Sept. 17, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:47:07
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Let's start. | ||
| That could be, yeah. | ||
| Chris Ryan and I have decided that for my friend Steve Renazzisi, who just admitted that he lied about working who just admitted that he lied about working in the September 11th, the Twin Towers during September 11th, that we're just going to lie all day. | ||
| So this podcast is all bullshit. | ||
| Everything we say. | ||
| Psychologically, this is a tough one for me because I really like Steve. | ||
| He's a good friend. | ||
| I really like that guy. | ||
| I see him in the comedy store all the time. | ||
| I've known him for years. | ||
| I really like him. | ||
| And then I see this and I'm just like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| You know what gets me? | ||
| What gets me when someone does something like this is I imagine what it would be like to be them, to have told some sort of a crazy lie and got stuck telling it, where you're repeating it over and over again, and then you just got, it just becomes like it's locked in. | ||
| It's like, how do you erase it? | ||
| How do you go back and take a lie away? | ||
| Especially if you transition from like a regular guy who just bullshits with his friends to a public figure. | ||
| Like I guess this guy got famous at some point, right? | ||
| So then you've got your lies that all your friends think are true. | ||
| And now you're doing interviews with the fucking Wall Street Journal or whatever. | ||
| And if that comes up, What do you do? | ||
| You stick to your guns or you humiliate yourself in your private circle? | ||
| Well, apparently he did humiliate himself in his private circle. | ||
| He pulled Ari and a few guys aside years ago and told them that it wasn't true. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd just been fucking with him forever. | ||
| I just, you know... | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| He's coming out of the closet. | ||
| Although he got pulled out of the closet, I guess. | ||
| I think he got pulled out by the New York Times. | ||
| I think the New York Times got him. | ||
| You know, they do their research and they found out that he didn't really work for Merrill Lynch. | ||
| You know, he said he worked for Merrill Lynch for like a year and a half as an account manager. | ||
| Didn't really work for Merrill Lynch. | ||
| As you were saying before the mics went on, like, what a dumbass lie. | ||
| Like, oh, Merrill Lynch account manager? | ||
| Wow, let me suck your dick. | ||
| Like, who gives a shit? | ||
| You used to work for Maryland? | ||
|
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It's like, hey, I used to be an accountant, baby, you know? | |
| I like how lies for Chris Ryan immediately translate into potential sex. | ||
|
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Why else would you lie? | |
| Why else would you lie? | ||
| Nothing else is worth it, you know? | ||
| I guess to get a better job or something, maybe that would be something. | ||
| I don't want a job. | ||
| My entire life has been about avoiding ever having a job. | ||
| Other than blow job. | ||
| Writing books even. | ||
| Just like, God, let me just get this out of the way so I don't have to have a job. | ||
| Dude, I don't ever want to write another fucking book in my life. | ||
| Even that, I'm trying to get out of. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| But you're an author. | ||
| You're an established, successful author and you're like, fuck, I don't even want to do that. | ||
| Dude, I wrote a book and suddenly was running a business. | ||
| Like, I never wanted to have a business. | ||
| I'm not a business guy. | ||
| What is the business? | ||
| Chris Ryan, Inc. | ||
| You know what it's like. | ||
| If, like, you're in the paper, suddenly managers are calling you and lawyers and you've got, you know, you've got the sort of parasite infrastructure that gloms onto you like, you know, those things on the bottom of boats, you know? | ||
| And it's like, no offense to any accountants who are... | ||
| But you know what I mean, right? | ||
| I mean, you know, Joe Rogan Enterprises is a huge thing, you know? | ||
| And that must take a lot of time, a lot of attention. | ||
| And so even in my, you know, micro scale, it's just a giant pain in the ass. | ||
| It certainly can be. | ||
| Fortunately for me, I don't think of anything that I'm doing as, like, really work work. | ||
| You know, it's just stuff I enjoy doing that happens to be an occupation rather than... | ||
| Also, what you're doing, you're at a level where you can afford to hire good people to help you. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| And my wife is useless. | ||
| She's a wonderful woman, don't get me wrong. | ||
| And she's very good at certain things, but producing a podcast, editing a book, the kind of stuff I need someone to do, I have to answer her emails. | ||
| She can't be bothered. | ||
| When you hear a guy like this Rent is Easy story, when you hear a lie, does it freak you out? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Here's the thing that freaks me out. | ||
| And it freaks me out. | ||
| Even like the Jared from Subway thing or when I read something about some guy who was methed up. | ||
| I forget what the article was about. | ||
| I think the article was about a guy who was friends with a guy who turned out to be a murderer. | ||
| And it's about a guy who got methed up and got involved in some rough sex with some prostitute and killed her and then sawed her up and left her fucking body in bags and shit. | ||
| Could have been an accident. | ||
| Whenever I hear about anybody who's just gone completely off the rails like that, I always say, okay, If I was that guy, if I was born in his shoes, if I lived his life, would I have been that fucking guy? | ||
| Like, how much of what we are is determinism? | ||
| You know, how much of what we are is based on the events that took place that are completely outside of our control? | ||
| About how much of it is how we were raised? | ||
| I mean, we've all heard... | ||
| People tell, like, terrible stories about how their parents raised them. | ||
| Terrible stories about the environment they're forced into. | ||
| And you always wonder, like, how much of who each one of us is is based on a bunch of shit that's completely outside of your control. | ||
| And how much of these events that take place, whether it's the Jared from Subway thing or... | ||
| I had my friend Barry Crimmins on, who's this great comedian and a real icon in Boston, and Bobcat Goldthwait did a film on him about his horrific childhood sexual abuse. | ||
| He was raped when he was four years old by his babysitter's boyfriend, and it was this horrific, horrific story. | ||
| And, you know, this is something completely outside of this guy's control, and how much of who he is now is based on that. | ||
| Well, he's, like, in his 50s, and this is, like, still something he's dealing with from when he was four, you know? | ||
| It's just, what you are now is, like, this series of events that have kind of... | ||
| A lot of them just laid out in front of you without you having any control over it at all. | ||
| Now here you are. | ||
| And when I see a guy that does something really crazy... | ||
| I mean, this is, like, minorly crazy. | ||
| We're not talking about a horrific crime, like a Bill Cosby thing or something like that. | ||
| We're back to the comedian now. | ||
| Yeah, the comedian. | ||
| Not the chopped-up prostitute. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, Steve Renazizi, my friend. | ||
| You know, what he did just doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And you just wonder, like, what it must be like... | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| To be that guy who's done that, who's just like said this thing for no fucking reason, it doesn't make any sense, and then has to stick with it. | ||
| Just, I don't, I mean, that's my angle on these things. | ||
| Instead of getting upset about, I mean, especially this one. | ||
| But how does that relate to what you're saying? | ||
| Do you feel like if you may, if you were in the position he was in, you might have done something similar? | ||
| I always worry that, yeah. | ||
| I always, whenever I see someone do anything crazy, like murder or craziness or anything, I always say, well, How much of who you are is because of your life experiences? | ||
| A lot of them outside of your control. | ||
| Your genetics, your parents, the environment that you were raised up, and the people that you came in contact with when you were younger. | ||
| How much of that is who you are today in 2015? | ||
| I think it's, goddammit, I think it's a lot. | ||
| And so I see this guy, you know, my friend, and again, Steve Renazizi, what he did was just dumb. | ||
| It's not evil. | ||
| Nobody got hurt, you know? | ||
| I mean, he might have hurt someone's feelings, people that actually were survivors of 9-11. | ||
| That's potentially possible. | ||
| But you know what I mean? | ||
| He didn't rape anybody. | ||
| He didn't murder anybody. | ||
| It's just fucking, what happened? | ||
| How does that, how does the brain get so fucking tweaked? | ||
| So, and of the lies he's been busted for, the, I was in the Twin Towers at 9-11 is the one that everyone's focused on, right? | ||
| Yeah, no one gives a fuck about lying about working for Merrill Lynch. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, although I don't understand why you would, right, like you said, unless you're trying to get laid. | ||
| And also, like... | ||
| I would argue that anyone who was a survivor of 9-11 who was actually there has bigger issues to think about than some comedian. | ||
| So I would argue he didn't really hurt anyone except himself now that he's busted. | ||
| - Rationally, yeah, you're right. - So who gives a shit, you know? | ||
| And everybody in public life is lying on some level, right? | ||
| You've got a persona, and you have to be true to that persona even, I mean, I remember when I first sat down with this producer to talk about doing a TV show, which ultimately never got made like most TV shows, But when we were putting together the whole summaries of the episodes and all this stuff, he said, so what's your on-air, who are you going to be on the show? | ||
| And I said, what do you mean? | ||
| It's like, I'm just going to be me. | ||
| He said, no, are you going to be the funny guy or are you going to be the really smart professorial guy? | ||
| What's your image, your persona going to be? | ||
| I said, I'm just going to be me. | ||
| He said, oh, you're going to be authentic. | ||
| With air quotes. | ||
| I said, what the fuck is that? | ||
| No, I'm going to be authentic. | ||
| He's like, no, on TV you can't be really authentic. | ||
| The most you can be is, quote, authentic. | ||
| Because you have to be the same every fucking episode. | ||
| And if you come in one day and you're feeling pissed off because you just had a fight with your wife or you got diarrhea or whatever your issue is, you can't express that. | ||
| You have to be the same guy you were last week. | ||
| But why is that? | ||
| Consistency. | ||
| Well, it's entertainment. | ||
| But that's the medium, though. | ||
| The medium is just so limiting in that way that people expect that every week. | ||
| That's one of the cool things about a podcast is that they kind of don't. | ||
| Like when you do Tangentially Speaking, you can kind of like... | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| ...be you. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I try to, but still, I am conscious of the... | ||
| the distinction between who I really am and who people are getting the impression I am. | ||
| And I try to be like just a lot. | ||
| Last episode I did in the intro, I did a little thing about because people were writing to me saying, like, what's it like to go from like some nobody in Barcelona to TED Talks and Rogan show and all this stuff. | ||
| What's that like? | ||
| Did you feel it happening? | ||
| Did you expect it? | ||
| Is it like being on a river and it was just flowing that way? | ||
| Or were you swimming toward it? | ||
| And so I tried to address it a little bit. | ||
| And what I said was, in my very minuscule experience, fame is like wine that tastes really good and can only get you drunk while it's in your mouth. | ||
| So you swallow it quickly. | ||
| I know, it's not the best thing. | ||
| The other metaphor I thought of was like... | ||
| Oh, okay, okay. | ||
| So if it's in your mouth, it gets you drunk, but if you swallow it... | ||
| You're fine. | ||
| You're fine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you... | ||
| I mean, you know what I'm talking about. | ||
| Someone comes up to you and they're like nervous and like, oh my God, it's Joe Rogan. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And you're like, yeah, I'm just me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you know the truth. | ||
| You're just a guy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But they're reacting to what they think you are, which is so much more than what you actually, what anyone is, you know? | ||
| That's the nature of fame. | ||
| It's this bullshit thing that only has the value that people apply to it. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And they're applying more to it than you are because you're you, right? | ||
| And you know what it's like behind the curtain. | ||
| So, but you don't want to disrespect them either. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And you don't want to disrespect what it is that they're experiencing in that moment, even though it's complete bullshit. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. | ||
| No, no, you're making sense. | ||
| Because it's very confusing to people that don't know it. | ||
| But it's like a magic trick that if it tricks the magician, he's a fucking idiot. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like you have a magic. | ||
| Look, I pull a dove out of my hat. | ||
| You know there was no fucking dove and the dove's in your sleeve, asshole. | ||
| You're hiding the dove. | ||
| I see what you're doing. | ||
| You know what you're doing. | ||
| But if you say, I have this amazing ability to make doves appear out of nowhere and you really believe it, well, you're a moron. | ||
| You know, it's like you have a magic trick in being on television or being, you know, on the radio or in movies or whatever it is. | ||
| Whatever it is that people get attracted to you by your work, by you being an author, whatever it is. | ||
| That thing makes you different than another person instead of just like I appreciate Talent like very much so and I can kind of be like I'm a little starstruck when I meet someone that I really appreciate or that I really am admiring of their work, but I kind of know what it is. | ||
| It's like I've seen it enough times that I'll go, hey, there's that guy that fucking sings that awesome song, hey, I love your shit, man. | ||
| It's a good thing, but I don't think of him as other than a human being. | ||
| But I remember one of the first times I ever met a famous person, or the first times I ever met famous people, I couldn't believe I was seeing them in real life. | ||
| One of the first guys I'd ever met, I was in Harvard Square in Cambridge. | ||
| I don't even remember the dude's name, but he had been in a bunch of television dramas. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| And I was like, you're that guy from that show! | ||
| And he'd tell me what the show... | ||
| He's asking a question. | ||
| He wanted to know where the T-stop was, where he could catch public transportation. | ||
| So he approached you. | ||
| No, he just... | ||
| He asked a question. | ||
| I don't know if I asked him if he was that guy first or if he asked me, but he didn't give a fuck. | ||
| He was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm that guy from that show. | ||
| Did you guys know where this thing is? | ||
| And we told them where it was, and we're like, whoa, we just saw that guy! | ||
| I still to this day don't remember who the fuck he was. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's funny. | |
| And when I was little, my uncle used to work for Howard Marks Advertising. | ||
| My uncle Vinny is an artist, and he worked for the company that drew the album covers for KISS. So when I was like, boy, I guess I was like eight or nine years old maybe, I don't know how, somewhere in that age, I met Ace Frehley, who was the lead guitarist to Kiss, and he always wore makeup, and I met him with no makeup on. | ||
| And he would come by, and it was a great hustle they had. | ||
| They wore makeup when they were on stage, but then offstage, no one knew who the fuck they were. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they were huge superstars selling out arenas, rock stars, but they were just completely incognito. | ||
| So this guy just walks into the office, and my uncle knew him because they were friends, and he's like, oh, hey, what's up? | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| And I was so confused. | ||
| I was like, is that... | ||
| Is that what he looks like? | ||
| Because you couldn't even see them. | ||
| This was obviously pre-internet, but there was no photos of them available without their makeup. | ||
| There was maybe one photo with a hand in front of them or something like that, where you really couldn't see clearly. | ||
| But to see them in the flesh, moving around and walking and talking, I was like, what the fuck? | ||
| Yeah, they had it from the beginning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, we don't want to be recognized at the Whole Foods. | ||
| Did they see that shit coming? | ||
| They saw Whole Foods coming. | ||
| Trader Joe's. | ||
| It's all out there. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think there was a style of, I think they used to call it glam rock. | ||
| Is that what they used to call it? | ||
| David Bowie and all that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think that's what it's called, but I think it was just a hook. | ||
| I think their hook was that they were going to wear face paint, you know, and have these designs in their face. | ||
| Like, Paul Stanley was the star child, so he had a star over his face. | ||
| And Gene Simmons was the demon who used to spit blood and blow fire on stage. | ||
| And they had, you know, Peter Criss was the cat, and Ace Frehley was... | ||
| You know, he was like the Spaceman, and they had this persona that they had adopted, like these characters, and no one knew what they were, and all their names were fake too, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| So, like, who they were when they were on stage, and it was sort of taken even further into Fantasyland by this makeup and these crazy costumes that they wore, like they wore boots, like Gene Simmons' boots had teeth on the bottom of them, like these... | ||
| It's just all so nutty. | ||
| So bringing it back to your buddy, imagine, you know, your kiss and you're trying to pick up a woman in a bar and you're like, you know, I'm Gene Simmons. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You probably work at Merrill fucking Lynch. | ||
| I think... | ||
| They probably had so many girls coming up to them, they never went to a bar and tried to meet people. | ||
| They never went. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they were probably just trying to think, how many can I fuck in a day? | ||
| And how many do I have to say no to? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because it's just not going to work out. | ||
| Well, you've got people to do that for you, right? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Yeah, they probably had like... | ||
| Handlers. | ||
| Handlers. | ||
| Wranglers. | ||
| I heard an interview the other day with, I forget his name, but he's one of the main guys of Iron Maiden, which is a band I don't know, but I know they're huge. | ||
| And he's a jet pilot. | ||
| And he flew commercial airlines for years. | ||
| So he was like, you know, nobody knew it was me up there, you know? | ||
| And I'd just be, you know, flying, you know, London to New York or whatever. | ||
| Like, this is your pilot. | ||
| We're reaching out to cruising out today. | ||
|
unidentified
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How bizarre. | |
| And then he'd go, like, play a gig in New York. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he would fly as a commercial air pilot and then do a gig. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then they bought a jet, you know, 747 or something, to fly the band around. | ||
| So now he flies the band to gigs. | ||
| How fucking strange. | ||
| Didn't John Travolta fly commercially for Qantas? | ||
| That rings a bell. | ||
| Yeah, I know he's an accomplished pilot. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he did. | ||
| A friend of mine went flying with Tom Cruise. | ||
| He's got like one of those biplanes, a stunt plane. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it was like loop-de-loop. | ||
| And she said, man, I almost puked on him. | ||
| Because she was in front, you know, the pilot's in back. | ||
| And she was like, I was this close to Ralph and all over Tom Cruise. | ||
| So the pilot goes in back and the passenger is in front. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those old planes, man, when you see what it is, this wire frame with this very thin coating outside of it. | ||
| So the cables going out to the flaps and stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they used to have to manipulate the flaps with handles in order to make it go up and down and move the rudder. | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| And they fought with those things. | ||
| You remember the old King Kong? | ||
| King Kong 1 with King Kong on top of the World Trade Center. | ||
| No, it wasn't World Trade Center. | ||
| It was the Empire State Building back then. | ||
| King Kong lied about that. | ||
| Fucking liar. | ||
| He's climbing up the Empire State Building and they're shooting at him with those planes. | ||
| Those old rickety World War I planes. | ||
| It's pre-World War II. Yeah. | ||
| Because King Kong, I believe, was the 30s. | ||
| The original King Kong. | ||
| It's early. | ||
| I want to say like 33 or something like that. | ||
| It was a talkie, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was a talking. | ||
| Early talkies. | ||
| We went over that yesterday, that the first movies were actually the 1800s for silent movies. | ||
| It was the late 1800s. | ||
| With the horses, the first one to show that all the horses' feet came off the ground at once. | ||
| No. | ||
| You know that story? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that was the first motion picture. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| A French guy. | ||
| Yeah, there was a bet. | ||
| It's a long time since I may be full of shit here, but I'm sure people are Googling it even as we speak. | ||
| But there was, I think it was the first motion picture was that they were trying to determine whether all of a horse's feet came off the ground at once. | ||
| So he set up, I don't know if it was like a bunch of cameras in a bank that sequentially shot. | ||
| Well, they have a video of it. | ||
| Oh, here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
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1889. There you go. | |
| Yeah, in the second frame you can see all the horses' feet are off the ground. | ||
