Steve Hofstetter, a comedian and ex-drinker, argues alcohol doesn’t create assholes but exposes them, citing his 12-year sobriety after a violent sorority incident and AA’s 5% retention rate. He and Joe Rogan debate detachment in harmful actions—like drone pilots or spiked drinks—versus purpose-driven roles reducing PTSD, like Navy SEALs. Critiquing modern "nerfed" safety, they compare reckless behavior (e.g., gorilla enclosures, 2008 mortgages) to climate change denial, where delayed consequences fuel complacency. Hofstetter’s viral heckler videos and baseball interviews pivot to frustrations over irresponsible dog ownership, aggressive breeds, and absurd traffic laws, ending with Rogan jokingly crediting Steve for his podcast fame. [Automatically generated summary]
People sometimes will be like, why do you have so many Heckler videos?
It's like, because most of them start with me going, what'd you say?
Because I don't let it go, because I don't want to lose control of the crowd.
I don't want other people to be like, oh, well, he talked, I can talk.
And also, you know, I just...
I can't concentrate on this, you know, bit I've done a thousand times if, in the back of my head, I was like, wait, what's happening right now in the back of the room?
I mean, part of why I say it's ego is because if there's hundreds of people at this show, and they're all quiet, and then one person thinks they're all doing it wrong...
You just do the math on that, and you're like, I'm gonna die.
And I started realizing, you know what?
I don't have inhibition that alcohol changes.
Like, that same year, I had done some show in Bloomington, Indiana, and we went to a bar afterward, and there were a bunch of hot girls dancing on the bar, and I went up and I danced on the bar with them, and I wasn't drunk.
I just wanted to dance with the hot girls.
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And there were all these, like, there were all these drunk...
Because that makes me reconsider all the times I've like touched the bar and then touched food and then put my phone up there and touched that and then touched food.
You have the unique personality trait that allows you to get crazy and dance on bars.
That is a strange thing, though, about the people that are in those 12-step programs, because they really do get super attached to the idea that that's the only way to be sober.
There were a couple times where I was like, alright, I need to quit, I need to quit, and that never works.
And then there was one night where...
So, it's the first real time I'm on the road.
I was terrible with women in high school and college.
And then suddenly I hit the road as a comic, and they're everywhere, and they're interested, and life is different.
And so there was a show, I was doing a show for a sorority, and usually the sororities that sponsor comedy shows are like the philanthropy sorority, and they're all terrible.
No, these girls were all hot.
Just dimes.
The whole chapter, just full.
They had like one ugly friend as the charity, but they had just gorgeous girls.
And my opener goes up and bombs.
And then I go up to a standing room only crowd and crush.
And so now, it's afterward, we're hanging out, there's like this after-party thing that they put together for just them and the two of us, one of which they hated because he bombed.
And, like, there are just these eight hot girls surrounding me, one shouldered another one out of the way to sit next to me.
I was like, this is, this is, like, nothing I've ever experienced.
And then they took us to another party.
And I'm pretty sure someone put something in my drink.
Not in the way of, like, I want to fuck this guy.
In the way of, like, this is a guy getting all the attention away from the other guys.
And I think one of the other guys fucked with my drink.
I was, we were driving, it was the middle of winter, but I was wearing like two pairs of pants, like two sweatshirts, and in a sleeping bag in the car with the heat on full blast, and I was shivering the whole way.
I just listened to Radiolab the other day about addiction, and they said that 95, or sorry, I'm going to start that over.
Of 100 people, if they started at AA on January 1st, as of December 31st of that year, only 5 would still be in the program.
Basically saying it doesn't work, but there's a lot of factors that could mean that or why that could happen because some people could start a different program, they could go to the meeting next door, but they're saying only 5% of people will stay in the program through some certain statistics.
Ibogaine is a drug that is from the aboga plant, and it's supposed to be fantastic for people that have heroin addiction, alcohol addiction, even addictive personality disorders, gambling problems, things along those lines.
It's supposed to be this ruthlessly introspective psychedelic experience that brutally breaks down Your pathways, your thinking pathways, and shows you why you keep going into this self-sabotage mode.
And it's apparently unbelievably uncomfortable to go through.
Psychologically, physically, it doesn't feel good.
