Shooter Jennings and Joe Rogan debate internet chaos, from Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook controversies to 90% Chinese bots probing DVR vulnerabilities post-2016 election. They critique social media’s polarized censorship—allowing porn but banning hypothetical creative discourse—and compare it to humanity’s unfiltered "adolescent" phase. Jennings champions decentralized digital spaces like Peep ETH, while Rogan reflects on lost early internet freedoms, praising Johnny Cash’s defiance and Sigourney Weaver’s feminist AI heroism in Alien. The episode blends tech paranoia with nostalgia, ending with a call for compassion amid ideological wildfires. [Automatically generated summary]
There was a point in time when I moved here, I remember, well, for a while there were prescriptions, so I had an excuse for a long time, but I went back to contacts.
But there was a point in time when I remember turning to my friend, I was like 21, and I was like, I think I'm just going to keep him on all the time, and then it'll just be a thing.
And that way I can just, if I have to close my eyes, nobody will notice, or if I'm stoned, nobody will notice.
When people get super famous, like Jay-Z famous, they wear them inside everywhere, just so people don't catch a glimpse of their eyes and hand them a demo tape.
My dad used to wear Porsches, and at one point I ran across their purple ones, and I was like, I bought like four pairs, and I keep breaking them, and it's my last one.
That's why people, gorgeous women, will put those fucking crazy cartoons, those selfie filters on, and they're beautiful, and then they'll turn themselves into a cartoon.
Like, you don't get it.
Like, you're supposed to have pores.
We don't mind pores.
I don't mind the wrinkles on your skin when you smile.
I don't mind, you know, the bubbles of saliva on your teeth, okay?
People are getting in this weird state of mind where they think there's a, you know, they said there's an epidemic of girls, like Instamodels, that are actually getting surgery to try to look like they look in their selfies.
You know, speaking of Instamodels, I just listened to David Spade's audiobook, which I thought was great.
I guess what Polaroid guy in a snapchat world or whatever there's a lot of chapters that deal with the instant I don't even realize I didn't even realize this is the thing like I'm so out of the loop with with you go to Instagram do you do you like pay attention to it you just post pictures occasionally Man, I'm not really good at paying attention to any of it.
Twitter, from day one, I kind of was in, and I'll go in and out, but it's hard for me to actually keep up and care about it.
Like, I hate posting pictures of myself, and my manager, Adam, who's here, he's always like, dude, if you're going to post something on Instagram, just make sure you're in it or something, because I'm always, like, taking pictures of other people.
I mean, my son got so obsessed with fidget spinners, and my daughter, but really my son, to the point where they were spending some time in New York, and I'd be going up there, and we walked down the street, and every fucking vendor, every newsstand, every pretzel place had fidget spinners out.
I think there's all kinds of networks that have been going on for years that are involved in shit.
I tell my friends, or my drummer specifically I talk to, but I was like, man, I think...
I'm not a rich guy.
But I think that there's a point of money that I would like to know the threshold in which you get past that, and then the Saudis, and then all these people start coming and wanting a part of you, and then you start selling your soul.
Whatever that is, if it's five million bucks, I'm just going to stay right there.
I don't want to get richer than that.
And once you have influence, I think it becomes a scary world.
Someone told me that they believe that there's reptilians underneath the Earth and that they have carved tunnels.
Underneath the Earth?
They've carved tunnels through the ground with laser beams and they have like a network of tunnels they use.
They travel amongst us waiting for their time to expose themselves.
People believe, like, you see someone, like, say if you live in an apartment building, and you drive by a dude's house, he's got a fat house, you go, wow, that guy's got a fat house, I wonder who he knows.
I wonder if he's in with the mob, or maybe he's deep with the Democrats, or maybe he's the bankers, or who does he know?
Because you always think of someone being at a level where they sit you in a room, and they give you some communications that you're not supposed to expose to the rest of the world.
Yeah, see, the difference between the experience in a boat that big and an experience in a boat that's like a fraction of that size is not that different.
Like, that's pretty fucking awesome.
But ultimately, there you get a good impression of what it's like.
It doesn't really do it justice in an image because it's so modern.
Like, when you get near it, it's so strange looking.
Recently it was a Questionnaire that showed that people who eat higher carb diets live longer But it's it's basically a questionnaire that over 20 something years of like what you eat And then the people who died like there was all sorts of problems with it like they didn't exercise as much They were fatter than the people who ate more carbs and also you're asking people to remember what they ate Which is like very very ineffective and then the same comp the same place put out a study Really
recently that showed the exact opposite effect.
And so it's like, well, what the fuck?
If I'm just a regular guy who barely has time to read the paper, and I read a study every now and then, it's basically what you catch.
You know, you can catch some.
Second analysis found that about half of the benefit appeared to be due to people switching from regular to diet sodas.
Oh, so the colon cancer was really just, you stop drinking Coke.
Coke was giving you colon cancer, so now Diet Coke's like, Diet Coke prevents colon cancer!
But it's really, no, Coke gives you fucking colon cancer.
