially like with young artists they get talked into these really creepy deals Where, you know, they got locked up for X amount of years, and they're really, like, strange contracts that established artists would never agree to, and then you have to try to get out of them once you get to a certain point.
But they're just trying to figure out a way to lock down these artists and try to suck money out of them, where...
I mean, what do they have to offer these days?
They don't really have anything.
It used to be like you needed a record company to release your record and to get you on the radio.
For most artists, that's not going to happen, right?
Maybe for him, but for most artists, you got a hit, you got a few songs that people are into, and then you're hoping they're going to come see you live.
That's the big thing.
But with Paul Stanley, he was just saying that you used to be able to make a lot of money off the sales of the records, and now it doesn't exist anymore because of illegal downloads.
But they must be making some money right off of iTunes and shit.
I mean, you guys, I mean, that always blows my mind when I try to think about, like, what, you know, would you have a mailing list?
You know, at the end of a show, you put out a pad of a paper and, you know, like, write down, you know, I'll send out a mailing list every year, let you know.
I remember when I was a kid, I'd go to the record store and just check to see if the bands that I like had new albums out.
Because there was no way to know.
Like, you know, you would just go and sometimes, you know, you'd check multiple times a year and then you'd be like, oh, there's a new, there's no way to...
Interacting with human beings as today in 2015 as opposed to like 1985 well, I I was we were shooting whitest kids when the iPhone came out and We were in production, you know, and I remember like me and a guy Zach from the troop would direct everything so we remember directing you know,
we were like midseason and and the day before the iPhone came out and You know, everyone would kind of be talking, you know, in between takes, like everyone would be on set, like, you know, PAs, like, you know, like the costume department, everyone would kind of be like joking around and stuff like that.
And then the iPhone came out at midnight.
And like, you know, it was a huge thing.
Everybody went in line, a lot of people got it.
And the next day, everybody was just staring at the iPhone.
And it was this thing where I was like, well, it's crazy because I bought one too.
And I was like, it's just crazy what this thing can do.
And everybody's fascinated with what this can do.
But we never went back.
It never went back.
I thought it was just going to be like a couple days where everyone's just staring at this thing.
And that was the dividing point.
It changed after that.
And now, just interacting with people is just completely different.
Or it's just the beginning of, it's metamorphosis, it's the beginning of evolution, like to us becoming like a synthetic kind of non-carbon based, you know, silicone based being kind of thing.
And, you know, then we put nanobots in ourselves and, you know, it's just the first step of that, you know, of evolving.
Well, they're saying, I was reading something where they're saying the nanobots thing is going to be commonplace within like 15 years, where you inject them into you, and then it just constantly is doing readouts like, oh, your platelets are low.
Oh, your white blood cells are low.
And it's just telling your doctor so you can keep up with everything.
Kurzweil believes within the next few decades, you're going to have nanobots that are going to allow you to hold your breath for over an hour.
They're going to give you these nanobots that somehow or another do something with maybe artificial blood cells or something like that, where they can hold and carry oxygen through your system so well that you'll be able to take a deep breath, jump to the bottom of the pool, and sit there for an hour like a regular person.
Jamie, pull that up, because it's kind of difficult to describe Exactly what they did, but somehow or another, like, say if you're thinking Christmas tree, you know, you actually can send that word to me through the internet, and somehow or another I receive it, I'm not sure I understand it.
Scientists transmit thoughts from one brain to another.
International team of scientists have succeeded in transmitting the thoughts of one individual into the brain of a second person located thousands of miles away.
Combining some of the latest technological marvels with the long arm of the internet is thought to be the first time the two brains have communicated with each other directly over long distance without the sender having to utter a single word.
Two greetings.
Hola and chow.
Oh, can't even do it in America?
unidentified
How come you can't use English, you fucking queers?
Scientists want to ensure that the receiver knew what his colleague 5,000 miles away was thinking because of the brain-to-brain transmission, not because of some other cue.
That's amazing.