But when it's over, the rate of retention, the retention of sobriety, the rate of sobriety that people retain afterwards is staggering.
That's good, though, because then you get to know, should I listen to this moron?
Let me see what they have to say about dating.
Why is it that men these days don't want to open up a car door, don't want to open up a door for a lady, get upset when you're expected to pay and don't understand that you do want your own career?
It's also tough, like, using Yelp sometimes in the middle of nowhere, that's really tough, because then you're like, these motherfuckers don't know sushi.
It's like YouTube reviews and a lot of other things.
You're relying on random people.
If I call you up and I go, hey, Steve, what do you think about this?
Well, I know Steve's an intelligent guy.
He's going to give me a really nuanced, thought-out opinion of whatever we're discussing.
But if you don't know a person, you're just reading their type, their type could be, I mean, when they write things down, the printed word could be just as valid as some fucking psychopath's printed word.
I mean, you really don't know.
You gotta go deep, deep, deep into their paragraphs, and you gotta really try to...
I have a theory I have a theory that the way we make online tolerable The way we make like you know online not be this you know just I guess Bastion for angry thought is everyone's not name, but everyone's job should bring parentheses So we know what people do for a living.
Because I thought, I thought the idea, because there was, you know, the reviews of people and people getting upset, and I was like, the only people who would get upset at that are the people who know they're going to get two stars.
I was reading this thing about this guy who's getting stalked online by this other guy and they found the person and it was a 17 year old kid that was the son of one of his friends.
Just for the fun of it because he knew he could fuck with the guy and scare him and he did all this Holocaust juice stuff and all this anti-semitic stuff is Really really crazy stuff like sent ashes to their house and left ashes at their front door Just a total psychopath.
A kid.
A 17-year-old kid.
And it apparently had haunted this guy for a long time.
And he was trying to figure out who it was.
Then he hired someone.
It's pretty easy to find people once you hire someone who's an expert.
They found the kid, like, instantly.
And they realized it was this...
Fucking high school kid that was the son of one of his friends and they all had a sit down and they printed up all the stuff this kid had written for like a fucking year and handed it to him.
And the kids started crying and I don't know why I did it.
You know, and if you're not there when the person is reacting, especially when you're 17 and your emotions, maybe they're not so complex or they're not so rather formed, they're not mature.
I didn't either, but there was, I think it was an SNL sketch about it where they were, like, they explained the whole premise, or, like, you press this button and somewhere, someone in the world died, and the guy just hits the button.
And they're like, you didn't let us finish.
Like, we would give you a million dollars, and then he just hits it again.
Because we're that, like, inhuman and impersonal.
Like, if you just tell me that someone somewhere else in the world died, like, that doesn't really affect you.
They say that drone pilots suffer through a lot of, like, severe anxiety when they're done, and, like, it's apparently incredibly psychologically stressful because you're doing this weird thing where you're sort of sending this robot, and they're doing it from Nevada, right?
And so the robots are in Afghanistan or Pakistan or...
Yemen or wherever the hell they are and they're launching missiles from these sky robots and It just feels so detached and creepy to the people that are doing it Well, it's the same I guess the same psychology of like why you're able to get into such credit card debt,
but you wouldn't do that with cash Because like you were you you see it as just some mythical thing right and then afterward you realize oh this is real and Would you be able to kill someone if you knew that they were a bad guy?
Because there are all these, like, there's this trope in movies and TV about, you know, like, a cop shot someone that they had to shoot in the line of duty.
It wasn't, you know, like, just killing some kid.
It was, you know, shooting a bad guy, and then they have to go to therapy over it.
The real PTSD with soldiers is things they can't control.
That's what really fucks with them.
Like worried about being attacked, worried about being blown up, worried about driving over an IED. The soldiers that are proactive, like Rangers, Navy SEALs, guys who go in and hunt people down, they don't have that much PTSD. They're different types of people.
I mean some of them have just been through crazy firefights, and they wake up with horrible nightmares, but a shocking amount of them realize they're doing the right thing, they have to do this, this needs to be done, and they're the man to do it.
Well, you know, I mean, those movies, like, how many of these movies have, like, these, like, we're talking about the grooves that are carved in that some people have that get depressed very easily or behave really...
Like, really sad, really easily.