There's a band called Hellbound Glory that I've loved for years, and the lead singer, Leroy Virgil.
They live in Reno.
And so he took me to Reno on the—I'd been to Reno before, but he took me on the Hellbound Glory tour of Reno, which was him going to different bars and shit.
And he took me to this guy's house, and it was a friend of his lived down the street, and it was like their garage was open and a bunch of people hanging out playing vinyls.
And this dude and drinking, you know.
And at some point, this guy was like, hey, I gotta show you something.
And he reached into his ceiling light.
He had like one of these, but not with the clouds on it.
It was just a regular light you pull out.
And up in there, he had an x-ray that he pulled out.
And it was...
An x-ray of a woman's vagina with a flying V guitar neck, the headstock, in it.
Freeway Ricky, who's been on the show a couple times, sued to get his name back and to keep his dude from using his name because he was actually Rick Ross.
Rick Ross, Freeway Ricky, was the guy who was selling all the cocaine that paid for the Contras when the Contras are fighting the Sandinistas and Nicaragua and that whole Oliver North shit.
Calm nice guy and that's one of the reasons why he did so well said he wasn't this crazy Buck wild dude driving rolls-royces throwing money out the window.
He wasn't that guy He was like the cool calm collected John wick sort of character that kept his shit together You know and everybody respected him because of that He just was like I mean the same reason why he learned how to be a lawyer while he's in prison and He's a systematic, intelligent dude who just had a shit education.
Just grew up in a very bad, scary, dangerous environment and didn't even learn to read until he got to jail.
So when I did that record, Alex Jones was the only person that would support the record.
He debuted the whole record on his show and then it was on for two hours by phone.
And then I went in and was on his show in person about just the music business.
That's all we were talking about and kind of how things were.
And then later I was on for Bitcoin discussion kind of by Skype or something.
But I will say this in his defense in all of this.
I just think that like, dude, that guy has been saying things, conspiracy theories about all kinds of things.
What do you want to call him that or not?
But like forever.
And like now the situation is like so volatile that like they're going to, you know, the All right, so, like, they definitely caught fucking Anderson Cooper having the green screen.
It's probably because they had another person there talking to the mom.
Right, so I used a part of that, but I remember watching that documentary, and his deal has always been so over the top, where you go, he's like, where are the...
He'd go to the local people near Bohemian Grove, he's like, we're looking for where the Satanists go to go do that thing.
And it's obviously, at this point, it's not like people who are knowingly Satanists, it's like really old, fat, rich guys that go there, and there's probably hookers and all kinds of shit, because that's what happens at big...
But if I came here with the intention of just talking to you, and then all of a sudden you were like, hey, on this day, on this thing, when you did this thing, you focused on this one thing.
I already had the rich thing, because people thought that I was rich because of my dad, which I never really was.
I mean, he was supportive of me, but once I got here, I was kind of on my own, and I liked that.
But then once I talk about Bitcoin with you like fucking five years ago or whenever it was I was here three years ago, and everybody's like, oh, you got to be rich now because of that.
But my point is, from doing that show, it soured me off conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories were fun for me.
And me, and especially Eddie Bravo, me and Eddie Bravo would get high, and we'd watch documentaries on flying rods, and all these UFO documentaries, and all the fucking Zachariah Sitchin shit.
It's fun, but it falls apart if you're being a serious person, and if you're really being honest about what you actually know.
This is the problem.
It's like the same, and the parallel is like, comparing to Alex Jones saying that my family's threatened is the same thing.
My family's never threatened.
No one ever threatened me.
So, but he's saying this on the radio.
Why is he saying it?
Because someone told him, and maybe he believes it, and he also thinks it's fun to say.
It's the thing to say if you're really into conspiracies.
But this is the problem with these fucking conspiracies.
They say things they don't know are true, and they say them like they're true.
Now this is fine if you just talk- But why is that an issue?
It's not an issue if you're talking about the Illuminati.
If you're talking about your kid getting shot, if your kid's dead, and someone says, hey man, this fucking Tom Smith on the radio saying, you're full of shit, you're a crisis actor, and your kid's not dead.
I'm defending the right of people to be who they are.
And I love David Allen Coe's music and all that.
But I played a show with David Allen Coe one time.
And my dad always would tell me these things about him.
You know, he liked David and everything, but there was always kind of a little distance of, like, there was a showmanship part of him.
And, like, a good example of this, again, distancing from Sandy Hook, but a good part of it was that when...
When David Elko, we did a show with him one time.
My mom was over on the side of the stage with me.
I was opening for him.
This is many years ago before I even had a first record out or anything.
And David Elko did, you know, we did our set and then he played and he was on stage and he performed a song my mom wrote called Storms Never Last.
So my mom's over on the side of the stage and we're talking, me and my mom, we're watching it and he's singing it with his wife and stuff.
The next night, I'm opening up for him, and he goes on stage, and he goes, Last night, Jesse Coulter was right in the front row when I sang this song with my wife, and she was crying.
And, like, I'm sitting there going, I was here, and she was not crying.
