Kevin Smith and Joe Rogan bond over near-death experiences—Smith’s 80% blocked "Widowmaker" artery, saved by a stent after a Twinkie-heavy childhood, and his heart attack-induced gratitude, while Rogan shares his friend Aaron Snyder’s bow-hunting confidence as therapy for veterans. They debate UBI’s potential amid AI job displacement, with Rogan reconsidering it, and Smith’s vegan diet success cutting cholesterol despite past struggles. Adoption stories—Smith’s rescue of Marty, a starving pit bull, and Rogan’s feral cat—highlight animal loyalty and territorial instincts, contrasting with big cats’ lethal power, like the trained lion in Roar (1981). The conversation pivots to ancient mysteries: Toba’s near-extinction hypothesis, Yellowstone’s supervolcano threat, and Robert Schock’s claim that the Sphinx could be 10,500 years old, challenging lost civilizations and suppressed knowledge. Ultimately, they agree life’s fragility demands living boldly, blending humor with existential reflection. [Automatically generated summary]
You're one of the few people I follow on Instagram.
And I've said it on the previous show.
I just love to look at your life because I'm like, fuck, he's doing everything he wants and nothing I'd ever want to do, but fuck, he goes to the hill.
And not in a judgy way of like, he shouldn't be doing that, but just like, you know, I've said, you live a man's life.
I live a boy's life as a 47-year-old man.
So you do things like you got a float tank.
You hunt.
You know how to handle a bow and arrow.
I'm the guy that writes about people that shoot bow and arrows to stop crimes.
They usually have boxing gloves at the end of them and shit like that.
I guess the point is, I know you're busy as fuck, and I know sometimes I get very busy as fuck, but I think we only don't do this because of how busy we are.
For me, I'm like, fuck, I could do that once a week because I'd walk away.
I always walk away with a real like, I've never done cocaine, but I imagine it's what it's like to do a line of cocaine off, I don't know, somebody beautiful or something like that.
I always walk away with wisdom.
And it's wisdom that even though it's on a podcast and recorded and there's a record of like, well, that's where you learned those things.
I still go out into the world, present them as my own.
Yeah, and also just as entertainers, we're rare as well.
Does it ever make you feel less than?
No.
Those of us who try to be funny in this business and those who have been insanely successful and become icons, they always have, you know, and then they did blow for hours and blah, blah, blah.
Do you ever feel like, oh, that's not part of my matrix, hence I must not be one of the greats?
When I jumped in, it was Leo Laporte doing This Week in Tech, and I think he still does that.
And the Happy Tree Friends, and that was like the Apple Podcast Top 5. And then me and Scott started with Smodcast, and then later on we added a bunch of stuff.
But getting in within the first two years, we happened, and then right on the heels of us, Adam was on the radio, and then the radio job went away.
When you go to K-Rock, that's how our friendship began.
You sit there doing the show and then afterwards, like I was a cigarette smoker in those days, and we'd sit there out in the parking lot and smoke.
And Slowly, like, I remember I came in once to K-Rock, just announced, like, hey, I've rented a theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, and we're calling it Smodcast, and we're the world's first live podcasting theater, and we're going to do podcasts there and stuff.
And so, Ralph was listening.
He's right there.
And then, like, months prior, he had approached me.
He's like, hey man, would you ever want to do, like, the showbiz beat?
That's what he used to do on K-Rock, on Kevin and Bean.
Like, as a Saturday show, and I was like, fuck yeah, hear myself on the radio?
That'd be fantastic.
So, we recorded a demo for the show, gave it to his bosses, and his bosses were like, nobody wants to listen to people talk on the radio anymore.
And so it died there, just like how years ago things died when you couldn't get past a gatekeeper who was like, we don't want your shit.
So it was like a jazz club where you wouldn't mind looking down at the acts, but for a podcast, and with a guy with a fucking bald spot, it was nerve-wracking, because how am I supposed to be funny knowing they're staring down at me judging my bald spot?
Well, it's really more about the rise of certain intellectuals that are very controversial, like Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris and all the debate about them.
I'm just someone who they get a chance to talk to for three hours in a pretty well...
Well, subscribe to base.
There's a lot of people that are going to listen to these conversations and they go, well, why haven't I heard people talk like this before?
Why haven't I heard about the idea of determinism versus free will?
You're like, wait, why don't I? I didn't have a clear defense of my actions, the way I thought.
I didn't do anything.
But the way I considered this subject, I didn't have a real base.
I was very knee-jerk.
So I said, okay, let me really examine this.
The real issue, I think, is going to be automation and artificial intelligence.
I think it's going to remove a tremendous amount of jobs.
I think automation in terms of car driving and different functions, once they get better at robotics and being able to do things, then people will be less and less necessary.
They have a real problem, they think, with cars, with the number of males that drive cars.
It's in the millions for a job, and that they would all almost instantly be out of work if they ever get these automated cars down.
Would that scare you more or would it scare you more if there were like the Eater robot, its head is full of hypodermic needles, each one more toxic than the last and infectable at a moment's touch?
and he got up in the middle of the night, cooked himself a meal, ate it, went to sleep, got up in the morning and had no recollection of it.
He had to be told that he did.
He was trying to figure out who put the plates in the sink, who ate this food, where this food come from.
He couldn't figure it out.
He got up in the middle of the night, doesn't remember a thing, and cooked himself a meal, sat down, ate it, went back to bed, had zero recollection of it.
I'm not close to her on a daily basis You know, I have tremendous respect for her as a comedian I think she's she was a real pioneer in a lot of ways.
She was this brash like really confident lady who shit on stupid men and And she did it in this, like, really bold way in stand-up that was very unique for the time.
I think if people go back and you watch, like, some of her early stand-up when she was coming out of Denver, The domestic goddess stuff.
She was a beast, man.
She was a beast.
She was crushing.
She was crushing.
And then she got that sitcom, and it's absolutely one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.
But now she's 65 years old, and it's fucking hard for her.
And that schedule, she was telling me, was absolutely brutal.
They were killing her with all the work.
I don't know her very well, but I do know there was another time where she said something about Susan Rice, who is another African-American woman, and she said something about her and compared her to...
That was the part of the story that, again, I have no skin in the game other than I watched the old Roseanne and I was enjoying the new Roseanne as well.
But I came home from, like, I was in Vegas the other day and I flew home yesterday morning and then I had a meeting over at the studios, like, at noon.
So I took a nap when I got home.
And all of a sudden my wife wakes me up and she goes, you got a meeting, don't forget.
It's 11.30.
Oh, and Roseanne's been canceled.
And I'm like, that's impossible.
I was groggy, but I'm like, that's impossible.
Like 20 million people are watching that show.
And she said, she tweeted something racist.
So I fucking pick up my phone and I look at it and stuff.
And by the time, this had happened in the span of the hour I took a fucking nap.
Like, all of a sudden, they were just like, we're done!
We don't know her!
Disabow!
And I think it was so surprising because it's been a while since somebody did something even...
Superficially moral.
You know what I'm saying?
I've read a lot of articles online where people are like, hey man, ABC didn't own the show, so of course they didn't have as much skin in the game, so it was easy for them to cancel it.
Would they have canceled it as fast if they owned the show?
You can make a bunch of caveats, but at the end of the day...
Something bad happened and then the network reacted.
A major company, a major corporation reacted and acted.
Well, there was a guy that got pulled over a few years back who was famous.
And I forget what he said something about like I got to get to the dance or something like that and the cops are like what the fuck are you talking about?
And they realized like he was kind of out of it and then after it was over it was revealed that he had been on Ambien and that he had gotten in his car and really had no idea what the fuck.
