Oct. 23, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:17:34
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| And now the official hello. | ||
| Hello, Chris Ryan. | ||
| Hello, officially. | ||
| What's going on, buddy? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Everything. | ||
| You distinguished-looking motherfucker. | ||
| Am I distinguished? | ||
| What's going on with the goatee, the whole deal? | ||
| Yeah, it comes and goes. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What have you been up to, man? | ||
| I've been following your Instagram chronicles. | ||
| Have you? | ||
| Yeah, you travel in the world in a van. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Vanthropology, I call it. | ||
| It's the Vanthropology Tour. | ||
| Yeah, I love it, man. | ||
| It's like, you know, you and I have probably spoken about in my 20s, I backpacked all over the world and hitchhiked to Alaska a couple times and did all these adventures. | ||
| A sprinter van that you have a bed in and a cooler and a freezer, that's kind of like a backpack for an older, slightly richer dude. | ||
| That's how I look at it. | ||
| Because you have everything you need with you, which is a feeling I love. | ||
| I love just being able to say, you know what? | ||
| I'm tired. | ||
| I'm going to pull over and sleep right here. | ||
| And before I do, I'm going to have a couple of beers and listen to some music. | ||
| And it's like everything I need is right here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What is the deal with pulling over in a sprinter van and drinking? | ||
| You're not even allowed to be drunk in the back seat of your own car. | ||
| Yeah, I believe if you have a bed, it's considered a domicile. | ||
| That's what I've been told. | ||
| I'm not a legal expert, but my understanding is that the front two seats are considered the vehicle, but beyond that, in the back where you have the bed and all the stuff, that's considered your house. | ||
| So a warrant to search is the same as someone coming into your house. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I know a dude who got in trouble because he was drunk in the backseat of his car because he knew he was drunk and so he's like, I'm not fucking driving. | ||
| I'm just going to sleep it off. | ||
| And he laid down the backseat of his car and the cops knocked on the door and he opened up the door and he said, yeah, I'm drunk and I'm sleeping off and they arrested him. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know. | ||
| Some cops, they feel like they have to make a certain number of arrests. | ||
| Some places have quotas. | ||
| I've always thought that was so strange. | ||
| What happens if no one commits crimes? | ||
| What do they do about the quotas? | ||
| Do they just make up crimes? | ||
| And how do they fill those prisons that are, you know, dependent upon 98% occupancy rate? | ||
| Yeah, they just assume that there's going to be a certain amount of people that fuck up. | ||
| Like, what happens if something happens? | ||
| I mean, I don't know what it would be other than a mass consumption of mushrooms across the entire population. | ||
| Oh, if people just stop breaking laws? | ||
| Yeah, people just stop. | ||
| They'll just pass laws. | ||
| I mean, every one of us breaks several laws every day. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, there are laws we don't even know exist that we're breaking. | ||
| Like, what kind of laws do you think? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I read an article about this years ago. | ||
| I'd be hard-pressed to give you examples right now, but I'm sure there are financial laws, and we're all cheating on our taxes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Not me. | ||
| Not me. | ||
| But everyone I know except for Joe. | ||
| Well, I hand mine off to accountants. | ||
| I don't handle that at all. | ||
| But I mean, cutting corners. | ||
| You know, we're all cutting corners. | ||
| I ran two yellow lights on my way here, I'm sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| I probably, you know, it's four miles per hour over the speed limit. | ||
| So that's how they get you. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| What about autonomous vehicles? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Once that kicks into gear, that's going to be real interesting when no one's ever breaking the speed limit. | ||
| What do they do? | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| Six laws you broke without realizing it? | ||
|
unidentified
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There you go. | |
| Jamie, you're the best, man. | ||
| Cracked.com always has great articles like this. | ||
| So what does it say? | ||
| What do we got here? | ||
| Connecting to unsecure Wi-Fi networks? | ||
| That's a law? | ||
| What? | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| So if you go to Starbucks and it's an unsecure or the airport, that's... | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Those are open for that purpose, but like if someone, your neighbor leaves theirs on open, I think that's what it's saying right here. | ||
| Oh, why don't do that? | ||
| Wi-Fi squatting. | ||
| What about every time you update some software and you click agree, I have read and agree to this? | ||
| You didn't read that shit. | ||
| Nobody reads it. | ||
| One of the things that Snowden talked about yesterday, about the terms and conditions that you accept. | ||
| And who knows what's in there that then you're not complying with. | ||
| Well, you'd have to have a lawyer go over every piece of it and then a lot of it is open to interpretation and they can change it at a moment's notice. | ||
| One of the things that you see in terms and conditions is they have the ability to change it without notice. | ||
| Sam Harris had a great podcast with this guy who was an expert in data collection. | ||
| He was talking about what's actually happening now is that there's a commodity. | ||
| That commodity is data. | ||
| And we didn't know it was a commodity. | ||
| And then all of a sudden these companies like Facebook and Google made billions and billions of dollars off of this commodity that we didn't even know we were giving up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And we didn't know that they had it. | ||
| We didn't know it was valuable. | ||
| And there's no way to protect it. | ||
| And that's their business model. | ||
| And then also their business model is tricking you into clicking on things by getting you outraged. | ||
| So they're consistently bringing up things, whether it's Trump or abortion or whatever it is that gets you riled up. | ||
| That outrage algorithm is going to find your little soft spot. | ||
| Oh, God damn it. | ||
| I thought you just posted something on that recently on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, Facebook thing. | ||
| Yeah, Facebook. | ||
| Yeah, it was an argument that Facebook is – what it is is an algorithm that's designed to find outrage. | ||
| It's not free speech. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just an outrage accelerometer or something. | ||
| Well, you think about even, you know, that goes back to William Randolph Hearst, you know, saying like, you know, I'll give you the war. | ||