So somehow or another, those two words were transmitted, and they knew what those two words were, thousands of miles.
But they thought that they'd be able to beam you, to break your body down into subatomic particles and reconstruct you on the surface of an alien planet.
That makes sense, but you've got to walkie-talkie or something.
I always feel that when a celebrity dies, and then everybody posts like, oh my god, this guy meant this to me, or this to me, this to me, this to me, this to me.
I get it, but it seems to be about themselves, kind of, in a weird way, where it's like, this is how much this affected my life.
Yeah, the Kony 2012 and the Ice Bucket Challenge, they both had that thing in common where I felt like there was an insincerity to the message that people were sending out through social media.
Like they were sending it out to get social media brownie points.
They wanted everyone to know that they're super conscious and super progressive.
And that's one of the things that drives me nuts.
There's certain Twitter pages that I'll visit.
One of them recently blocked me.
Because I've mocked him on the podcast.
Hilarious.
By the way, dummy, don't you know that all I have to do is log out and I can still see your Twitter page, you dipshit?
It's public.
Just type it into a browser.
I can read all your stupidity.
This guy's entire Twitter page is like telling people how they should be living and telling people what's wrong with the way other people are living and what's wrong with the way other people are thinking and what's so bad about certain social issues.
It's hilarious.
Don't you have sandwiches that you like?
Isn't there like a movie you enjoyed?
Did you have a great time today?
Did you have a revelation today?
Did you feel bad about something that maybe you thought?
Is there any unique insight as to you as a human being?
Or is your whole thing like lessons to other people?
Like everybody needs to learn.
And this is what's wrong with this.
And this is what's wrong with that.
And it's all like...
Those type of people are almost all either like extreme right-wing...
Like, real, like, heavy-duty Republicans.
Like, this one dumbass that I go to, he's a young, earth Christian guy, and, you know, everything in his entire timeline is anti-Obama, anti-liberal, anti-gay.
Dinosaurs.
Yeah, anti-dinosaur.
And then this other guy I go to is extreme left-wing.
And everything that he does is, like, super progressive, super, like, really, like, uber left-wing, uber socially conscious, to the point where I'm not buying it.
There's a fetishization of being outraged or being offended, you know, for a lot of like on both sides of the thing where you've, you know, I mean, there's genuine outrage and there's genuine being offended at things that there should be, you know, you should be offended by.
But then there's some of these people that you see, it just seems like, well, you're kind of reaching.
It would make weird noises, and then your cat would come over, and your cat would touch it with his paw, and then he would burst into flames, and then he would jump on the couch, freaking out, and then the couch would go up, and then your fucking whole house would go into flames.
I think that the internet and the ability to communicate, it's so fresh that there's all these archetype, stereotypical sort of characters that have come up, like the right wing guy.
You know who's a great one to follow?
Chuck Woolery.
The guy from 2 and 2. We'll be right back in 2 and 2. Guy does his bitch about Obama.
I did stand-up at the Laugh Factory when I was 18, and they had scouts for the dating game in the audience, and they were like, I guess at that time they were doing two contestants, and then the third contestant was always a comedian.
So they were going, trying to find kids that were doing stand-up, and like, basically, you want to be on the dating game?
I mean, there's a time where there's just like, you know, guys would just go out into the woods with a foot magazine and just jerk off and leave it there.
Like, that's like the scariest person I can think of.
I mean, when you get enough numbers, you know, you get like a million people that listen to a podcast at once, you know, there's got to be one dude out there jerking off to a foot magazine.
But I checked into my room, and there was, you know, most of the hotel was rented by furries, and there was the loudest, like, sex going on, like, against the wall while I was trying to sleep, and all I wanted to do was, like, midday, and I just wanted to get, like, a couple hours of sleep before the show that night, and it's just, like, loud sex, and then these guys just getting in fights, being like, I would never...
I would never, just repeating that again and again, I would never, like, you know, and then just more sex kind of stuff.
And then it was, that's my only encounter with furries.