| What was the first movie ever made? | ||
| The first movie, Thomas Edison in 1889. Oh really? | ||
| Thomas Edison? | ||
| Yeah, that's what this is saying. | ||
| It's too bad he was such a prick. | ||
| Apparently he was, right? | ||
| He stole Tesla's ideas? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's hard to tell though. | ||
| That could be like one big he said, she said thing, but obviously Tesla was a super genius and Edison electrocuted a fucking elephant. | ||
| For fun. | ||
| To show. | ||
| To scare people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Against DC. Which is hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, against ACDC. Against alternating current. | ||
| Like, DC was what was the standard. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And ACDC alternating current was what Tesla had invented so that you could plug in all sorts of different devices that need less power. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But then Edison already had a business thing going. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And didn't want... | ||
| And even though Tesla's idea was better. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| More efficient. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, Tesla was a weird, weird, weird guy, man. | |
| But you kind of have to be to be that fucking smart and figure out that many different things. | ||
| So that brings us back a little bit to what we were talking about before with the persona. | ||
| I've got this idea that most of the people who rise to positions of prominence in Western society are troubled in some way. | ||
| So, like, you know, you're talking about geniuses. | ||
| Like, you have to be... | ||
| A genius is a certain kind of distortion, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think Einstein said that a smart man controls his mind, a genius is controlled by it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So there's an obsessive quality to it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I wonder if, you know, the extent to which our, you know, this is this whole book that I'm writing, it seems that if you say the underlying structure of civilization is essentially pathological, then it makes sense that the leaders, the people who rise to prominent positions within that society, will predominantly be pathological. | ||
| Is that necessarily true? | ||
| Is Zuckerberg a guy who creates something like Facebook? | ||
| Is that guy pathological? | ||
| Well, I would look at him and say, I don't know the guy, of course. | ||
| I saw the movie. | ||
| That's as close as I got to him. | ||
| But does he seem like a balanced, healthy character? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| To me, you know, it seems like a lot of what's created is created by sexually frustrated adolescent men or boys. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he would probably fit into that area, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, wasn't the whole thing like a dating, a way to meet chicks at Harvard? | ||
| Wasn't that the origins of it? | ||
| I think it was a dating thing. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| It was in the movie. | ||
| Makes sense, though. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, anyway, I mean, Freud talked about this in Civilization and its Discontents, that, you know, civilization is built on deflected sexual energy, and if we were all just getting laid as much as we wanted, nobody would do anything. | ||
| That's a good point, and also, if you really concentrate on what is healthy, in quotes, what's healthy is friendship and fun. | ||
| None of those really stack up points, you know, as far as, like, monetary, you know... | ||
| What you can put in your bank account, what you can show as far as your real estate holdings. | ||
| Look at my fancy stuff. | ||
| That's really what people look to when they look for the gauge of success. | ||
| The gauge of success is almost always attached to money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And if you get to the point where you see through money or fame or power these metrics that are socially accepted, Then you become, you know, what? | ||
| The Jesus figure, the Buddha, the, you know, you sort of check out, tune in, turn on, drop out, right? | ||
| Yeah, and then you're a loser. | ||
| You're a loser, exactly. | ||
| And you're not influencing the direction of society, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird, like, it's weird about our ideas. | ||
| Like, knowing the temporary nature of life, it's weird that our idea of success is based almost entirely on the possession of things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that, of course, feeds into the powers that be, right? | ||
| The consumerist change, the change nature into plastic, you know, which seems to be what we're about. | ||
| I have a weird theory about this that I've repeated before. | ||
| So in the interest of saving the... | ||
| Attention span of the people that listen. | ||
| I think that the reason why people are hooked on materialism, the reason why it's so attractive, is because ultimately what it's doing is propelling technology and innovation. | ||
| And that the more we become obsessed with acquiring the newest, latest, greatest things, the more it will push innovation, these newest, latest, greatest things. | ||
| And the reason for that is we're ultimately creating an artificial life. | ||
| And I think that we are the technological caterpillar that becomes some artificial intelligent butterfly. | ||
| And that what we're doing is creating a new life form. | ||
| We're so arrogant that we think that we're the only life, and this is the only life that's possible. | ||
| But meanwhile, what we're doing is we have been born into these inefficient, these biological entities. | ||
| These shells that house our imagination and that we eventually will escape them or create something that makes us obsolete. | ||
| More likely the latter. | ||
| Yeah, I'm grappling with these very issues right now at the end of this book, right? | ||
|
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Oh, yeah? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever read Kevin Kelly or heard of him? | ||
| No. | ||
| He's a very deep thinker in artificial intelligence and the internet and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Very interesting guy. | ||
| And systems, like how systems self-organize and like... | ||
| They take high-speed film of flocks of birds, and they see that the individual birds are reacting to other birds. | ||
| The flock is reacting quicker than individual birds can react. | ||
| There's what they call phase change. | ||
| Where you shift from a group of birds to a flock of birds, or a bunch of fish to a school of fish, where everything starts functioning very differently. | ||
| For example, did you know that Locusts and grasshoppers are the same animal? | ||
| Yeah, it did. | ||
| Completely crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's just a matter of the swarm of them. | ||
| Well, yeah, when it rains, and so then there's a lot of food, they reproduce really quickly. | ||
| So now you've got the population density, and then the food starts to dissipate because the water is going, and now they get Very tight population density, and they become locusts, which their brains change, their legs change, the coloring changes, their behavior changes, and they start swarming. | ||
| So with less food, they swarm? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the food is restricted, so they get into, you know, like an oasis or something. | ||
| So they get into smaller areas because the water from the—first it rains, so you get lots of them. | ||
| Then the water starts to disappear, right? | ||
| It evaporates over a few days or whatever, and the food is less and less. | ||
| So they're concentrated. | ||
| And it's when they're packed tightly that they shift into locusts. | ||
| And that's when they swarm and they go out, you know, and wipe out anything they can find. | ||
| But then they can shift back to grasshoppers again. | ||
| So I'm sort of arguing in this book that civilization is when our species shifted to locus, a phase shift into a locus form, and we swarmed, and we've been swarming ever since, but we're about to run out of material. | ||
| And, you know, like the fish stocks are down, the water's gone, like everything's, we're in the age of no more, you know? | ||
| It's hard to argue. | ||
| You know, I was watching this documentary the other day about the 1970s, when they were talking about the 1970s, there was 100 million less people in America. | ||
| In America. | ||
| In America. | ||
| And like the world population was... | ||
| Billions less. | ||
| But that's stunning. | ||
| A hundred million... | ||
| I mean, think about if a hundred million people died today in America. | ||
| It would be a fucking enormous tragedy of epic proportion. | ||
| But that was just the numbers. | ||
| A few decades ago, four decades ago, whatever it was. | ||
| Pick a number. | ||
| That's fucking crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| 100 million people is a lot to gather inside of 50 years. | ||
| That's really remarkable. | ||
| Yeah, and we're still talking as if growth is the natural and, you know, it's the only way to be, right? | ||
| We need growth. | ||
| We need growth. | ||
| They're worried that reproduction levels are below zero in Japan and Spain and some other countries. | ||
| Why are we worried? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I mean, short term, it's a problem, because you don't have enough young people to work and pay for the old people, whatever. | ||
| But long term, imagine how great the fucking Earth would be if there were one billion people on Earth. | ||
| You know, that was something that came to McKenna in a mushroom trip. | ||
| He asked the mushroom how to save the human race, and they said every couple reproduce only with one child, and the human race will be saved. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's all we'd have to do. | ||
| Significantly lower population with mortality and accidents and natural causes and all the other jazz. | ||
| Take control. | ||
| Actually, this is going to be historic. | ||
| I am a little... | ||
| I'm at the end of the book, right? | ||
| Where the publisher requires a prescriptive, like, what's next? | ||
| You know, what do we do with all this kind of chapter? | ||
| Which I hate doing, but I'm doing it. | ||
| So you have to, like, have a solution? | ||
| Takeaway. | ||
| Their phrase that they love is, what's the takeaway? | ||
| Takeaway. | ||
| Gotta have a takeaway. | ||
|
unidentified
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Have to have a final act, Mr. Ryan. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| The gun's been on the mantelpiece through the whole play. | ||
| Somebody's got to get shot. | ||
| You can't end the movie like No Country for Old Men. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You just can't just... | ||
| The guy just wanders off and like, what the fuck? | ||
| Where's the resolution? | ||
| But, you know, I've been reading Kevin Kelly, reading other stuff, and I've come around—you and Duncan and I have always had this sort of three-way debate about the future of humanity and all that. | ||
| And I see three scenarios, one of which is the one you just outlined, where we are a transitional life form that gives birth to techno-intelligence and spreads out into the universe and whatever. | ||
| And another is sort of apocalyptic collapse and Mad Men, not Mad Men, Mad Max. | ||
| They'll become advertising executives in the 60s. | ||
| Completely different outfits. | ||
| Thin lapels, a lot of smoking. | ||
| But the other one, which I'm actually, you know, if I were a betting man, I probably wouldn't put my money on this, but I'm... | ||
| I'm encouraged to think about it. | ||
| I read a book recently called Future Perfect. | ||
| I don't remember the author. | ||
| Steven Johnson is the author. | ||
| Another internet tech web guy, right? | ||
| And he makes a really strong case, which I've heard you make. | ||
| You've made it to me, actually, that the internet is, first of all, it's very, very early days for the internet. | ||
| And it opens up There's revolutionary possibilities, like, beyond anything that's happened to our species in the past. | ||
| The fact that you and I right now are talking to hundreds of thousands of people with no sponsor telling us, don't say that, don't say this, that we can talk shit about Monsanto, we can talk shit about the U.S. government, we can do whatever we want. | ||
| That is really revolutionary. | ||
| And the effects of that are impossible for us to really predict. | ||
| And it's international, right? | ||
| It doesn't respect national borders, anyone, anywhere. | ||
| It's archived. | ||
| You know, it functions vertically and horizontally. | ||
| That's really something. | ||
| And one of the examples he uses in his book is Kickstarter. | ||
| In two years after they launched, Kickstarter was already spending more supporting artists than the National Endowment for the Arts. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| In two years. | ||
| And now it's like three times that. | ||
| That's amazing, right? | ||
| Who would have thought that there were so many people who were like, I'll give 20 bucks to that guy. | ||
| I'll support that. | ||
| And, you know, just with this technology, you're able to do stuff. | ||
| I was reading about this tribe in the Amazon the other day who are... | ||
| Basically have taken over defense of their land because the government's useless and so they've got legally they're completely justified but the loggers keep coming in and you know invading. | ||
| So they've set up like GPS units all around and motion controlled cameras and they're using technology to try to defend their land and document incursions and stuff. | ||
| And I was thinking like wouldn't it be cool to set up crowd-funded Where you could send 20 bucks to this tribe in the Amazon to help them buy a fucking motion-detected camera or a drone. | ||
| Why not, right? | ||
| Like, you know about Kiva? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Kiva is microloans, and it's just a website like Kickstarter where you go in Kiva, you put 100 bucks in. | ||
| And they've got all these people who have applied for loans. | ||
| You pick a country, El Salvador. | ||
| Okay, you go through, you look at all their pictures and like, okay, I need 150 bucks to buy a goat because I make goat yogurt and sell it in the village. | ||
| Okay, you give her 25 bucks. | ||
| She pays it back. | ||
| Their repayment rate is over 99% because they've got people in country who verify that everything's cool and this is a real thing and whatever. | ||
| So, then the money gets paid back to your account after they get their goat and they sell enough yogurt. | ||
| And then you can either take your money out or you can recycle it. | ||
| Like, go to Uganda and let's find somebody in Uganda. | ||
| We can help them put a new roof on the shop, right? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it's completely you to them. | ||
| And the company just, you know, it's like Tinder or anything else. | ||
| It's just a way to connect. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Really cool, you know? | ||
| And it's your money, and if you don't want to do it anymore, you take your money and you're out. | ||
| Yeah, these, like, sort of non-capitalistic ideas are one of the most beautiful things about the internet. | ||
| Like, these sort of organically created ideas, like Kickstarter, crowdfunding. | ||
| Couchsurfing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, all the sharing economy. | ||
| He calls it, his term is, pure progressives. | ||
| And so then, like, what's going to happen if We can get the oligarchs out of the way and make internet direct voting. | ||
| That's the ultimate future, right? | ||
| Internet direct voting, where it's no longer an electoral college. | ||
| We don't look at things in terms of states, but we look in terms of the mass of the race or the mass of the human organism. | ||
| What benefits? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| The problem is there's been people that have been candy-fed, they've been baby-fed for so long that it's almost like they're... | ||
| It's like taking a person who's been in solitary confinement, locked up like a veal, and then forcing them to run an ultramarathon. | ||
| It's like, you're not prepared for this. | ||
| You're not conditioned for it. | ||
| You don't have the resources to pull off an informed version of the future, you know? | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| You know, and again, it's really weird that I'm arguing the hopeful side here, but hey, what the fuck? | ||
| We said this was going to be a bullshit podcast, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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We're lying. | |
| We're lying. | ||
| We're fucked. | ||
| I don't believe any of this. | ||
| The one thing I would say about human nature, because I get asked a lot, what's human nature, you know? | ||
| I think... | ||
| The strongest thing I can say about human nature is humans want to do what everyone else is doing. | ||
| That's what we're really good at. | ||
| We're not good at thinking it through, but like, oh, everyone else is killing Jews? | ||
| Well, I guess I'll kill some Jews then. | ||
| You know, like everyone else hates black people, then I hate black people. | ||
| Gay marriage is cool? | ||
| Okay, gay marriage is cool. | ||
| Like, look how fast that changed. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to bring that up when you were talking about the birds. | ||
| Like, the birds moving in a flock in a way where they're moving in such harmony that they couldn't possibly be reacting to each other. | ||
| Is that what happens with mob mentality? | ||
| I guess so, yeah. | ||
| And I think, you know, in humans it's mob mentality, it's fan, like that hysteria. | ||
| Like the Beatles. | ||
| The Beatles, that's what I was thinking. | ||
| Yeah, like just insanity, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there is, you know, greater than the sum of its parts, right? | ||
| That phenomenon. | ||
| Like, there's no, you know, I mean, geese are a different thing, but most flocks of birds, you know, the starlings you see doing that thing at night, there's no leader. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's nobody saying, hey, let's go to the left now. | ||
| There's no choreography. | ||
| It mimics in fish as well, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Fish in swarms of locusts. | ||
| And in fact, in one of these books by Kevin Kelly, he talks about how they were doing the artificial, the guys who did the Batman, one of the Batman movies, and they were doing the special effects. | ||
| And I guess they were... | ||
| There were flocks of bats that they needed to replicate on screen and they just set up a logarithm where each bat would react to the other bats near it according to certain variables, calculations, and then they just set it loose and it formed a flock. | ||
| So it's like it doesn't even have to be alive. | ||
| It just has to have certain consistent responses. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what the fuck are we talking about? | ||
| Well, we're talking about human beings moving in a mob mentality. | ||
| Do you think that we're a... | ||
| I think... | ||
| I think the evidence is that we're a superorganism more than we're an individual. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, see, what I did in the book, and, you know, I hope this is making people want to read it when it comes out, not like, yeah, I already heard all this shit. | ||
| But, you know, what I did was I started by saying... | ||
| Your individuality is itself an illusion. | ||
| Because 90% of your weight, once you get the water out, is made of... | ||
| No, no, not your weight. | ||
| 90% of your DNA, of the DNA that constitutes your body, is not your DNA. It's the DNA of microorganisms. | ||
| That live on and in you, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I got into the whole... | ||
| The whole... | ||
| Ecosystem. | ||
| Intestinal fauna and all that. | ||
| Yeah, and it's... | ||
| So you couldn't exist without that. | ||
| So each of us is a community, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you go to the higher level and it's just the same thing. | ||
| Each of us constitutes an organism as well. | ||
| We're part of this thing that... | ||
| We can't really see because, you know, we're part of it. | ||
| It's like fish don't think about water, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's not considered because we always like to think of ourselves as individuals, but the evidence is there that we get insanely lonely when we're by ourselves. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Solitary confinement. | ||
| It's the worst thing you can do to someone in jail. | ||
| I mean, it's really crazy. | ||
| And if you think about human beings being isolated and being lonely and then the incredible joy that they have when they find civilization or people, like someone alone on a raft, they're not thinking about, well, I'm alive at least. | ||
| Let me just think about my life. | ||
| No, they're like, fuck, I've got to find people. | ||
| I have to find people. | ||
| Like, even if you have all the food in the world, if you're floating around on a boat lost at sea, you're incredibly sad. | ||
| Like, we have this insane, intense need for each other to be united, bonded with each other. | ||
| And if we're not, we're fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're some strange sort of super organism. | ||
| I made a video when I had my 2005 Showtime special, and I did this video about flying over the earth. | ||
| And then if you fly into Los Angeles, And if you look at the Earth as a host for life, and, you know, our bodies, you could certainly say that our bodies are a host for life. | ||
| Because of all the organisms that we just talked about, the fact there's more E. coli in your body than there are people that have ever lived ever. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| And all that stuff is important for life. | ||
| But when you fly into Los Angeles and you're flying over that just gigantic mass of cities, like, if the Earth is an organism, well, what are people? | ||
| It looks like a growth. | ||
| Like, Los Angeles looks like a growth. | ||
| It looks like a growth on the superorganism, like mold on a sandwich. | ||
| And if you saw mold on a sandwich, you don't think of individual pieces of mold with individual identities and personalities. | ||
| You just see mold. | ||
| And I think the same thing could be said about human beings. | ||
| That we're just so close to it, we can't see the forest for the trees. | ||
| That we don't see ourselves objectively. | ||
| We don't go, Oh, we're one thing. | ||
| We're one big thing that's making technology. | ||
| I mean, that's essentially what we are. | ||
| We're one big thing that's willing to sacrifice the very fucking air, the very air that we need to stay alive. | ||
| We're willing to blacken that shit up in order to produce industrial goods. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I hope that's not the way it's going, but it feels that way. | ||
| That's the trajectory we're on at the moment. | ||
| What I'm hoping is that the internet... | ||
| I mean, I look at the gay marriage thing, and a lot of the stuff is ugly that happens on the internet. | ||