| You know, you give me the war, I'll sell the papers and get the public behind it because it's good business. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's an interesting world, isn't it? | ||
| Were you talking about Tristan Harris? | ||
| Was that the guy on Sam Harris' podcast? | ||
| The ethicist? | ||
| I do not know. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I heard him on Sam Harris' podcast. | ||
| I think he has a PhD in computer science and philosophy, and he worked at Google as their in-house professor. | ||
| There's no such job. | ||
| Don't be evil. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| They stopped having that. | ||
| Don't be evil doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| How crazy is that? | ||
| When you have that and you go, ah, let's get rid of that. | ||
| Well, you can be evil. | ||
| It's a weird thing to both have and then weirder still to remove. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I want to get a marriage contract that has that clause in it where you can update it without notification. | ||
| You know, just get that in there. | ||
| Have your lawyer slip that into the prenup. | ||
| Yeah, at any moment you could bail. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| Or bail or just change the terms, you know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It's a strange world, Joe. | ||
| That's why I like being in my van. | ||
| Keep things simple. | ||
| Well, humans are strange creatures, you know, and we vary so widely that, you know, trying to make any sense of putting 300 million of us together on an island, essentially. | ||
| Like, good luck with that. | ||
| And we vary, not only individually, but I think we vary... | ||
| We become different creatures in different conditions. | ||
| So people sometimes will ask me, like, what is human nature? | ||
| What's your opinion, you know, based on these books? | ||
| And I say it's like asking, what's the natural state of H2O? Right. | ||
| Is it boiling? | ||
| Is it ice? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What's the pressure? | ||
| What's the altitude? | ||
| Don't you feel like you're different people with different people as well? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I had a girlfriend. | ||
| A Spanish – her mother was French. | ||
| Her father was Catalan. | ||
| She was raised in Spain and then lived in Miami when she was 13 to 15 or something. | ||
| So she spoke English really well, Spanish, French, and Catalan perfectly, right? | ||
| And we were living in San Francisco. | ||
| And I was high. | ||
| I was smoking a joint. | ||
| She was across the room talking to her mom on the phone in French. | ||
| And then her mom put her dad on the phone, so she switched to Catalan. | ||
| And I was just high enough that I noticed, like, wow, that's not – Peggy talking two different languages and then three because she would like put her hand on the phone and say, my mom said no, no, no. | ||
| So English, French, Catalan. | ||
| It's not Peggy speaking three languages. | ||
| Those are three different Peggies. | ||
| She's different. | ||
| Her facial tics and her movements and her body position changed depending on the language she was speaking, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And at the time I was in grad school and I thought this is like multiple personality disorder. | ||
| So I started researching multiple personality and I sort of came up with this idea that language, in her case, because she learned them all when she was very young, She reconfigures the brain in such a way that she actually has different identities in those languages. | ||
| And next time we were fucking, I started talking to her in Spanish, and she freaked out. | ||
| She got mad at you? | ||
| Yeah, like I was a stranger suddenly. | ||
| I just said, like, you're beautiful or something. | ||
| She's like, get away from me, you creep. | ||
| Because our whole relationship had been in English. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, it's strange. | ||
| So anyway, so I looked into multiple personality disorder. | ||
| The story has everything. | ||
| And I don't know if you've checked that out. | ||
| You remember Stanley Krippner, my buddy who came down and did the podcast with you? | ||
| He had done a bunch of research on that. | ||
| There was a movie called Sybil. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| He was the consultant for that movie. | ||
| He was also a consultant for Rosemary's Baby. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| The Possession? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| That's a Polanski movie. | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, one of the early ones. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| People have, with multiple personality disorder, the research is bizarre. | ||
| It seems to indicate that people have different physiological states in the different personalities. | ||
| So you could have a different baseline heart rate, blood pressure, Different baseline heart rate. | ||
| I don't know how reliable this is, but I even read that some people have different ocular pressure, so that one personality needs reading glasses and another doesn't. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| How much is psychosomatic? | ||
| Like really, how much of who you are and how your body works is dependent upon the way your brain is catching things? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Culture, language, personal experience. | ||
| I mean, it's all your mood, how much you slept the night before, you know, all these things. | ||
| Identity is something we take for granted, but if you start to look at it, it's like gravity. | ||
| You know, gravity we sort of include it in our calculations, but nobody has any idea what's happening. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| How does that work? | ||
| Like, oh, two things are attracted. | ||
| Neil deGrasse Tyson got real touchy about it. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| When I brought it up, he – I think he's – We had a weird conversation, and I think part of the weird conversation was the first conversation that he's had publicly since he's been accused of, you know... | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he came back from that. | ||
| Sexual misconduct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he was... | ||
| You know, they found him innocent, according to whatever internal... | ||
| Right. | ||
| ...investigation they had, you know, when they were doing his television show... | ||
| Right. | ||
| ...planetarium. | ||
| But it's still... | ||
| Even if... | ||
| Even if he's proven innocent, you've got the weight of... | ||
| Who knows how many people that think you're a creep now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And he's carrying that around because he was always thought of as being this jovial, really sweet, nice guy. | ||
| So he's a little tense anyway. | ||
| That's why I start out admitting I'm a creep. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, I am a fucking creep. | ||
| You can't shame Charlie Sheen. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let's take it from there. | |
| You cannot shame Charlie Sheen. | ||