I just feel like, look, man, the times that I met Alex, the times I've been around him, Yeah, man, his gig is this.
And he got called out for a specific thing.
Yes, it involved the lives of children and everything like that.
I understand that.
I'm not at all sympathizing for him versus those families.
But I'm just saying, I just think that at the moment, everything is so hot with this.
And it's kind of exhausting.
And the internet is the reason for it, in my opinion.
Because I think that all the years that have come along...
The mass amount of people that have migrated to social media, the way that the integrated conversations happened, the way that that stuff ends up on the news now.
Like AOL chat rooms in fucking 1998, that shit did not end up on CNN. People were not listening to those things.
The best you could get, the closest you could get to fucking TV was to catch a predator when you were on that at that time.
And I feel like at this point in time, people need...
Again, not those families.
Their lawsuit, that's fine.
That's their thing.
But I just feel like people need to lighten up a little bit in the sense of...
I just think that the social media thing is very hazardous.
And I think that...
People's faith in all of it.
It doesn't have to do with fake news, and it doesn't have to do with Russian bots and all this shit.
I just think that, like, Alex Jones is a casualty because he's always been that guy.
There's an NPR document, no, no, no, a Radiolab podcast about Russian troll farms.
It's fucking fascinating.
It's really interesting.
Where these people show up at work, and their basic job is to put propaganda out on Instagram and social media and Twitter and comments and all that stuff.
It's not always 23 on the units, but it's shared with the Telnet port.
So during the election, during the months up to the election and the months after the election, I would say four months, five months leading up, five months after.
On my bulletin, this is kind of technical when I'm trying to explain this to you, but when you telnet into a computer, for mine, you would telnet in and it would give you a login.
It has a picture that's drawn and you put your name and your address or your password in and you log in.
Well, during the five months leading up to the election and the five months afterwards, I was getting every day, probably all day long, 10 or 20 connections that were coming in.
And they were just, I wouldn't say a bot.
They were like, they were scripts that were trying to log into DVRs.
And trying to log into IP cameras that you can control and everything like that.
They would be looking for a Linux login, which would be like, you know, login.
Like if you were to Telnet or SSH into a device like that, the first thing we get was a login.
And usually its root is the controller.
And so they're just trying to find...
They're just blindly...
Mass blindly going to IP addresses and trying to hack into them root.
And then they try password.
Then they try like this.
They try that.
They try the black, you know.
So the Russian bot thing, I understand that.
But I don't think it was a coordinated effort.
I think that like all during that whole time, I was watching my computer like I have.
It's kind of...
I'm getting real nerdy here, but it's like I have these games that people play, and once you get past the 13th, 14th, 15th node, which essentially means once there's 15 people playing at the same time, then the games stop working.
So I would be having to deal with...
These Chinese and Russian and all of them just mass trying to just break in.
And it was because of the DVRs and because of the IP cameras.
They were really literally trying to hack your system to just do whatever.
I don't know what the purpose was, but I watched it and it was China mostly.
I mean, Russia was a small amount.
And I think that all those countries, all the time, Or have people that are constantly trying to hack and interact with our shit.
But there's also people that are absolutely trying to influence elections.
They're absolutely trying to influence our system.
And they're trying to manipulate political parties, and they're trying to start dissent.
And this is one of the things that's really fascinating about this Radiolab podcast, where they talk about how these Russian troll farms literally set up protests.
They hired people to pretend to be Donald Trump, and they hired people to pretend to be Hillary and put her in a cage and have people chant, lock her up.
Like, this is all manufactured dissent and manufactured outrage that they're strategically promoting.
I guess when I'm trying to ask about this, it's like when I was watching that happen with my system, it's like how is this any different than what is going on For the last hundred years.
Well, I guess what I'm asking here is in the way of the—I just feel like the Russian bot thing was—all of that.
I feel like the Russian bots is a term for people who don't understand computers in a way, and they've just kind of thrown that out there as a political device.
I think that Russia, China, Korea— Like every other fucking country that is enabled in a way in which they're so far ahead technologically was involved in all kinds of fuckery and they're still involved in it and will still do that during the election.
You know, it's like, I felt bad for fucking Childish Gambino that he had a song that had Stay Woke in it, because immediately that song, that was what an amazing song, and it was, that term became dumb immediately.
But I just feel like All of this that's happening, all of this talk, all of him getting banned, all this stuff, it's all this kind of effect of the world.
Instead of being out in the world, everyone has gone to this point where it's these groups, these really rich groups, Google and Facebook and Twitter and all this, and everyone has gone to this central point, and now they're lynching people.
Whether or not you agree with Alex Jones, whether or not you like him, whether or not he's being lynched in the situation.
As much of a nerd and a technology person as I am, I hate that people have...
I mean, I'm sure they have their own lives, but the fact that we have become so centralized to these small groups of internet companies like social media and things, and then now...
Look, it's on both sides, man.
I mean, Alex Jones is getting lynched, Harvey Weinstein, whatever.
I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion, but I just feel like the centralization of society into social media is resulting in a lot of things that are very ugly.