| But the idea that there is, for the first time ever, the potential for a species mind... | ||
| A species-level mind, what's the first thing any conscious mind becomes aware of? | ||
| Its own mortality. | ||
| So maybe, maybe what's happening is as these synapses are connected for the first time ever and there's this super mind for a super organism, it becomes aware of what it's doing and suddenly it's like... | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Stop this. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| We're killing ourselves. | ||
| If we can understand that at a species level, then we can change it, right? | ||
| I mean, the passive technology's there. | ||
| We all know how to, you know, anal sex is better. | ||
| You know, let's make anal sex the way to, you know, no more reproduction. | ||
| Just, let's all go. | ||
| I'm not going to talk about it. | ||
| You just went on a fucking crazy tangent. | ||
| But no, I know what you're saying. | ||
| I think the idea... | ||
| Non-reproductive sex. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Sodomy is where it's at. | ||
| Sodomy is where it's at. | ||
| Be a good t-shirt. | ||
| There's a lot of protein in cum, too. | ||
| You don't necessarily have to eat chickens. | ||
| By the way, I saw your Ronda Rousey interview. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you were really funny. | ||
| You said, what is it with lipstick? | ||
| It's like, right here, this is where the dick goes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I was thinking, that is why and how lipstick was invented. | ||
| Egyptian hookers. | ||
| You know that? | ||
| It was hookers? | ||
| Yeah, it was Egyptian hookers to advertise that they specialized in blowjobs. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So if you saw a hooker with the red lips, it's like, she's the blowjob specialist. | ||
|
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Wow! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| How do we know that? | ||
| Was that written somewhere? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Syroglyphics? | ||
| You know, I trust that I read it in The History of Sex by somebody or other. | ||
| We lost so much of what Egypt was all about when they burned the Library of Alexandria. | ||
| Ah, huge loss. | ||
| It's incredible because if you see what they were able to accomplish, so much of what archaeologists and historians do when they go back and they look at what Egypt, what they were accomplished, it's like trying to figure out why and how the fuck all this stuff was done. | ||
| I mean, all they have is what's left on the walls. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| All they have, literally, they have the Rosetta Stone and they have the hieroglyphs and they have the architecture and then they have to try to back engineer and decipher. | ||
| To this day, there's a dozen different theories about how they built the pyramids. | ||
| They really just guesswork. | ||
| And it's not aliens? | ||
| I thought it was aliens. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| I think it's much more likely the advanced civilization rise and decline is much more likely. | ||
| And as we're learning more about geologic catastrophes, as we're learning more about asteroidal impacts and things along those lines, it's way more likely that what you're looking at when you're looking at a lot of the ancient structures that exist that we can't totally explain was that something happened. | ||
| Civilization had reached a very high level and then probably were hit by giant rocks from space, and very few people survived. | ||
| But the people that did survive sort of re-figured out all the things over a course of a few thousand years, just like we have. | ||
| I mean, you go back a thousand years ago. | ||
| Okay, let's just go a thousand years ago. | ||
| Go back to 1,015. | ||
| People are apes. | ||
| I mean, you're talking about like Genghis Khan, they're riding horses, no one's got a car, they're shooting arrows at each other, no one's got guns. | ||
| I mean, you're talking about craziness. | ||
| You're talking about a crazy part of the world. | ||
| They have catapults and shit. | ||
| That was what the world was just a thousand years ago. | ||
| So in a thousand years, we've gone from Genghis Khan to Elon Musk making Teslas. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Genghis Khan to Elon Musk. | ||
| A thousand years. | ||
| That works. | ||
| I mean, essentially a thousand years. | ||
| So imagine what we're talking about when, like, I've had Randall Carlson on my podcast, who is a fascinating guy who is absolutely obsessed with asteroidal impacts, and he studied them his entire life. | ||
| And as time has gone on, more and more of his work has been vindicated. | ||
| Especially by core samples. | ||
| He believes that there's enough proof that the Ice Age ended because of astral impacts. | ||
| And he had thought this way before they had figured out this stuff called, I think it's called Tritonite. | ||
| They found evidence of what they call nuclear glass all throughout Europe and Asia, and it all is around 12,000 years ago. | ||
| It's all around the same time the Ice Age ended. | ||
| And he thinks it was the catalyst for the end of the Ice Age and probably wiped out a gigantic chunk of humanity. | ||
| That there was just massive asteroid impacts all over the planet. | ||
| And that it just fucking killed almost everybody, or a huge percentage. | ||
| And everybody who's left Sort of how to re-figure out how to make buildings, re-figure out how to engineer society, and then they were left with the skeletons, the architectural skeletons of the past. | ||
| You know, they would look at Stonehenge or look at, you know, Gobekli Tepe or any of these giant ancient structures and go, okay, what the fuck was, what's this all about? | ||
| Who did this? | ||
| How'd they do this? | ||
| And they would try to mimic it or create their own. | ||
| And that what you're looking at when you look at many of these ancient structures is just whatever would be left When a giant chunk of civilization is wiped out, people have to start all over again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever read a book called The World Without Us? | ||
| I've heard of it. | ||
| I didn't read it. | ||
| It's a good book. | ||
| It's basically taking that same thought pattern and applying it to now. | ||
| So what would happen if people all disappeared right now? | ||
| And so he talked to engineers in New York, for example. | ||
| So what would happen? | ||
| Right now, there are no people. | ||
| What would happen? | ||
| Well, the pumps would stop. | ||
| And there are all these pumps that keep water out of the substructure of Manhattan, right? | ||
| So then that fills up with water. | ||
| Okay, then how long does it take for the... | ||
| The anchors and the skyscrapers to rust away and corrode. | ||
| So the skyscrapers start falling. | ||
| And so he figures all that out. | ||
| What animals would go feral and survive versus... | ||
| Dogs are fucked. | ||
| All dogs would be eaten immediately. | ||
| Cats would survive, though. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| What about feral dogs? | ||
| There's populations of feral dogs that exist even in America today. | ||
| They killed some old couple outside of Georgia. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Better predators. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Yeah, more adapted. | ||
| Pros. | ||
| The amateurs don't last. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I met a guy in Colorado that is a professional mountain lion hunter. | ||
| And they get hired oftentimes, like whether or not you knew it, California employs professional mountain lion killers. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They don't have a hunting season on mountain lions in Colorado, or in California rather. | ||
| In Colorado they do, and so the wildlife organization, they measure the population, they calculate it, and they decide how many would be viable to take to keep the community of them healthy, but to protect the elk population and the deer population. | ||
| And so then they adjust accordingly and they release tags, and tags are what the hunters use to go out and legally kill these animals. | ||
| Well, California doesn't have that, so in California they have, I think he said, three different guys that kill an indeterminate amount of mountain lions, any troubled mountain lions they have all throughout California. | ||
| They just travel around and kill these fucking things. | ||
| Because if you don't, then they overpopulate and then they become a problem with dogs and people and joggers and shit like that. | ||
| But there's groups in California in particular, like extreme wildlife advocates, that want that. | ||
| They want no more hunting. | ||
| What they want to do is reintroduce wolves and grizzly bears to California. | ||
| So that those animals control all the game populations to a sufficient level. | ||
| Which is really, like, it's not very well thought out. | ||
| Because then no one controls their population except assassins. | ||
| They have to hire assassins to go out and kill the grizzly bears that start encroaching into civilization and the wolves that start moving in on people's livestock. | ||
| They have to hire people to kill them. | ||
| But it's this fascinating idea of animal management that these people are juggling back and forth with, between the people that are pro-hunting and then the people that are the conservationists or the wildlife advocates. | ||
| It's really fascinating stuff. | ||
| Yeah, you remind me of something I just read recently about the cobra effect, it's called. | ||
| It refers to the... | ||
| Unintended consequences of trying to control wild animals. | ||
| And it started when the British were in India. | ||
| In New Delhi, the local authorities decided to deal with the fact that there are all these cobras living in the sewers and causing a big problem. | ||
| So they instituted a price for each dead cobra that you would bring in. | ||
| They'd pay you a bounty, right? | ||
| So that worked really well. | ||
| They were getting rid of a lot of cobras. | ||
| Then people started breeding them. | ||
| To make money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| So suddenly there are all these cobras coming in and they realize they're being played. | ||
| So then they're like, fuck that, and they stop paying the bounty. | ||
| So now the breeders have thousands of cobras, you know, and so they just let them loose. | ||
| Oh, gee. | ||
| So you end up with a much bigger problem than you thought you were solving. | ||
| Well, Australia's done that too. | ||
| Australia didn't really have large mammals. | ||
| Or rather, New Zealand didn't really have large mammals. | ||
| But Australia introduced certain predators to try to deal with introduced animals, like rabbits. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, they introduced rabbits to Australia, but they didn't have natural predators, so they brought over foxes. | ||
| And then the foxes ate a shitload of rabbits and then got out of control and started eating ground-nesting birds and decimating the population of ground-nesting birds. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they never did get a hold of the rabbit population. | ||
| They put up fences to try to stop the rabbits from moving into new areas. | ||
| But they weren't quick enough, and the rabbits got through the fences. | ||
| As they were building the fences, the rabbits fucked their way through to the other side of the fences and just fucked and made more and more rabbits. | ||
| So then they wanted to introduce the foxes over there. | ||
| Then they wanted to bring in predators to kill off the foxes. | ||
| Like, it's a clusterfuck of human beings trying to somehow or another manage nature. | ||
| And every time it gets away. | ||
| Yeah, through predators, especially things like a rabbit that can just breed like crazy in an environment where they really didn't have a natural enemy. | ||
| There's a great documentary called Cane Toads about the same thing in Australia where they... | ||
| There is some grub that was eating, destroying sugar cane. | ||
| And in Hawaii, they're able to grow sugar and the grub is under control because they have these big toads that eat the grub. | ||
| So they brought the cane toads to Australia and introduced them. | ||
| And these toads are like that big. | ||
| I mean, they're like the size of a 16 ounce steak. | ||
| You know, they're massive. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| What a fucking, that's a frog? | ||
| And they're everywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A toad? | |
| And they've just, like, gone crazy. | ||
| And the movie is really funny, because it's like these people and their encounters with these cane toads, and they're Australian, so they're just naturally funny. | ||
| Can you eat them? | ||
| No, no, but they do have bufetinin. | ||
| If you lick them, you can get really high. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| But if your dog bites one, you'll kill your dog. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, they're so... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It makes you think, like, you know, the whole superorganism idea. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| It's bigger than a steak. | ||
| Jesus fucking Christ! | ||
| That is so big! | ||
| It's so big, it looks like a large bass. | ||
| The movie is so funny. | ||
| It opens, there's this scene, it's like early morning, and the fog is sort of, it's a foggy hillside, and there's a road, and you see this van coming down the road, and it's sort of swerving, swerving around, and gradually you realize that he's running over as many cantos as he can, and they're all over the road. | ||
| And he's like, he's hitting these cane totes. | ||
| And he talks about how if you hit it just right, where it's facing the van and you seal its mouth, it pops and there's this big explosion. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| They have so many of them that they just run over them in the road? | ||
| They're everywhere, man. | ||
| And it's the same thing as you were talking about. | ||
| They don't eat the grubs. | ||
| They eat everything else. | ||
| They eat mice. | ||
| They eat rats. | ||
| They eat all sorts of shit. | ||
| And they have no natural predators, and they're poisonous. | ||
| Right, and they're poisonous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| So that's out of control. | ||
| What's the proposal to try to manage that? | ||
| I don't know what they're doing now. | ||
| I saw this movie like 20 years ago at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York, and I've lost track of the cane-toed issue since then, I'm sure. | ||
| Do you know what happens with rabbits? | ||
| Every seven years, rabbits have a die-off. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Rabbits, apparently, all farmers and ranchers would tell you, they go in these great cycles, these seven-year cycles. | ||
| And right now, the population in a lot of areas is very high. | ||
| Where I was in Colorado, this is where the guy was explaining to me. | ||
| You were just there like two days ago or something. | ||
| And the guy who I was with, he explained it to me, but I had heard it from a few people before, that their populations get extremely high, and then a disease comes along and wipes them out. | ||
| And it's clockwork. | ||
| It happens every seven years. | ||
| And then you find very few rabbits. | ||
| And then seven years later, it'll be a swarm again. | ||
| It just takes a few years for them to rebuild back up, and then they're back, and then the same thing happens again. | ||
| A new disease kicks along, maybe the same disease, I don't know. | ||
| But this cycle of die-offs, of great population growth and die-offs. | ||
| And this guy was arguing that I was hanging out with in Colorado. | ||
| He was saying, you know, it's quite likely that what we're looking at is a natural cycle and that it could be applied to the human race as well. | ||
| Yeah, there's a beautiful book, which I've recommended many times, called A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, a Canadian scientist. | ||
| And he looks at every civilization that's existed. | ||
| You know, the Mayans, the Sumerians, the Romans, the Easter Island, all these different civilizations. | ||
| And he shows that they all follow the same life cycle. | ||
| It's exactly what you're saying, that there's an organic rise, and then there are certain conditions that happen just naturally. | ||
| One follows the next, and then the decline. | ||
| And, you know, you see it happen again and again and again. | ||
| Yeah, it's like the tide. | ||
| You know, it's in and it's out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It seems to be like a cycle that exists just in almost everything in nature, that there's some sort of a balancing factor that occurs with any system where you get an accumulation of one particular species or one particular thing, and then it dies off, and then it comes back. | ||
| I mean, it could be argued that that's what the asteroidal impact is, that it's some sort of an inoculation from space. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, and also life apparently came from asteroids, right? | ||
| Yeah, panspermia. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's the theory that even the building blocks of life, like simple life, like the amino acids, that all those things came by stars. | ||
| And then when you find out that a human being really essentially is made out of stardust, in order to have carbon-based life forms, you have to have a star explode. | ||
| Are you going to start singing hippie songs here? | ||
| No, it's too crazy, man. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| We are stardust. | ||
| What is that song? | ||
| Fucking shit. | ||
| Joni Mitchell. | ||
| Yeah, there's a bunch of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By the way, while we're talking about the cycles of life... | ||
| We are Billion Year Old Carbon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we've got to get away. | ||
| Get back to the garden. | ||
| Back to the garden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Crosby, Stills, and Ash covered it. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| What was the name of that song? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woodstock? | |
| Yeah, Woodstock. | ||
| By the time we got to Woodstock. | ||
| We are stardust. | ||
| We are golden. | ||
| We are billion-year-old carbon. | ||
| We got to get our way back to the garden. | ||
| That's a beautiful song. | ||
| It was. | ||
| They were hippies. | ||
| I love their song. | ||
| High on acid, dirty feet. | ||
| Love the one you're with? | ||
| Yeah, that's a good one. | ||
| You like that? | ||
| That's the theme song to Sex at Dawn, yeah. | ||
| You should get a CD with the book or something. | ||
| It's funny, I've met quite a few girls who have read your book, and when they do read your book, there's one of two reactions. | ||
| One reaction is, fuck that guy, and the other reaction is, it's time to be a hoe. | ||
| It's time to just go out and get your freak on. | ||
| I was talking to this comic a couple weeks ago, and she was saying, have you ever read this book? | ||
| It's called Sex at Dawn. | ||
| I go, yeah. | ||
| I go, the author's a good friend of mine. | ||
| And she goes, fucking so right. | ||
| It's so right. | ||
| And I'm immediately like, oh, there's a freak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There we go. | |
| She's a freak. | ||
| Finally, somebody gave her her freak license. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Somebody came along with a PhD next to his name and said, it's okay to be a freak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's okay. | |
| Do what you do. | ||
| It's all right. | ||
| Oh, man, I've gotten so many beautiful emails from women. | ||
| You know, I've gotten some angry ones, too, but some really beautiful ones from women who say, you know, like, and even some of the most moving ones are the ones where they say, like, I get my mom now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| That's what really touches me. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| She wasn't bad. | ||
| She just liked to fuck. | ||
| Isn't that funny? | ||
| And in those days, that was a big problem. | ||
| It's a weird thing that we have such a conflicted relationship with. | ||
| On one hand, we sell everything with sex. | ||
| We use it to sell cars and fucking houses and everything. | ||
| It's so much so that a normal look for a woman, normal, in a business environment is exposed legs. | ||
| Just think about, what kind of a business environment would it be if men walked around with thongs? | ||
| It wouldn't exist. | ||
| I mean, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| If men had like little short skirts that they wore to work, where your cock was just, you could just lift up the shirt, the skirt, and your cock would be right there. | ||
| That's not acceptable. | ||
| But women are so desirable, and sex is so desirable, that we have accepted this idea that a woman's attire could be like the easiest possible thing to fuck in. | ||
| Like, literally, panties that you just pull to the side and a skirt you just lift up. | ||
| Easy access. | ||
| And it's on Fox News. | ||
| And high heels, which flips your, you know, rear entry, you know. | ||
| And a bra. | ||
| What's a bra, you know? | ||
| I mean, a bra is about, like, here it is. | ||
| It's a tit shelf, you know? | ||
| A tit shelf. | ||
| That's exactly what it is, yeah. | ||
| Just letting everybody know. | ||
| It's right here. | ||
| Come and get it. | ||
| And yet, on the other side, you know, there... | ||
| You know, and none of this is to say that women should buy into this if they don't want to, or that, you know, objectifying... | ||
| I mean, objectifying is a complicated thing. | ||
| I think we all objectify constantly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, like this guy, there was a big controversy a week or so ago. | ||
| Some guy, a woman sent, a lawyer in England sent, tried to contact a senior lawyer in this firm through LinkedIn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| To get a job. | ||
| And he wrote back and said, well, you know, we don't have a job right now, but I'll tell you, your photo is stunning and I'm sure you'll have lots of success. | ||
| So then she calls him out for sexual exploitation because he said her photo was stunning. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| That's just a compliment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that all he said? | ||
| He didn't make any sexual advances? | ||
| Not like let's have dinner or nothing. | ||
| Just like your photo is stunning. | ||
| So it became this big deal. | ||
| And the guy, like, you know, half the people are saying the guy's a creep, you know? | ||
| And I'll tell you, creep-shaming is an interesting thing. | ||
| It is. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, if you're over 50, you should never... | ||
| You shouldn't be sexual. | ||
| You shouldn't be sexual, yeah. | ||
| What are you, like a 30-year-old girl, you piece of shit? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're a pedophile. | ||
| Oh, you creep. | ||
| She's 22. Yeah. | ||
| Why would you be attracted to her? | ||
| She's a baby. | ||
| You Woody Allen. | ||
| You disgust me. | ||