| But we had this conversation about gravity, and it was weird. | ||
| It was like I was arguing with him, but I wasn't arguing. | ||
| I was like, what causes it? | ||
| And he's like, we know! | ||
| Like, he went into this whole thing. | ||
| We know what it is. | ||
| We know how to measure it. | ||
| That's good enough for me! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a very tense conversation. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it is a faith-based thing there, you know? | ||
| Like, he's right. | ||
| They know how to measure it. | ||
| But we also know how to measure placebo. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we don't know how the fuck that works. | ||
| We know that hypnosis, people can have open heart surgery under hypnosis or have limbs amputated or all sorts of amazing things with no anesthesia whatsoever. | ||
| Has that really been done? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever been hypnotized? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't have high hypnotic ability. | ||
| That differs. | ||
| It's another thing that differs among people. | ||
| And Stanley actually has a really interesting theory along those lines, which is that in prehistoric populations, would be adaptive because a lot of the healing rituals were keying into placebo response. | ||
| So if we have a certain ritual, if you're susceptible to – you believe in that, like voodoo – There's a voodoo death. | ||
| People die when a spell is cast or a curse because they believe it. | ||
| If you don't believe it, it doesn't happen. | ||
| So it happens the opposite direction as well with healing. | ||
| So his idea is that that would have been a very adaptive characteristic in prehistoric societies, whereas in contemporary societies it's maladaptive because you're more susceptible to advertising or you're easier to manipulate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I – yeah, I've – when I was in grad school, I had some professors who worked with hypnosis and I studied it a bit along the same – around the same time I was looking at multiple personality disorder. | ||
| Because I was real interested in this question of how the brain and the body interact. | ||
| There's all this research showing that people with the same condition in hospitals, exactly the same age, same prognosis and all that. | ||
| They heal significantly faster if their hospital window looks out on trees as opposed to looks out at another building. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Just looking at something like nature keys the body into some sort of energy that helps it to heal. | ||
| Completely makes sense. | ||
| I've met people with multiple personalities. | ||
| Well, Roseanne. | ||
| Roseanne's got... | ||
| Doesn't she? | ||
| Make sure that's true. | ||
| I know another one that's a weird one is the football player Herschel Walker. | ||
| I think he had trauma-induced multiple personality disorders. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Does she? | ||
| There's an article that says Bill Maher reminds us she does, and then Roseanne says she doesn't. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I think she does. | |
| And then 2001 says having seven personalities is tough, her saying it. | ||
| Well, here's the thing about Roseanne. | ||
| I'm saying this for the tenth time, I guess. | ||
| She was hit by a car when she was 15 and she was put in a mental institute for nine months afterwards She had severe brain damage and she lost her ability to do mathematics and like really scrambled her brain and that is probably the birth of the Roseanne that we know the comedian and That's also the case of Sam Kinison Sam Kinison was also like a pretty normal kid and then he was hit by a car and you know pretty severe brain damage as well and Brain damage, | ||
| especially has an impact on your ability to be rational and impulsive behavior. | ||
| People with brain damage a lot of times get very impulsive. | ||
| It varies so widely. | ||
| It's what happens to you dependent upon what kind of trauma, where the trauma is, what part of your brain. | ||
| But when they said it about Herschel Walker, I was always confused. | ||
| I wonder if it was from football, like football trauma, or was it personal trauma, like, you know, abuse? | ||
| Yeah, people with – are diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, if I remember correctly, almost always were severely abused as kids. | ||
| You know, in fact, the rationale is that they develop the alternate personalities as a way of escaping a reality that's intolerable. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, people do weird things with horrible memories. | ||
| You know, they bury them to the point where they don't even really have access to them anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Sexual abuse, some traumatic events when you're young. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But the fucking human brain and the way it adapts and molds to things is so bizarre. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's an anecdote that is in this book, Civilized to Death. | ||
| Notice that segue. | ||
| Oh, good segue to the book. | ||
| Pull that bitch over here. | ||
| By the way, the art is done by a guy who listens to my podcast. | ||
| It's really... | ||
| It looks like the art by a guy who watches your podcast. | ||
| Cheeseburger, a chimp wearing a cheeseburger with a nice suit on. | ||
| Yeah, he's got an iPhone. | ||
| Oh yeah, the story. | ||
| So there's a species of grasshopper in North Africa. | ||
| That, you know, they hang out. | ||
| They're grasshoppers. | ||
| They're dispersed. | ||
| They eat grass. | ||
| They chill, right? | ||
| Rains come. | ||
| The grasslands expand. | ||
| Grasshopper population increases. | ||
| Then the rains stop. | ||
| Grasslands contract to the point where the density of the grasshoppers triggers dormant genes. | ||
| So there's an epigenetic event in these grasshoppers, and they start to transform, and not over generations, individuals. | ||
| Front legs get shorter, back legs get longer, thorax changes, shape of the head changes, coloring changes, and behavior changes from being these chilled out, solitary, relaxed grasshoppers. | ||
| They start attacking each other. | ||
| They become cannibalistic, and they swarm. | ||
| Locus. Locus. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They become locusts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this species of grasshopper and locust is the same species. | ||
| It's the same DNA. | ||
| It's just responding to different conditions. | ||
| So, you know, we're talking about the brain and who you are and what identity is and all that. | ||
| And I was reminded of this when you said, you know, people are so different and the H2O thing. | ||
| We're not only different as individuals in the same context, we change completely given the context we're in. | ||
| So the focus of this book is that hunter-gatherers were essentially a different sort of animal. | ||
| They were essentially, you know, the parallel is with the grasshoppers and now we're swarming. | ||
| Now we're a different kind of animal even though our DNA is the same. | ||
| Well, that completely makes sense. | ||