I fell asleep on the couch watching TV. And before my brother had lost his fucking wallet at a school dance, and my mother was like, I'll drive you up there and try to find it.
And my father would get up for work at about 9 o'clock at night and then head to work at 10 o'clock.
And I think he started work at 11 o'clock at night.
He worked at the post office canceling fucking stamps.
So my mom tells me that and I fall asleep on the couch watching like fucking Dynasty or some sort of shit.
It was the 80s.
And then my dad wakes me up because he woke up and nobody was home.
Like my mom wasn't around.
Nobody was there.
And he's like, where is everybody?
And he fucking startled me awake, so I was like, what?
Oh, Donald, they had to go to the school because Donald lost his thriller.
And my father goes, what?
And I was like, Donald lost his thriller.
And he was like, I don't know what you're saying.
And I was like, Mom said that Donald lost his thriller.
And I kept replacing the word wallet.
With fucking Thriller.
And my father looked at me and literally set me aside the next day to be like, are you using drugs?
And I was like, no.
You woke me up.
I guess I was in some sort of...
Maybe I was dreaming about fucking Thriller.
unidentified
It was 1982. Yeah, your brain just never clicked back over into waking life.
At the end of the day, it's not like, she took Ambien and that makes her bad.
Like, no, it's that she fucking tweeted what she did.
And it's like, if you think for a second that if in using this drug, which I need to go to sleep because I'm a late 60s woman and I need my rest or whatever...
Or you just deserve fucking sleep.
Mercifully I've never suffered from a lack of sleep, but I know people who have and it's fucking mind-bending itself.
But if you know you have to do that, and you know there's the slightest chance that You could become somebody else or say things that are not in your character.
Yeah, the distrust and hate for specific gigantic general groups of people, like Asians or blacks or whatever, and the disparaging ideas that you have about a race.
Just because a person's from a specific part of the world.
California is a place that actually does kind of work.
Believe me, I've heard people out there about to like...
Judge the fact that he's fucking selling California.
California blows!
I'm not saying, like, yay, California, fuck the rest of the world, or fuck the rest of the country, but I will say this.
Everyone here lives fairly multiculturally, and there doesn't seem to be...
I mean, granted, in this area of the state, perhaps it's different elsewhere, but it feels, I'm not going to say utopian, but it feels like people get along out here.
But the checks and balances that are in play, like the representative government, is what keeps someone from just like running through the whole thing.
And we get a little bit of a test to it by like Trump.
Kifaru, K-I-F-A-R-U. It's a company that he works for that makes really high-end hunting and hiking backpacks and military backpacks, and he does a podcast through them.
Like, there was nothing about him that instantly, I mean, he was definitely very macho, but there was nothing about his thing that was like, I'm a guy's guy.
It wasn't even that.
Like, honestly, that flight attendant probably could have been a guy, and if Aaron was just as interested in short-range bow hunting, he would have landed that guy as well.
Like, he was very, I don't know, it was good.
Like, when he said, I do a podcast too, it made sense.
It's a lot of these ex-military guys that get really into bow hunting because they find it very difficult and a physical challenge and it's nerve-wracking and it's hard to keep your cool under pressure.
And for a lot of guys who they go from the military and maybe do a few tours overseas and come back to...
The mainland and just have a real issue with being just not stimulated enough and you feel detached and you don't feel like you're involved in anything that's got like a high adrenaline threshold and for a lot of these guys bow hunting is very therapeutic.
Not even necessarily that they were, yeah, like Hurt Locker.
Not even necessarily that they're there for the rush, but that once they experience that rush, you know, gotta bring this book up too much.
But Sebastian Junger wrote a book called Tribe, and it's all about this.
And it's about these guys coming back from war and trying to Just sort of assimilate and having a really difficult time and how so many of them talk about when they were over there they had a purpose and that the life was intensified and cranked up to 10 and the highs were the highest and the lows were the lowest and they come back here and everything's just too flat.
It's just really hard for them to adjust and they feel disconnected from their community and they long to go back.
And that's why a lot of them keep signing up and going back.
And they feel that that life at the tip of the spear is actually more satisfying, more rewarding.
It just feels right for them.
And the regular world, just for whatever reason, they've just tasted it or they've adjusted to it.
But they have a very, very difficult time, some of them do.
When I had, three months ago, I had a heart attack.
When I was on the...
Table, because the doctor was just like, you have 100% occlusion in your LAD. And I was like, I don't know what that means.
He said, your LAD is the main artery that goes across the front of your heart.
He's going, 100% occlusion means 100% blocked.
Cholesterol is blocked.
There's no way for blood to get through, and that's what's creating your massive heart attack.
So he's like, we're going to take care of it right now.
He goes, but you're a comic book guy, right?
I said, yeah.
And he goes, you'll like this.
That artery, that's called the widow maker.
And I said, why?
And he goes, because in 80% of cases of 100% occlusion, the patient always dies.
He's going, but you're going to be in the 20% because I'm really good at my job.
And he fucking disappeared into my crotch, went up my groin, through my femoral artery, and fucking went up into my heart and put a stent in that LAD. And the moment he opened up, he goes, I'm going to open it up now.
And he showed me what it was, tiny little mesh wire thing.
He goes, I'm going to open it.
Suddenly it was like...
Because that artery had been like a hose if you bend it and it's fucking full of water and shit.
It was pushing down on the heart, which was in turn pushing down on my lungs.
We only shot the one because I had the heart attack and we didn't do the second one.
But it was for the folks at Comedy Dynamics and it became a Showtime special.
So we were shooting two shows that night.
It was meant to be like an hour and an hour.
But, you know, once you get up there, I feel like, I'm fucking rolling, I'm rolling.
So I did two hours.
And after the first show, they were like, we don't even need to do the second show.
We're only cutting an hour out of it, so you gave us plenty and stuff.
I said, I got two different hours, so I want to do the second show.
And plus, everyone was there.
They were lined up.
And so I took a big swig of fucking milk.
I was a dairy drinker, heavy dairy drinker in those days.
I've since become vegan.
I used to be happy, now I'm fucking vegan.
But I took a big swig of milk.
Then I went to the green room and I chit-chatted real quick with Jordan, who runs our company.
That's Jason's wife, Jason Mewes' wife.
And Emily was there.
She does my hair and makeup.
So we were chit-chatting and I was like, man, I feel fucking weird.
I feel sick.
I feel like I'm going to throw up.
Can you guys get out of here?
Because when I get sick, I just want to go off like an animal and fucking die alone.
Like, I don't want to be ministered to.
I'm like, fuck off and shit.
So they were like, yeah, totally.
And I laid down on the floor and I felt like nauseated and I never feel sick like that.
I wound up throwing up some bile, nothing chunky, but just like fluid.
And so I was like, well, maybe I'll feel better now.
I stood up and I looked in the mirror and I was just swamped, man.
Now, as a heavy dude, you sweat when you fucking breathe.
This was like, I'd look like I'd just come out of the pool.
And I felt really cold.
I couldn't get warm and shit.
Emily popped her head in and she's like, are you okay?
I was like, no man, can you turn on like a hair dryer and just like dry me off?
I feel fucking freezing cold.
And she touched the back of my neck while she was drying me.
She's like, you never feel like this.
This is scary.
You should do something.
I said, yeah.
I said, I still want to do that second show.
I was like, so I'm going to find a couch.
Just find a couch for me to lay down.
If I get like a half hour nap, I'm sure I'll be fucking fine.
And I couldn't get comfortable on the couch, couldn't sleep.
And that's when I started not being able to catch my fucking breath.