| You disgust me with your sexual desires and your fucking Cialis-induced heart on. | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Speaking of standing up for people, I really appreciated the article you wrote recently. | ||
| It was Men's Life or I don't know. | ||
| Maxim. | ||
| That was really nicely done, man. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Seriously, as a guy who's not in great shape, I appreciated that. | ||
| Yeah, the concept. | ||
| Well, they wanted me to write something about the human body, about getting in shape or whatever. | ||
| And it just occurred to me to make the comparison to a human body in sandcastles. | ||
| Your body is like a sandcastle. | ||
| The reason why sandcastles are kind of cool is because you know that they're not going to last. | ||
| Yeah, it was really well done. | ||
| I mean, it called the mandala, the idea of building something beautiful that's going to be washed away as soon as you get done with it. | ||
| I often think about life that way, not physically so much, but... | ||
| Like, I feel I'm in my mid-50s now, and I feel like I'm starting to figure it out. | ||
| Yeah, that is part of the problem, right? | ||
| By the time you realize the hustle, the fucking game is almost done. | ||
| It's like I'm learning how to dance, and they're turning the lights on. | ||
| That's sort of probably also what contributed to all these fucked-up civilizations, was that people only lived to be like 30, you know, if you were really lucky. | ||
| So you were just constantly on momentum, like running downhill where you couldn't stop, like, ah! | ||
| And then the barbarian hordes cut your head off and then hopefully along the way you fucked and left behind some of your genes and then they fucked and people just died off in these giant chunks when rats came into your cities that carried fleas that had the plague and just... | ||
| And then finally we developed the ability to fight off diseases, inoculate ourselves from certain viruses, build up walls to keep out the barbarians, build up stockpiles of food so that we didn't have to constantly hunt and gather. | ||
| And then everybody went, hmm. | ||
| I think if you make something circular, we can roll it. | ||
| I'm going to call it a wheel. | ||
| And then they started pushing things along. | ||
| I mean, you could argue that agriculture and that civilization was the downfall, but you could also argue it was the beginning of real thought. | ||
| It was the beginning of relaxed thought because you had the opportunity to innovate. | ||
| Well, and you had the surplus of food that you could have people who thought for a living. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the machine slowly started to plot our demise. | ||
| They started with the, listen, I could be a wheel, man. | ||
| I can carry you around. | ||
| You don't have to put anything on your back. | ||
| I'll make life easier for you. | ||
| Hey, dude, you know, if you just fucking make a silo, you could put all your grain in the silo. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You have stockpiles in the winter. | ||
| And next thing you know, you got Steve Jobs. | ||
| Oh yeah, let me... | ||
| I mean, I remember in the... | ||
| It must have been the 80s when my boss gave me a beeper. | ||
| And I was like, oh cool, I get a beeper now. | ||
| And within two days, it's like, you might as well put a fucking leash around my neck, you know? | ||
| It's like, this isn't helping me. | ||
| This is for you, you fuck. | ||
| How about people that are required to answer emails over the weekends? | ||
| There's a lot of jobs that you're required to answer emails at night, over the weekend. | ||
| You have to constantly be aware. | ||
| You have to have your phone. | ||
| There's certain companies that require people that are employees to have their phone where the notifications are turned on so that an email's come in for the company. | ||
| You have to instantly answer them. | ||
| Even when you're not at work. | ||
| You're not at work. | ||
| You're working. | ||
| There's jobs, especially when it comes to Silicon Valley and these really very competitive tech industries. | ||
| There's a lot of debate as to when you should not have to answer an email. | ||
| When is it okay? | ||
| If your boss sends you an email at 7 o'clock at night and you don't respond until 6 o'clock in the morning when you wake up or whatever it is, you could get in trouble. | ||
| And they're fucking drug testing you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| That drives me nuts. | ||
| You know, you smoke weed fucking last weekend, and you come to work, and you're like, are you fucking kidding me? | ||
| This is slavery! | ||
| That one's nuts. | ||
| That is slavery. | ||
| We're moving back to Spain. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, this was always a temporary visit. | ||
| This was a slow, nomadic trip through North America. | ||
| Portland, and then Spain. | ||
| Well, it was, I mean, first it was Vancouver, Canada. | ||
| And then we were in Nicaragua for the winter. | ||
| Then we went back to Vancouver. | ||
| Then we came to L.A. for the winter. | ||
| This is when, you know, you and I, Duncan, started doing the shrimp parade and all that. | ||
| I was living in Topanga. | ||
| But it's always like a slow move. | ||
| And then we went to Portland for a year and a half. | ||
| And now we're going to go back to Barcelona. | ||
| What made you decide? | ||
| To go back? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we were always planning to go back. | ||
| I mean, we sort of flirted with maybe staying for a while. | ||
| But my wife's a doctor, and for her to get a license in the U.S. would mean like going back to medical school, essentially, which she's not going to do, right? | ||
| And she really likes working. | ||
| She hasn't worked in four years while we've been traveling. | ||
| So, you know, that's an issue, like if she's going to continue practicing. | ||
| But also just we really like Spain. | ||
| You know, I've lived in Spain most of my life. | ||
| I've lived in Barcelona longer than I've lived anywhere else. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And what is it about Barcelona that's more appealing than America? | ||
| You know, when I first got to Spain, I felt I traveled a lot and I was actually on my way somewhere else, but I got robbed and, you know, I ended up hanging out. | ||
| And the way Spanish people see life is much closer to the way I see life. | ||
| And so even though I was raised in America, I never felt like this country never really made sense to me. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, like what we're just talking about, like work. | ||
| Materialism. | ||
| Materialism, you know, it's all about money. | ||
| Spanish people, you know, the expression is we work to live, we don't live to work, right? | ||
| You know, there are no, like Spanish cars, there's no cup holder. | ||
| If you want to get a drink, pull over in a cafe and get a drink. | ||
| There are no to-go cups. | ||
| You want a coffee? | ||
| Go to a cafe. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Someone should tell them about cups with lids on them. | ||
| What the fuck is wrong with those apes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy, uncivilized, heathens, fucking cave people. | |
| Sex. | ||
| You know, even though Spain is, you know, officially a Catholic country, there's so much more chilled out about sex. | ||
| About sex outside of marriage. | ||
| Like, eh, whatever. | ||
| Just don't tell me about it. | ||
| That's the sort of normal way to deal with it. | ||
| Women. | ||
| No. | ||
| I've lived in Spain 23 years or something, right? | ||
| I get accustomed when I see a beautiful woman. | ||
| I look at her. | ||
| And she knows I'm looking at her. | ||
| And she appreciates it. | ||
| And she smiles. | ||
| And I smile. | ||
| And everybody's happy. | ||
| Come to America. | ||
| Look at a woman like that. | ||
| You're a fucking rapist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're eye raping me. | ||
| Have you heard that? | ||
| Microaggressions. | ||
| I mean, fuck your microaggressions. | ||
| I don't want to hear... | ||
| If you're not a fucking dwarf, I don't want to hear about microaggressions. | ||
| Give me a break. | ||
| I mean, this country is just nuts, man. | ||
| And I feel bad because I love people here. | ||
| I've got great friends here. | ||
| There are a lot of things I love about it. | ||
| Work-wise, it's the best place to be. | ||
| But life-wise, fuck, I love Spain. | ||
| You go out to lunch with a friend, it's probably going to go until 5 or 6 o'clock. | ||
| Everybody just hangs out. | ||
| It's more of a hangout. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, like restaurants. | ||
| I'm sitting in a restaurant. | ||
| And we're talking. | ||
| The waiter, first of all, the waiter is going to come four times and ask, you know, how is everything? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| How's your day going? | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Get away. | ||
| I'm trying to talk to my friend here, right? | ||
| Then they'll come and say, are you still working on that? | ||
| This isn't work. | ||
| This is fucking lunch. | ||
| Am I working on that? | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| Drive me crazy. | ||
| Tips, 20%. | ||
| I go to Portland. | ||
| I fucking buy a croissant and a cup of coffee. | ||
| There's a big tip jar. | ||
| I run my credit card. | ||
| 10%, 15%. | ||
| You just handed me a fucking bag and a cup. | ||
| I'm supposed to give you 15% extra? | ||
| That's because your boss is too fucking cheap to pay you a decent wage. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| That is exactly what it is. | ||
| I like the tip thing because I like being generous. | ||
| I like the option to make someone happy by giving them a nice tip. | ||
| But it is kind of fucked that waiters and waitresses don't even make minimum wage. | ||
| I don't know if that's true anymore. | ||
| Is that still true? | ||
| That is true. | ||
| That's crazy to me. | ||
| That seems rude. | ||
| It seems evil. | ||
| It seems illegal. | ||
| It's humiliating, too, because they have to smile and give you all this fake cheerfulness. | ||
| There was an article that was written recently about that, about the emotional toll of requiring people to be artificially happy and that it's not productive. | ||
| And that, like, the artificially happy people that answer phones and ask questions and, and how are you today, sir? | ||
| And how's everything? | ||
| Like, requiring people to do that, that work for you, not only is it not productive, it wears them out and it makes them less productive at other things that you probably need them to because there's like a, there's a mental, there's an energy that you need to do that, that you could be doing and directing towards something that's actually productive. | ||
| Instead of like, it's one thing, you don't want to be rude, but just being efficient is enough. | ||
| You don't have to have this like fake sort of smiley bullshit. | ||
| But that fake smiley bullshit, people require it, like especially people who are customers. | ||
| The customer's always right, like that kind of nonsense. | ||
| Like this relationship where the customer has to be like massaged and catered to. | ||
| Instead of just appreciated as a fellow human being. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's like an established relationship between the customer and the employee. | ||
| Your employee is rude. | ||
| Sir, I'm sorry. | ||
| Is there any way we can make it up to you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I might be taking my business elsewhere! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I mean, if that was about friendship, you'd be like, well, go fuck off. | ||
| Make a new friend, dickhead. | ||
| And in Spain, that's the reaction you'll get. | ||
| Well, that's nice. | ||
| You go into a show. | ||
| But see, in Spain, I bitch all the time, too, right? | ||
| So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. | ||
| What do you bitch about in Spain? | ||
| Where's the fucking waiter? | ||
| The people are rude. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That is true, though. | ||
| One thing I do find in Europe, the service is not as good. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| No, because they don't get paid tips. | ||
| And they don't give a fuck. | ||
| But they should probably give a fuck. | ||
| Like, there's a middle ground there somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that is the middle ground, right? | ||
| I think, like, in Spain, you go into a shop to buy whatever, and the woman's on the phone with her boyfriend. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| She's going to finish her conversation before she comes to help you, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, for example, I went to Spain a few months ago to renew my residency paperwork and all that. | ||
| And it was a typically Spanish experience where, you know, this kind of thing in America, you would, you know, go online and fill out this thing and, you know, call the IRS and be on hold. | ||
| And then you'd get some grumpy asshole in Philadelphia. | ||
| But it would all get done pretty quickly. | ||
| In Spain, you go to this office, and they're like, hey, how are you? | ||
| No, they're really friendly and nice. | ||
| Oh, no, it's not this office. | ||
| You have to go to this other office. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You go to the other office. | ||
| They're really nice, but that's not the right office either. | ||
| They misinformed you. | ||
| But nobody's got any mala leche, as they say in Spanish, which is like bad milk, literally, which is like bad intentions. | ||
| So it takes three days, and it's kind of a pain in the ass, but it isn't a pain in the ass because you're having fun all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Everyone's nice. | ||
| The women are beautiful. | ||
| The cops are nice in Spain. | ||
| They're nice guys. | ||
| You can go up to a cop in Spain and be like, hey man, you know, can I park here? | ||
| And he's like, eh. | ||
| I remember literally I was trying to park my motorcycle in the Ramblas and it's no parking, but there are motorcycles everywhere. | ||
| And there's this cop standing right there. | ||
| So I go over and I'm like, I'm a foreigner, right? | ||
| Can I park my bike here or not? | ||
| And he says, legally no, but nobody will say anything. | ||
| Can you imagine an American cop saying that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Never. | |
| Maybe in the 60s. | ||
| When would that have ever been said in this country? | ||
| It'd have to be a long time ago. | ||
| And see, the legal system is, in Spain, it's a problem if you're bothering someone. | ||
| Not if you're breaking a law. | ||
| If you're breaking a law and nobody says anything, the cops don't give a shit. | ||
| So in America, it's the law. | ||
| It's, did you break the law? | ||
| Are you growing weed on your terrace? | ||
| We're flying helicopters with infrared detectors to catch you. | ||
| Not, did your neighbors complain or did you shoot somebody, right? | ||
| In Spain, like, I grew weed on my terrace for 20 years. | ||
| Nobody said a fucking word. | ||
| Nobody cared. | ||
| Is weed legal in Spain? | ||
| Like a lot of things in Spain, it's kind of not, kind of is. | ||
| Tolerated? | ||
| And this is a really important cognitive difference between Spain and the U.S. is tolerance for ambiguity, right? | ||
| Like in Spain, I'll tune in like, oh, there's a Barca-Madrid soccer game. | ||
| Really big deal, right? | ||
| Starts at 8 o'clock. | ||
| I'll turn on the TV at 8 o'clock and there's still some fucking sitcom on. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Well, they're running late. | ||
| You know, the game will start in 10 minutes. | ||
| Or, you know, it's just, can you park here? | ||
| Well, you know, there's a lot of ambiguity, and no one really cares. | ||
| If it's not causing a problem, whatever. | ||
| Whatever, you know? | ||
| So weed. | ||
| For a long time, weed was illegal, officially. | ||
| But the cops didn't care. | ||
| So if you're smoking a joint on a playground and a cop walks by, he's probably going to say, dude, what the fuck? | ||
| Go somewhere else. | ||
| Get away from this playground. | ||
| The kid's here. | ||
| That's what would happen. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| If you give him shit, then maybe it'll escalate. | ||
| Do they have quotas? | ||
| No. | ||
| No quotas. | ||
| No property seizures. | ||
| There's none of that stuff. | ||
| No minimum mandatory sentencing. | ||
| The property seizures, if people don't know about it, they've lessened them considerably. | ||
| But those things are horrific. | ||
| And what they've done to people is they've dragged people into the legal system, oftentimes when they're completely innocent. | ||
| Property seizures are not necessarily... | ||
| In many states, even a result of them catching you with something illegal, it's catching them with too much cash. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of people that have gotten caught. | ||
| Some states, I think it was North Carolina or South Carolina, some states were really bad with it. | ||
| They would catch people that would be, say, like, say if you were going to buy a car. | ||
| Like, you call the guy on the phone, how much do you want for the car? | ||
| Ten grand. | ||
| Okay, I got it. | ||
| So you got your ten grand, your cash, you're driving over to this guy's house to buy the car, and you have this ten grand, you get pulled over. | ||
| The cop would go, what are you doing 10 grand? | ||
| I'm going to buy a car. | ||
| Well, we don't believe you. | ||
| We're going to take that 10 grand. | ||
| And so they would take that 10 grand. | ||
| In one case, this police department had bought a margarita machine with the 10 grand that they stole from people that they thought were buying drugs. | ||
| Or they claimed to think were buying drugs. | ||
| Claimed to think. | ||
| But just stop and think about that. | ||
| They took the money to buy a drug machine. | ||
| Which is what a margarita machine is. | ||
| I mean, a margarita mixer. | ||
| Like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| Like, that kind of corruption, that kind of sneakiness where you write it down and you make it legal in quotes. | ||
| Well, it's on the books. | ||
| Search, you know, asset forfeiture for people that are suspected for selling drugs. | ||
| If you have more than X amount of dollars on you, we can pull you over for that. | ||
| And they've just used that over and over again, that one law, to rip off law-abiding citizens and then drag them through the legal system for years at their own expense. | ||
| So even if they get their money back, the amount of time it's cost them, and obviously that time, a lot of it is you're going to lose work because of that time, and then hiring lawyers, legal fees. | ||
| And if you lose, they robbed you of time and the money. | ||
| If you can't prove where that money came from, maybe you're just really shitty with your taxes. | ||
| You don't pay taxes, you work for cash, and you've been just working odd jobs for cash, you saved up a bunch of money. | ||
| You can't prove that that money came from illegal means. | ||
| You're fucked. | ||
| Well, like everything else in this country, it's set up to fuck the person who can't afford to defend themselves. | ||
| And it's set up even a creepier way that's anti the way this country is supposed to be set up where you're guilty until proven innocent. | ||
| You have to prove yourself innocent just by having currency on you. | ||
| I mean, and it's less than someone makes in a year. | ||
| It's like the idea that you had savings, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You don't save anything, dummy. | ||
| Give me that. | ||
| And some kid who's selling weed and living in his parents' basement, if they bust him, they take the parents' house. | ||
| Parents had nothing to do with it. | ||
| They'll take your car. | ||
| They pull you over and you got a joint in your car, they sell your car. | ||
| I mean, there's been a lot of that going on over the past few decades. | ||
| Ever since that Just Say No shit, when we saw on television with Nancy Reagan, that began the fucking hysteria of this stuff. | ||
| And then asset forfeiture is just legalized stealing. | ||
| And it's, you know, a fucking billion-dollar industry in this country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Legalized stealing, and then you got legalized, you know, bribery in the political system. | ||
| Okay, sure, yeah. | ||
| That's what lobbyists are. | ||
| Yeah, super PACs. | ||
| I mean, this country is collapsing, right? | ||
| You can see it. | ||
| If you start reading these books we're talking about, you can see the phase that we're in. | ||
| We're in a phase now where there are all these different industries that are set up to extract the commonwealth. | ||
| Literally, the wealth of the community is being pulled. | ||
| The war is in the Middle East. | ||
| What was that serving? | ||
| The only people who benefited from any of that were Bechtel and Raytheon and Halliburton. | ||
| Yeah, these guys who do this for a living. | ||
| And Eisenhower himself said, you know, the military-industrial complex, when you get people who make a living... | ||
| With bombs, and they need to be making bombs, well, they're going to blow those bombs up. | ||
| They're going to find a reason to use those bombs. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That was one of the creepiest speeches ever, and the most fascinating thing about it is that it was captured, I mean, it was broadcast on television, but if you didn't listen to it that time, it was gone. | ||
| He said it, and then it was gone. | ||
| And it was years and years and years later before people started actually watching that, like in the fog of war. | ||
| Wasn't it in the fog of war? | ||
| Was it in that? | ||
| Is that the McNamara movie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It might not have been in that, but regardless, it's definitely available on YouTube. | ||
| I mean, I've watched it a dozen times. | ||
| I saw it in The Corporation. | ||
| Have you seen that film? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| That was a great documentary. | ||
| Very good documentary. | ||
| That's a creepy documentary when you realize that when they compare corporations to psychopaths and the idea of the infinite. | ||
| There it is, yeah. | ||
| If you make a billion dollars a year, you go, wow, you're successful. | ||
| What do you make next year? | ||
| Well, I'm just going to make a billion again. | ||
| What are you, a fucking loser? | ||
| You have to make a billion one or a billion two. | ||
| Growth. | ||
| Infinite growth. | ||
| Like, that is what the stock market's all about, right? | ||
| Consistent, infinite growth. | ||
| Apple consistently makes more money. | ||
| Every year, they have to make more money at Google. | ||
| Every year, you know, every fucking company, they have to make more money. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| Chris Ryan Enterprises is... | ||
| You have to constantly be in the black, Chris Ryan. | ||
| I got bad news for my shareholders. | ||
| We peaked. | ||
| We decided to convert our dollars to whatever the fuck they have in Spain. | ||
| What's the Spain money? | ||
| Oh, they're in euros now. | ||
| It used to be pesetas. | ||
| So what do you do when you go over there? | ||
| I sit back and let my fucking wife work. | ||
| I married a doctor, dude. | ||
| I married a doctor. | ||
| I'm like, I am set. | ||