| I mean, people that live in small towns are so different than people that live in cities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so rare that you find someone who has a small town sensibility in Manhattan. | ||
| Yeah, they get chewed up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| Yeah, literally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The locust thing is amazing. | ||
| Have you ever read the accounts of the settlers in the pioneer days making their way across the country and dealing with these swarms of locusts and really not having any idea what to do with them and how to handle it? | ||
| Eat them! | ||
| Yeah, you can. | ||
| The Native Americans ate them. | ||
| That's probably a real good move, right? | ||
| That's one of the things that people think is probably an excellent solution to some of the issues that people have with meat. | ||
| Because a lot of people don't have any problem killing bugs, but they wouldn't want to kill a lamb. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you can have cricket protein. | ||
| We call it microagriculture. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Cricket protein is apparently very healthy. | ||
| I've eaten crickets. | ||
| Yeah, I have too. | ||
| In Thailand? | ||
| I've had them in Mexico. | ||
| oh yeah Mexico they've they had them fried and we're staying in a resort in I Punta Mita? | ||
| Yeah, I think it was down there. | ||
| Puerto Vallarta? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And they had a bowl in the resort when we walked into the hotel room. | ||
| Like mints? | ||
| Yeah, they had sliced mangoes, and then they had fucking crickets. | ||
| And I was like, alright, I'll try that. | ||
| I hosted Fear Factor. | ||
| There's a restaurant here in LA that I was at just a couple weeks ago that has all sorts of crickets and grasshoppers. | ||
| Really? | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| It's a Mexican place. | ||
| They specialize in mole. | ||
| I don't remember what it's called. | ||
| A good Mexican place? | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| Isn't it weird that there's a lot of great Mexican food in LA, but it's like your basic burrito joints and taco joints. | ||
| It's not like gourmet Mexican food. | ||
| There's very few gourmet Mexican places. | ||
| Is that it right there? | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I couldn't remember the name. | ||
| Guelaguetza. | ||
| Is that how you say it? | ||
| Have you been there? | ||
| No, I just, I know the word. | ||
| It's like a, I don't know if it means party, but it's a celebration down in the Oaxaca. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Oaxaca. | ||
| Serving up insects. | ||
| Yeah, check it out. | ||
| It's a good place. | ||
| I really, the mole's fantastic. | ||
| Where is that at? | ||
| What part of LA? On Olympic. | ||
| Olympic. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Deep in the heart of Texas. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mole. | ||
| I love mole. | ||
| And let's face it, shrimp, lobster, that's just bugs. | ||
| Those are just big sea bugs. | ||
| Well, we found that out on Fear Factor because people that are allergic to shellfish are also allergic to roaches. | ||
| Ah. | ||
| Yeah, we found that out the hard way. | ||
| A lawsuit? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| The dude was allergic to shellfish and he had to eat roaches for this thing and they wound up having to give him an adrenaline shot. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| EpiPen. | ||
| Yeah, he was seizing up a little bit. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| Your windpipe starts constricting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not allergic to anything as far as I know. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| I'm very happy. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Yeah, that's a bummer, man. | ||
| Allergies are a bummer, especially freaking peanuts. | ||
| I've heard peanut allergies are so bad that people will ask you to not eat peanuts on a plane with someone who has a peanut allergy. | ||
| Like some people's peanut allergy is so severe that even like the dust of you chewing peanuts on a plane next to them can get them sick. | ||
| And it's interesting to think about the state of consciousness and how that affects allergies because apparently – and again, I'm always cautious about saying shit on the show because there's so many people listening. | ||
| So caveat, it's been a long time since I read the research. | ||
| But if I remember correctly, under hypnosis, a lot of people with allergies no longer – in fact, I remember the research – Yeah, it was a setup where the person could see. | ||
| So like you and I are talking across the table and there's a mirror behind me. | ||
| And in the mirror, in your peripheral vision, you see roses. | ||
| And you're allergic to roses. | ||
| You'll have a reaction. | ||
| Even though they're plastic roses. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So it sort of enters the consciousness and triggers the response subconsciously. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's how it was. | ||
| And then with people under hypnosis, like Andrew Weil wrote about this cat allergies. | ||
| He was on MDMA, I think, and he was playing with a cat and had no reaction to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Self-hypnosis squelches allergies. | ||
| I need a Jamie in my life. | ||
| You do. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Picturing ski slopes reduces hay fever symptoms by a third. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Picturing ski slopes. | ||
|
unidentified
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How weird. | |
| What a weird... | ||
| Oh, I'm skiing... | ||
| Well, because you're picturing a place where there's no pollen, right? | ||
| You could probably picture the surface of Mars, too. | ||
| Yeah, well, if you've got a needle, you get a shot, and the doctor's about to give you the shot, and you start tensing up. | ||
| You feel the anticipation. | ||
| Your heart starts quickening, and you get really weirded out by it. | ||
| But then you get the shot, and you're like, oh, that wasn't shit. | ||
| Why was I freaking out like that? | ||
| But it's the psychosomatic aspect of it. | ||
| I think that's what life is, basically, in a nutshell. | ||
| It's an analogy. | ||
| We're always worried about things. | ||
| We spend so much time worrying about things, most of which never occur. | ||
| And even the ones that do occur, it's like, wow, whatever. | ||
| Like death. | ||
| I'm not worried about death. | ||
| Dying, maybe, if it takes too long. | ||
| But if it takes an hour or a day to die, that's a tiny fraction of your life. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| You're not a guy that really spends a lot of time working on fitness or health or any of those. | ||
| That's a nice way to put it. | ||
| Well, you enjoyed that article that I wrote back in the day. | ||
| Lazy fuck is what you're trying to say. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| I take it as a compliment. | ||
| I got better things to do than work out, Joe. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You enjoyed that article that I wrote a long time ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did. | |