I was in Pittsburgh, and apparently that's one of the places where they have big, they used to have a big one in San Diego, but they moved it to Pittsburgh because Pittsburgh is more open-minded than San Diego.
That doesn't make any sense to me, but this guy was telling me that he might be bullshitting me, but apparently San Diego's like a pretty conservative town in a lot of ways, because there's a lot of military down there.
And it was just total dumb luck that we were in town the exact same time.
And when we got to our hotel, the people that were working there were ecstatic to talk to people that weren't furries and wanted to tell you all the things that furries were asking for.
There's girls who think that, I do a song about it on this new album.
I do a song called Bullies.
Where the whole point of the song is like, you know, everyone's cracking down on these bullies, but like, okay, fine, bullies are bad, but like, if the bullies go away, we're screwed.
Like, you know, when I was a kid, I... You know, you go away for the summer.
You know, you don't see your friends so much like that.
And so I was really into Ninja Turtles.
And like, and so then when it gets to be around like 13 or years old, like I come back to school with all my Ninja Turtle toys, you know, thinking that everybody's going to like, you know, be still into Ninja Turtles.
And then everybody just made fun of me.
Like, what are you doing with toys?
Like, and I was like, okay, good.
Duly noted.
Got rid of them.
And it was fine.
Like, you know, because the bullies kept me in line.
They kind of told me like, that's not cool anymore.
When I was a kid, I was 11, and I moved from Florida to Boston, and I guess I was 11, 12, I might have been 13. Yeah, about 13 and I guess I was in middle school and I went to this I was in Jamaica Plain, which is kind of it now it's become more gentrified But when I lived there it was pretty sketchy.
It was like late 70s early like maybe 1980 at the latest 1980 I think high school freshman year was 81 for me.
So I guess it was like 1979 or 1980 and I had like an incredible Hulk lunchbox And, you know, and when you're in a fucking, you know, quote-unquote urban middle school and you show up with a fucking cartoon lunchbox, you get shit all over.
I had that lunchbox for one day.
I remember, like, I was so happy I got this lunchbox.
I was, like, super psyched.
I love the Hulk.
And they fucking looked at me like I was, like, a victim.
Like, I was, like, ready.
I was going to get attacked.
Like, I was a limping antelope straying in front of the waterhole.
But on the other hand, now I'm even doubting myself, I'm playing devil's advocate to myself, even if it is about that, and it's just a person who wants to dress up like an animal and fuck another guy dressed like an animal, who gives a shit, really?
I mean, I think it's weird, but it doesn't affect me at all.
How come they have the little e-cigarettes, and the little e-cigarettes where it looked like a cigarette, and then it turned into, like, black ones, like, ooh, it's murdered out.
I mean, I remember, I was just talking about this last week, where there's, um, I remember when I was a kid, you know, you download, like, Anarchist Cookbook and all this stuff from, like, the internet, and There was a CIA handbook that you could download.
I don't know if it's real or not, but one of the things that they told you how to do in there is they said there's enough chemicals in a pack of cigarettes to kill somebody.
You boil it down, you distill it, and you can make a paste that you'd put on a doorknob.
And then if somebody touches it, it'll kill them.
It'll give them the same type of deal with the nicotine thing, where it's an absorbent toxin.
So I don't know why there's 599 ingredients and 4,000 chemicals.
I don't know how that works.
But all those things were approved.
That's what's really crazy.
They say, yeah, yeah, yeah, put that in.
We're thinking about throwing formaldehyde and just, oh, yeah, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
We're still golfing, right?
Yeah, you're golfing.
I mean, it's through all these different chemicals, and what's really fascinating about it is the object, or the purpose of all these chemicals is just to try to make you more addictive.
There's a documentary that I'm in called The Culture High, a recent documentary by the same people that did this other documentary I was in called The Union, and it's all about how the prison industry and the medical marijuana and marijuana has been demonized, how many people are in jail because of it, and just the percentage of people that are nonviolent drug offenders that are in there because of marijuana, and how many How many people, like, literally the drug war would dissolve if it wasn't for marijuana being illegal.