So, you know, I'm no doctor, but like fucking you think, you know, I know my body and I know what this is.
I smoke too much weed and I've got too much mucus in my fucking chest.
That's all this is.
So I said, I better sit up and put my arms up like this because that will help me breathe.
And Jordan comes around the corner eventually and she sees me.
She's like, are you all right?
And I was like, you know, having a hard time catching my breath.
I can breathe.
I just can't get all the way to the top and stuff of the breath.
Can't take a full fucking breath.
I was like, maybe we shouldn't do that second show after all.
And she goes, we already canceled it.
And I was like, why the fuck did you cancel the second show?
And she was like, because I've never seen you sick like this.
She's going, you know, this is weird.
Something's going on.
I said, yeah, maybe I should see a doctor.
And she goes, it's Sunday night.
All the doctors are closed.
So we called an ambulance.
I was like, why the fuck did you call an ambulance?
Oh, my God.
This is embarrassing.
She's like, they're already here.
And six firemen came into the room.
Big brawny fucking dudes.
When you call paramedics, fire department comes as well.
So, they're looking at me, because I'm sitting in the chair with my arms up, and some of them were young, four of them were young, and they looked at me like, why is Silent Bob celebrating a fucking touchdown?
All of a sudden, the medics came in, and there was a guy and a girl, and the guy puts a cuff on me, he goes, how you doing, man?
I was like, good, I just can't really catch my breath.
And he goes, well, we're going to look at you right now and put this cuff on you.
Have you ever had this done?
I said, oh yeah, I know how to do this.
And then the girl looked like a fishing tackle box.
Had a bunch of leads, wires coming out of it and shit.
She put that down as a heart monitor thing.
You know, they get your fucking blood pressure, all that shit on one arm, then the other thing they put on your chest to monitor what's going on inside.
So she's like, I've got to put these wires on you.
I said, okay.
And I'm sitting in the chair, and this is 40 pounds ago.
And sitting is no good angle for a fucking fat guy to begin with and shit like that.
So she just yanks my fucking hockey shirt and my undershirt up, and every titty I have falls out of my fucking shirt in front of these people.
And there's a room full of people, and I'm like, holy fucking shit!
And I yank my shit down.
She's like, what are you doing?
I was like...
Man, that's my fucking best friend's wife over there.
She'd never seen my fucking tits.
My wife's never seen my tits.
Like, I can't, you don't yank my shirt up like that.
And I was like, just use my nipples as guideposts.
Like, you know, I've spent all of my life trying to hide my fucking fat.
And when your life is in danger, I've never been in that situation, but when your life is in danger, nobody gives a fuck about your fucking ego and shit like that.
So they looked at their info and they realized, I guess, what was going on.
They were like, we're going to take you to the hospital just to be safe.
And I was like, don't do that.
That's fucking embarrassing and shit.
And they were like, nah, we're so close, man.
It'll be fun.
You ever been to the hospital?
I was like, no, not really.
They're like, oh, it's so fun.
It's fun.
He goes, you're going to have a good time.
I was like, all right.
And, you know, I'm a podcaster.
So I'm like, look, at the end of the day, no time is wasted.
Everything's a fucking story.
So if this turns into the opening five minutes of Hollywood Babylon, where I'm like, they took me to the hospital and it turned out I was just too fucking high.
Like...
Life's great when you're a podcaster because there's no such thing as fucking bad news anymore.
Like, it can hit you on the level of like, oh shit, that's unfortunate.
But right away, you repurpose it into like, alright, well, I got something to talk about.
And this latest setback is just the longest, is just a momentary chapter in the long story you're fucking telling.
So I was happy to go to the hospital, not because I was like, I think I'm dying, but because I was like, alright, fucking I'll have a story to tell after this.
Next week, it'll be fun.
I got to the hospital, like Dr. Leidenheim, he's the guy who's now my cardiologist, they pulled me into the ER and he's like, hi, how are you?
I'm Dr. Leidenheim.
I said, hey man, how are you?
He goes, what's wrong?
What's going on?
I said, I can't catch my breath.
And he goes, well, that's because you're having a massive heart attack.
And it was the first time anyone had said anything like that.
I gotta find these kids and give them a hug one day.
On the call sheet, because we were shooting that night, on the call sheet was a different hospital.
But they took me to Glendale Adventist because they knew that I was having a cardiac episode.
And that's shy of one hospital in New York Glendale Adventist is one of the best cardiology wings in the United States of America.
So I happen to be in the right fucking place at the right time.
We were supposed to shoot my comedy special at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.
It wound up being shot instead at the Alex in Glendale and stuff.
And if I hadn't been doing the show there, who fucking knows, man?
I've gone to a hospital, but I probably might have fucking died.
Because Homeboy told me when he went up the heart, when I was in the operating room, and he told me, like, they call that the Widowmaker and shit.
80%, 80-20, I sat there going, like, these are the weirdest odds I've ever had in my life.
I figure, like, look, you leave the house, it's 50-50, you're gonna fucking drop dead, right?
You get hit by a car, struck by lightning, you trip over a fucking dog, and then the dog bites your jugular, and you fucking bleed out.
You're like, but I always loved dogs, and you die, ironically.
But, you know, just stringing along.
But the 80-20, man, 20% chance of life was fucked up.
Fucked up thought.
First time I'd ever had that kind of thought.
And in my head, I had to cognitively reframe it and go, You don't know.
You might have been close to death so many fucking times in your life.
There might have been like a psycho behind you with a fucking knife and then all of a sudden you got a cell phone call and forgot about you or something like that.
So suddenly I repurposed it.
The whole time I was laying on the table I kept repurposing every thought.
Not repurposing.
Cognitively reframing.
I was sitting there because I couldn't At one point, they were like, your wife's on the phone.
Do you want to talk to her?
After they told me that I was having a heart attack and that they had to get up me fast and stuff.
So they're holding up a phone, and I see it, and that's the first time it crystallized where I was like, oh, these people think I'm going to die.
Like, I didn't, I was in no pain whatsoever.
I couldn't catch my breath.
They kept asking me, like, zero to ten, how do you feel?
What's your pain level?
I was like, negative three.
They're like, you're doing this wrong.
I didn't feel pain.
It wasn't like, you know, I grew up in the 70s watching Sanford and Sons.
So my idea of a heart attack is, Lisbon!
It's big and shit.
Felt none of the symptoms, no numbness in the arm, anything like that.
I was sweating.
I threw up bile, a little bit of bile.
I was cold.
And what was the last one?
It was just fucking shit you would never associate with a heart attack.
Like you would associate it with like, oh, I just feel under the weather.
But apparently these are symptoms of heart attacks as well.
I like to share it because some cats never heard that before.
And I've seen a lot of people on social media since who are like, you saved my life, here's why.
Because I talked about the fucking symptoms and shit.
So...
While I'm laying there, and they go up your groin, they go up your femoral artery to your heart and stuff.
He went up and he saw that it was all blocked.
I said later on, I was just like, fuck man, I dropped 80 pounds three years ago.
I've been walking up a hill a mile and a half every day and stuff.
He goes, yeah, but the kind of blockage you had...
He goes, that didn't start fucking recently.
He's going, that started in childhood.
And I was like, man, fucking hostess Twinkies.
And then I remembered we had no money.
So I was like, man, fucking Little Debbie Swiss Delights and shit.
Yeah, I was doing a bit of that, which they've since told me is not good because you're supposed to distribute the juice of whatever with the fiber while eating the fruit and stuff.
The trick of the diet, at least in my estimation, is that you...
You're allowed to eat as many potatoes as you want.
And you think you like potatoes.