And I think that the Russian bot thing, the Chinese hackers thing, the Alex Jones issue, the Me Too movement, all that stuff, which I'm behind all the people that were hurt.
I'm behind the Sandy Hooks people.
I'm behind the people who had the bad experiences in Hollywood, all that.
When he talks and he says something crazy, he goes, wait a minute, how do you know that?
And he goes, well, we have the documents.
Well, show me the documents.
Well, the documents don't say that.
Well, you know, the problem is, Joe, they are definitely trying to influence.
And he goes, yeah, they probably are.
But if you leave him alone, if you leave him alone and just let him rant.
By the way, he's doing six hours, eight hours of radio a fucking day.
I know.
Definitely likes to drink.
So he's doing six hours of radio a day.
At least three of them are drunk.
And he's fucking filling time and screaming and no one can say anything to him.
And he's the fucking man over there.
That's also part of the problem.
He's got a bunch of these other people that are around him all the time.
And they're conspiracy theorists as well, but they're 28. And they're hanging out with Alex Jones and he goes on these rants and no one interrupts him.
I think what happened is now the idea is that he's influencing people politically, like the whole Podesta, Pizzagate, all that stuff scared the shit out of people when that guy showed up at that pizza place and fired off around and You know, and then they wound up arresting them and they really thought there was a dungeon in the basement where they keep their kids.
It's not whether or not he believes in Bohemian Grove, which is real, and he proved it on video back when they had VHS tapes, and I watched it.
I mean, I've known Alex since 99, or 98, I think, maybe.
I've known him for a long-ass time.
And this is a very big difference between then and what's happening now as far as the reach and influence.
And I think people are sort of panicking about reach and influence and what it means and how to mitigate it, how to stop people from going into pizza places and shooting them up because they think that something that they heard online is true.
There's a lot of stuff that people hear online that is just not true.
You know, the lizards underground or the fucking earth being flat.
There's a lot of stuff that's just nonsense.
So it's hard to separate.
Here's what I think.
I think we are going through an adolescent stage as a being, as an evolving being.
And I think...
Our bodies and our minds and our consciousness are becoming synchronized with technology and along the way, like right now, we are in this chaotic, screaming, sweating, crying, pissing, shitting state of chaos And we are looking to figure out how to stop the bleeding.
We're looking to shove thumbs into dikes.
Dikes meaning like dams.
And we are looking to try to figure out a way to stop the bleeding.
We're trying to put patches and band-aids on things.
The ability to communicate widespread over millions and millions of people instantaneously is a new thing.
So people have say that never had say before.
They have influence that never had influence before.
They have their ability to contribute and they might not have thought these things through and these things catch fire and they run through dry forests like a goddamn Tornado of flames that you see on CNN when the Mendocino fire up in Northern California This is this is what happens with ideas because there's no way to contain them and they don't know what's right or what's wrong I think that what we're going through from the period of 1994 the period of 2018 is like a crazy fire in the middle of a hurricane
and It's like everything is nuts, and no one knows how to stop it, and no one knows what to do.
And what do we do?
We get together in shelters, and we fucking give people water, and we try to stop the fire and take away everyone's lighters.
And that's what we're doing right now.
We're trying to take away lighters.
We're trying to stop people who start fires.
And this is what's happening with Alex.
And it's not that Alex is a bad guy.
Is that he's by himself.
Irresponsibility.
It's irresponsible to say that you know for sure a fact that these parents from Sandy Hook are crisis actors and their kids never died.
It's irresponsible.
And he didn't think it was irresponsible when he was doing it because he's probably caught up in what he does and he's caught up in the wave of ad-libbing, just like you and I are ad-libbing.
We didn't even talk about what the fuck we were going to talk about, right?
I think what I'm trying to articulate, and I'm not doing as well as I wanted to, but...
I think what my problem is is the synchronization of consciousness is what I'm not into.
I think just like you have a rut of people who now believe that the Sandy Hook thing is fake and they're calling the families because of this conversation.
This is where that lawsuit is really coming from because the other people...
But then you also have another side of it.
You know, back in the day when they said that Paul McCartney was dead, and they got harassed, but it was on such a small level because there was no way to just email Paul McCartney and say, you're not the real Paul McCartney.
Which is the centralization that creates these rivers and these ruts that people who don't know what to do and they fall into one rut or another and they kind of become this kind of streamlined thing.
So I think the way you just described it is very articulate.
All he wanted to do was make it basically like medical documents where you would say like, you know, this guy had a brain transplant and then brain transplant would be underlined and you clicked on that and it would take you to a link that explained brain transplants and that would be worldwide.
So the internet is decentralized.
And the web is decentralized to some degree, okay?
Now, Google coming in with search engines, like, that's focusing points.
What scares me is those people being, like, Facebook being the avenue in which everybody talks.
All I know is I don't believe in trusting anybody who says, hey, I'll take care of you.
You come this way.
Just don't worry about a thing.
And they're the ones making all the money.
And it's like that's how the internet has become.
It used to be a Wild West of information.
Emails are fucking information.