Like, those grooves, those psychic grooves that they think that they're supposed to behave like that, those are carved into tropes and storylines and plots, and there's so many plots, there's so many movies you watch, like, you didn't even write this, okay?
You knew what has already been written about these subjects, and you just sort of repeated it with different words.
One of the most fascinating interviews I ever saw was, you know, they interviewed the guy who was, you know, all the gangster movies in the 40s, the same, huh, same, like all that.
I got to meet, when I was 21, I think, I covered, I was in college during the Seinfeld send-off party, and the place where, like the Tom's Diner, where Monk's was based, the exterior shot, was like a block off my campus.
So I made up a fake press pass, and I went and I covered the party.
And I got to meet De La Soul was there, and it was like, it was so great.
But it's like, play the beginning of it, because the beginning of the show, see if you can find it, because the beginning of it is so fucking preposterous when he explains how we're going to keep it real.
I would just watch people desperately need attention and do nothing of quality to get it.
So there was this one woman, they put out the craft services, and this one woman goes up and she loads up like two plates and then is putting stuff in her purse also.
And she catches me looking at her.
And she just goes, I'm just keeping it real!
And I go, well, if you want to know what's real, they're going to refill this table later.
The worst thing we can have to one of those people is one day they'll just catch that magic wave where, you know, there's this one crowd where almost anyone can do well.
Here's a great story that I've told before, unfortunately people have heard it, but Joey Diaz was The early days of the comedy show, there was this one woman who was insane.
I mean, completely insane.
There was nothing remotely funny about anything she ever had to say.
She was brutal.
And she would go up, and every time she would go up, everybody would have to get out of the room.
It was just like, what?
What is happening here?
How does she even get spots?
It was during the 90s.
When it was easier to get spots.
And so Joey Diaz goes backstage behind the OR. There's a curtain.
And he goes backstage and takes his pants off.
And every time she hits a punchline, he opens up the curtain and shows the crowd as balls.
He's got no pants on.
So every time she hits the punchlines, he's doing this.
And she's killing.
I mean, killing.
And you see the confident look in her face.
She has no idea what's going on behind her.
And the stride and her swagger.
And she hits those same punchlines!
And all of a sudden, Joey comes out with his balls and everybody's crying, laughing.
Yeah, they just standing on this lady named Mary and so one by one they would all show up and they'd be like there were like 12 people there and it was a nightmare and Everyone is talking about how shitty it was and how everybody bombed and the night was terrible Then one comic gets there and doesn't know that everyone had already done that and the first thing he does he Yeah, I just got back from Long Beach, man.
I crushed that.
That was such a great show.
Everybody was going nuts and just going on and on about how great it was.
And the rest of us are just being like, oh, you've never killed.
Because if you think that that was killing, you've never killed.
You've never had a good show if you don't understand what that feels like.
Or you just lie and tell everybody all the time you have good shows.
I used to be a segment producer on a show, and we would always put in stuff we didn't want to use, so that they could come in the room and be like, no, no, no, you have to take that out, you have to take that out, and then leave in the thing that we thought they would take out.
Well, I'm sure you've seen the scene in Team America World Police, where the sex scene between the two puppets, they made, like, ten minutes longer than they wanted it to be, where he shits on her chest, or she shits on his chest, they pee on each other.
There's a way to do art, and it's definitely not by having a bunch of people that have money invested in it, looking around it, going, okay, how can we maximize this?
How can we make this as sellable as possible?
That's just the opposite of the kind of mentality that you need to make something good.
And just like you were talking about with...
Comedy where people don't see themselves if you don't see yourself how other people see you It's not gonna work and it won't be funny.
Well, that's kind of the same thing with art if you produce a television show or whatever it is and People don't enjoy it.
Well, it won't go anywhere.
It'll fall off and then it's not good anymore But to have someone come in and say oh You got to do this and you got to do that because we know better because we're the ones with the money that never works But every time every time I think that I remember that According to Jim had over a hundred episodes.
Like, I never put it on purpose, but if, like, someone, if I'm, like, in a hotel room or something, I flip it on or whatever it is, like, it takes me a little to just shake it off because I just want to be like, how is this made?
How is this possible, you know?
And so, I was watching it and I was thinking, like, the comedy in it was so bad.