When I was reading Penn's book, or rather listening to Penn's book, I was like, oh my god, I can do that.
I fucking dig potatoes.
And then you realize you don't like potatoes as much as you like butter and salt and milk and everything that goes into mashed potatoes and stuff.
So, in the beginning...
There's a sense of satiety because potatoes have some girth to them and stuff, but they're mostly water, so it's an excellent diuretic, so you're pissing like a fucking racehorse, and that's dropping weight, like the more water out of your body.
Vitamin C. But some people, like when I was telling them, you know, the moment you tell people what you're doing, you know, everyone's got their fucking advice about how to diet and shit, and when I was talking about, I'm doing this potato diet, people, you can't eat potatoes?
It's carbs, man!
That's too much!
It's bad and shit!
But in two weeks of eating nothing but potatoes...
In New York, they got a place in Brooklyn called Champ's Diner, which is also like all...
It's not plant-based vegan food, but they do comfort food, like you can get an Impossible Burger or Beyond Burger, or you're eating meatballs, and you think about it, you're like, alright, the bread is most of it, the sauce is the next biggest part.
And meatballs themselves aren't really that packed with meat.
It's much more breading than fucking meat and stuff.
So all you have to do is find something that'll stand in for the fucking meat.
Drench it in fucking marinara sauce and put it in between a nice soft roll.
And they use like ricotta, like cashew ricotta to like kind of finish it off.
It is fucking bliss, dude.
Now, you know, it's just like it's vegan comfort food so you can't do that every day.
Now, I can't say that 100%, but that's the way it was communicated to me because I thought, I was like, this magic drug will eat up the cholesterol.
He goes, no, we have to be very careful with the cholesterol because it moves throughout your system.
So I guess maybe eventually it moves out of your system, but if it's in your blood system, right, there's a chance that it goes up near your brain eventually.
So maybe that's what they're trying to keep that shit.
No, interestingly enough, Weight Watchers is so fucking simple because the app, it's all app-based now.
I was part of it when I was a kid.
At age 14, I was part of Weight Watchers.
And I was like the lone male in the group and stuff.
Now it's so technologically based that if you're in a food store and you're like, oh, I... I want those, but I wonder how many points...
You just scan the fucking barcode and it tells you.
And so you can enter things like pinto beans.
Boom, it tells you.
They're zero points.
So anything you enter, they generally have a value for, even fast food chains.
So it's shockingly easy to use.
Take Weight Watchers out of the equation.
Is being vegan...
Difficult.
Yes.
Like, I watched my kid go through it where I'm like, you have no choices.
You're really limited to the places you can go in life and go out to eat.
But if it's a choice between winding up in the fucking emergency room again and, you know, eating whatever I want to eat, which is what I did for 47 years and then wound up nearly fucking dying, closest I ever came to death, I'm okay to go plant-based for a while.
Like, I told the kid, I'm doing it for at least a year and if I can live like this, I'll keep going.
You're like the adrenaline junkies who have kind of raised their level, and so it's not enough for you to just sit in one place.
Like, you could do this, and it's shocking that you'll do it for three hours, but then after this, you probably do something like Razzle a Bear, I don't do any of those things, but I run hills.
Because you're supposed to be in a meditative state where you're just pushing yourself at a certain pace.
And when you're listening to something, especially something cool, it distracts you to the point where you hear how heavy you're breathing, but you don't think negatively about it.
Because you're thinking about whatever the music you're listening to is.
It's really interesting because it's a nice trick.
Because you can actually work harder and not be bothered by it.
Because you're so tuned into the music that you're listening to or whatever it is you're really captivated with that you can keep pushing.
But most of the time I like to do it where I don't hear shit.
I just hear the pounding of my footsteps and my breathing.
And those cats, they weren't like, yeah, they weren't going like, hey man, we may fucking encounter a mountain lion.
And they did the right thing.
They swung the fucking bike.
At first they tried to get big because I go to a place called Canyon Ranch with the wife in Arizona.
And there's like one trail where they have a sign right at the gate that's like, you know, mountain lion area.
And it's got one of those little like graphic tutorials on what you're supposed to do with your body if you encounter a mountain lion.
And, you know, you're supposed to big up like the way they're like, hey, man, if a bear is charging at you, you fucking big up at it or some such shit.
Same thing here.
They're like, get big up, grab a stick, make noise and shit like that.
And that story, those guys did exactly as told and it fucked off for a minute and then fucking came back.
And that's when they started swinging the bike at it.
The one guy, his friend got bit and dragged and then he took off like he was gonna get help or I don't know what he was gonna do and the mountain lion said fuck this guy I'm gonna go after you now and chased him.
He was born in the wild and I had to stay with him in a room to get myself used to him.
Get him used to me.
This is pre-internet too, by the way.
So this is like in the 90s.
And so I locked myself in a bedroom with this kitten and just brought a stack of books.
Put a mattress in there, brought a stack of books, just hung out with this cat.
And every time I'd get near this cat, the cat would freak out and hiss at me and jump on the curtains and fucking literally like climb the blinds, screaming and hissing.
And then I finally would get my hands on him and he would immediately start purring and giving in.
Because once he realized I wasn't trying to eat him, that I was his friend, I would pet him and he would purr louder than any cat would purr.
It was crazy.
Like I developed this bizarre bond with this cat because this cat was so scared of the world.
He was hissing at me and trying to get out of the room.
I had to throw a blanket at him.
And under the blanket, I scooped him up and I put him in the laundry basket.
And then I slowly pulled the blanket out so he didn't suffocate while keeping the lid down and then taped the laundry basket up so I could put it in my car and he wouldn't jump out my car and claw my fucking face off while I'm driving.
That dude scared the fuck out of me with marriage.
In what way?
Because he would talk to me about his divorce.
And he would just grab me.
Like, grab me.
He goes, don't you fucking get married.
Don't you ever do it.
He's half joking and half serious, but he's like, trust me, you don't want to have to go through this kind of a breakup.
He goes, you got a girlfriend right now?
You break up with her, what happens?
You get broken up.
That's it.
You break up.
And he goes, you don't have to see them in court every week for a year over and over again while they're just trying to take money from you and lying about what you've done so they can get more money from you.
He went through a bad one, and I believe some of his friends went through real bad ones, too.
And just, he was one of those dudes.
And I was like, you know, 26, 27. I was like, Jesus, man.
So, you know, we'd never, like I'd never even owned a dog, so I was like, we should get a dog to see if we'd be good parents.
And so we went to the pet store in the Menlo Park Mall in New Jersey and looked for a yellow lab.
She had it in her head.
She's like, I had a yellow lab when I was a kid, and they're the best dogs for children, so let's go get a yellow lab.
I'd never had a dog in my life, so I was like, that sounds great.
I knew what they looked like.
So we went to the pet shop, tried to find a yellow lab, and we found this dog that was blonde like a yellow lab, and they were marketing it as a yellow lab, but she'd been left behind.
All the other puppies had gone, and she'd been there perhaps a little too long.
Like, you know, she wasn't a dog yet, but she was fucking on the, you know, what was the Britney Spears song?
So I put a scarf under her, the back end of her, called her the magic walking scarf, and I would become the back legs for her.
So she would walk and I would be the back legs and, you know, fucking get shit and piss all over her and stuff.
But I dug the dog, so it was no big deal.
So I did that all the way up to when Scully passed away.
And then Mulder was always very healthy and fucking mobile and loved walking and stuff.
Super athletic dog.
Jen would take him up on Runyon Canyon and shit.
Then one day his back legs started dropping and your fucking heart sinks because you're like, all right, Scully, she wasn't that active.