The amount of people that get arrested for other drugs pales in comparison.
But one of the things they talked about was cigarettes, and they said that if you take, if you smoke two packs of cigarettes, that's the breaking number, where you are 4,000 times more likely to get cancer.
I think during or leading up to the Civil War, Texas wanted to be part of the Union or it came that Texas could be part of the Union, but then they wouldn't accept them because they thought they didn't want to swing the amount of pro-slave states.
They didn't want to add another pro-slave state.
They had an equal amount of pro-slave and non-slave states.
So they didn't accept Texas's entrance into the Union.
So they made their own country.
And then after the Civil War, when they asked Texas to come into the country, they had this kind of caveat.
Which they're like, okay, but at any point, if we want to leave, we can leave.
And apparently there's so much of a demand for Cuban cigars that the quality has diminished for some of them.
Yeah, they're just not worth as much as they used to be.
They're just not as good, rather, as they used to be because the soil's getting depleted.
There's a lot of fake ones, a lot of counterfeit Cuban cigars, but it's another one of those things just like the fucking rich guys that want to go to Everest.
Well, it's almost like, you know, all those, well, I guess everybody smoked, so it's not really, you know, but like all those old writers, you think about like Hemingway or anything, it's all smoking and drinking and all this stuff.
There's a commercial that they air from some woman.
She was beautiful when she was younger and then she smoked a lot of cigarettes and got cancer and now half her face is missing and she's got no throat.
Probably more complicated than that we're probably going to be some sort of artificial creation like an artificial body like not necessarily a computer but like you know everything about us artificial not like living well you know eventually probably a virtual thing we'll probably realize like why we so hung up on bodies Yeah.
Like, maybe they'll just be, it'll probably just be like a computer that has versions of us, just kind of out of, well, it's good to know where you came from.
You know, computers paying respect, like, let's keep, you know, a lot of them virtually inside of us, and then the computers will go out and explore the galaxy and kind of, you know, and we'll just be kind of an interesting footnote, you know, that they kind of pay respect to.
Yeah, I was reading something about this company that's trying to start up where what they're going to do is take these, because I think it's like a spherical camera that is basically recording in all directions at once.
But they want to go to like Everest, they want to go to the pyramids, they want to plant one of these things and you pay like a monthly service and then you're just sitting in your home and you're like, I want to see what it's like at the pyramids right now.
You put this on and you're there.
They're gonna put one on a satellite in low orbit going around the planet so you can just be like floating in space over like anywhere you want and then they're saying that like what's really gonna be crazy about it is how it's gonna change news because like CNN will have their camera like you know Fox News will have their camera so like you know something happens in Ferguson You know, they go down there, and they plant their camera there, and then you can just, all their viewers can just go and actually be at, like, where the news is happening, and you can kind of look around and see for yourself.
You can watch the State of the Union with, you know, the camera there, and you see what your specific state senator's doing.
I mean, it's not like he's just old and he exercises a lot and, you know, he's not Jack LaWayne.
I mean, he was really fucked up because of being a prisoner of war.
I mean, he was tortured and his shoulders are fucked up, like, really beyond repair.
That's the thing.
Like, he can't raise his hands.
He can't, like, raise his arms over his head.
He's not like physically well, but he makes sense sometimes just weird You know he's not off about everything like he starts talking like one of the things about when he and Obama were debating He was they were talking about going into Afghanistan and You know Obama was like, you know, we'll just go in we'll send troops.
We'll take care of the bad guys and And McCain was like, whoa, wait a minute, man.
That's when McCain made sense, because this guy was in war, was a prisoner of fucking war, was tortured, held by the Viet Cong.
And he was like, it is not that easy, man.
Do you know what it's like over there?
One of the things that he said that really fucking stunned me, and I had to research it, and it turns out it's totally true.
He said, most of Afghanistan operates essentially exactly the way it did when Alexander the Great was around.