Like, the jokes were so terrible that I almost wondered, you know how they hire people for punch-up?
For people that are all just exhausted from eating carbs and sugar all day, and they're just sitting in the couch just melting.
And then the dumbest fucking humor plays out in front of them, and it's just enough to keep them paying attention so they watch those Toyota commercials.
And her friend and her mom was over, and they were watching some Spider-Man movie, and Spider-Man got bit by a spider, and she just goes, he got bit by a spider.
I'll never forget that.
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I just never forget her going, he got bit by a spider.
Well, you see that with Trump now, where people are like, oh, he reminds me of me, and I'm just like, he's the furthest thing from you.
He's the...
I grew up in New York City, and so, like, I remember...
I was a kid when it happened, but I remember the Center Park Jogger when Trump took out four full-page ads in different newspapers calling for the death penalty for these black kids who didn't even do it.
And he was just inciting a riot, basically.
He was just trying to race bait and get attention.
Like, I've told this before, but it always struck me as being really bizarre.
I was with a buddy of mine who's a writer, and he was talking about the election.
He's like, we have to win in Idaho.
If we win in Idaho or Iowa, if we win in Iowa, we've got it wrapped up.
I was like, what is this we?
What is this we shit?
It's like the Democrats.
I'm like, okay, you're on a team, right?
You're on a team.
This is the Mariners.
This is the Mariners versus the Raiders.
You got this weird team mentality.
And I think that's entirely one of the things that is real comfortable for people to fall into when it comes to elections.
And it's one of the reasons why I think we need way more parties.
At least that way we'll have more teams.
Because this two-team option is like, if every fucking year it was the Celtics versus the Lakers in the NBA Finals, wouldn't you be tired of that after a while?
Well, that's, I think, how America feels about the election.
That's why the ratings are down.
That's why people aren't really paying attention that much.
That's why people are so frustrated by the choices.
Superdelegates were basically to keep Jesse Jackson out of office.
Really?
That's how they started.
Yeah, when Jesse Jackson was starting to get some heat, and I think it was 1980, suddenly, there was 80 or 84, I forget, but it was suddenly superdelegates came out.
Not only superdelegates, though, but even the delegates of the Electoral College, they don't have to vote the way their constituents do.
In fact, there was a time when one of them, I think it was in Minnesota, accidentally wrote down the name of the vice president in both slots for president and vice president.
So his vote didn't count.
And that was like 30,000 people that he was representing.
Whoa.
And just because he was a fucking idiot.
And like, you can actually, if you're, now obviously, people wouldn't do it for the most part because you'd think, oh well then they'll lose the ability to do it and that's all the little power they have in their life is to be a delegate at this convention.
But the fact of the matter is that like, New York State can vote 100% for a Democrat and then the Electoral College can go and just vote for a Republican.
I was on a TV show, it was on news radio, and they brought in a chimp for a scene, and this two-year-old chimp with diaper on was like, I was holding it, and it was beating on me, it was like hitting me in the back, like playing around with me.
They're unbelievably strong, and sinewy, like a little tiny bodybuilder.
Like, they don't feel like a baby.
Like, I have little kids.
And when you pick up a little kid, they're all soft and they feel like little kids.
They're mushy.
This chimp was not mushy.
And I think this gorilla probably had no idea how to handle a baby softly.
Or a toddler.
Really didn't know.
And they panicked and then they shot the gorilla.
But it seems to me that there's got to be a better way to do that.
But I could see the parents being like, fuck that gorilla.
It's, it's, I mean, it's a bit I enjoy, but there was a, there, so there's a bit I used to do, there was a story in Chicago, like, 15 years ago, where a woman was holding her baby over a gorilla.
Like holding it straight up and then drop the baby and on that one the gorilla saved the kid and picked it up and And kept until the zookeeper could give it back to the mother.
Yeah, and the joke I used to do is be like I'm sorry give it back Like at that point a gorilla is a better parent than the person who once you voluntarily dangle your baby over a wild animal It's that's you giving of the baby away.
I just think human beings need a certain amount of adversity.
We need a certain amount of difficulty to overcome, to learn those lessons, to filter that experience down into your behavior.
And when you don't learn those lessons and you just live this muted, nerfed up world, then you're holding your fucking baby over the gorilla tank because you're getting a little thrill.