| The sand. | ||
| Yeah, human body is like a sandcastle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| You can make it beautiful, but it's not going to last. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you know that going in. | ||
| You know that way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I mean, I've got this idea for a book, if I keep writing books, which is sort of a self-help book, but it's a parody of self-help books. | ||
| And so it'll be calling attention to the way so much of what we do to try to be healthy is actually counterproductive because we stress, especially Americans. | ||
| Everything's work. | ||
| Everything turns into work. | ||
| And Americans are very suspicious of pleasure. | ||
| We're taught that pleasure is evil and dangerous and all this. | ||
| I've never bought that line of reasoning. | ||
| I've always felt like what feels good generally is good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's a reason it feels good, you know? | ||
| Now that can get corrupted by advertising and false messaging from a sick society that tells you, you know, sit on the sofa and drink beer and eat bags of chips all day. | ||
| But if you get beyond that and you can actually hear the voice of your body, I think if your body is telling you to, you know, stay in bed because it's a rainy cold day, Now, I know this is totally against your perspective on life, where you're like, you've got to tame the inner bitch, you've got to get out of bed, you've got to work out, it doesn't matter. | ||
| I'm like, no, man, I'm staying in bed. | ||
| You go do what you need to do. | ||
| I used to climb mountains with this friend of mine in Spain, and he was like you. | ||
| He was a fucking billy goat. | ||
| And I'd go with him until I got to a nice spot with a nice view. | ||
| I'd be like, dude, I'll be here when you come down. | ||
| Taking a nap. | ||
| Got a bottle of wine and some cheese. | ||
| I appreciate that, too. | ||
| I'm not married to my perspective, but I think I have a very peculiar biology that demands a certain amount of exertion. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| And I have friends like that. | ||
| I mean, you know, I have lots of friends like, man, if I don't run every day, I feel like shit. | ||
| Running's very addictive, though. | ||
| I feel fine. | ||
| Yeah, you get used to it. | ||
| There's a high that you get from running that's really interesting. | ||
| And any long-term cardiovascular exercise, you get this. | ||
| It's like we did, you know, last October, we did the Sober October thing where we had this crazy fitness challenge. | ||
| So all of us were doing cardio like five hours a day. | ||
| Really crazy amounts of cardio. | ||
| And one of the things that Tom Segura and I both agreed on is like... | ||
| The amount of internal chatter dissipates to zero. | ||
| You have no anxiety. | ||
| I didn't realize I had any anxiety until that happened. | ||
| And then I was like, God, it goes to zero. | ||
| It goes to nothing. | ||
| When you do five hours on a treadmill or just running, when it's done, man, there's this peace of mind that comes with that. | ||
| This release of endorphins that's incredibly addictive because that feeling is so pleasing. | ||
| It doesn't feel good to get out of bed and to just push when you don't want to, but the end result feels amazing. | ||
| It does feel really good. | ||
| I wonder if there's any research... | ||
| Looking into whether that effect happens universally. | ||
| Because I've worked out. | ||
| I've run. | ||
| There were times in my life I've never gotten a runner's high. | ||
| Never. | ||
| I get my teeth hurt, my knees hurt, my back hurts. | ||
| I feel my brain bouncing around in my skull. | ||
| You know, I'm half a mile into it and I'm like, fuck this. | ||
| This doesn't feel good. | ||
| You have to get in shape first. | ||
| That's a big part of it. | ||
| It's not that simple. | ||
| It's like, for me, I never really got into running. | ||
| The first time I really did any serious running, my friend Cam Haynes had a 5k, which is, what is that, three miles? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
| And I didn't run at all in preparation for it. | ||
| And when I ran the 5K, I was like, Jesus Christ, this is hard. | ||
| Like, I didn't have – there was no good feeling at all. | ||
| You know, it's running on concrete and shit. | ||
| In Vegas, it's gross. | ||
| Oh, in Vegas. | ||
| You're smelling sin in the air. | ||
| But when it was over, I was like, okay, obviously, I'm in good shape, but not in good running shape at all, so I should probably get in shape for this. | ||
| So then I started running. | ||
| And then when I got into running, and particularly running hills, then I started feeling it once I kind of got in that kind of shape. | ||
| And then when the workouts are over, I run all the time now. | ||
| And when it's over, I just have this, ah. | ||
| Yeah, you and Marshall are doing your thing. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Yeah, I fucking love it. | ||
| And he loves it, too. | ||
| They had a crazy bonding experience with that dog, you know, because he loves it, you know? | ||
| I got my dad a golden retriever years ago when my dad was like, you know, maybe it's genetic because he was pretty lazy. | ||
| He'd come home from work and he'd sit in front of the TV and drink vodka. | ||
| And my mother didn't like dogs, but my sister and I convinced her that dad needs a dog because dad will get this dog and he'll go for walks because the dog needs to walk. | ||
| And so we got a golden retriever. | ||
| He named it Stoli. | ||
| Bad sign right there. | ||
| And then he never went for walks. | ||
| Stoli just sat next to him and got fat. | ||
| Oh, poor Stoli. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, it's common. | ||
| Doesn't always work. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, it helps me get going because I know that he needs exercise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It does. | ||
| But it helps me too. | ||
| And it's fun. | ||
| I talk to him when we run. | ||
| I guess we're running. | ||
| I have little conversations with him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Fun. | ||
| He's not judging you, right? | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| I could be fat. | ||
| I could be covered in shit. | ||
| He'd probably prefer that. | ||
| Make you more interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the runner's high is a real thing. | ||
| But you have to achieve some level of fitness before I think it kicks in. | ||
| Yeah, closest I've come to that is the sex high. | ||
| Post. | ||
| No, during. | ||
| Maybe there's like a workout element to that. | ||
| Well, sex, when you're really aroused and you're really attracted to the person, like in the middle of the act of it, it's like you're on a drug. | ||
| It can be like this incredible elevation where you're high, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're high in this crazy aroused state. | |
| And you have that hyper-focus that you're talking about removing anxiety. | ||
| You're not thinking about anything other than where you are. | ||