When we landed, we were coming down the escalator, and there was all these people that were waiting there for the missionaries to return, the elders, who were in foreign countries convincing these poor people to sign up and become Mormons.
I was I was doing a sketch like a music video for It was this country music song called, you know, it was about like blue laws and states like, you know, and if they won't tell you Alcohol, you know, the song is called what about mouthwash and it was like, you know, all these different things like what about mouthwash?
What about huff and paint and all these things that you could you could do and for the music video I was like, oh, fuck it, we'll just, you know, we're in the truck, got some paint, spray paint in a bag, and my friend had, like, mouthwash, and so we just, like, did it for the shot, and I... I just, you know, because the shot was on, so I just sprayed the spray paint in the bag, and then I just huffed in, and it's so fast.
You know the problem with that show is I have been exposed too much to how television works.
Part of me is calling bullshit.
Part of me is saying this person is so together that they've contacted the producers of this show, they're on the show, they're walking around, the camera's following them.
Really?
Are you sure or are you sure they're not engineering this whole thing?
I just don't get why, I mean, like, if I had a loved one who was like, you know, like, had a problem, you know, and was like, alright, I gotta do an intervention.
Like, the last thing I would think of is like, and I gotta get a TV show to watch this thing, like, you know.
It's about people who just didn't realize that they were pregnant and then they have their babies in the toilet or just walking to work or something.
And they would reenact it.
Like, it was kind of like Unsolved Mysteries style, where they'd interview the real people, and then they'd have actors, like, playing it out, like, oh, my stomach hurts, I'm gonna go take a shit, and then the baby, they'd put, they'd throw, the crazy thing about the show is that, I watched one episode where they had the mom get up, you know, and then the camera goes into the toilet, and they put a real baby in a toilet, like a real, like, for the shot.
There was a girl that worked at the bank that I used to go to when I was a kid, and she had her baby and threw it in the garbage and went back to work.
She worked at a bank.
No one knew she was pregnant.
She was overweight.
Went to the bathroom, had the baby, threw it in the garbage, and went back to work, and then they figured out what the fuck happened and arrested her.
Well, there was a bumper sticker once I saw on a car, like a cop car, that was like telling people they didn't have to throw their baby away and they could bring their baby to a fire department and drop the baby off or a police station.
I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Who the fuck is like, I'm on my way to the dumpster with my baby?
It's more evidence that there's groups of people when you have a city.
You know, you have a million people or five million people or ten million people, whatever it is.
When you get groups of people that aren't really interacting with their neighbors, don't really have real communities, they're not in real tribes, they're just sort of independent and wandering around.
There's madness all around us.
Unrecognized, unchecked madness, ignored madness.
It's just all around us.
We just don't deal with it.
If there was only 50 of us and we lived in the jungle together, you would know that bitch is pregnant.
Didn't, like, the population of the entire world stay somewhere around one billion for as long as we can, like, kind of, for a long time?
Like, you know, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
And then, like, once we invented, basically, once we figured out how to use fossil fuels and, like, plastics and things, it kind of shot up to, like, seven billion within, like, a hundred years.
Like, you have more of a chance.
I mean, there's more people now than there's ever been by like a huge long shot.
Yeah, there was a thing that I was listening to the other day that was talking about the population of the United States during World War II. And it was in the 1940s, it was 150 million people or less.
But that's the other thing about the points to urbanization and to improvement of the quality of life is that apparently when the quality of life improves and there's more resources, people have less kids.
And also, when the quality of life improves and resources improve, the people have less kids because their careers become more important.
And they become more concerned with progress and with their career than they do with having a family.
So they have families later and later.
That's one of the things they also attribute to the increase in autism.
I think there's a contributing factor, apparently, like several times, several fold, is when you have children after a certain age.
I think it's when something is around a lot, you know, you're kind of just, you know, as a kid growing up, you're kind of just like, okay, does everything have to be about, you know, church, that kind of thing?
It was always me and like two or three of the other quote-unquote bad kids that would be at the back of the class just like not taking things seriously and kind of making fun of everybody kind of thing.