| I am set for life. | ||
| And that's how you were thinking when you married her? | ||
| Well, you know, a little bit. | ||
| Well, you love her, obviously. | ||
| Of course, I love her. | ||
| But there's also that added benefit, the fact that she's in a good business. | ||
| Well, I mean, the thing is, doctors in Europe don't make the kind of money doctors make in the U.S., right? | ||
| But nor do they, you know, come out of college with $200,000 in debt. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Malpractice insurance, is that all a burden? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing is so amped up in the U.S. A good doctor, like, you know, normal sort of—she's a psychiatrist— The psychiatrist in Spain, you know, good experience, whatever, might make 70 grand a year. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| You know, like a decent, stable, you know, good benefits. | ||
| Everyone in Spain, everyone in Europe gets at least a month off every year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's cool. | |
| Paid. | ||
| A month off. | ||
| If you work in a shop, you get a month off. | ||
| But they have the full 30 days off, or do they get like a week here, a week there? | ||
| Full 30 days, use it when you want. | ||
| 30 days in a row, you can do if you want. | ||
| You can do if you want. | ||
| Most people take August. | ||
| The month of August, like nothing is happening. | ||
| Barcelona is empty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| In the month of August. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| But, you know, like, the thing about Spain that I love is that life is about pleasure. | ||
| I mean, if we had to really boil it down, there is no shame in pleasure. | ||
| And in America, pleasure is shameful. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| Why are we so— Outsiders who did have pleasure. | ||
| Black people. | ||
| Indians. | ||
| Mexicans. | ||
| They're coming back again into fashion as the victims. | ||
| Attack these brown-skinned pleasure hedonists. | ||
| Because they're evil. | ||
| That's all evil shit. | ||
| Nobody buys that shit in Europe. | ||
| In Spain, anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Fucking Footloose. | ||
| This is how dumb we are in America. | ||
| We made Footloose again. | ||
| They tried to remake Footloose as fucks. | ||
| That's interesting, though. | ||
| It's also, when you look at it, America is so overwhelmingly infatuated with productivity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I mean, being productive and getting... | ||
| Efficiency. | ||
| Yes, efficiency. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, look at our workforce. | ||
| You know, we have... | ||
| Like, there's a goddamn commercial. | ||
| I think it's for, like, Shell. | ||
| I think it's a Shell commercial. | ||
| And there's an old man, and it's the weirdest fucking commercial. | ||
| And it's talking about how hard this guy works. | ||
| And this guy, he's a farmer. | ||
| And he's standing in a field of wheat. | ||
| And he's like, you work hard not because you have to, but because it's what you do. | ||
| And the guy smiles. | ||
| And I'm like, what the fuck are you saying? | ||
| It's almost like you're trying to trick people into working hard so they can tell people. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| This is the guy. | ||
| Can we play this? | ||
| Let's play this because it's just go full screen because it's so fucking bizarre. | ||
| This is one of the weirdest commercials, man. | ||
| I always weird out because they air this commercial during hunting shows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not because you have to. | |
| Not because some boss told you to. | ||
| But because that's what you were born to do. | ||
| Now watch this. | ||
| They get close on this guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that deserves the best we can do. | |
| And he smiles. | ||
| It's what you're born to do. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for working hard from the number one heavy duty engine oil in America. | ||
| What the fuck kind of a commercial is that? | ||
| It's what you were born to do? | ||
| Now here's what kills me. | ||
| The person who wrote those words... | ||
| Doesn't work for Shell. | ||
| He works for an advertising agency that they hired to do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That old man, he's a fucking actor. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Nobody who works for Shell really had anything to do with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, so the classic commercial. | ||
| Here at Chevron, we believe that blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then you see all the people with clipboards and hard hats of various racial backgrounds. | ||
| None of those people work for fucking Chevron. | ||
| None of them. | ||
| The guy who wrote the words doesn't work. | ||
| The guy who's reading the words doesn't work. | ||
| Chevron is an entity that there is no there there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just a collection of people designed to collect money. | ||
| And it's not even the people who matter because all those people could quit tomorrow and Chevron would still exist. | ||
| They just hire more people. | ||
| So Chevron's like the whirlpool and the people are the water. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So that's part of this whole thing I'm writing. | ||
| But, you know, did you see that commercial? | ||
| Speaking of irritating American commercials, there was one, I think it was on the Super Bowl even, where there's like a dude walking through the house and he's like, why do I have the best? | ||
| I have the best because that's what I am and that's what I do. | ||
| And he like high fives his kid. | ||
| It was a Cadillac commercial. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you remember that? | |
| It was so irritating. | ||
| I haven't seen it. | ||
| Oh, it was so fucking annoying. | ||
| Why do I have the best? | ||
| Because that's what I am? | ||
| Because that's who I am. | ||
| We work harder. | ||
| We play harder. | ||
| And it's about America? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bro? | ||
| What happened to bro? | ||
| Bro used to be cool. | ||
| You know that guy was in a frat. | ||
| I know, but calling someone bro used to be, what's up, bro? | ||
| It used to be okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It used to be like a black thing, in fact. | ||
| It started out, and white people ruined it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
White frat boys. | |
| Like, dorky young white guys ruin bro. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's up, bro? | ||
| Like, that used to be okay! | ||
| Bro would be like, he called me bro. | ||
| I'm a brother. | ||
| It's short for brother. | ||
| But now bro is like the douchiest thing someone could call you. | ||
| He's a bro. | ||
| Or one of the things that people love to throw around is, especially in the fitness industry, is bro science. | ||
| There's a lot of really wacky ideas when it comes to athletics, and some people, they have these ideas that don't necessarily have any scientific background to them, and they call it bro science. | ||
| Yeah, he's full of bro science. | ||
| Bromance? | ||
| Yeah, bromance. | ||
| But bromance is, you know, you love a guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's like, oh, that guy's awesome. | ||
| I got a bromance for that guy. | ||
| That's not quite as douchey. | ||
| Someone was teaching me the, what is it, the handshake, shoulder, one arm. | ||
| There is a definite thing there. | ||
| There's a thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's like a grip, like a fucking manly thumb up grip. | ||
| And then the one thing, and if you're really douchey, give a couple slaps on the back. | ||
| Yeah, there's a word for that too. | ||
| It's like, I'm not gay slapped. | ||
| I've seen people slap each other pretty goddamn hard doing that. | ||
| That doesn't feel good. | ||
| Here's another thing I love about Spain. | ||
| You kiss girls, always. | ||
| On the mouth? | ||
| No, on the cheeks. | ||
| Right in the pussy. | ||
| You meet a woman, you kiss, kiss. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Then I come to America and it's like, hi, how are you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, like keep four feet away from me. | ||
| You might be a rapist. | ||
| You're eye raping them already. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Looking at them? | ||
| You fucking creep. | ||
| You over 50? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am. | |
| You over 50 looking at a woman? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You piece of shit. | |
| I know, I know. | ||
| What the fuck is wrong with you? | ||
| Don't you have grandchildren or something to go wait on? | ||
| Hey, what do you think about Donald Trump talking about how hot his daughter is? | ||
| Did he say that? | ||
| He did. | ||
| Oh, you didn't hear about this? | ||
| So this became a big problem because he said, you know, Ivanka, my daughter, she's one of the hottest, you know, most beautiful women in life. | ||
| And he said, I'll tell you what, if I were 30 years younger and not her dad... | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| What the fuck does that mean? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I wonder if he's jerked off to his daughter. | ||
| Just saying, look, this is just thought. | ||
| No one's getting hurt here. | ||
| It's me alone and my ideas. | ||
| I made her. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| That's a weird thing to say. | ||
| It is a weird thing to say, but I think it's better to say it than to think it and give it power. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think saying shit, and this, again, you know, back to the whole Spain-US thing. | ||
| In America, there is thought crime. | ||
| And in Spain, I don't think... | ||
| Now, maybe I'm romanticizing Spain. | ||
| I lived there a long time. | ||
| But another thing I really like about living in Spain is that I speak the language well enough to... | ||
| Like, if I'm paying attention, I know what everyone's saying. | ||
| But if I'm not paying attention, it all just becomes in the background. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| Like jazz. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Certain kind of jazz. | ||
| Elevator music. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| When I was in high school, someone wrote an article for the local school paper. | ||
| And I don't remember... | ||
| Most things from high school, so long ago. | ||
| But I remember this one article that this kid wrote about what they make you do in the Boy Scouts. | ||
| And it was about the tenants of the Boy Scouts, whatever they were. | ||
| But one of them was about keeping your thoughts pure. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And he wrote something that was really cool. | ||
| It was, you know, obviously a really smart kid. | ||
| I wish I remember who it was. | ||
| But he wrote, well, why do I have to keep my thoughts pure? | ||
| He goes, one of the things that I like about my thoughts is that they're mine. | ||
| I can think whatever I want. | ||
| As long as I don't do anything that harms anybody, why do you care what my thoughts are? | ||
| And I remember reading that. | ||
| I was like, wow, that's so right. | ||
| What does that mean, keep your thoughts pure? | ||
| Guy's in jail now. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| He might be. | ||
| George Carlin did a great thing on that, you know, in terms of Catholicism and how he said, like, this was like class clown way back, right? | ||
| But I remember I was a little kid. | ||
| My dad got that record. | ||
| And I remember one of the bits in there was like, You know, in Catholicism, if you think about sinning, you've already sinned. | ||
| So if you're thinking about feeling up Sally at the weekend, save your time. | ||
| You're already sinned. | ||
| It's done, right? | ||
| Impure thoughts. | ||
| Yeah, impure thoughts. | ||
| That's straight out of Christianity. | ||
| Well, also, the confession. | ||
| The confessional is one of the most bizarre and ridiculous ideas. | ||
| Put your balls on the table. | ||
| And it was invented to make sure that people weren't doing anything wrong. | ||
| I mean, the priests would immediately report to any higher-ups of any illegal activity or stealing or, you know, adultery or fornication or whatever the fuck it would be. | ||
| Do you ever read about the crazy shit where people were fucking animals in the Middle Ages and they would have trials? | ||
| And sometimes the animals would be executed for being overly seductive. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Now that you brought this up, I read something recently about this. | ||
| God, I can't remember what the story was, but it was the animal trials. | ||
| It was about animal trials. | ||
| Did you tweet that or anything? | ||
| Could be. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have a friend who just wrote a book, The Boundaries of Desire. | ||
| He's a historian who focuses on sexuality. | ||
| And his first book was Sex and Punishment, and it was sort of like from the origins of civilization to the end of the 19th century, and then Boundaries of Desire is the 20th century. | ||
| So he writes about all this crazy legal shit and, you know, like the Comstock laws that made it illegal to, in early 20th century America, to even teach sex education to women. | ||
| Like you couldn't even teach women how they get pregnant. | ||
| That was illegal. | ||
| Because of this crazy fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I've always wondered what it is about people that makes them, like, it's oftentimes, like, some of the earliest imprinting with pleasure that makes people attracted to certain things. | ||
| That's where, like, fetishes come from. | ||
| And I've always wondered, like, some people are like, Just overly attracted to extremely overweight women, like for whatever reason, that just locks into them. | ||
| That's their thing. | ||
| And I've always wondered, like, what is it about sexuality that, like, sexuality is, like, malleable? | ||
| Like, it kind of adjusts to, like, what... | ||
| I've heard stories of guys who caught their mom putting on pantyhose once when they were really young and then for the rest of their life became fascinated with a fetish of women wearing pantyhose and they want to jerk off on pantyhose and have pantyhose rubbed on their dicks. | ||
| It becomes this weird sort of a sexual imprinting thing. | ||
| Yeah, one of the interesting differences between male and female sexual development is that women don't seem to have that. | ||
| It's called erotic plasticity. | ||
| Women are plastic throughout their lives, so it's easier for them to adapt to different situations. | ||
| Now, sometimes that works against them. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because they fall in love with an asshole, an abusive asshole or whatever. | ||
| But men have a developmental window, generally from like five to nine years of age, somewhere in there. | ||
| And exactly as you described it, if there's a particular experience that they have during that time, it can resonate with them for the rest of their lives. | ||
| And once that window closes, that's it. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| You know, as you say, it could be pantyhose, it could be red high heels, it could be, you know, whatever it is. | ||
| They've got that association and they can never not have it. | ||
| They'll have it for the rest of their lives. | ||
| Some people argue that pedophilia is a result of the same sort of thing. | ||
| And I've argued, not in writing, but I've mentioned it on the podcast, I think that there's We form a manifestation of homosexuality, of what we call homosexuality, which is really a fetish, is better described as a fetish experience by a straight man. | ||
| I'll tell you what I mean by that. | ||
| Let's say you're born straight. | ||
| There's definitely a genetic component to sexual orientation, right? | ||
| It's getting back to where we started, like how much is genetic, how much is experiential. | ||
| So just as a seven-year-old boy can have an experience with, you know, seeing someone with pantyhose or, you know, whatever, he's under the table and his mom's friend comes and she's got red high-heeled shoes and he's got a hard-on and so he associates the two. | ||
| What if that seven-year-old boy has an experience with another boy or with a man or an adolescent or whatever, right? | ||
| So this guy sucks his dick or whatever it is. | ||
| And so he's got this very deep association between having a man sucking his dick and this incredible pleasure. | ||
| Even though he's straight, he's got that association. | ||
| So for the rest of his life, he could have that association in the same way that another boy has the association with pantyhose or high heeled shoes or whatever. | ||
| It's a fetish. | ||
| It's not his orientation. | ||
| So then what you've got is a straight guy. | ||
| Who has a fetish for getting a blowjob from a man. | ||
| So every once in a while he goes down to the truck stop and has this experience. | ||
| He gets caught. | ||
| Everyone says, oh, you're a closeted gay man. | ||
| And he's thinking, I don't think I am. | ||
| But I don't know what the fuck I am. | ||
| All I know is I love my wife. | ||
| I have sex with my wife. | ||
| I could never fall in love with a man. | ||
| I never think about having a relationship with a man. | ||
| But man, I love it when this guy with a mustache sucks my dick. | ||
| I've never really wanted to write about this. | ||
| And the reason is that I think it could play into the hands of the Christians who are arguing that you can pray the gay away. | ||
| You see what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because in a case like that, I think there could be a therapeutic... | ||
| Solution? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| Solution or just a therapeutic treatment that could have some value. | ||
| But, I mean, in my case, I would never say that there's a sickness there. | ||
| I would just say it's a fetish. | ||
| Like, some people are into latex. | ||
| You're into that, you know? | ||
| Totally makes sense. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| There are weird things that people get sort of bonded to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That their sexuality gets bonded to. | ||
| Always men. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Almost never women. | ||
| You'll never find a woman who can't come, you know, if she's not sniffing latex. | ||
| That's something about rubber. | ||
| I have a friend who's a dominatrix. | ||
| She's more than a dominatrix. | ||
| She's a humiliatrix. | ||
| Humiliatrix. | ||
| Humiliatrix. | ||
| Take it to the next level. | ||
| She specializes in dudes who get off on being humiliated, and I had her on the podcast. | ||
| She's really smart, really interesting, and it's not her thing. | ||
| She just stumbled into this. | ||
| So it's just a business for her. | ||
| It's a business. | ||
| She's like Shell Oil of dick slapping. | ||
| We hear it, humiliatrix. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We suck dick not because we want to. | |
| But she never meets the dudes. | ||
| It's all internet. | ||
| One of the best things about it is she's got phone lines dedicated to guys who get off on being ignored. | ||
| So the phone rings. | ||
| She picks it up. | ||
| Oh yeah, okay, I'll be right back. | ||
| Puts the phone down. | ||
| It goes about her day and it's like clocking up. | ||
| That is hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Guys who get off on being ignored by a pretty girl. | ||
| So they seek. | ||
| To be ignored by a professional ignorer. | ||
| She sells her socks, her panties, her old tennis shoes, her toenail clippings, her hair, her salon. | ||
| The way she got into it was she was living in Japan and she was like 17 or something and she was corresponding with some guy online and he was trying to pick her up and she wasn't into it but he was funny so she corresponded with him. | ||
| And at one point, she said, I gotta go take a piss. | ||
| And he said, oh, don't throw it away. | ||
| Put it in a bottle. | ||
| I'll buy it from you. | ||
| And she's like, come on, you're full of shit. | ||
| And he's like, no, seriously. | ||
| Trust me, I will. | ||
| I'll, you know, 200 bucks or whatever. | ||
| So she puts, she pisses in a bottle and she sends it. | ||
| And there's 200 bucks shows up in her account. | ||
| And she's like, huh, this is interesting. | ||
| There must be more guys like this out there. | ||
| So she starts, you know, investigating it and she finds that the world is full of these dudes. | ||
| Seriously, check her out. | ||
| Sierra Lynch. | ||
| I'm going to write her name down. | ||
| Check out her site. | ||
| She's beautiful. | ||
| Where does she live? | ||
| She lives in Portland. | ||
| But she spells it C-E-A-R-A. Sierra Lynch. | ||
| And yeah, she's got guys. | ||
| She's been on... | ||
| She was on a show on... | ||
| HBO recently. | ||
| Some sex show. | ||
| I was on it, too. | ||
| She's been profiled. | ||
| She's a public figure. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Duncan used to know a girl who would... | ||
|
unidentified
|
There she is. | |
| Ta-da! | ||
| Duncan used to know a girl. | ||
| Humiliatrix extraordinaire. | ||
| Congratulations, young lady. | ||
| You found an excellent niche or niche as it were. | ||
| Duncan knew a girl who would sell her socks and she would wear them for days at a time to get them like really stinky and then she would sell them to dudes and you know like a couple hundred bucks at a time so like that was her thing she would just be wearing socks all the time and then sending them to people. | ||
| That's a good gig. | ||
| Getting paid for doing what you're doing anyway, you know? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's just something weird about the idea of being connected to these people that are so fucked up they want your stinky socks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, although as, you know, as things go, I mean, getting back to fetishes, you know, it's a relatively harmless, harmless thing, you know? | ||
| And the fact that now people can engage these things in a more or less open way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, what worries me with her is she was telling me, like, there are guys who really get off on being blackmailed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So these guys would give her like all their bank account numbers and passwords. | ||
| And then they would send her photos of like, you know, like me with a dildo up my ass. | ||
| And now her job is to threaten to tell the wife. | ||
| Uh, you know, I'm gonna tell your wife if you don't, like, give me $500. | ||
| And, oh, no, please don't tell my wife. | ||
| And you gotta go through this whole thing. | ||
| And I mean, it's kind of crazy, you know? | ||
| It's very crazy. | ||
| And I said to her, like, you know, well, and she said, like, I never, you know, I don't contact wives, because they haven't agreed to participate in this. | ||
| I'm not gonna do that. | ||
| Well, that's very ethical of her. | ||
| Oh, she has to be ethical. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's a professional. | |
| She's a pro. | ||
| But I said to her, well, like, what about the bank account? | ||