So when she lost her legs, like, yeah, it was a bummer, but she wasn't like the runaround dog.
She used to chase moldy.
You'd throw a ball.
Mulder would run after and she would just chase Mulder and try to bite his back legs to prevent him from doing it because she wasn't nearly as fast.
Mulder was the go-out guy.
He loved to fucking be active.
So when his back legs went, it was like heartbreaking.
And then he stuck around for two more years.
So it was literally two years of me magic walking scarfing this dog.
Then he got to the place where...
He did, you know, it wasn't distemper, but when you were talking about it, it sounded so familiar.
He would do that thing, this thing where he would be like...
And this would go on for fucking hours.
And you could tell it was exhausting for him.
And he couldn't fucking move.
So, you know, everyone in the family was like, it's time to let him go.
And this was like when he first lost his legs.
But I was like, are you fucking shitting me?
If I lose my legs, you better fucking put a magic walking scarf around my fat ass and not fucking turn me over to the needle.
I was like, this is fucking family here.
So, I held on to him for as long as I could until he got to that place where he was in obvious fucking pain.
And I remember I shot a video of it on my phone.
I still have it.
And it's not, you know, it sounds fucking cruel or sick, but...
It was just a reminder because every once in a while, I knew eventually that we would have to put him down.
It's such a weird relationship where one day you're like, I love you to death and I love you so much I have to fucking kill you.
So I had that video on my phone for the longest time so that when, in the wee small hours of the morning, I would wake up and be like, you killed your best fucking friend.
I could watch that video and be like, you had to.
He wanted to go.
His dog was sick.
So the doctor came over.
We got the vet to come over to the house.
And it was like a big deal.
It was like we all knew it was coming and shit.
I was flying home from a gig.
And I kept telling Jennifer, don't do anything.
Just freeze.
I'll be there as quickly as possible.
And so, like Dr. Kumar, who's our vet, was scheduled to come over and that last fucking hour was probably hands down the most difficult hour of my life, man, because we all knew what was coming.
And you're programmed to stop that at all costs.
You're programmed to keep people around, keep yourself around.
And yet, like, we were just all sitting there loving on him, knowing that, like, by the time Dr. Kumar gets here, it's all done.
It was fucking hard, dude.
It was the hardest thing in the world to do, and he was still in pain the whole time.
So even though you knew you were doing the right thing, it was like, like, I understand why that vet, you know, got emotional.
But the two females, like the male got along great with both dogs.
He had no problems with them.
But those females, man, they would fight all the fucking time.
And they would fight whenever one of them, when someone would come over to get They got in a big fight once because the pool guy came over and the pool guy was like, hey, what's up kids?
And he pet one of the dogs and didn't pet the other one.
And so they started going after each other like, fuck you, no fuck you.
And you know, I get this call, hey man, your dogs are about to fuck each other up over the pool guy.
We were keeping them separate with Gates, but somebody turned her back and the two wound up in the same space and fucking went at it.
And so one dog's way bigger than the other, and so the big dog picked the little dog up by her hind quarters and was like, shaking it like a dog shakes a toy.
But meanwhile, Shecky is the little one.
She has no Napoleon complex, so she's got no idea of like, you're bigger than me.
She didn't give a fuck.
So as...
The dog, as Marty is swinging Shecky, the little dog, the little dog is swinging from side to side, biting her, and then swinging to the other side and biting her.
She wouldn't go down, dude.
Like, I imagine if somebody bit me in the ass and shook me from side to side, I'd be like, you win.
But this dog was just like, from fucking hell's heart, I stab at thee.
She kept trying to go right back at her.
So when I came home, it was fucking heartbreaking, because I'd heard they got in a fight, and my daughter was like, she's got stitches and stuff.
So I was prepared for stitches, but when I got home...
It looked fucking terrible.
She looked like the fucking walrus from Tusk, like a Frankenstein version of her leg.
She knew she got in trouble because Jennifer put her into what we call chicken's prisons, the other side of the gate where you lured dogs in with chicken and then you're locked in the bathroom.
You can still see everybody else, but there's a gate keeping you on that side of the room.
So she went to jail.
For that.
And you can tell she felt fucking bad about it.
But does it linger?
Like, you seem to know more about dogs.
That little dog's always going to remember that fight, right?
The way you talk and the way you look, if a guy the size of LeBron James was right next to you with his fucking crazy deep voice and super powerful body, and he talked to that dog, that dog would listen to him.
I am about to pull out my flea dick and throw it on the table against your own flea dick.
We had cats, and the cats, a lot of them were outside cats, so they would come in with fleas.
We'd never had pets when I was a small child.
We didn't start getting cats in our house until I was about 12, 13 or something.
So, my mom, like, having no prior experience with cats and stuff, decided that, like, these flea problems are too much, we have to give the cats baths with, you know, fucking flea shampoo and stuff.
So, you would do that, and cats don't like to be anywhere near water and shit like that.
You wouldn't be able to stop it from biting you and clawing at you.
It would be too big.
And if you got to 100 pounds, you're fucking dead.
Dead.
If it gets to 200 pounds, you're super dead.
You're dead quick.
It'll crush your head.
It's going to grab ahold of your neck.
It's going to crush your esophagus, crush your windpipe, and it has sensors in its teeth.
Like certain big cats, they can feel where your veins are with their teeth.
Their teeth have like a sense of where it can bite into.
You know how like...
You ever eat something and you feel like a hard piece of something, like maybe you're eating a crab or something like that, a little piece of shell gets in there, or you can kind of move that shell around inside your mouth while you're chewing, and you get the shell over to here.
That sense of moving your tongue and knowing what that...
That cat has that with a fang and knows how to hit like an antelope's jug or a lion when it bites into something.
I have a joke in my act about how you could have a dog and have a pet hamster, and that hamster could live a long and healthy life in the same house, running around.
If you've got a good dog and you train that dog, if you've got a cat that lives in a house with a hamster, the hamster has an hour to live.
If it's lucky.
There's no such thing as a cat that also has a pet hamster.
That's a dead animal next to that cat.
They kill everything.
Everything they can.
Canaries, lizards, whatever the fuck you leave around that they can kill, that's what they like to do.
Did you see that video of the guy who was a long-time animal trainer?
He trained lions, and he trained this lion for like 10 years, and he's in the pen with the thing, and the thing just looked at him funny, and the guy starts backing up.
It's like, oh no, and he runs, and this lion just chases after this motherfucker, grabs him by the head, and drags him around.
And apparently he survived.
The lion let him go and somehow or another they got the lion away from him and got the guy to a hospital.
But he was an older guy.
I want to say he was like deep into his 60s.
And this lion was dragging him around by his fucking head.
Roar is a 1981 American adventure exploitation film written and directed by Noel Marshall, produced and starring Marshall and his then-wife Tippi Hendren, co-starring Hendren's real-life daughter Melanie Griffith and Marshall's real-life sons John and Jerry.
70 members of its cast and crew being injured by the many predatory animals used in the film, including its main stars, sustaining life-threatening injuries raining from bone fractures to scalpings and gangrene.
Much of the footage capturing the injuries was included in the final cut of the film, resulting in real blood on screen.
It has been considered the most dangerous film shoot in history.
They're out there taking out as many of those fucking zebras or water buffalo or whatever they can.
And so that's what they want to do all the time.
And if you're just feeding them and then you just have them in a yard, they don't even do anything, you've got to exercise the fuck out of those girls to keep them from just that kill lust that's in their body.
It's evolved over millions of years to get to this point where they're this enormous, hulking, supernaturally powerful animal that kills things with its face.
I'm in a 0% chance in most of my life of getting eaten by a shark.