That's me communicating with you and no one else seeing it.
That's beautiful.
And I think the idea of Twitter and Facebook and all that is fantastic when it first started.
But at this point in time, it's gotten so big.
If it doesn't break up into something where people figure out that they are in control of the internet, not these other people, that's what bothers me.
Okay, so what bothers you is that someone comes along and says, the people aren't in control of the internet.
So it's not like a free market.
It is a free market.
It was a free market.
It's a free market.
A guy like Alex Jones would say, this guy's preposterous.
I'm not listening to him anymore.
When it's not a free market is when YouTube, I don't know if they collaborate or if they just all agree.
I don't know if they all agree, but they just all decide.
Everyone's going to take them off.
Facebook's going to suspend them for 30 days.
Twitter's going to suspend them for a period of time.
YouTube's going to remove them.
All these people are going to take Vimeo, jumped on ship, and they pulled them off too.
So this becomes an issue.
What is it that causes you to get removed?
What is it?
And should we be really clear on that, or is this just a whim?
Because this is a really important thing.
If we really are fucking with free speech, we have to be very careful on what we decide Is a valid reason to pull people off of our airways?
Because if you have stuff on your airways that's far more vile, and you let that stay up because it doesn't have the same reach, like, what is your criteria?
It doesn't have the same influence.
It doesn't have the same political ties to it.
Like, what is the reason why you're pulling one thing off and not another thing?
Is it because of a popularity issue?
Have you searched your Trillions of fucking hours of footage for offensive speech, content, ideas, disinformation.
What have you really done to mitigate this issue?
Or are you acting on this because it's a social hotspot issue right now, which it most certainly is, and most certainly should be?
I really think that Alex needs a guy right next to him.
I believe in protecting children's innocence in a certain way that I agree with YouTube not allowing porn and stuff like that, you know, because my kids look at YouTube all the time.
He's a CNN anchor who is reasonably self-righteous, but he's in a difficult situation.
He has to challenge the President of the United States, who is also a famous celebrity billionaire guy who has his name on buildings.
I mean, this literally is Rosebud.
This is the tale of Citizen Kane.
I mean, this is someone with...
Ungodly power and influence.
And I'm not standing up for Jim Acosta.
I'm just going to say, just put yourself in that guy's position.
What a crazy spot.
You're yelling out questions at the President of the United States, who also happens to be Donald Trump.
You think like you're on acid.
The world has gone into a vortex of crazy, and you're the guy by some fucking freak of chance, whether you're Jim Acosta or Don Lemon or fill in the blank.
If you're one of those fucking people and that's your job and we expect them to handle that, that's probably like being Beyonce and The Rock on steroids.
But in a negative way.
It wouldn't be those two because those are very beloved celebrities.
Very few people are as beloved as The Rock or Beyonce.
Like, when we were doing the first record, it was me and Ted Russell Camp, who still plays with me, and Leroy Powell, who doesn't play with me anymore, but he played on that record.
He played guitar.
Brian Keeling was the drummer.
We started doing our shit.
Like, our idea was...
We were living here.
You know, I just...
2003, we started recording the first record.
And I had moved here three years ago.
And we were like...
Our whole thing was, like, we like rock music because it sounds cool.
And we like Dylan, and we like...
You know, even...
I wasn't even smart enough to like Dylan then.
We were, like, into fucking...
You know, Bowie and...
I kind of came from the Nine Inch Nails side.
That's how I got into music.
We kind of talked about that in the other show.
By that time, the idea was like, can we make country music?
We like the old stuff, but have it sound cool.
And why can't we bring in the stuff that's cool about rock?
And why can't you go psychedelic?
And why can't you kind of push the limits that way?
And we were just dumb.
And trying to do it that way.
And Dave Cobb, who produced this record, we met back then and he produced the first record.
And he was the same way.
We were like more Beatles, Stones, Bowie kids musically in the amount of records we listened to and, you know, obsessed over Pink Floyd and stuff, you know, than we were a country.
So we were kind of trying to blend those two back then.
And I always felt if Electric Rodeo got considered a country record when it came out and charted, then I felt like we had done our thing.
But it did come out and it did chart.
But once we came out with that, we had Universal who had been behind us.
And they had basically been...
The people that worked at Universal had been kind of, in my opinion, in their opinion, duped because Tony Brown and Tim Dubois, who believed in me, and we had done this record without a deal.
And I sent it to Tony Brown because I knew I just as a kid had met him and him and my dad had done business and I liked him.
And there was he had made me feel like he liked me.
So I sent him this record after me and the band and Dave did the record.
And they believed in me and they signed it.
And he kind of like remixed our first song so they would play it on radio.
And Tony was a big producer, still is.
I mean, he produced like the first bunch of Steve Earle records and he played piano for Elvis.
And he was our label head.
So we kind of remixed it so we get on radio.
So I'm thinking, they like me, because we have kind of a number 24 hit.
So I'm like, I'm going to hit them with some good shit now.
And then I hit them with what I thought was a good shit, and they said, this is not what we signed up for.
