Joe Rogan and Christopher Ryan dissect the psychological toll of fame after Steve Renazizi’s exposed 9/11 lie, comparing it to a magic trick where public personas mask reality. Ryan’s Sex at Dawn reveals how America’s repressed sexuality—rooted in Catholicism and productivity-driven norms—contrasts Spain’s pleasure-focused culture, with corporate narratives like Chevron’s further disconnecting work from identity. They explore testosterone’s role in behavior, from jiu-jitsu performance to fleeting "love" spikes, and debate whether extreme kinks or natural experiences yield deeper fulfillment, while Sierra Lynch’s ethical dominatrix work highlights the fine line between fetish and exploitation. Ultimately, the discussion frames societal progress as a mix of biological drives, cultural conditioning, and the risks of detachment from genuine human needs. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.