| It's one of those beautiful moments. | ||
| I had a guy on my podcast recently who's like a legend in the world of high-risk stuff. | ||
| He's a base jumper and he flies those wingsuits. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| What is his name? | ||
| He lives in Bozeman, Montana. | ||
| Andy Stump? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's crazy, because my friend Andy Stump lives in Montana, too. | ||
| I'm sure he knows him. | ||
| He holds the world record for that wingsuit shit. | ||
| Ben Stewart, could it be? | ||
| Man, I don't remember. | ||
| I'm sure Andy knows him. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| He lives in Bozeman. | ||
| And this guy's 44. He's been doing it a long time. | ||
| It's about how old Andy is. | ||
| Andy's probably a little younger than that. | ||
| They probably fly together. | ||
| Yeah, really nice guy. | ||
| But it was interesting how here's this guy who's doing this super high-risk adrenaline stuff. | ||
| Like, he just had done this thing where he's paragliding with another dude on the Brooks Range in Alaska. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Like, just the two of them, and they'd land and camp. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| You know, nowhere, bears everywhere, like, forget it. | ||
| And then they'd get up the next morning, jump off the mountain, and keep going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, fuck. | |
| Fuck. | ||
| But this guy was so calm. | ||
| He was just like, it was like talking to Buddha or something. | ||
| He was just like so centered and relaxed and focused. | ||
| It was beautiful. | ||
| We had a really enjoyable conversation from my perspective anyway. | ||
| Because I tend to be kind of scattered and, you know, tangentially speaking, right? | ||
| I'm going all over the place. | ||
| Whereas he was just like, it was just really centered and balanced. | ||
| It was nice. | ||
| I guess you have to have laser focus if you're going to fuck around with that kind of stuff. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You don't want to... | ||
| Is that the jam? | ||
| Yeah, Jeff Shapiro. | ||
| That's him. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Yeah, thanks, Jamie. | ||
| Yeah, and that's his falcon. | ||
| He's got this falcon as well. | ||
| Right when I was starting to love him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's got a fucking falcon. | ||
| He's all into flight, man. | ||
| Yeah, I guess so. | ||
| Yeah, he's a cool dude. | ||
| Those wingsuits, man. | ||
| I mean, talk about risk versus reward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| He told his story. | ||
| He was like, he said, yeah, you know, I've had the experience a few times of, you know, standing on this toes over the cliff 3,000 feet up or whatever and fist bump with your buddy and he goes and says, see you, you know, see you down there. | ||
| He goes and then you hear it. | ||
| Yeah, he's gone. | ||
| Like, I've carried dudes' bodies out of the woods, you know. | ||
| I've done that too many times. | ||
| He was talking about, you know, these different approaches and how the young guys tend to be more, fuck it, man. | ||
| They think they're indestructible. | ||
| And at his age, he's seen enough, he's carried enough bodies, he's lost enough friends that he's not thinking that way anymore, you know. | ||
| And he doesn't want to be around guys who are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because he doesn't want to deal with the trauma, you know, well, it's all there's a competitive aspect to it, too Come on. | |
| Don't be a pussy. | ||
| Yeah, you know like that stuff can get you killed too because then it's just like sort of Hijacks your own Way of interacting with whatever the fuck this danger is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, peer pressure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's real Yeah, I start off. | |
| I'm a pussy I'm a creep. | ||
| I'm a pussy. | ||
| You know, like, you got no leverage. | ||
| I'm lazy. | ||
| You know what fascinates me, man? | ||
| Mob mentality. | ||
| Mob mentality like, you know, if there's like a riot, like physical violence, in a way that you would never, like, a lot of people who would never think about hitting someone When people are hitting people all over the place, you'll just dive in. | ||
| People will dive in and kick people and punch people. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| Like bar fights, you see? | ||
| I've never seen one in real life. | ||
| Oh, I've seen a bunch of them. | ||
| Does that happen? | ||
| People just randomly punching each other? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| People just punch people. | ||
| I've seen some pretty chaotic brawls. | ||
| But there's a strange feeling in the air. | ||
| It's almost like a smell. | ||
| Jim, you're nodding. | ||
| I was at a riot, and earlier in the day, we were like, the hornet's nest is going to explode tonight. | ||
| We kind of felt it. | ||
| What was the premise? | ||
| It was after the Ohio State-Michigan game in 2002. The Ohio State-Michigan game, I know you don't really understand the football thing of it, but there, it's a huge day, big event. | ||
| We won in a very close game, undefeated season for Ohio State, so they're headed to the national championship. | ||
| This then meant sofas on fire in the street for like the next couple hours. | ||
| And then shortly as the night exploded, there was a couple bonfires in the middle of the street. | ||
| We saw that on the news, so we went close to see it because we were a couple blocks away. | ||
| As we got close, we heard the knee-knocker bullets getting fired out, so everybody scattered. | ||
| Were those rubber bullets? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everyone went from one street on campus to three other streets. | ||
| Then it started up again. | ||
| The street I was on, seven cars got flipped over, I think, and lit on fire. | ||
| So people started trying to move their car so they didn't lose it because their college kids don't have any money, whatever. | ||
| A lot of those people got caught on videos, expelled from school, whatever, but... | ||
| the riot police, the SWAT team, like, lining up. | ||
| They started firing out tear gas everywhere. | ||
| A tear gas canister ended up on the porch of the house we were in. | ||
| Like, exploded in the house almost. | ||
| Like, we were all coughing and had to get the fuck out of there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Lasted for a couple hours, like... | ||
| No one died or anything like that. | ||
| There wasn't a lot of violence, but just 12 to 15 cars got fucked up. | ||
| The thing is, someone could have died. | ||
| What's really crazy about those chaotic moments of violence is that when something's in the air and you see a big brawl going on, it's like everything seems... | ||
| It seems like civilization's flimsy, like for that brief moment. | ||
| I think there's a natural thing that kicks in with people that sort of allows them to act in war and allows them to act like when the tribe is invaded. | ||
| Like when, you know, when a neighboring army invades your village, there's some thing that kicks in where you, like, recognize this is violence and you just look to swing on anybody that's around you. | ||