I mean, I like a lot of great music, and your music is great.
But it's also that you're clearly coming at this from an artist's perspective.
You're not a marketing genius by any stretch of the imagination.
Your dad's fucking Waylon Jennings, dude.
I mean, you have the in of all inns.
Your dad is like a super legend, you know?
I mean, he's a super, super legend, but you choose...
To legitimately carve your own path in the wildest of ways.
It's really interesting how you do that.
And I think that thoughtfulness that allows you to be free like that is also what allows you to explore these complex issues like censorship or Bitcoin or any of these things that are like, whoa, this is some heavy stuff.
You have a curious approach to these things and an ability to express who you really are, right?
Which is what comes out in your music.
It's not like your image.
You're just doing what you really feel when you're writing it.
I think that's a big part of community.
That's a big part of being a person.
Like, let some person uniquely be themselves.
And I think this is a real issue with social media.
The people are so terrified of expressing themselves because they're terrified of the hate they get back But then they get addicted to attacking other people that are failing or other people that are making mistakes And I get I think this again goes with this whole fucking chaos thing that we're talking about before I mean, I think we're in the middle of a storm right now And I think that your your take on Alex Jones and Bill Maher's take on Alex Jones and what we're saying here about him it doesn't It doesn't in any way negate arguments that you shouldn't say some of the things he's saying.
We agree with you.
But we also say, human beings, we have to figure this out together.
And if you start conflict, and one great way to start conflict is to ban and to take people down.
Call people a Nazi that aren't really a Nazi.
Like, decide that someone's an alt-right white supremacist.
This is when they're really not at all.
They're a liberal and a Democrat, and you know they are.
You're saying crazy things because you're trying to demonize people and slot them into groups.
We have to reject that with every fiber of our being because this is tyranny.
This is a type of group tyranny that although it's not connected to a network like the fucking, you know, the KKK or the Democrats or the Republicans, It's still this chaotic group think thing that happens where we decide to go after people and stop being compassionate, stop being just a human being who recognizes that other human beings are flawed and they make mistakes and they do stupid shit.
But as soon as you oppose them so vehemently for something that really should be treated with curiosity and compassion and maybe a little bit of understanding and mockery, instead of that, there's this anger and this vitriol that we just have to Put a curb on shitty thinking.
It was like that fucking border patrol station in Mexico.
It's hard to get in the country, bro.
If you want to be that guy who risks his life in the middle of August and take your family through the fucking desert with a couple of jugs of water and you're going to walk and hope you find a job...
You know?
That's what it used to be like.
What this is like is the walls came down and they changed the law.
And everybody said, go ahead in.
And everybody's in.
And in and down, too.
People going down, too.
Up and down.
Just opening it up.
It's getting crazy!
See, this is what everybody's afraid of.
And this is what's happening right now with information.
This is what's happening for the very first time ever.
Between this period of, you know, 1994 and 2018, it's been this inevitable change in the way people are able to express information.
And who gets to express information?
You know, they'll question the legitimacy of someone who becomes famous through the internet, but not famous through NBC. He made it!
He's on NBC! Meanwhile, this guy is just talking to his webcam.
He has 30 times as many people paying attention to him.
Why is he wrong?
Why is he incorrect?
Because he didn't go through your established channels that have existed with...
Who's your gatekeepers?
Oh, guys like Harvey Weinstein were your gatekeepers?
Bitch, get the fuck out of here.
You don't get to dictate what's interesting or what's creative or what sounds good, what kind of music people like.
It used to be that if you liked rock, you didn't like country.
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When I was a kid, you were a loser if you liked KISS. Right.
Yeah, like when you start actually kind of understanding the words and all that and like you it just it hits you Yeah, like oh shit this this shit is like the heavy shit Yeah, it's like there's some deep deep fucking emotions to country songs I mean Johnny Cash just his lyrics alone like some of his songs are fucking phenomenal man.
Yeah, they're phenomenal Yeah, you know, you know what one always blows me away on cash is the man in black still to this thing the lines like, you know What is it?
The thousands that died thinking that the Lord were on their side.
And then here's to the hundreds or tens of thousands that died thinking that we were all on their side, like that verse and everything.
I was looking at it.
I forgot to look it up.
Hey, would you mind looking up who wrote The Man in Black?
Sorry to ask you that, but I've been dying to know that because I wanted to know if Shel Silverstein was involved or if it was just Johnny Cash that wrote it.
Shel's like the forgot, he's the guy that brought like the New York sense of humor and really cultured writing style, like the kind of Hunter S. Thompson world.
He's the link.
Between that and country music, for sure, Shel Silverstein.
I got to be around him a couple times when I was young.
Though Cash wrote the signature song, Man in Black, to explain the social conscience behind his wardrobe choices, just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back.
In fact, he took to black simply because it was easier to keep clean on long tours.
It's like his original song is about one person who lived through these different lives, and then he ends up being a simple drop of rain after the starship.
And I think that's kind of part of the point earlier, too, is it's just like, man, everybody gets wrapped up.