But I have friends who are surfers who surf all the time, and they fucking love it, and they're willing to roll that dice because they like surfing that much.
And I'm like, you know, you can't get bit by a shark if you don't go in the ocean.
Let's hope we wane gently because once in our history the worldwide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults.
One study says we hit as low as 40. 40?
Come on, I can't be right.
Well, the technical term is 40 breeding pairs, children not included.
More likely there was a drastic dip and then 5,000 to 10,000 bedraggled homo sapiens struggled together in pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years Until in the late Stone Age, we humans began to recover.
But for a time there, says science writer Sam Keen, we damn near went extinct.
Meanwhile, what it is is it gets to this peak and the eruption is so violent, it flattens out and the mountain disappears and they just left this crater.
And so when they were first looking at it, they were trying to figure out what it was.
They didn't know if it was an impact crater, where was this crater from?
And then they started using satellite imagery, I want to say like 20 years ago.
20 plus years ago they realized that it was a super volcano, an enormous volcano.
I think it's something like 600 kilometers across.
And if that fucker blows, like that is a wrap for North America.
That's a wrap.
And it blows every six to eight hundred thousand years.
And the last time it blew was six hundred thousand years ago.
unidentified
So we could be on the verge of the worst blowjob in history?
Within the next 200,000 years, it's likely, if the history repeats itself again, that we get some sort of unbelievably violent event that comes out of Yellowstone that literally brings humanity to its knees.
So all of our problems with overpopulation, destroying the environment, crime and war and corruption, they will seem like nothing.
It's not like it is in the movies where you suddenly...
You're like, no, I see everything fucking more clearly.
It's certainly an organizer where you're like, you know, I guess that shit just doesn't really matter so much anymore.
And periodically you sit there and go like, oh, fuck, I almost died.
So it puts things in a different perspective.
But I saw a lot of folks online going like...
I can't wait to see what he makes next, man, because it's going to be so profound, and that's not true.
The next thing I'm going to make is Jay and Silent Bob reboot.
There's nothing profound about it and stuff.
But I figured, because I started thinking about that, why?
And I think it's because I've just always, at least for the last 20 years, 25 of my career, Just conducted myself in a way like live a fucking bucket list life.
And he is one of many people that's now pushing this very controversial theory that the Sphinx and many of the other structures in Egypt are far older than people think they are.
Not just like a couple thousand years ago, but maybe even 10,000 years ago, maybe even more.
And he bases it on water erosion marks in the Temple of the Sphinx.
Like where the Sphinx was carved out in the Sphinx enclosure, there's all these deep fissures that they thought was sand and gravel and wind.
But he has, you know, he studied, he's a geologist, so he studied erosion his whole life.
And he looked at it and he's like, this is water erosion from thousands of years of rainfall.
And he goes into it in great detail.
The last time there was great rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 years ago, which is many thousand years before they think the pyramids were constructed.
So it's one of these things like they didn't even know of a civilization from 9,000 years ago that was capable of cutting and moving stone like this.
Like this rewrites history to people who are super reluctant.
But the idea that all these people have, these people that are talking about these ancient civilizations, is that humanity rose to a very high level and built some incredible structures.
And then something like that super volcano or an asteroid impact or an ice age, some gigantic catastrophic event wiped out a shitload of fucking people.
And then people were forced to rebuild and sort of relearn.
So if you're looking at some of the construction of the pyramids, like the Great Pyramid of Giza, I'm pretty sure they've dated that to 2500 BC.
So the people that made the Sphinx and even some of the other structures, they might have been from longer ago in history in relationship to the construction of the Sphinx than we are to the construction of the Great Pyramid.
Like, we might have – well, we were talking about if the Great Pyramid was 5,000 years old, right?
I have to – It's entirely possible, if the Great Period of Giza, which I think is somewhere around 5,000 years old, if that was 5,000 years old, the Sphinx might be 4,000 or more years older than that.
There might be structures that are 10,500, even 30,000 years old, as some people, when they go deep, like a guy named John Anthony West, that was his deep speculation.
Based on the way the Sphinx lines up with constellations and the constellation Leo, it does it at like 10,500 years ago, but it also does it at like 30,000 years ago or somewhere in that range, like really long ago, which people are going, get the fuck out of here.
That's just not possible.
And his take was like, we don't know.
We're just talking about rocks.
We don't know how these rocks got into this shape.
has experienced these great, great, like, high achievements in construction methods and their ability to put together these enormous structures.
And then cataclysm.
People die off.
They get down to a small number, and then they rebuild.
And then they do these over the, you know, these dips and ups and downs over the course of thousands and thousands of years, which we've got to put into perspective.
This country is only— 250 years old.
Yeah, that's nothing.
So if you went back, just let's go full crazy.
Let's go back 500 years.
Go back 500 years, which is nothing in terms of the history of the planet and nothing in terms of even the history of human beings, relatively.
But 500 years, there's nothing here but Native Americans.
There's no structures.
There's a few Europeans that have visited.
There's a few people that have come over in boats.
But there's no buildings in terms of, like, there's no New York City.
Well, they don't think the pyramid, I'm pretty sure, and maybe this is controversial as well, but I think it's based on the biological material that they can pull out from in between the cracks and the stones.
Yeah, but even that, I think it's weird that we're holding on to these numbers.
Instead of saying, well, we have some tests that show that we're pretty sure that this was created around then.
But that, you might be right.
That might be older.
But people really resist what he's saying.
They really resist it because you'd have to go back, and a lot of people that got degrees in Egyptology, you have to rewrite what we know.
Because once they...
Once they decide this is the age where this was made and Thutmose III was responsible for this and this guy's responsible for that, once they write that and sell the books, it's super hard to take that back.
Well, we knew people existed, but we didn't know they were capable of building things like that.
But I'm saying, why is that even surprising?
If people 4,000 fucking years ago could build something as crazy as the Great Pyramid, why would I be shocked that someone 4,000 years before that could build a Sphinx?
Or 4,000 years before that could build some other fucking temple?
So 200,000 years ago, more over around 50,000 years ago, for a period referred to by archaeologists of the Upper Paleolithic, an unprecedented cultural explosion began to manifest itself for human communities.
Maybe that's what I remember.
So 50,000 years ago is the number that's in my head.
So language.
They had it a long time.
They don't think, at least, they started writing shit until somewhere around 10,000 years ago.
But they don't even know if that's the case.
But I think the oldest known writing that we know of today, I think, is that stuff that comes out of Iraq.
Cuneiform, I think it's called.
It's from the ancient Sumerians.
They were the oldest civilization that were like modern, I mean, not modern, but advanced civilization that we're currently aware of.
Dude, that is like some sort, like if you had a computer printout, remember those old school printouts that would run through computers with little holes punched in them?
I remember when I was a kid, like, you know, I went to Catholic school as a kid.
And the big story when we were younger was we got like new nuns.
Sisters, like at a certain point.
Like when I started Catholic school, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, they had old school nuns that, you know, would wrap your fucking knuckles and shit like your parents would talk about.
And then all of a sudden these new sisters come in, the Franciscan sisters of the infant Jesus.
And they were more like about education, almost like a Jesuit priest.
So they definitely had their vows and whatnot, but they were more progressive in their thinking than like the previous generation that had come prior to them.
So, Sister Teresa, who is like our 8th grade teacher, captured our imaginations with the Dead Sea Scrolls story.
About how, you know, there was a Bible that we all worked off of.
And then thanks to some kid who threw a rock in a cave, they found all these jars.