| And you see it in these brawls when you see some sort of a riot. | ||
| Like, you see these people and you're like, I guarantee you that guy's never punched anybody before in his life. | ||
| And he's running over trying to punch people. | ||
| And everybody's punching everybody. | ||
| And people are swinging. | ||
| You see it in these fucking... | ||
| Whenever you see, like... | ||
| Like an Antifa versus Proud Boys type thing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like these left versus right Trump supporters versus Bernie bros. | ||
| You see chaos. | ||
| You're talking about online or in the street? | ||
| Tribal. | ||
| Tribal moments where it feels like it could break out into violence at any time is a smell in the air. | ||
| It changes the atmosphere of the air and you feel like you've got to protect yourself. | ||
| Anything can happen at any moment. | ||
| From people that you would never think of as being violent. | ||
| You would never assume violence. | ||
| That these folks would be violent to you. | ||
| They don't look scary. | ||
| They're not scary-looking people, but everybody just seems to get out. | ||
| It's like a thing happens, like the locust. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like a little trigger happens with people. | ||
| Dormant behavior patterns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've often wondered about what that is, because I've been around it a bunch of times. | ||
| Well, I was around it once, big time in high school. | ||
| When I was in high school, there was a kid who lived in this really nice house, and he'd moved into the neighborhood for the first time, and he decided he was going to have a party to meet a bunch of people, make friends. | ||
| And people started robbing his house, and a brawl broke out. | ||
| I'll never forget it. | ||
| I was there at the event horizon of the brawl. | ||
| I was there the moment it happened. | ||
| A girl did something to a guy. | ||
| I can't remember what she did. | ||
| I can't remember if she threw a drink in his face or if she hit him. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| But I remember him hitting her. | ||
| Because I remember him pulling his hand back. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god, he's going to punch her in the face. | ||
| And boom! | ||
| He punched her right... | ||
| I mean, like, he knew how to punch, too. | ||
| It was like a real punch to the face. | ||
| The girl goes unconscious. | ||
| And then, you know, she falls back. | ||
| And then chaos. | ||
| I mean, people diving on top of people, piles of people out in the yard. | ||
| Everybody's fighting everybody. | ||
| You're just ducking. | ||
| It's like a movie. | ||
| And almost everyone has no idea what they're even fighting about. | ||
| No, I saw the moment it happened. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| God, I wish I could remember. | ||
| Memory is so sucky. | ||
| You know, it really is. | ||
| I have like this blurry slide, but I do remember that fist hitting her face. | ||
| Because I remember he went like this. | ||
| I was like, oh no, he knows how to punch. | ||
| And he went BANG! He just cracked her in the face. | ||
| And she just, like, her head went back and she went out cold. | ||
| And I think somebody caught her. | ||
| I think someone caught her as she was going down. | ||
| And then it was just melee. | ||
| But I remember the feeling in the air. | ||
| Because that was the first time I think I'd ever been around anything like that. | ||
| I was like, whoa! | ||
| It was piles of kids fighting on everyone's team. | ||
| Were you fighting? | ||
| No, I was running away from everybody. | ||
| I was like, I gotta get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I mean, I always did martial arts, but I was very, very rarely involved in any... | ||
| Extracurricular altercations. | ||
| So I just got the fuck out of there. | ||
| And the other time was when I was a security guard for Great Woods. | ||
| Great Woods is a place in Mansfield, Massachusetts, was like this concert venue. | ||
| And Neil Young was playing, of all people. | ||
| And there's a lawn area. | ||
| I've slept in his bed. | ||
| Have you really? | ||
| Yo, I can't tell that story. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Yeah, never mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I haven't. | |
| I haven't. | ||
| So it's an amphitheater. | ||
| So there's this covered, seated area. | ||
| And then behind the covered, seated area is this gigantic lawn area. | ||
| And I don't remember if it was cold out. | ||
| I remember what the deal was. | ||
| But people started lighting fires on the lawn, like little bonfires. | ||
| And then chaos broke out. | ||
| The security people started trying to put out the fires and tell people to stop. | ||
| And then people started hitting people and just crazy. | ||
| And I always kept a hoodie with me. | ||
| Because I was getting like $9 an hour or something like that. | ||
| I'm not going to get shot for $9 an hour or beat up. | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| So as soon as shit went crazy, I put my zip up. | ||
| I put my hoodie on. | ||
| I'm like, I quit. | ||
| I quit the job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| And as I was leaving, as I was quitting, I was watching people just beat the fuck out of people. | ||
| And I was like dodging my way through this thing. | ||
| I'm like, get out of here with this stupid fucking job. | ||
| You got to know when to leave, man. | ||
| But it was a feeling. | ||
| It was like, oh, there's that fucking smell in the air. | ||
| Like anything can happen at any moment now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you think about these dudes who, you know, come back from war with PTSD. You know, again, it's this consciousness context dependent behavior where, you know, they do things in that situation and then they come back to the normal world. | ||
| It's like coming out of a dream. | ||
| And it's hard to believe you did that. | ||
| It's hard to believe that was you. | ||
| And how do you integrate that into your life with your wife and your kids and mom and dad and the neighbors? | ||
| I mean, those poor guys, they're dealing with some real heavy shit there. | ||
| And no one tells you how to do that either. | ||
| No. | ||
| No one knows how to do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And no one gives a shit, right? | ||
| Like, once they get there, you know, get you to go do what they want to do, then, you know, it's hard to even get, you know, is what, a two-year wait for any sort of psychological counseling? | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It depends on the state, but at least that. | ||
| I had a guy on the podcast... | ||
| Actually, the one Jamie showed, it was right before the wingsuit dude, was a dude who'd been in Iraq, and then he came back and worked as a SWAT team commander. | ||
| So he was doing all sorts of really heavy stuff, and then he just got out. | ||
| And now he's living off-grid in Idaho, raising three little boys with his wife. | ||
| And he's a former Mormon, so he sort of talked about how Mormonism taught him to respect authority and do what he was told. | ||