Well, so Bowers has a great theory where, you know, the way to, I guess, prevent the stupid people in the overpopulation is if everyone is basically sterilized and you have to take something in order to be able to be pregnant...
But the only way you get that pill is you have to take that pill every day.
You don't take a pill to stop yourself from being pregnant.
You take a pill to get yourself pregnant.
So you have to take that pill.
Both partners would have to take that pill every day for six months.
Because if you can't commit to taking a pill every day for six months, you can't raise a kid.
It should be like one of those crows have to get a crumb out of a tube, and they have to use one tool to get the other tool to get the third tool in order to get the food.
That's how it should be.
It's too fucking easy to just take a pill.
You should have to do a puzzle.
Every day they should give you a puzzle.
And if you fail the puzzle, you don't get a pill.
So you get six months of correct answers to puzzles to get your pills.
That's the only way you should be able to get your pills.
But 20 years ago, and now that's part of because they do the spoke garbage now where they, you know, you have to fly through Cincinnati to go to Denver or whatever it is.
And so what happens is, even if there's, even if the no-show rate is way less than it is, even if there's weird anomaly where the no-show rate is like zero, there's still people who come late.
Well, I know that Green Day isn't real punk-punk, but at the same time, that's the movement it came out of, and it's supposed to be anti-establishment, and the whole point of the show, I mean, the broadwaying of it, Basically made it like everybody's just jazz hands to fucking Green Day.
I was so disappointed because afterward I was like, I can't believe they lent their name to this and then I looked it up and I go, oh no, they were in charge?
So Avenue Q is a great show, but the most fun part of watching it was watching the old Broadway people Thinking that they're super naughty for going to the show.
Just like these, like, 60, 70-year-old women who, like, just couldn't believe, like, they said masturbation!
Well, there's a bunch of people that are like that, that are just completely locked up in consumption, and that's the only thing that they can discuss.
I had this neighbor, I used to call him Bling Bling, because Bling Bling always had like, everything was shiny, he always had like expensive watches, and he always had like the nicest cars.
I couldn't talk to the fucking guy about anything other than like cars and houses.
You know, like I would say, hey man, how you doing?
And they're good, good, good.
See what that guy did to his house?
Looks like shit.
What year is that car?
Like, that's all he would talk about.
All he was into was consumption, what was good for the property values, where'd you get the watch?
Oh, nice, nice watch.
Like, that was all he was into, like, acquiring items, moving items around, fixing items, making items better.
But this was, he was the American idiot.
I mean, he was locked into that.
I mean, I knew this guy for years.
I mean, literally, that is why I called him Blink Blink.
We never had a conversation about anything other than objects that he wanted or objects that he saw that he liked.
I mean, it was really weird, but I think there's a lot of people like that out there, especially really rich people.
When people make this argument about, like, oh, well, you know, we have to allow the rich to be able to spend their money because it's for the economy, and that's why they shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't have higher taxes on the rich, I'm just like, do you see how they spend it?
The problem with higher taxes on the rich is that, like, what's going on?
What is capitalism?
Like, what is it?
Is it a game?
I mean, if one person works harder and they make more money, and one person is more innovative, they're more creative, they figure out a way to extract more money from the system, should they be penalized?
I mean, aren't we all trying to do that?
Are we all trying to acquire money in some way, shape, or form?
And who is to say that one person, some Bill Gates-type guy, is better at it, so they should be penalized?
It seems like you're trying to rig the game because someone is just way fucking better at it.
What I want to say to those people is like, I get, you know, we all want to be millionaires, we all want to be successful, and that's wonderful, and we need a path to get there, and that's fantastic.
But tell me this, when you were 55 and you were working at Applebee's, what the fuck is your path?
Where from here to there, you tell me what app you're going to invent, you tell me what, you know, you're going to win on American Idol as the old lady.
Like, you tell me how the fuck are you going to go from the lowest tax bracket to the highest one when you're already 55 and your dream has gone.
If you're actually just taking all your time and you're staying at Applebee's and then you're drinking and then you watch the TV and then you're falling asleep.
If that person said to me, well, I've been working on this novel for a very long time, and I have a lot of faith in it, and I've sent it to a lot of publishers, and you know what?
I've been rejected a lot of times, but I'm not going to take no for an answer.