And inside of the jars, perfectly preserved, were all these writings on parchments and scrolls.
us yeah and so that's where we started getting a clearer picture of the bible and that's where they found bibles or gospels that aren't included in our bible and man it was like this is a minute before raiders of the lost ark came out so then when that movie came out you were like it's all it's all connected yeah the the scrolls are fascinating man you
You know, they had to use DNA testing to make sure that they were getting the pieces of this parchment from the same animal skin.
So like, say, if you had these pieces, they studied them for years.
Right.
And to decipher them, they would have to lay them out on tables.
You ever see what they look like, like laid out on tables?
And so one of the ways that they had to determine where pieces would go, and this is an incredibly painstaking process, they had to take small bits of organic material, because it's animal skins, and then they would run it through a DNA test and go, okay, this is the same animal.
You know, I'm grateful that there's guys like that, like Robert Shock, who's, you know, taking these trips to Egypt to study this and really putting his neck out there, releasing this very controversial theory.
I'm glad there's all these people out there that are questioning these things and looking into these things and that someone has the energy to study the Dead Sea Scrolls and to go over and apparently there's some wacky ass fucking crazy stories in there.
Like, they've tried to compare the stories, like, way more extreme, way, way weirder, to the point where people are like, oh, I don't think we should use these stories.
Probably have to read a book on what they learned out of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
But I remember there was some sort of a documentary on all of the hidden truths of the Dead Sea Scrolls and why these Christians were trying to omit it and not put it into the final version of the Bible.
From there, the Gnostics were people that, it was a faith, I guess, or a section of faith, that they were great record keepers, but they were also not necessarily like, and it was the Christ himself, the mighty Son of God, you know, they were a bit more practical in their telling of the tale.
If you could go back to a time and observe life, like being like a giant bulletproof hamster wheel and observe life, would you go to the dinosaur era and see like live T-Rexes running around and predators and crazy thick atmosphere and heavy vegetation of pre-65 million years ago?
Or would you go and watch people from like 5,000 years ago?
So this guy is the one who got me like really into it in the first place.
Wrapping my head around the concept of civilizations collapse and then a thousand years later rebuilds again.
And then you think about what the United States was like 500 years ago.
It was non-existent and now look at what it is now.
That these great moments of change happen periodically in human history, especially in places where there's a lot of commerce and there's a lot of food, like the rich, vast wilderness and the rivers filled with fish and places where people could get enough food and they would build these cities and then they would start inventing shit and innovating and a hundred years later they'd be better.
Two hundred years later they'd be better than that.
Five hundred years later they'd have crazy structures and then they'd be building things and Apparently, this is what it was like in the Nile Valley when they were constructing all these things.
Yeah, because this is what they're saying about the Nile Valley is that before 9,000 years ago, it was a tropical rainforest.
And now it's all sand and desert.
But before that, it was like fucking trees.
The climate changes.
Whether we fuck with it and make it change faster or not, it's not stable.
It's constantly going up and down.
And so this is probably also partially responsible for what happened to those people.
But those people had taken shit to another level, man.
I need to go there because I've only been watching DVDs and I'm scared of going to Egypt because sometimes it's a little unstable.
But man, what it must be like to see these 4,000-fucking-year-old gigantic stone structures that were cut and moved by who knows how many people and who knows how the fuck they did it.
And I think in that regard, I'm right there with everybody.
I think you can have your ideas, and I think those ideas can strengthen your resolve in this life, and they could even help you.
And this is something that I had to accept as I got older, more of the same thing, like, okay, why do I have this reaction?
Like, there's certain people that are like these ardent atheists.
They're like, God is dead, there's no God, shut the fuck up.
I'm like, okay.
How do you know you don't know?
So even though logic would point, I mean, if you really paid attention to the way human beings tell stories, you would have to say, well, a lot of these religious stories are probably fabricated, or maybe there was an initial message, or maybe there was some wisdom that these people initially stumbled upon, they wanted to document it.
But whether or not all this came from God, you know, the Cain and Abel shit, and trying to trick a brother into killing another brother, like, oh, Oh, I almost got you.
This universe is too bizarre for you to leave anything off the table.
Any possibilities of what created it, what sustains it, other than scientific, you know, you get down to like the most reductionist perspective of it's just a series of quarks and gluons and atoms and, you know, and energy and maybe...
Maybe it is all that.
Maybe it is just that, but maybe that in itself is God.
Maybe God is not a material thing, but it's a creating force of the entire universe itself, and it also has good in its heart.
Like, maybe the reason why we love, like, hugs and good conversation and, you know, a cute puppy and all these different things, we like love and we like happiness, because all these things are powerful forces in the universe, and all these Things represent the greater will of the Creator, of whatever it is that makes this universe so spectacular, whatever the fuck that is.
I don't know what it is.
But anybody who says they know what it is, is lying.
You're lying!
You're trying to trick people so that you have the ultimate truth and they don't, and that's how we control people.
And that's fine up until around now.
It's fine when there was no internet.
It's fine when books were scarce.
It's fine when we had to keep order.
It's fine.
It's fine.
But it's not fine anymore.
Because we know too much now.
So it doesn't mean that there's no God, but it means you definitely, this guy that wants the jet, who's that televangelist that wants $50 million to buy his own private jet?
I've met people that my belief is that a lot of that can be attributed to the chemicals that your brain is capable of producing on a regular basis.
It does while you're sleeping.
It does while you're in periods of extreme stress.
And that all these different chemicals most likely are released in the brain during these overwhelming periods of anxiety and fear and terror and injury when your body is thinking, hey man, this might be it.
And I think that's probably what a lot of these near-death experiences are, is that people are experiencing what you would call an endogenous psychedelic experience.
Your brain is releasing these potent chemicals that it has, it absolutely has inside of it.
Your brain has a ton of different You know, things like dimethyltryptamine and different psychedelic chemicals it's capable of producing, as well as like melatonin, dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol.
There's a fucking storm of shit going on in your brain.
It probably pumps it through your fucking neurons and everything's firing and you're seeing things that aren't there and you're talking to dead relatives and you're imagining the pearly gates and your imagination is on 10 and you're just seeing everything.
That's the reductionist perspective.
The hopeful, optimistic, spiritual woo-woo perspective is this is a chemical gateway, and you're seeing through the door of the other side, and then when they decide it's not your time yet, you're sucked back to where you lie, and then you're allowed to resume this life because you have more work to do.
And that's the perspective that a lot of people feel when they come out of those experiences, right?
My mom, years ago, God, it was like 10 years ago, more than that even, maybe 15 years ago at this point, had a heart attack, or a heart episode, rather.
My dad died of a heart attack, but my mom was on the table and they were putting a stent into her heart, into her artery.
And she was sitting there chit-chatting while they were doing the surgery.
I guess she was on a local more so than anything else.
And she was joking around with the doctor.
She's like, you gotta hurry up, doc, because I gotta pick up my mom for the...
And then went out.
And so she died for a minute and a half, clinically fucking dead.
They had to fucking try to restart the heart.
So I was like, what happened?
What was it?
And she didn't describe, like, I saw the bright lights and I saw people and blah, blah, blah.
She said I was floating.
And I was like, floating up?
She goes, no, floating on my back.
I was like, okay, well, you were on your back in the hospital.
Do you think that's what it was?
She's like, I don't know, but this is what I remember.
Every Iota of responsibility I ever felt in my life was gone.
She's like, I felt free.
Like I felt instantly lighter.
And just as I was heading in a direction, that's when like they pulled her back.
So she'd been dead for like a minute and a half.
Her heart had stopped.
So I was like, all right.
You've been in this best of all possible worlds for, you know, fucking 60 plus years.
Now you've seen a glimpse of the other side, which is better.