| She's like, no, I would never, you know, I don't, I don't, that would be a crime, even if the guy gave it to me. | ||
| I said, yeah, but what if your email gets hacked? | ||
| And she's like, oh, hadn't thought of that. | ||
| Yeah, some Russian kid hacks that email. | ||
| That's a lot of stuff there. | ||
| Wow, that's an interesting thing. | ||
| Well, maybe the guy has a separate humiliation bank account. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, God, I mean, but to get the real rush, you'd have to give her your real bank account. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To get the real full, like, fuck, I could be ruining my life. | ||
| I know another woman who specializes in kicking dudes in the balls. | ||
| I've seen that. | ||
| I've seen girls step on them, like step on guys' balls, like high-heel shoes, stomp on them. | ||
| You could lose a ball like that, by the way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Super easy. | ||
| Yeah, I would think so. | ||
| Oh, God, that's so terrifying. | ||
| I'm so boring. | ||
| I mean, I spend time with all these, like, really kinky people, but, like, I'm so dull. | ||
| Sex, sex, sex. | ||
| Basic, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you're not fucked up. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Sorry to tell you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not yet. | |
| But it goes back to what we're saying about people being sexually malleable. | ||
| What do you think that is? | ||
| Is it because people couldn't have like a very rigid, or men rather, couldn't have a rigid idea of what's sexually attractive because if they did, if their standards were too high, then they wouldn't reproduce. | ||
| And so in the times of demanding, you know, what we're like... | ||
| John Marco Allegro, who was one of the lead scholars that was deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls, he wrote this book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. | ||
| I've read that. | ||
| It's a great book. | ||
| It was bought up by the Catholic Church, actually. | ||
| For a while, you could only find it in used form. | ||
| But now Jan Ervin has republished it. | ||
| You can get it again. | ||
| And he wrote another one called Sacred Mushroom and the Cross and something, Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. | ||
| And it's essentially about what the, it's his, after studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years, it's his interpretation that what Christianity was really all about was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility cults. | ||
| And that fertility back then was extremely important. | ||
| It was extremely important to breed. | ||
| Because we didn't have this luxury that we have today of, like, people say, oh, is your girl on the pill? | ||
| Man, I got her pregnant. | ||
| Fuck, what do I do? | ||
| Like, people wanted to get people pregnant. | ||
| Because the human population was not guaranteed. | ||
| Like, there was a very real possibility that you would come into a village that was empty. | ||
| Because everybody died. | ||
| They died of plague or they were invaded or whatever the fuck it was like they didn't have enough people and now there's no one and your name doesn't pass on so that this was like a real possibility so people is the idea of being sexually malleable that people can adapt to almost anything to become attracted to just make sure that they are attracted to something That they can come in something and make a person, | ||
| whether it's overweight women or skinny women or this or that, that it can move around and that occasionally it gets imprinted that this is like the thing that you're really into. | ||
| And that in times of great excess, when people are slovenly and like today, like this idea that a guy gets a fetish off being blackmailed, like what is that? | ||
| That's a guy with too much fucking free time. | ||
| I mean, clearly. | ||
| Too much money, too. | ||
| Yeah, too much money, too much free time. | ||
| He's not starving to death. | ||
| That's not a guy who's out there picking mushrooms trying to find something edible to eat. | ||
| No, this is a guy that's like sitting around trying to figure out a way to occupy his fucked up mind because, you know, it's too easy to just live. | ||
| Like, he doesn't have real survival concerns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, we've eroticized power, which ties into that. | ||
| I've read that one source of clientele for a lot of these sorts of women is Muslim dudes who want to be forced to eat pork. | ||
| They get an erotic charge from that. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| It makes sense, right? | ||
| It totally makes sense. | ||
| I mean, I often think, getting back to my boring sexuality, I think part of the reason that I'm not kinky is that I'm not repressed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And in a way, it's like a steam engine. | ||
| If you don't have that container and build up the pressure... | ||
| So if you're just kind of like, yeah, whatever, you know, I get laid sometimes and I like women and yeah, like it's great. | ||
| But it's I mean, I wonder if healthy is less exciting than crazy. | ||
| Well, is crazy exciting to you, though? | ||
| Because crazy is not exciting to me. | ||
| The humiliatrix, I absolutely believe her. | ||
| I believe that she has a series of guys that want her to shit in their face or whatever the hell it is. | ||
| But to me, it's just silly. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| But are those guys having stronger orgasms than you and me? | ||
| It could be. | ||
| At what cost? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| They steal your bank account and shit in your face, and you just cum like a fucking wildcat. | ||
| I'm broke! | ||
| I mean, maybe, but it's that fucking brief experience of cumming. | ||
| You know, I mean, how much... | ||
| All you have to do if you want to cum really hard is just not cum for a while. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you don't really need to have someone kick you in the balls or shit in your hair. | ||
| There's other things that you can do. | ||
| All you have to do is just, like, go without... | ||
| You know, water tastes amazing when you haven't had any water for a while. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| When you haven't had water for a while, God, it's the greatest thing in the world. | ||
| But when you have it all the time, it becomes normal and you don't even want it. | ||
| You want a Diet Coke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you're starving or dying of thirst, rather, you would just love to get that water in your mouth. | ||
| And I think that's kind of the same thing with sex. | ||
| And that's where I think a lot of perverts fuck themselves over, because they're just jacking off all day until they get blisters on their dick, and then they have to find a new way to hold their dick where it doesn't hurt as much. | ||
| And when you do cum, you're chasing the dragon. | ||
| It doesn't feel good anymore. | ||
| But if you could just take a few weeks off, you would be so horny that when you did cum, your ears would ring. | ||
| You'd be like, whoa! | ||
| But you can't hold off long enough. | ||
| And if you hold off long enough, then you get to the promised land, which is Wet Dreams. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I can get those after three days. | ||
| Seriously? | ||
| Yeah, three days of no sex. | ||
| Man, your testosterone levels must be through the roof. | ||
| I put it in there. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I make sure they're through the roof. | ||
| I add it. | ||
| Oh, I should probably try that now that I'm a creep. | ||
| Yeah, you are a creep. | ||
| Once you reach creep age, what you need is tea. | ||
| Well, people do, you know, it's like a source of shame for some people. | ||
| They don't want to admit that. | ||
| Like testosterone replacement therapy is like a shameful thing. | ||
| Like people have asked me and then I told them, I go, yeah, yeah, I take testosterone. | ||
| And they go like, what? | ||
| You just tell me? | ||
| You're just admitting it? | ||
| It's a chemical component of your body. | ||
| It's like if your body was lacking in blood and you could just simply add blood to it, you'd feel better. | ||
| Wouldn't you do that? | ||
| But for whatever reason, testosterone is associated with being a man. | ||
| I also have hypothyroidism. | ||
| It's called Hashimoto's disease. | ||
| It's genetic. | ||
| My mom has it. | ||
| And other people in my family have it. | ||
| So I take this stuff called Armour Thyroid. | ||
| It's formulated from pig's thyroid. | ||
| And it's great. | ||
| It makes me feel way better. | ||
| But I was having some real problems before I was taken. | ||
| I get these crazy headaches at night, like my head was pounding. | ||
| Or I thought it was something really wrong with me. | ||
| And I would fall asleep. | ||
| When I would fall asleep, it was like I got shot with a tranquilizer dart. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Like at the end of the day, I was just so wiped out. | ||
| I couldn't figure out what it was. | ||
| And so while I was on Fear Factor, I had some real issue with it. | ||
| Like my fucking headaches would be crazy. | ||
| I was so tired at the end of the day. | ||
| And then I got my blood test done. | ||
| But I tell people that I take thyroid medication and nobody would bat an eye. | ||
| Like, oh, you replace your thyroid hormone. | ||
| Well, that's logical. | ||
| But you tell people that you replace your testosterone, and they're like, well, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Do you have to? | ||
| No, I definitely don't have to. | ||
| If I stop doing it, I will have less testosterone than I have now, but I won't feel as good. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| It's up to you to not abuse it, though. | ||
| Because if you abuse it, there are guys, especially some MMA fighters have tested these hyperhuman levels that are not even safe. | ||
| They're really actually kind of dangerous. | ||
| Because the idea is that more is better and just keep going harder and harder. | ||
| But you really shouldn't do that because then you could develop anxiety. | ||
| There's a lot of different things that happen when you do it. | ||
| Like rage and stuff? | ||
| You can definitely get rage. | ||
| You definitely get more upset at things more easily. | ||
| But a lot of people, they develop actual anxiety. | ||
| You have anxiety attacks from having an excess of testosterone. | ||
| You start getting paranoid, and you can get weirded out about things. | ||
| It's just a matter of going to an ethical doctor that really understands what they're doing, and then make sure you're not taking too much of it. | ||
| You're doing it right, and you just want to stay within a healthy, consistent standard, and you'll just feel better. | ||
| Your immune system will function better, but people don't like to talk about it because you have to admit that somehow or another you needed that. | ||
| You have to admit that you're aging. | ||
| Which is shameful, again. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And you're taking it not to combat a disease, you're taking it to feel better, which is pleasure, which is shameful. | ||
| Shameful pleasure, dirty pleasure. | ||
| Oh, you want to feel good all the time? | ||
| What's wrong with you? | ||
| Well, that's my issue with marijuana, too. | ||
| You know, I tell people, like, people say, well, why do you need pot? | ||
| It's not that I need it. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| Yeah, I enjoy it. | ||
| And it gives me more pleasure. | ||
| It gives me more pleasure when I watch movies. | ||
| It gives me more pleasure when I eat food. | ||
| And it gives me way more pleasure when I have sex. | ||
| Sex feels way better when you take marijuana. | ||
| But that's an embarrassing thing to admit for some people, whatever, for whatever reason. | ||
| I love how the word needs comes in. | ||
| Yeah, why do you need it, bro? | ||
| I don't need weed to have fun. | ||
| Who the fuck said anyone needed anything here? | ||
| I don't even need toothpaste. | ||
| Moralistic bullshit. | ||
| If I don't use toothpaste, my teeth will be less clean, but I don't need it. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| We're weird, man. | ||
| We're weird and also that we don't want to factor in our own mortality. | ||
| We don't want to address it. | ||
| We don't want to admit it. | ||
| So anything that you're doing to mitigate that is a weakness. | ||
| Anything you're doing to combat anti-aging is just vanity. | ||
| Well, I guarantee you I have more energy because of it. | ||
| I know I do. | ||
| I know I feel better. | ||
| I can get more things done, and my body works more efficiently. | ||
| Especially someone like me that enjoys doing things that are physically active, like martial arts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Without the testosterone, without growth hormone and thyroid hormone and all these different hormones that are functioning at their optimum levels, your body's just not going to work as well. | ||
| It's like having a race car that you don't take care of the spark plugs. | ||
| You don't replace the oil. | ||
| You just let it drive it until that fucking engine seizes up and then you're done. | ||
| That's nature. | ||
| That's nature. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's not nature, because why are we getting vaccinated then? | ||
| Why are we taking vitamins then? | ||
| Why am I going to the doctor and getting checkups? | ||
| Why don't I just let cancer eat my body? | ||
| Why get chemo? | ||
| It's just natural. | ||
| We have weird ideas of what you should... | ||
| All those weird ideas are not based on critical thinking and objective analysis. | ||
| They're just based on the standards that somehow or another someone else has set forth. | ||
| Chevron. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shell, you were born to work hard. | |
| Because you were born to, you actor. | ||
| Well, I mean, you know, same thing with like these sex pills, like now the female Viagra and stuff. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's bad for you. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it doesn't work either because of what we're saying. | ||
| No, because of what we were talking about earlier, the plasticity, that women's sexuality isn't about blood flow. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Men, if you make your dick hard, you're horny because it engages nerve endings and, you know, like, well, my dick's hard. | ||
| I gotta fuck something, you know? | ||
| Well, even when guys get, like, a pee-boner, like when guys, like, if women don't know this, when men have to urinate and you wake up in the middle of the morning and your dick is hard, it's not because you're horny a lot of the times, it's because you have to pee. | ||
| It's morning wood. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what morning wood is, but you can use that morning wood Like you could use any regular old boner. | ||
| So when a guy wakes up and he has a boner, oftentimes he's like, well, I don't want to waste that. | ||
| I got a hammer. | ||
| That looks like a nail. | ||
| It becomes like, this looks like a thing to use right here. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Well, you have, on average, three erections per night if you sleep eight hours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| So while you're sleeping, you're getting boners. | ||
| Yeah, and that's one of the ways they test to see if your impotence is psychological or physiological. | ||
| They'll put like a little piece of paper tape on your dick, and in the morning, if the tape is torn, It means you had an erection at night, so it means your blood flow is fine. | ||
| It's a head thing. | ||
| Wow, how weird. | ||
| You have to tie a ribbon around your dick to see if you have an opening ceremony in the middle of the night. | ||
| For the hostages. | ||
| How strange. | ||
| What a strange thing. | ||
| Sex is weird. | ||
| I mean, you asked a question earlier about the, you know, what's the purpose of the fetish generation, you know, module in the male brain and all that. | ||
| And I was thinking, well, two things. | ||
| One, in Sex at Dawn, we talked about animals, because this appears to be not only a human thing, but common to male mammals as well of other species. | ||
| There was one experiment where this guy... | ||
| I think it was in Scotland, took all the, he had a herd of sheep and a herd of goats. | ||
| And one year he took all the babies and he put them with the other species. | ||
| So now all the baby goats are living with the sheep and all the baby sheep are living with the goats. | ||
| And he let them live with that species till they reach sexual maturity. | ||
| At which point they were having sex with the... | ||
| So the goats are having sex with the sheep and the sheep are having sex with the goats, right? | ||
| Then he takes them and puts them back with their own species. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And what happened was the females were like, all right, whatever. | ||
| So now the female sheep are having sex with the male sheep, right? | ||
| They were switched back. | ||
| But the males refused. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| The males who came, you know, who had been raised with the other species were like, no, I'm a goat fucker. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Not interested. | ||
| Because they had been imprinted. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So the females just went with what was there. | ||
| The males were like, no, no, that's not me. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's really interesting. | ||
| And the testosterone, we also talked about that. | ||
| I remember there were some interviews with a guy. | ||
| There was one that was a guy who had a disease where his body suddenly stopped making testosterone. | ||
| And he described, you know, eventually he was diagnosed and started taking supplements, but he described it and it was like all... | ||
| It wasn't about sex. | ||
| It was all pleasure stopped. | ||
| It was like, I didn't give a shit about music. | ||
| I didn't give a shit about food. | ||
| I didn't give a shit about relationships. | ||
| I just was like blasé about everything. | ||
| And then there was another one where we quoted a... | ||
| Someone who was going through a sex change from female to male, and she talked about, like, when she was a woman, she was a lesbian, and she lived in Manhattan, and she was talking about, like, yeah, you know, I'd be on the subway, and I'd see an attractive woman, and I'd think, I wonder what she's like, and what kind of food she's into, and what she's reading, and you know. | ||
| And then when she was transitioning to male, she started taking testosterone. | ||
| And she said, once I started taking testosterone, I'd be on the subway and I'd see the same kind of woman. | ||
| And I'd just be like, tits, cunt, ass, cunt. | ||
| And she said, it really gave me insight and compassion for adolescent boys. | ||
| Chaz Bono said that. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, she said that when, well, he said that when he transitioned from being female to male, that he understands it now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For the longest time, like, never understood men, and it was just alien to him, and then once he started taking testosterone, he was like, oh, this is why guys are so fucking creepy. | ||
| It's like they're just overwhelmed by this demon inside of them, who we call testosterone, that you require in order to be happy and to enjoy anything in life. | ||
| That's one of the things that happens to men with traumatic brain injuries, is the pituitary gland gets damaged, they stop producing testosterone, they get deeply depressed. | ||
| And one of the best ways to mitigate that are supplementing them with testosterone. | ||
| Like that cures a lot of the depression that a lot of these soldiers go through when they come back from the war. | ||
| This traumatic brain injury just disrupts the pituitary's ability to function. | ||
| You know, one of the... | ||
| When you start a typical situation, you get a guy like my age, right? | ||
| Mid-50s, been married a long time, monogamous. | ||
| Typical midlife crisis, has sex with his secretary, and then suddenly it's like, holy shit, you know, I'm in love, right? | ||
| Why does he think he's in love? | ||
| Because food tastes better, the colors are brighter, everything's more interesting. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because his testosterone levels have gone up. | ||
| One of the only things you can do without supplements to increase testosterone is have sex with a new woman. | ||
| Your body responds to you having sex with a new woman with a spike in testosterone production. | ||
| So he's got this elevated T levels. | ||
| He thinks he's in love. | ||
| He's not in love. | ||
| He's just fucking someone new for the first time in 20 years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So he divorces his wife because now he's in love with this woman who seems to have the keys to the fucking universe. | ||
| That wears off in a couple of years. | ||
| And now he's, you know, even more fucked than he was before. | ||
| Well, that's also the key to this whole midlife crisis thing where guys buy sports cars. | ||
| Yeah, risk. | ||
| Well, also sports cars. | ||
| Like, literally driving a sports car elevates your testosterone, especially when you're quote-unquote peacocking. | ||
| Especially if Jay Leno's driving and you're in the passenger seat. | ||
| That was a good episode, actually. | ||
| But when you're driving around people, especially potential young mates, females that could see you, your testosterone rises when you're in this car. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And even talking and flirting with potential young girls that you may, you know, one day have sex with, just being around them raises your testosterone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just the possibility. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I wonder, getting back to Sierra, I wonder if some of those guys who are buying her panties... | ||
| If they're not getting testosterone surges. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Something's happening, right? | ||
| There's getting some kind of dopamine, serotonin, some sort of a rush. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| Dirty panties. | ||
| Hey, have you ever heard of fecal transplants? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, that sort of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. | ||
| The biological thing. | ||
| Really interesting. | ||
| Well, it's fascinating how many things it cures and how many people have real bowel issues. | ||
| 30,000 people die from C. difficile infestation every year. | ||
| And with fecal transplant, 98% recovery rate within hours. | ||
| Nuts. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Within hours. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the biological organism, the idea of the biological organism being an individual has been completely debunked. | ||
| And that's what probiotics are all about. | ||
| I'm a big fan of probiotics. | ||
| I drink, where is it? | ||
| Must have left it in my car. | ||
| I drink kombucha every day. | ||
| I drink that shit like water. | ||
| I drink two or three of them a day. | ||
| Well, I'm a big fan. | ||
| I mean, I spent a lot of my younger years traveling, you know, in Central America and Asia and stuff. | ||