I'm going to pound the pavement, and I'm going to find it.
Maybe I'll self-publish it, and I'll walk around, and I'll go to libraries, and I'll get my book in libraries.
And if they said all that, I would be like, you know what?
The problem with those goddamn mortgages, man, that was the craziest Ponzi scheme ever.
That you would have someone with an adjustable rate mortgage and all of a sudden the rate gets jacked up through the roof and you're paying three times as much.
Like, what did I sign up for?
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Wait a minute, I was only paying $1,500 a month and now I'm paying $15,000.
So lonely at the top of Olympus well one of the things we were talking about earlier about debt and about people with credit card debt that they don't realize it and if you had money I cash money and you wouldn't you wouldn't be so likely to go into debt with cash Yeah, well, I think that's the same thing with the environment I think the environment is almost like credit because it's we're like throwing garbage out the window and no one's thinking about it We're just burning fossil fuels and fucking spraying hairspray into the sky.
No one's thinking about what that's doing because we don't feel it instantly and immediately.
I was flying, and it was during that crazy winter with the polar vortex stuff, Where it was, like, negative two degrees in a lot of places, and it got down to, like, negative 20 in the Midwest.
I know, in L.A., we're just like, yeah, it got all the way down to 55. It was terrible.
And so, um...
Yeah, I got woken up by the bells of the ice cream truck.
It was really a difficult winter.
But the...
Um, but...
So I'm flying somewhere, and there's this guy, you know, going through in front of me at TSA, and, you know, he's taking off his coat and all that stuff, and...
TSA got a cold outside, didn't it?
One of these small airports where they all went to high school together.
And the guy goes, so much for global warming.
And I need to leave well enough alone.
I need to learn how to do that.
But I was like, actually, you know, global warming also makes it colder in the winter.
I think it's, I think it's a, yeah, it's what you were saying, the idea of like plowing ahead and not knowing, like, I have this thing where it bothers me when someone's unhappy.
Like, when I can see unhappiness, whether, like, someone's mad at me about something I did, or just someone's sad, like, immediately I'm like, I have to fix this!
You know, like, and I don't know what that's from.
I don't know how I got that way, and I try to get over it to a degree.
I like being compassionate, but I also don't want it to, like, totally ruin me.
And I think that there are people who are wired in completely the other direction, who they can walk by someone bleeding to death and just be like, ugh, the sidewalk used to be so much nicer.
The third one was one who was, I don't think she's ever been owned.
It was just on the streets of Louisville and just walking around near the airport.
And then the fourth one was actually one where this was the one that made me the most upset because leash and collar right outside of a dog grooming place.
So I'm like, oh shit, one got out.
And so, this is in Phoenix.
And I'm running around.
It's 95 degree heat.
And this dog is fast.
And I'm like running around trying to chase it.
And finally, there's like this alcove in the shopping center where it goes in the alcove.
And I'm like, great, it'll be cornered.
I'll finally be able to get it.
And so I go in there, and there's like a woman with a stroller.
And I go, hey, do you see a stray dog run by here?
And then I see the dog in the corner.
And I go, oh, it's right there.
And she goes, that's my dog.
I go, that's your dog.
I've been chasing it for 20 minutes through a parking lot.
It almost got hit by three different cars.
And she goes, oh, did it?
Like, yeah, that's what happens when dogs run around parking lots.
And he, like, what's crazy is, so that breed, if you were to buy one, they're $2,500.
And that's one without training, without anything, like, and he was just sitting in a shelter.
And so anytime someone's like, oh, well, you know, I gotta go to a shelter because I need a really specific, or, sorry, I gotta go to a breeder because I need a really specific dog.
I'm just like, but they're out there.
Yeah, there's every- You can find anything you want.
So she followed me on Twitter, and I just write back and I go, hey, I'm so honored for the follow.
Since you're the PETA spokesperson, could you let me know why PETA has a 90% kill rate?
And so she starts doing, you know, the standard PR thing of like, well, you know, people bring dogs to us that, you know, don't really have much of a chance elsewhere.
And so, you know, we're kind of a last resort.
And I go, oh, well, that's actually not true, because I know of shelters that are like that, and their kill rate is one-tenth of yours.
So, if you could explain...