You said you were talking about When you were just afterwards, but you were talking about everybody gets sucked up into all these different, you know, fucking confrontations all the time.
I think albums aren't listened to like they used to be because we used to have so much time, man.
You used to sit in your room and that's all you had.
And now there's this constant focus.
It's like, there's a way.
And I think the only answer is there's going to have to be some established decentralization of the internet that returns it to the form in which all can exist digitally as they do physically, just like we do now.
And we're going to have to figure it out as a society.
Because one of the things that's interesting is the people at the very top of the heap...
We always thought were the proponents of free speech.
We always thought that the repressive people were the right-wing conservative people that wanted to stop progress and stop nudity and people smoking pot and, you know, and Tipper Gore wants to ban rap music.
But we always thought of it as being the conservative ones that were like the most – The most into suppression of free speech, stop people from swearing, stop the nudity, stop the pornography.
It was always thought of as being a conservative thing.
But I would argue today, it's almost like your behavior is more restricted on the left than it is even on the right.
The right has seemed to be more relaxed in terms of what they're willing to let people do.
But the left is putting up all these boundaries for what people can and can't say, do and don't do.
Tom Segura sent me this photograph of some sort of a sketch comedy group where they were trying to figure out what you can and can't do today and what is okay to do in a sketch.
And a lot of it was about gay people and trans people.
And can you be a straight cis man playing a trans person?
All caps.
Absolutely not.
Can you be a cis person or can you be a trans person playing a cis person?
YES! All caps.
You can do whatever you want.
If you're a trans person who's a woman, you can play a man, and that's totally cool.
But if you're Shooter Jennings and you go, you know what, man?
I just think it would be cool to do a movie where I play a chick.
No chance, buddy.
You're not allowed to make believe in that way.
You can't make believe in a certain way.
They're basically saying, your thoughts are not allowed to go down these roads.
There's no way you could manage this respectfully and with enough dignity.
Who's saying that?
People who are crazy.
But this is my point.
These people exist.
And they're on the left now.
They're super inclusive.
Super worried about diversity.
Super worried about people of color.
And there's all these weird words that are thrown around.
You ever seen those hailstorms where they hit those Ohio backyards and fuck up the pool and everybody's in Scott screaming and you're here in the house like it's getting attacked by rocks?
Yeah, are these people like legit Boy Scout, you know, instructors or whatever they be who really want to show everybody the way of the woods?
Yes, most likely.
It's amazing.
Amazing experience for young men.
But just as human beings, anytime you get human beings, anytime you get a certain group of human beings and you leave them alone with large groups of kids, You gotta be super careful with what their motives are and how they handle pressure and how they deal with conflict and how they deal with sex.
Were you ever molested?
Tell me when you were molested.
What happened?
These are weird issues when you're talking about dealing with children and dealing with them.
But it's funny how, like, you know, from the day you're born, the day after somebody else's summer camp starts and it kind of kind of generationally goes on forever.
And you kind of like realize that you're stuck in this like movie.
By the way, all the people out there that are summer camp counselors are mad at me right now.
I'm not saying...
You're worried about that after this conversation?
I don't want anybody to feel bad.
The vast majority of you are awesome.
We're just talking about, in general, human beings.
It's the sheer numbers of human beings.
If you get a certain number of people, there's a certain percentage of those people that are going to be a problem.
This is the problem with cops.
It's not that cops are bad people.
So when you say fuck cops, you're crazy.
You're gonna need cops, okay?
If something goes wrong at 4 o'clock in the morning, you want the man who has the courage to stand there with the bulletproof vest and shoot at the bad guys.
This is like Blade Runner-level shit, in my opinion, in the sense where, at first, it doesn't seem like it's a massive thing, but it's just like, for life, it's that.
Like, Prometheus is fantastic.
And the question that it opens, and the second piece where...
I gotta shout out to Blake Judd, because he said, hey, man...
You're going to see it, but you're going to leave and you're going to be mad because you're going to have way more questions than before.
No, I'm just saying because I want to see the next one.
I want to know more.
You still don't know the engineer thing.
They seeded.
That was just one of their planets, like our planet.
That they seated and they went there.
So you're like, the next one should, or at least like the finishing story, they said they want to make a War of the Worlds kind of thing, where it was like all of a sudden these people descend and it's the two opposing kind of parties, which is the David side and then maybe us.
But just stop and think about, they were worried about artificial intelligence back in 1979. And that's like, when you talk to Elon Musk, it's like one of his primary concerns.
No, he's supposed to do the podcast.
I was in his physical presence at the UFC, but I didn't get a chance to communicate with him.
He was with his lady, but we had been going back and forth through email, so it was extra weird.
But I'm working.
When I'm doing the commentary, man, I'm trying to be...
I have to shout out to the Blocktronics crew, my antsy artist.
I was talking about computers and BBSs and Blocktronics are an antsy artist group.
They're great.
Sturgill.
It's so cool to watch him come up and he's got this kind of angle.
I just love watching him on your show and I just have to say us hanging out and everything all these years later.