| And, like, when I'm in America, I put on weight. | ||
| Now, part of it's that, you know, the food, and I drink beer, probably more beer. | ||
| You know, here you get a beer, it's a pint. | ||
| In Spain, you get a beer, it's about half a pint. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, it's a caña. | ||
| Again, Spain, it's just a different vibe. | ||
| Servings of everything are smaller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Higher quality, like really good and tasty, but small. | ||
| So you eat more slowly. | ||
| And Europe is all about grass-fed food, too. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You don't get that corn-fed steak. | ||
| No fucking Monsanto, GMOs, you know, that whole thing. | ||
| They're kicked out of a lot of countries. | ||
| But yeah, and pesticides. | ||
| A friend of mine's in the wine importation business. | ||
| He distributes organic wines. | ||
| And he said he was in, I don't know if it was Spain or France, and he was like, you guys should get organic certified. | ||
| We could charge more. | ||
| And they're like, what are you talking about? | ||
| We would never put pesticides on our grapes. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| We don't need to say it. | ||
| Nobody would do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it's a very different culture. | ||
| But I think that because the cheeses and the things are alive there, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You can't import the ham, even. | ||
| You can't import Spanish. | ||
| I guess now they've changed it. | ||
| You can start. | ||
| But, yeah, food is alive. | ||
| So the microbiome is very different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I go to India. | ||
| I lose weight quickly. | ||
| Part of it's because I have fucking dysentery. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Diarrhea. | |
| The part of it is because you feel bad because everybody else is starving. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was an article recently about gray market foods in New York City. | ||
| And I forget. | ||
| It was something I read online. | ||
| And it might have been from Dig. | ||
| See if you can find it on Dig. | ||
| I think it is from Dig. | ||
| That's where I get a lot of my interesting news stories. | ||
| But they were talking about this one particular type of cheese that is very difficult to get, and it's cured with cheese mites, like these mites. | ||
| And if the mites are of a certain number per cheese, it becomes illegal to import into America. | ||
| It's very sketchy, like how you do it. | ||
| Over in France or wherever the fuck they grow this cheese where it's really popular, it just gets fucking lousy with mites. | ||
| And that's where you get the real flavor of this cheese. | ||
| And it's like a nutty, sort of a sweet taste to this cheese. | ||
| And a lot of it is attributed to the fact that, first of all, They don't use homogenized or pasteurized milk. | ||
| They use raw milk when they make their cheese, which is the way they make the best cheese. | ||
| It keeps the enzymes in it. | ||
| And then they're not scared of all these funky organisms. | ||
| Yeah, this is it. | ||
| The gray market foods. | ||
| If you scroll down, you'll see that cheese. | ||
| It's sort of like an orange-looking weird fucking cheese. | ||
| That's it right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I've heard that. | |
| Yeah, that stuff. | ||
| And if you make that a little larger so we can read it. | ||
| It looks really weird, but this guy was talking about how good it tasted. | ||
| See, it's the unique way they alter the aging process, the presence of mites. | ||
| FDA singled this cheese out as a potential public health hazard. | ||
| How do you say it? | ||
| Mimolet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mimolet. | |
| Mimolet has been banned and made illegal for sale in the U.S. and indignant consumers staged protests. | ||
| Yeah, it looks cool. | ||
| I'd like to try a piece of that. | ||
| I've definitely had that, yeah. | ||
| One of the things we did on Fear Factor to make things more disgusting was we used really expensive cheese. | ||
| We mixed really expensive cheese in with some of the stuff to give it this horrible fucking rotting smell. | ||
| And there's an expensive cheese, what do they call a cheese place? | ||
| There's a name for one of those places. | ||
| I don't know what it's called. | ||
| But they had a cheese place in Beverly Hills, and so we used to send these people who worked for Fear Factor to Beverly Hills, to this super expensive cheese place, and buy this really expensive, hard-to-get cheese, and it stunk like death. | ||
| And we would pour that onto whatever the fuck they had to eat, and it would make them more repulsed. | ||
| Did you ever have, like, French people on? | ||
| No. | ||
| And they'd be like, ooh la la. | ||
| Well, Filipinos, I have a bunch of friends that are Filipino, and they would always be like, because we serve people balut, and balut is a chicken or a duck embryo. | ||
| It's like the full little embryos in there, and they'd eat it. | ||
| And they were like, we love that. | ||
| Like, get me on that show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You ever have Anthony Bourdain on this show? | ||
| On this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, really? | ||
| Yeah, that's cool. | ||
| I'd love to meet him sometime. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's an interesting character. | ||
| He'll eat anything. | ||
| Yeah, well, he's gotten, like, super into jiu-jitsu to the point where he trains every day. | ||
| With Henzo. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Every day, sometimes twice a day. | ||
| Yeah, and his wife and his kid are doing it, too. | ||
| He's 58 years old. | ||
| He started at 58. Now he just earned his blue belt. | ||
| Oh, he just started recently? | ||
| Yeah, like within a year ago. | ||
| Oh, I thought this was a long-term thing with him. | ||
| No, no, it's really recent. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Aren't you risking getting hurt? | ||
| When you start something like that old? | ||
| Well, it depends on how you do it. | ||
| It depends on who you do it with. | ||
| But absolutely. | ||
| If you have bad training partners, you can definitely get hurt. | ||
| But you can definitely get hurt even with good training partners. | ||
| Because weird shit happens. | ||
| You roll over on an ankle. | ||
| You blow some tendons out in your knee. | ||
| You fuck up a disc in your back. | ||
| It's all potential. | ||
| It's definitely not... | ||
| It's not fucking video games. | ||
| It's real life. | ||
| It's definitely dangerous, especially for a guy who's 58, who has no background of athleticism at all, and all of a sudden starts at a very advanced age and becomes completely obsessed with it. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Yeah, it is cool. | ||
| His original show, that No Reservation show, really got me into the idea of food as an art form. | ||
| Because I just thought of food as being, oh, that's good. | ||
| Food's good. | ||
| This is good. | ||
| That place is good to eat at. | ||
| I didn't think of it as like, oh, this guy's making art that you taste. | ||
| When you eat a great meal, that experience, that sensual experience, that pleasurable experience is art. | ||
| It's like someone's art is giving you pleasure through your taste buds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's through smells and, you know, like when you have a really good meal, you smell it, you eat it. | ||
| Like there's an art to that. | ||
| I never really considered it that way until I watched his show. | ||
| And again, that's a very European approach to food. | ||
| You know, America, food is fuel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shove that sandwich down your throat and get back to work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not in Spain, man. | ||
| Or France or Italy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have a buddy who's an athlete and all he thinks about is food is fuel. | ||
| He goes, I don't even care what it tastes like. | ||
| I just eat it. | ||
| He goes, I just want food as fuel. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| Soylent. | ||
| You heard about that? | ||
| Well, Soylent Green. | ||
| Yeah, they named it after that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| What is it? | ||
| It's these guys in Silicon Valley who are coding, right? | ||
| And they're like, I just want to work 24 hours. | ||
| I don't want to stop and eat. | ||
| It's a waste of time. | ||
| And so they came up, they like developed this food source, this garp that you just like squeeze out of a tube and it's got everything you need. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| Soylent. | ||
| How bizarre. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| So it's... | ||
| Yeah, you just like drink... | ||
| That can't be good for you, though. | ||
| And look at that. | ||
| 29 bucks a month. | ||
| Modular... | ||
| Soy protein. | ||
| Oh, that's going to make you grow tits. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Vitamins and minerals. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, but what about... | ||
| Yeah, it's just weird. | ||
| Where's the pleasure? | ||
| There's no pleasure. | ||
| That stuff's nasty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's one thing if you're a fucking astronaut. | ||
| You've got to survive in the space station with stuff you squirt in your mouth, but... | ||
| This is like you have the abundance of the earth and you choose to squirt paste in your mouth instead? | ||
| Well, see, maybe this is part of, you know, this is this movement you were talking about, right? | ||
| Because getting us to eat Shit that doesn't take up space and we don't need clean air and we don't need healthy oceans. | ||
| That's in the interest of the technology. | ||
| If you see that that's where we're going, if you think that that's where we're going, then a lot of these things start to fall into place and make sense in a weird way. | ||
| I mean, I read the other day that the tuna stocks in the Pacific Ocean are down like 40% in the last 20 years. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Did you ever see Jiro Dreams of Sushi? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I've got it on. | ||
| Someone gave it to me. | ||
| I haven't seen it. | ||
| I resisted for a long time. | ||
| People kept telling me how great it was. | ||
| I'm like, whatever. | ||
| It's a fucking guy making sushi. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| But it's great. | ||
| It's really great. | ||
| And one of the things that they show in this movie is when he was young, what it would be like going to the fish market in Japan. | ||
| Just fucking stacks of tuna. | ||
| And the tuna was so abundant. | ||
| And then the overfishing has made a massive impact. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On the fish supplies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We've literally... | ||
| I mean, look at how goddamn big the ocean is. | ||
| The fact that we put a dent in it at all is just shocking. | ||
| More than a dent. | ||
| Like, we're collapsing this shit. | ||
| Three quarters of the fucking Earth's surface is water. | ||
| That plastic island? | ||
| The size of Texas? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| I think it's even bigger than that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and this kid has developed, I don't know if it's an actual functional machine, but he's developed some sort of a device to clean up the ocean. | ||
| Like a skimmer kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, and suck the plastic out. | ||
| Well, you've got to think plastic, once it becomes a valuable resource, if someone figures out how to take it out of the ocean, if it was gold floating around out there, we would have a million ships that are fighting over this to try to get in. | ||
| Like, if Russia and the United States found gold Gold particles circling around at billions and trillions of dollars worth. | ||
| Boy, they couldn't wait to plant a flag in the middle of the ocean to suck all this gold out of the water. | ||
| Because it's plastic, we're like, I got plastic right here, dude. | ||
| I don't need the ocean plastic. | ||
| That's why you need the government, you know, because the government can create those artificial incentives. | ||
| Pay for Cobras. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pay for plastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that's the government being a solution. | |
| It's a beautiful idea, but it doesn't really work. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, it'd be nice if the government was completely altruistic and enlightened and they were just on the ball. | ||
| Well, see, here's the thing, okay? | ||
| Going back to what we were talking about earlier, if we had direct voting... | ||
| If they had an educated... | ||
| Decision-making process. | ||
| You really knew, like, well, what kind of a threat are we under? | ||
| How much military do we really need? | ||
| Because if we don't need any military at all, if there's no threat whatsoever, well, then that would be an appropriate way to respond. | ||
| But what if they couldn't tell us how much threat there really was? | ||
| And what if people had this idealistic idea of how the rest of the world functions, but meanwhile, there really is a need for the military? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle there. | ||
| I don't think that the world is this beautiful place that we need to not worry about at all and that we don't need any military. | ||
| That just doesn't... | ||
| I watch those ISIS videos on YouTube. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I'm not believing... | ||
| They're out there. | ||
| They're pretty nasty. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there that are fucking crazy. | ||
| There's a lot of nutty fucking people that are killing people and would love to kill more. | ||
| There's just always going to be that way. | ||
| And I think that... | ||
| Like, what we're talking about, I think there's a push and a pull in this life. | ||
| And I think, like, you know, we were talking about tides coming in and tides going out, populations dropping and then increasing. | ||
| I think there's a need for resistance in some ways. | ||
| And I think that there's almost a need for bad things. | ||
| In order to inspire good things, we have to see the evil of something like ISIS or something, you know, fill in the blank, Joseph Kony, the Congo dictators and evil warlords. | ||
| We need to see things like Idi Amin. | ||
| We need to see horrific things like Pol Pot. | ||
| We need to be aware of that in order to almost promote the opposite of it. | ||
| But what I would argue is that every one of those things that you mentioned is a response to something earlier. | ||
| Like Pol Pot is a response to the Vietnam War and the destruction of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger. | ||
| Kony is a response to the Congo having been exploited for ivory and then, you know, minerals in our phones and, you know, like every one of these things arises out of a colonial exploitation. | ||
| So, you know, we're saying, you know, Pol Pot's evil. | ||
| Well, but Pol Pot is a response to evil that we're not often recognized as evil because it's coming from us, coming from our side. | ||
| So I just feel like everybody who does something really nasty, they think they're doing good. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, those guys in ISIS, they think they're good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're doing it for Allah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or they're doing it for, you know, in revenge for all the bombing or... | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it's this process. | ||
| So I agree with you. | ||
| I mean, I'm not an anarchist and I'm not crazy. | ||
| So I do feel like, you know, you've got to be ready to fight to defend yourself. | ||
| But on the other hand, I sort of agree with, you know, the Gandhis and the Martin Luther King and that whole line, civil disobedience, Thoreau's great essay, that, like, the only way to really end violence is to just not participate in it. | ||
| Because the minute you participate in it, then it's this cycle. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Yeah, it's unavoidable. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's sort of inarguable, really, right? | ||
| But if you do not participate and your loved ones are slaughtered before your eyes, then what? | ||
| Like, should you have acted to stop that from happening? | ||
| And is a certain amount of violence justified in order to promote a higher ethical and moral standard for the culture to eliminate people who don't abide by those things? | ||
| But you would have to have very strict Interpretations of this, and you'd have to have very strict rules of engagement, and we clearly don't have that. | ||
| Yeah, and I wonder if we ever did. | ||
| It feels like it was better, right? | ||
| Doesn't it? | ||
| Talking about police in the U.S. Before the war on drugs, it seems like cops were cool. | ||
| They weren't the enemy. | ||
| I thought that, too, but when you talk to cops, it seems like poverty and drugs And crime, they're kind of always together. | ||
| There's a great documentary that I'm watching right now, I think it's called The 7-5. | ||
| Nick DiPaolo told me about it. | ||
| He actually talked about it on Ari Shafir's podcast, and then I went and got it. | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| It's called The 7-5. | ||
| And it's all about this really corrupt precinct in New York City in the 1970s. | ||
| But that's it right there. | ||
| It's fucking incredible. | ||
| It's so goddamn crazy. | ||
| This guy, Michael Dowd, who I don't know his history. | ||
| After the documentary's over, I'm going to Google him and find out what his history was. | ||
| But he's hilarious. | ||
| He's out now, I guess, because he's wearing civilian clothes. | ||
| He's not a prisoner. | ||
| And he testified about all the corruption that he was involved in and all the shit that he was involved in. | ||
| And then they start reenacting it and talking about it in the documentary along with facts and different people and different players involved. | ||
| And you're like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Just completely out of control. | ||
| Just totally out of control. | ||
| Crime and corruption. | ||
| And drugs. | ||
| So this is pre-war on drugs. | ||
| This is 1970s. | ||
| And it's just, I guess, kind of pre-war on drugs. | ||
| But Nixon sort of instituted a war on drugs. | ||
| They really instituted a war on drugs essentially when they passed the sweeping psychedelic acts of 1970s. | ||
| They made essentially everything psychoactive, illegal. | ||
| All the different mushrooms and LSD. Many people don't even know that. | ||
| But prior to 1970, all that stuff was legal. | ||
| That was one of the big issues with the tune-in, turn-out. | ||
| Timothy Leary's ideas was that it was legal. | ||
| And it was effective. | ||
| I mean, LSD, one of my favorite fun facts about LSD is that it was mostly used initially by psychiatrists to get insights into what it was like to be psychotic. | ||
| It was called a psychotomimetic. | ||
| In other words, it mimes the effects of psychosis. | ||
| So psychiatrists who dealt with psychotic people, as my wife does, would take LSD to like, oh, this is what it must be like to be them. | ||
| This is what it's like to hear voices and to lose touch with reality and to have all this overwhelming input. | ||
| And then they would go back to their patients with a greater compassion and understanding because they were like, I get it. | ||
| I know what you're going through. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| Which is what a shaman does, right? | ||
| Like in shamanic practices, often it's the shaman who takes the drugs in order to change his or her consciousness to help you with whatever you're dealing with. | ||
| I mean, that's such a beautiful, sort of noble approach to healing. | ||
| I was driving yesterday and I drove past a short bus. | ||
| You know, those little buses where kids are troubled. | ||
| And there was this little boy. | ||
| He looked like he was Indian. | ||
| He looked like he was probably about nine or ten years old. | ||
| And he was staring at his hands. | ||
| And he was like moving his hands around and nodding and going back and forth. | ||
| He was like, at first I thought he was just playing. | ||
| You know, I thought it was just a kid in a bus who was bored. | ||
| And then as I was stuck there at the red light and I'm looking in this window and he was making noises and look at his face and he was moving his mouth around and he was just staring at his fingers. | ||
| And I was realizing like, oh, this kid's kind of fucked up. | ||
| There's something wrong with him. | ||
| And then I started thinking, it was only for whatever it takes for a light to change. | ||
| I was thinking, what is this guy seeing? | ||
| What is he seeing? | ||
| He's obviously not seeing things that normal people see or experiencing it in the same way that a quote-unquote normal person would. | ||
| He was moving his fingers around and staring at it and bouncing back and forth. | ||
| I'm like, what is this kid's trip? | ||
| What is this like for him? | ||
| Does he have some abnormal levels of neurochemicals? | ||
| What is causing him to have this experience? | ||
| What error in his circuitry? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It was sad, but fascinating at the same time. | ||
| I don't know what he was suffering from, but it was clearly something. | ||
| Well, my Casilda, she's really interesting. | ||
| She loves psychotics. | ||
| That's her favorite population to work with, which, you know, psychotics are the people who have lost touch with reality. | ||
| So that kid may have been having a psychotic break or, you know, who knows what his thing is. | ||
| The first time I went into her office when I first met her, it was like one flew over the cuckoo's nest, right? | ||
| You know, like the double doors, the locking doors, the grates over the windows, high security. | ||
| People just like, you know, completely out of it. | ||
| And she loves those people because she says they're honest. | ||
| They're completely honest. | ||
| And they don't lie. | ||
| And when she meets them, and I've seen this happen in the street countless times at this point, she laughs. | ||
| She just laughs. | ||
| And they, because they know they're crazy. | ||
| There's part of them that's observing. | ||
| And they know they're acting ridiculous. | ||
| And they're like shouting, you know, something that they know isn't there, but they can't help it. | ||
| So she laughs in this very friendly, open way. | ||
| And they, like, oh, like, you get it. | ||
| They have this rapport. | ||
| It's a really beautiful thing I've never seen happen before. | ||
| But it's almost like a shamanic kind of connection she has with people. | ||
| But, you know, she sees kids like that, and she's just like, oh, I love those kids. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| She's not afraid of them at all. | ||
| She's afraid of normal people because we're all lying. | ||
| You know? | ||
| She's not good at... | ||
| It's a weird thing as a psychiatrist. | ||
| She's not good at seeing through bullshit. | ||
| She smells it, but she just, like, flees from it. | ||