And I just kept hammering her about it, hammering her about it, hammering her...
Animal Liberation Organization, at the very head of a lot of these really radical animal rights movements, and by the way, I love animals, so I get it.
I get the wanting pets...
To be taken care of, but they don't want pets to be taken care of.
They don't want pets.
They think animals should be free.
All animals should be free.
All livestock, all pets.
None of that should be real.
All animals should just exist in some sort of a wild state.
When you deal with the actual genetic lines of the dog, I've had dogs that were, their line was from fighting dogs.
And they were impossible.
You couldn't take them to the dog park, couldn't take them, it didn't matter how much I trained him, how much I was with him all the time, when dogs would bow up around him, he would get aggressive and he'd want to fight.
Well, I agree with you on a lot of things, but this is one where I have a completely different line, because I have a dog who is Chihuahua Basset Hound, and I can't bring her near other dogs.
The problem with pit bulls is, it's a very dangerous dog.
They're super powerful, they're really aggressive, and they don't...
Respond to pain the way a lot of other dogs do because it's been bred out of them Like if you follow the way they breed dogs for fighting when dogs fight if they back away if they cower they were killed That was the whole Michael Vick thing.
Is that they had killed all these dogs that quit in fights so when you have all of that Reinforcement genetically and you're dealing with a breed that's been Raised like this for hundreds and hundreds of generations, you're dealing with an incredibly aggressive dog with a really high kill drive.
And when these dogs with high prey drives are given to irresponsible people, that's when you're getting all babies getting killed, little kids getting killed, dogs getting killed.
But, I mean, that's also the same train of thought that people, you know, if you can put on a powdered wig and say that about, quote-unquote, the Negro.
Well, you have to have a yard that can contain that dog for sure.
You have to be on top of it when it comes to training it.
You have to really be aware.
You have to read books on it.
You should probably seek help with a professional, a behavioral specialist with dogs.
But even then, if some dog threatens your dog or growls around your dog, it's likely that your dog's going to clamp a hold of its neck, and that dog's going to get fucked up.
So if I know that there are going to be non-leash dogs there, I'm fine, because I know and I'm prepared and I'm ready, and the dog is prepared, and etc.
But if all of a sudden a dog just comes out of the woods...
Well, so far, I actually have not had that happen.
Usually it is either like one time there was someone else there that happened to work for rescue that also stopped You know one time there was like a pet store right nearby So I kind of like brought the dog into the pet store and like they were able to hold him while While you know the owner came huh, so So I actually haven't, but, oh no, you know, the one time, yeah, I brought a dog to, in Louisville, I brought a dog to a shelter, the one this past week, where like I, you And then I had to be super careful and disinfect everything, because you never know what the dog has.
And I have a dog, and so...
I just basically...
I had my buddy who...
Because I had my dog with me when I saw the other dog.
So I had my buddy...
We were like half a mile from the hotel, so he just walked back to the hotel with my dog.
And then I just drove the other dog to the shelter.
I mean, you have your reasonable people and then you have your people that take that to the utmost and take it to the furthest point of rational thinking.
To the point where you're like, you're killing all the dogs you capture?
One of my favorite things that I've seen was Jon Stewart showed a video of people merging to the, I think it was like the Holland Tunnel or the Lincoln Tunnel or something.
And it was like one car, one car, one car, one car.
Like you're supposed to do with merge.
And every now and then, someone would drive up on the shoulder and go around all of them.
Another thing that, another Chris Bauer story, another comic was asking him about, because he drives around to gigs all the time, and someone asked him about, because he said, oh yeah, I never speed.
And he's like, what do you mean you never speed?
How do you get there?
And he's like, well, I'm in my 40s now, so I wake up 15 minutes earlier.
And then I still get there.
Because that's all it is.
Like, at the same time, it's hard not to speed, because when you're like, when you have these straightaways, when there are no cars near you, and it's like, why the fuck is the speed limit 60 here?
Are you kidding me?
I can go 100 safely, easy.
But at the same time, the idea of like, well, I just...
What are you gonna save?
Unless you're doing like a 10-hour drive, you're not saving anything significant.
And if you text in your car, if you text while you're driving, while you're actually moving, I mean, how many times have I looked over and I saw this car acting weird and they're texting?
You should just, you should lose your license for a week.