He just has a sense where I feel like, wow, there's a rocket ship in this universe and we kind of speak the same language and it's like a cool vibe kind of having another dude out there who Who has the same sensibilities and like when we hang out, you and me and him and everything, I feel like it's, you know what I mean?
You took me, I came to go see you play and you took us in and then Dave Chappelle played right after you're like, oh yeah, hey, my friend Dave's gonna do a thing and then he came up.
You killed it, and then he killed it, and that was crazy, man.
You know how you have those iPhones where they have that little cord with a button?
You can press the button, and it'll just start playing whatever you got on your iPhone?
It just goes right to Cool Mo D. I go to work.
You know that song, I go to work?
I go to work like a boxer, you know, it's like it's a great like I go to work song So I'm about to work out and this fucking song comes on almost like the universe is letting you know look dude Just just don't try to think this through too much Just press that button the songs there.
I don't know why it's there You don't know why it's there either stop thinking about it, but it's there right when you needed it that songs there I go to work And then you go to work.
It's weird.
This is theater.
This whole thing is theater in some sort of strange way.
I mean, to me, the older I get, I just feel like the more appreciative for, like, my dumber self for having gotten through it without more damage being done.
Right.
So at this point in time, you know, like, I just really appreciate everybody who puts an effort into life.
The argument for free speech is ultimately people figured out and it balances out.
And it does.
I think it does.
And it doesn't totally because...
Let's just be completely honest.
Some people do a terrible job raising children, and these children go out into the world, and they're just causing damage everywhere they go.
They're on fire, and they're just running through dry bushes their entire life, right?
They're creating chaos, and it's from what set them off when they were young, how they evolved.
To expect everyone to have the same starting point and be judged on your emotional behavior, Your impulsiveness, your dishonesty, or your discipline, to be judged on those as if you all started from the same spot on the board is just crazy.
It's just crazy.
This is part of what we do.
We judge based on results only.
And when we see someone who fucked up, we don't go, okay, what happened to this person that made them so fucking crazy?
Like, is it really their fault?
Or is there a series of events that lead to you being who you are right now?
And maybe we should remap it.
Maybe we should remap it and just look at it in a different way and say, We definitely don't want that result again, ever, right?
We've got to figure out why you got to that result.
What made you break into the bank and put a gun in someone's face?
We've all broken in little ways in our lives, and we've all lived through it, and we all appreciate other people who have done the same thing.
And when you get to a point when you get old enough where you realize you can watch when someone Yeah.
through in ways you kind of find it you know those are the kind of people that i like that that will go and talk to that person because yeah i can see that and i think that you're absolutely one of those kind of people because i've actually had conversations with you when we were backstage at the comedy store or wherever we were when that night happened we had a conversation i don't quite remember the whole thing but it was about music and about listening music and it's like you're a compassionate dude and people who that's that's all i'm not sure about it but i'm not sure about It's about compassion.
It's about recognizing the best times come when we're nice to each other.
If you go to a bar and there's a bunch of strange dudes you never met in your life, and an hour later you guys are high-fiving and laughing and hugging each other and you're buying rounds, that's a great time.
Or you can go to a bar and someone wants to get in a dick-waving competition, next thing you know you got hit in the back of the head by a chair.
You pursue angles like you chose to pursue lots—like, similar to me, we're similar in this way.
Like, you chose to pursue all these little different angles of the universe that are in the entertainment business.
But they are also, like, things you love, like the UFC and then, you know, all the different little—I mean— You've had so many different little angles that you've occupied to land up here, where you get to just talk about all the shit that you love.
I've decided, one of the things I've been thinking about recently, especially over the last, like, maybe 10 years of my life, I've decided way less things than I did in the first years of my life.
I mean, they tricked me and they do things and they're smarter and they're, you know, nothing I could do could impress them more than what they can do by watching what I can do and doing it better.
Well, how about when they do, they fucking grab electronics, they figure it out, they're like, give me that, you don't know how to do this, you gotta go into settings, then you go down here, and you're like, you're eight.
Listen in on IRC back then like they had to pick up from the hackers like how to do it That was a very very different thing really a time when those all those message boards and all those things came up like Especially like the ability to you play games and talk to people in real time during games to do I'm one of the ways I learned how to type was from Learning how to type in game.
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Yeah, right quick because you got to type quick quake one or like quick.
It's funny that Misty, all these years later, she's like, I didn't have a computer, but I went and bought that soundtrack because Trent Reznor did it because she was into Nine Inch Nails.
I'm like, that's so hot.
She has the CD of it in our house still.
But anyway...
Man, I loved that.
And I used to do that, too.
And once the internet came on, I had a friend in Nashville, me and my buddy James and Greg.
Greg, this guy, ran a BBS, and he bought a Doom 2 server back then where it had four phone lines and modems in it, and we would dial in.
I'm glad you started off that controversial subject of the Alex Jones thing, and I'm really glad that Bill Maher went on a ledge and said that even if you don't agree with someone, you're not supposed to silence their speech.
You know, I just don't think people are supposed to be alone yelling into the wilderness.