| So she'd just rather have it where bullshit's not even an option. | ||
| It's not even on the table. | ||
| She wants honesty. | ||
| No. | ||
| And, like, if that means you're drooling and pissing down your leg, that's fine. | ||
| She doesn't care about that. | ||
| Lucky for me. | ||
| Boy, is she an outlier. | ||
| Shh. | ||
| She's a bit of a nutcase herself. | ||
| You know, in the best possible way. | ||
| I mean, I often think, like, someone who works in, you know, I'm a psychologist. | ||
| I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. | ||
| Someone who works in mental health is like a lifeguard, you know? | ||
| And 99% of us are the lifeguard who stands on the beach, and if you're in trouble, they'll, like, throw you a ring and wish you luck. | ||
| She dives in. | ||
| She goes right into the water, which is really dangerous and very rare. | ||
| And one of the reasons, honestly, she's been on a break for a few years, because it was blowing her mind there for a while. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So it was good to be able to fuck off to America for a few years. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine the burden of that would be pretty intense. | ||
| When I was fucking off my way through college, I shouldn't say fucking my way through, I didn't really do much fucking college, unfortunately. | ||
| But... | ||
| I went to UMass Boston, and I basically was wasting my time there. | ||
| I was only really going because I didn't want to be a loser. | ||
| I'd go there because I would tell people, oh, I'm going to UMass Boston, but wasting my time. | ||
| When I was trying to think of what would be a career that I would be interested in, psychology was the only thing that interested me because I thought, well, At the very least, at least I kind of understand how to manage my own mind because I obviously had a lot of troubles. | ||
| There was a lot going on in there that I was trying to always wrestle with inside my head and I felt like if at least I do that, I will have a greater understanding of my own problems. | ||
| But then I thought about it and be like, but I will be dealing with other people's fucking problems all the time. | ||
| And I just don't have the patience for that. | ||
| I admire people who do, but I'm not one of them. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I believe... | ||
| That that shit is contagious. | ||
| And I think that negative energy, laziness, slovenly behavior, all that stuff wears on you. | ||
| Because I think we imitate our atmosphere far more than we want to admit. | ||
| And we become in sync with our atmosphere far more than we care to admit. | ||
| And if you're around a lot of really positive, really healthy people, you tend to gravitate towards positive, healthy behavior. | ||
| But if you're around people that are constantly self-sabotaging, that becomes the standard. | ||
| That becomes the norm. | ||
| It's your culture. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's not good for you. | ||
| And it's very, very frustrating to me. | ||
| When I'm around people that are sabotaging themselves, I get angry. | ||
| I get, well, you just fucking stop. | ||
| Get your fucking shit together. | ||
| Which is not really a healthy way to approach them. | ||
| Because it doesn't work. | ||
| You can't yell at someone and say, get your shit together. | ||
| But it's almost like impulsive because I know that it's creeping into my brain. | ||
| Like, you're spitting on me, you fuck. | ||
| You're sick. | ||
| You're sneezing with your mouth open. | ||
| You're coughing in my face. | ||
| And that's what someone's doing when they're sabotaging their life in front of you consistently and continually, and they drag you into their world. | ||
| Well, fucking help me! | ||
| No! | ||
| You are a grown person. | ||
| Help yourself, goddammit. | ||
| And you get sucked into it. | ||
| You know, like, you okay? | ||
| I'm gonna call you. | ||
| I'll call you later. | ||
| Then you have to call and check up on them, and they're crying, and like, what the fuck? | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's like when people don't get their shit together, it becomes contagious, and I worry about that when it comes to psychology. | ||
| I worry, like... | ||
| People that are constantly dealing with other people's disasters and fuck-ups, if that's your day, it's just every day you're dealing with someone who can't stop eating cake or they can't stop jerking off or they can't stop whatever it is that they're hung up on, whatever craziness. | ||
| I always feel like, man, in trying or even making an attempt to help those people, you're sort of giving up a lot of your sovereignty when it comes to your own established mental state. | ||
| Yeah, which is why, you know, Casilda's got extremely firm boundaries. | ||
| And when we're, like, you know, if we're hanging out with someone, you know, potential friends or whatever, just people, whatever, if she detects Something that's not right, she's just like, yeah, I'm gonna go home. | ||
| And she's out. | ||
| Like, she's not gonna... | ||
| Because I think it's what you're describing. | ||
| She feels like, if this isn't a clinical situation where I'm in charge, then she feels contaminated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Whereas I feel more like, yeah, whatever, you know, everybody's got their weird shit. | ||
| But then I find myself developing friendships with people, and then a year or two down the road, it's like, fuck. | ||
| You know, they weird out on me. | ||
| And like, I didn't see that coming. | ||
| And she'll say, are you kidding? | ||
| I saw that coming the day you met that guy. | ||
| Like, why would you, you know, I tried to warn you. | ||
| Well, there's some people that are undeniably toxic. | ||
| And by toxic, it doesn't necessarily even mean that they're trying to harm you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They might be toxic just by the fact that they're fucking so self-indulgent. | ||
| There's a lot of people that constantly want to talk about their own problems. | ||
| Their own problems take precedent over everything that's going on, and it's just this constant examination of their own faults. | ||
| And they never get better, those fucks. | ||
| Those fuckers, they constantly repeat the same problems. | ||
| And I think that a lot of them, they have even addictions, and that these addictions, whether it's alcohol or drugs or whatever the fuck it is, those addictions they have are almost like, it's like facilitates this need to talk about themselves and their problems. | ||
| They create more problems, so they're constantly addressing their problems. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I hear that. | ||
| And that's why she prefers psychotics. | ||
| Because they're not doing that. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| They're crazy. | ||
| They have to deal with some real shit. | ||
| Neurotics are just a pain in the ass. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But psychotics, they can't help it. | ||
| They're just like that. | ||
| They're born that way. | ||
| Well, to wrap it all up, Chris Ryan, are we fucking doomed? | ||
| When is this book coming out, by the way? | ||
| Probably next summer. | ||
| Are you almost done with it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is it the editorial process now? | ||
| Not yet, but within... | ||
| I'd say within a month, I'll turn it in and then flee the country. | ||
| And then when you turn it in, does a bunch of fucking bean counters start going over your shit and deciding which way it should go? | ||
| Because you have to give up a little bit of creative control in order to have it published, right? | ||
| Is that how it works? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it depends where you are in that world, you know? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's probably the same with a comic. | ||
| It's your first special. | ||
| The producers are going to have a lot to say. | ||
| Someone like you, you can walk in and say, no, I'm going to do it this way. | ||
| Take it or leave it. | ||
| But even then, there were some bits that Comedy Central wouldn't put on my last special. | ||
| They were like, you can't do that one. | ||
| We can't put that one on the air. | ||
| I'm like, all right. | ||
| Yeah, although... | ||
| There's a couple of them, actually. | ||
| I mean, you could do... | ||
| You're in a position with your platform where you could just say, all right, Comedy Central, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to pay tape this myself in a small club in L.A. and then distribute it through my podcast and cut you guys out. | ||
| You could do that. | ||
| The earlier regime, like the regime that they have now is really good, but they had an earlier regime, and several years ago I had a conversation with them over the phone. | ||
| We were going over material, and in the middle of the conversation I went, stop, stop, stop. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| Like you've got to do this instead of that you can't say that instead of this and they were telling me as if like we're gonna Create some sitcom together, right? | ||
| You know like and as I go, this is like no That part has to be in because it's the whole point the whole point about Telling the story of Noah and the ark to an eight-year-old retarded boy. | ||
| You have to have an eight-year-old retarded boy So the eight-year-old retarded boy goes, well, there's a lot of holes in that story. | ||
| And they were like, you can't do that. | ||
| I was like, well, it has to be done. | ||
| You can't tell me what I can and can't do. | ||
| That's the whole point. | ||
| Are you saying that eight-year-old retarded boys don't exist, or you can't ever discuss them? | ||
| Which one is it? | ||
| Because I'm not making fun of the eight-year-old retarded boy. | ||
| I'm saying the eight-year-old retarded boy is too smart to buy Exactly. | ||
| The story of Noah and the Ark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And to them, it was just, the vehicle was unacceptable. | ||
| Like, well, we're done. | ||
| We're done here. | ||
| Like, well, like, why don't you have it like an older... | ||
| No. | ||
| You're saying this because you want to save your gig. | ||
| Your gig is to be able to somehow or another justify what you've put on the air to the advertisers or whoever the fuck is above you. | ||
| You can't do that with comedy. | ||
| If you homogenize comedy, unless it's your thing, some people, that's how they think. | ||
| Which is fine. | ||
| But they shouldn't be working in comedy then. | ||
| Well, they could be, like Jim Gaffigan. | ||
| He's a hilarious guy, but his comedy is very, like, anybody could laugh at it. | ||
| Brian Regan is the same thing. | ||
| He's hilarious, but that is him. | ||
| You know, there's always going to be pop music, and some pop music is really fucking good. | ||
| And then there's always going to be just dirty, fucking nasty, like, music from the street, which is also really good if that's what you're into. | ||
| You turned me on to Doug Stanhope talking about someone who just goes, he's fantastic. | ||
| Yeah, he's free. | ||
| He's the opposite of what you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah, he doesn't, no, you can't tell Doug what to do. | ||
| It's just, it's not, it's never going to happen. | ||
| He doesn't care. | ||
| He doesn't, all Doug needs is enough money to get by and he's done. | ||
| I mean, he lives in this weird fucking town, Bisbee, Arizona, seven miles from the border of Mexico. | ||
| It's this weird artist community. | ||
| He's got this strangely painted house. | ||
| He invites people over his house for Super Bowl party. | ||
| Like, literally, the internet. | ||
| He'll, like, put out his address, and people just come to his house. | ||
| He's had 500 people over his house for Super Bowl parties. | ||
| He didn't know 459 of them. | ||
| I mean, he's that nuts. | ||
| That's a lot of bean dip. | ||
| His girlfriend, completely out of her fucking mind, like legitimately crazy, on pills. | ||
| Her name is Bingo. | ||
| She shaves her head. | ||
| The hair that's left, she puts blue paint on it and they fucking go out of the house. | ||
| She's wearing like socks on her arms. | ||
| She's nuts. | ||
| And that's his reality. | ||
| He wears ironic suits and he gets upset because now like more people are wearing these ironic suits and he's afraid that he's going to get lumped into these categories of these people that are like trying to act as if they're ironic. | ||
| By wearing ridiculous suits. | ||
| He's a fucking national treasure. | ||
| He really is. | ||
| It's so hard for someone to go that road so 100% committed that they come out on the other end of Doug Stanhope. | ||
| Most of the time, somewhere along the line, they sell out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to, yeah. | ||
| But I mean, as far as the publishing thing, because of the success of Sex at Dawn, I think I'm in a position to sort of, you know, I've got leverage. | ||
| And the guy, the editor, who... | ||
| Who acquired the book is the guy who edited Sex at Dawn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's great. | |
| So I know how he works. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| Different publisher. | ||
| He quit and left. | ||
| He's with someone else. | ||
| So he's cool and we've known each other for years. | ||
| That's nice when you develop a relationship. | ||
| I've heard of authors that have relationships with their editors and it's really great. | ||
| I had a book deal for a while and it didn't go well. | ||
| It's the same thing as the Comedy Central thing. | ||
| I wrote some stuff, and they were like, well, we want it to be like your stand-up. | ||
| We want you to write. | ||
| I wrote stuff like that Maxim piece, where it's not like stand-up. | ||
| It's just my thoughts on things. | ||
| And they were like, we want it to be like a laugh every minute. | ||
| I'm like, we're done. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| So I gave them their money back. | ||
| I gave them their advance back. | ||
| My friend Steve Rinello, who's a writer, is like, do you understand that that's like every writer's dream? | ||
| To give the money back and tell them to go fuck off? | ||
| Well, see, I wouldn't give the money back and tell them to go fuck off. | ||
| I think what I'm going to do is eventually decide to sit down and finish it and just release it online. | ||
| I think that might be the best way to do it. | ||
| Release it as an audio, not an audio book, but a PDF or release it as an e-book. | ||
| An e-book, yeah. | ||
| Or, you know, maybe find a publisher that just leaves me their fucking home. | ||
| Well, you know what I'm doing? | ||
| I'm, and I might be getting a little ahead of myself here, but I've been talking to a company called Misfit. | ||
| Very cool guys. | ||
| Interesting story. | ||
| They're based in Fargo. | ||
| Sort of like Bisbee. | ||
| The guy was, he quit his job. | ||
| He was working on Wall Street. | ||
| JD, or I can't remember what his name is, but he was working on Wall Street, making a bunch of money, late 20s, gonna marry his high school sweetheart, And they're going to go to the Bahamas or something on their honeymoon. | ||
| And he goes in and he's talking to his boss and his boss says, oh, listen, by the way, sorry, congratulations on the wedding this weekend, but you got to be in here Monday because we got some deals coming up. | ||
| He's like, my honeymoon. | ||
| He's like, no, no, sorry. | ||
| It's Wall Street. | ||
| You're working for the big boys now. | ||
| Oh, and we're going to give you a bonus. | ||
| Bump up your annual salary now to $250 instead of $180 or whatever it was, right? | ||
| And so he goes back to his office and he's like, I just got a $75,000 raise. | ||
| I'm making a quarter of a million dollars. | ||
| I'm 28 years old and I can't go to the Bahamas on my honeymoon. | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| And he says, I got to quit. | ||
| And it was December 29th. | ||
| And if he had stayed till the end of the year, he would have had his end of year bonus, which was like 50 grand or something. | ||
| But he said, if I stay two more days, I won't do it. | ||
| You know, it's that moment you're on the edge, you're either going to jump or you're not. | ||
| And he went in, he said, sorry, I'm out. | ||
| Quit, quit his job. | ||
| Ballsy dude. | ||
| Ballsy dudes. | ||
| Had no money saved because he was, you know, living the high life. | ||
| And was actually in debt. | ||
| And so they couldn't go to the Bahamas. | ||
| They got married. | ||
| And he and his sweetheart got on the train and just went across America on Amtrak. | ||
| And the train stopped in Fargo. | ||
| And he was like, I love that movie. | ||
| Let's get off and check this place out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They ended up spending a few weeks there and fell in love with it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Fargo, North Dakota? | ||
| Fargo. | ||
| And he said it's a really cool town and there are all these great artists there and really creative people. | ||
| And it's this... | ||
| Because there's nothing for hundreds of miles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So all the interesting people are in Fargo. | ||
| And he said it's this great town. | ||
| So they opened this business where they sort of do branding for cool companies. | ||
| So they'll only work with who they want to work with. | ||
| And anyway, so I'm talking to them about putting together a book of excerpts of some of the best episodes of my podcast. | ||
| Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| For people who don't listen to podcasts and for people who do listen to podcasts to give as a gift, right? | ||
| To their dad or their girlfriend or whatever. | ||
| I mean, you guys could put together a fucking encyclopedia. | ||
| But anyway, I mean, like, why not? | ||
| You've got all these great interviews with really interesting people. | ||
| Why not make an e-book or a physical book or whatever? | ||
| It's not a bad idea if people are into reading it instead of listening to it. | ||
| I mean, why not? | ||
| And there's some forms, some places where listening to it's not appropriate or not an option. | ||
| On the toilet? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just think there's so many different ways to get information now. | ||
| It's such a cool time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just, I'm so, between podcasting and blogging and people creating little internet videos of their own and these YouTube content people, like I had this guy Lewis on yesterday from Unbox Therapy and he like reviews technological things, unboxes them, he's very educated on them and really explains the ins and the outs and He really educates your buying options because he gives you a lot of information that's pretty unique. | ||
| But these guys, there was no option like that before. | ||
| There was no in-depth consumer reports that completely uncensored, without commercials for 10, 15, whatever minutes he chooses to upload the video. | ||
| Completely up to him. | ||
| The same thing as we were talking about the impact the internet has, what an amazing thing it is because there's never been something like a podcast like this. | ||
| This podcast is going to reach a million people. | ||
| This one is going to get downloaded by a million people plus. | ||
| And over the course of X amount of years, who knows how many million it'll be because it's always up, available, it's always free. | ||
| Anybody can download it and it's available in a bunch of different forms. | ||
| So you can get it from YouTube, you can get it from Vimeo, you can get it from That's why I hope we're not fucked. | ||
| I don't know if we're fucked, but I know that this thing that we have right now is fucked. | ||
| Like this set up, you know, the Congress and the Senate and the fucking lobbyists and the president and the Department of Defense. | ||
| Corporations. | ||
| You know, I mean, the movement has been—you think about the focus of power, right? | ||
| It's been from hunter-gatherers dispersed, egalitarian hunter-gatherers. | ||
| Then you got despots that came, you know, gathered the power in agricultural societies. | ||
| Then the despots get together and form institutions. | ||
| Primarily the church first. | ||
| Then you've got political institutions. | ||
| Then you've got corporate economic institutions. | ||
| What's next? | ||
| There's got to be a next. | ||
| So I'm hoping that the next will be a return to the dispersed power because of what we're talking about, because now we've got direct connections To everyone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seems entirely possible. | ||
| And it seems at least if it's not the only option, it'll be an option. | ||
| It'll be like there will be corporations that are set up that are more ethical, more connected to people, and more grounded in their approach to trying to acquire money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As opposed to what we've got now, the infinite growth paradigm, which is kind of out of control. | ||
| It's not sustainable. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| But yet, it's the norm. | ||
| This non-sustainable idea is the one that everybody pursues. | ||
| As opposed to, hey, everybody, isn't a billion dollars enough a year? | ||
| We're good, right? | ||
| We're good right here. | ||
| Let's just, you know, I mean, it just seems like... | ||
| These kind of discussions and discussions like this, whether it's on social media or what have you, and just people's ability to Google and actually get the raw data and kind of... | ||
| It educates understanding and it just changes the way we view it. | ||
| Instead of viewing it as... | ||
| You know, this is how it is, and that's how you do, and you don't work hard because you have to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You do it because that's what you were born to do. | |
| And then this actor smiles, who, by the way, is not fucking working hard. | ||
| He's an actor that doesn't even talk. | ||
| I mean, bizarre. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bizarre and ironic. | ||
| I mean, what an easy job. | ||
| When we come in close, Mike, when we get right here, I want you to smile. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But not a happy smile, like I'm a rugged fucking hard man with calloused hands. | |
| Wearing overalls. | ||
| I mean, I think we're seeing the bullshit better than we've ever seen it before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's at least step one. | ||
| That is my hope right there. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| You're becoming an optimist. | ||
| I'm becoming. | ||
| It's like I have grandkids or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not that I know of. | |
| Wah, wah, wah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's wrap it up. | ||
| Are you still doing Tangentially Speaking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every week. | |
| Every week. | ||
| Get it on iTunes. | ||
| Everywhere you get your finer podcasts. | ||
| Website. | ||
| ChrisRyanPhD.com. | ||
| ChrisRyanPhD on Twitter. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| It's been a pleasure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As always. | |
| As always. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye, everybody. | ||
| See you next week. | ||
| Big kiss. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. |
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