And my mom said, the other side.
And I said, what?
You were there for like a minute and change.
Why?
And she said, I was completely fucking free.
Like...
That was it.
I didn't know this one.
I don't have to care for this one.
I don't have to make sure this is taken care of.
I don't have to feed the cat.
She was like, it was bliss.
She's like, and if that's what happens, then I look forward to that again.
So when I was having my shit three months ago, and the doctor was like, you got a 20% chance of living, I was sitting there going through all the fucking shit in my head about like, all right, well, this is it.
You've spent your life with your head up your ass, you know, fucking trying to figure out who you are.
Go ahead.
Look at your head and heart.
This is it.
This is the big moment.
What are your thoughts?
What's going through?
I'm such a chicken shit in life.
I assumed that I'd be like the guy who was like, I'll fucking suck your dick to stay in this life.
Because I know this life and I don't know what happens afterwards.
So I thought I'd be begging for help from God or something like that.
But I was like, I made dogma.
I'm sure Jesus would be like, go to hell.
Fuck you.
Buddy Christ my ass.
So instead of doing the religious thing, I started thinking about just the journey itself.
I was like, well, if the journey's ending, what are your thoughts?
Just like when they held up the phone, they were like, do you want to talk to your wife?
And I was like, no, of course I did.
But I didn't want to because I was like, I know in my heart of hearts, if I speak to my wife right now, I'm going to be in the 20%.
And still, I was in this state of like, I didn't even realize I was having a heart attack.
And so I remember looking at the phone and being like, if I answer it, if I talk to Jennifer, that's going to be it.
I'm not going to leave this room.
So I was like, I'm going to play the odds.
If I don't talk to Jennifer...
Maybe there's some part of me that's like, look, I like talking to Jennifer.
We've been together fucking 20 years.
I better enjoy talking to Jennifer.
Maybe if I put this phone call off, you know, that I'll get to talk to Jennifer when it's all fucking done.
So I said to the dude, I was like, you know what?
Tell her I'll call her back.
And the guy goes, seriously?
And I was like, yeah.
And I saw him talking and he got off the phone and I was like, what'd she say?
And he goes, she was fucking pissed, dude.
And I was like, well, I'm dealing with my own shit right now.
So I was laying there on the table and I was like going through my life and I was more grateful than anything else.
I wasn't scared anymore.
That was the thing.
That was the thing that I love to communicate.
I spent my whole life terrified of fucking dying.
And when I was as closest to it as I ever knew I was, and for all I know I was closer someplace, but like, I was cognizant and told by a professional, this is fucking risky.
I was just kind of...
I was grateful, more than anything else.
I was like, what a fucking journey.
Like, yeah, and I'm 47, and it seems short, but fucking, like, you gotta admit, you did more than fucking most people get to do, and maybe that's why it happened at an early age, because you weren't gonna get the rest of this time and shit like that.
But, like, I wasn't mad, I wasn't like, fucking, why?
This is unfair.
I remembered, like, there's an issue of Sandman, which I absolutely loved, Neil Gaiman's comic book series back in the day.
And after the first story arc, we meet his sister.
The main character is Dream.
Morpheus, the character of Dream.
He's part of the Endless.
And he's got other siblings, Delirium, Desire.
One of his siblings is Death.
And they represent death in the comic book.
You know, you're used to seeing the fucking Sky and the fucking Grim Reaper and shit.
She's the little emo girl, goth girl, wearing an ankh around her neck and shit like that.
It was written in the 90s.
And they don't tell you right away that she's death.
As you're reading the issue, you're like, oh, shit.
I think she's meant to be death.
She's ferrying souls over to the other side.
You see a baby pass and she's holding the baby and then the refrain is like I hear the sound of her wings and that's taking this soul over to the next place as she's sitting around talking to her brother.
And so she eventually gets into a room with this older guy who's like, who are you?
And she's like, I'm here for you.
You know who I am.
And he's like, that's it?
He's like, oh my god.
I did all these things.
I worked my fingers to the bone.
And what did I get?
This is it.
What did I get?
And she says, a line that when I read it when I was 18, it was powerful.
But when I was laying on the fucking table, it was powerful.
Constantly going through my head and made it all easier made me kind of at peace with the idea of dying There's this line she says to the guy she goes you get you got what everybody gets you got a lifetime and as I was laying there I was like oh my god I got a lifetime like that's that's what it was nothing more nothing fucking less and I did some shit in it and now it's gonna stop and people are gonna go on without you and That's not terrible.
Like, I thought I'd be fucking desperate to live.
And instead, I had that weird...
I understood what my mother said for the first time.
Because I was laying there, I was like, oh my god.
Like, I made it to the end.
Like, this is it.
This is the finish line.
And it had been something that I was terrified of ever getting to.
But then when really kind of faced with it, I was like, oh...
Like, I'm done.
Like, I'm not scared that I'm done.
I'm actually kind of relieved that I'm done.
And like, you know, fucking, like, I didn't get killed.
And I wasn't home invaded.
A shark didn't eat me.
All the things that, like, I've been terrified of my entire life.
Like, I don't have to think about it anymore.
I made it to the end, and it's kind of okay.
So it's weird.
My whole life I thought, like, you know, I'd be scared of death, and most people, we all are.
We're all terrified of fucking dying because we don't know.
But that was the closest I ever came, and I wasn't scared.
Like, suddenly the fear just went away, and it seemed logical.
Like, of course it's over.
Like, things end.
And I didn't want to die.
I didn't have a death wish, but I was like...
If it's done, it's done.
And count your blessings and be happy and don't be a bitch.
If the fucking ferryman shows up tonight, don't fucking hold out.
Don't be the last asshole at the party going, no!
Just fucking pay the ferryman, get on a boat and go.
We'll see what's next and stuff.
And then ultimately, Leidenheim did a good job and I fucking wound up living and stuff.
I know this much.
I got to read a bunch of shit like after I nearly died, and it was all nice.
People wrote very nice things about me and shit.
And I expected, you know, I'm a creature of the internet that some people would be like, I wish he had fucking died.
Fuck him to death and shit.
I wish he'd stay silent.
But generally, it was like very nice things.
People were kind of positive and stuff.
So I was like, fuck, man.
You know, again, I didn't want to die, but, like, if I had, like, that would have been okay.
Now I'm back at it.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, now, until it ends, like, I've got to, you know, and it's kind of easy.
As long as I don't wake up with a fucking dead girl or a live boy, I don't think, like, they'll fucking break me over the coals when I die in the future and shit like that.
But it felt weird to be so close to the completion and having something that normally terrifies you suddenly be like, oh, it's okay.
If you walked up and put a gun in my face, I'm sure I'd feel threatened, but I kind of lost my fear of death.
I'm not death-defying.
I won't go out and do anything differently.
But that dark cloud that kind of kills any good time, the moment you start thinking about like...
And I think if you can just think that way, like today's a borrowed day.
Sometimes you have to trick yourself into finding more enthusiasm.
You have to trick yourself to be pumped up about stuff.
But if you can really do that and exercise those patterns in your brain and get them normal, there's There's people that have tricked themselves into enjoying all sorts of things that they know are good for them.
They just fire up those fucking chemicals and today we're going to just go out there and attack this day because this is a gift.
That's like an underlying that goes under almost every thought I have.
And it doesn't happen constantly, but it literally happens about ten times a week.
You'll be doing something, you'll be heading somewhere, you'll be eating something, fucking whatever the fuck, fucking having a conversation, and then you'll be like, this isn't supposed to be happening right now.
Based on the odds, I was supposed to die back on that fucking table.
So suddenly you're like, I'm playing on house money.