Up until the time she was probably like 30. She went on a rampage.
There was like a long list of people that I knew that fucked her.
It was crazy.
At a certain point in time, we were like, by the time we were like 19 or 20, I dated her when I guess we were like 16. And by the time we were like 19 or 20, I knew like a dozen dudes that had fucked her.
And she was really pretty, too, so everybody wanted to fuck her.
All that suppression, like her parents were so overbearing, just so constantly drilling Jesus into her head and the Catholic guilt, and she just couldn't wait to just finger herself and just start sucking down.
Just run around.
She would get so drunk that she would just throw up and pass out.
I mean, it was more of like just phone arguments, kind of.
I did a song about the Pope called The Pope Rap, and I knew it was about to come out.
It was for my last album, and so I went home for Christmas one year, and I'd already shot the music video for it, and I was like, well, I might as well.
I was like, you know what I'll do?
I'll just kind of...
I'll just kind of nip this in the bud.
Like, I'll kind of show this to them while I'm here.
I can answer any questions about it.
Like, you know, so it's not like they see it.
It was a bad idea because I, like, ruined Christmas.
They did it authentically to how the battles would actually play out.
But see, it's very unorganized.
It's people just running around, and you're shooting, and then I guess when you run out, you fake death, and you die, and then you kind of lay on the ground for the rest of the battle.
You know, that was one of the things about that Brian Williams thing that I found particularly disturbing.
When Brian Williams got caught not telling the truth about his helicopter getting shot at, what was interesting to me was not just that, that this...
Fucking news guy lied, but that the pilot of the helicopter that he was on was telling his version of the story, because they had interviewed him, and he said, well, our helicopter did get hit with small arms fire, and the helicopter in front of us was the one that got hit by the RPG, and then we had to land, and we had to drop off our load first, and that's why we were an hour behind them, but we were all in the same convoy.
So he's telling the story.
He's essentially like...
Letting Brian Williams off the hook a little bit.
Because he was saying, well, we did get hit.
We were being attacked.
There's no doubt about it.
And then a lot of people were like, well, why would he lie about that?
Because the lie doesn't make him look any better.
You were in a war.
You were getting attacked.
You did have to land.
You did...
Take small arms fire, and you were stuck in a sandstorm for two days.
Just the sandstorm, just watching another helicopter in front of you get hit with an RPG. But then the guy said that he got calls from all these other people.
That were saying, no, you didn't have Brian Williams in your helicopter.
This guy did, or that guy did.
And there was more than one story emerging of different people saying that they had Brian Williams in his helicopter.
And then he said, you know what?
I might be wrong.
I don't even want to talk about this anymore, because I've been doing these interviews about this, now all the nightmares are coming back.
He was like, I tried to put this aside...
And it put in my mind, it made me really think about getting over traumatic situations like that and how much of the truth of, you know, we're talking about like 12 plus years ago, how much of the truth do you retain in your memory?
And how much of it is just...
Really, really confusing and fucked up because it's just bullets and chaos and nightmares and dead bodies and who knows how many times that guy saw somebody die.
And then they're asking him to recall a very specific instance where one very specific...
Unremarkable at the time, news guy was with him.
Unremarkable at the time, because nothing happened other than this news guy was there.
Yeah, I remember some things very clearly, very clearly, because I kind of told the story more than once, and the points in the story that were specific were very important.
But yeah, there's some other stories that are just fucking loosely pieced together flashes in my brain, like images that I can kind of recall, kind of, and chain of events that I can kind of recall correctly.
The weird thing is like when you tell a story, or like something crazy happens in college, and it's a story right out the gate, you know, kind of thing.
And you're telling that story, and you tell that story for years and years and years.
And then at a certain point, you don't really remember the actual event anymore, but you remember the story.
You've been telling the story forever.
Like someone will be like, remember when this happened?
You're like, no, but I do remember the story, you know.
I remember it happened, but I have no memory of it anymore, really.