| And that just fed right into his experience in the Army and with the police. | ||
| But man, I have so much compassion for those guys. | ||
| Who get out and like look back and say, what did I do, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who was that guy? | ||
| And how they sort of like stop that, like stop the thought process when they come back into civilization. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But still have the memories. | ||
| And how do you trust yourself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, that I'm not going to hurt anyone else, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it's hard. | ||
| And yeah, like we were just saying, they get very little support. | ||
| They're sent off to do this horrible stuff and then they come back and it's like, okay, no, don't do that anymore. | ||
| Yeah, the incremental progress that we achieve as a civilization is, it's amazing, but also so frustratingly slow that no one, I mean, no one I've ever talked to thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no war. | ||
| No one. | ||
| No one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no murder. | ||
| No one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no rape, where we just figure it out. | ||
| Like, I'm pretty confident if it was just the three of us forever, no one would rape anybody, no one would murder anybody. | ||
| Just the three of us? | ||
| Just the three of us. | ||
| I sure hope not. | ||
| But you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Because I'm probably the victim here. | ||
| But you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, what number of people, how many people do they have to be before one of those things becomes a possibility? | ||
| If you have a group of close friends, a group of close friends who are good communicators and good, honest, healthy, friendly people can live together. | ||
| And, you know, whatever issues you might have with someone not doing the dishes or someone forgetting to put back your lawnmower or whatever the fuck it is, you could work that out. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| Like, what's the number of people? | ||
| 150. Okay. | ||
| That's Dunbar's number. | ||
| Dunbar's number, yeah. | ||
| I'm sure you've heard about that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that might really be it. | ||
| That might really be what we're programmed for. | ||
| Well, that's where hunter-gatherer groups always splinter. | ||
| They never get beyond that. | ||
| And I think that's why, because, you know, a hunter-gatherer group, which is egalitarian and sharing and cooperative and all that, by necessity, right, because that's how our ancestors survived, is by taking care of each other, mitigating risk, you need reputational damage. | ||
| And if everyone doesn't know everyone, reputational damage is no longer effective. | ||
| So if you, let's say you go and you're a good hunter and you kill an antelope and then you don't share it and you just keep it for yourself, that's not going to go over real well with a hunter-gatherer group. | ||
| You're going to be ridiculed, chastised, maybe expelled from the group, maybe have a hunting accident and die. | ||
| Because that hoarding, selfish behavior is extremely taboo in a hunter-gatherer society. | ||
| Whereas, you know, you look at our society where reputational damage is no longer functional outside of your group of friends. | ||
| As long as you're good to your friends, your golfing buddies, you can screw the rest of the world. | ||
| You can not pay your contractors for years and become president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, everyone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Everyone in New York. | ||
| I worked in real estate in New York in the 80s. | ||
| Everyone knew who that guy was and what he was up to. | ||
| And you couldn't trust him. | ||
| He was full of shit and he ripped everybody off. | ||
| But that's how business works in New York. | ||
| Even the company I was working for is really interesting to see how your leverage increased when you owed somebody a lot of money. | ||
| You know, there's that truism. | ||
| If you owe someone five bucks, you have a problem. | ||
| If you owe them a million bucks, they have a problem. | ||
| You know, you really see that. | ||
| But yeah, I think it's 150 is the cutoff for how many people we can keep track of, I think. | ||
| Dunbar's number has proved to be pretty accurate. | ||
| Well, it seems to be what we evolved to sort of be accustomed to, right? | ||
| Well, that's the neocortex. | ||
| You know, Dunbar was looking at the brain anatomy of different primates, and by looking at the proportion of a neocortex to the rest of the brain, he predicted the maximum social size of those primates, of each of the species. | ||
| And that's how he came to the estimate of 150 for humans. | ||
| And then they went and looked at people. | ||
| They did, you know, data collection. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The physical size of something like that. | ||
| There's a direct correlation. | ||
| Like the direct correlation between the size of a primate's testicles and the amount of promiscuous females in the area. | ||
| You've read Sex It's On, Joe. | ||
| Yes, I have! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Finally! | |
| I read it a long time ago, man. | ||
| I read it a long time ago. | ||
| I'm thinking I might do... | ||
| I did the audiobook of Civilized to Death, which I really enjoyed that process. | ||
| I'm thinking I might do a 10th anniversary director's cut audiobook of Sex at Dawn. | ||
| Did you do the audio version? | ||
| No. | ||
| Who did? | ||
| Oh, yuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yuck. | ||
| My friend Steve Rinella, he wrote a book on Buffalo, the American Buffalo, you know, just the history of Buffalo in this country. | ||
| And someone else wrote it, and he finally got the rights back, and he did it himself now. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. | ||
| Because the person who read it was like a soap opera actor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Had no connection to the material at all. | ||
| And in Sex at Dawn, there are a lot of jokes and sort of wry asides and stuff. | ||
| And the people who read it, they don't get it. | ||
| They didn't get the humor. | ||
| So it's just the straight ahead. | ||
| It's as if someone took your comedy material and just read it in a monotone. | ||
| That's called criticizing me in a blog. | ||
| That's what they do when someone takes it and just puts it in quotes like that. | ||
| Yeah, good point. | ||
| There's no delivery there. | ||
| There's no voice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. | ||
| And I think I'm going to, I don't know if Steve did this or not, but I think I'm going to, as I said, a director's cut. | ||
| So I'll, you know, when I read a paragraph that reminds me of something, or, you know, what I thought when I wrote that, or, you know, my dad really wanted me to include that phrase or, you know, whatever little asides. | ||
| So there'll be some commentary as well, I think. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good move. | ||
| David Goggins had a really interesting way he did his. | ||
| He did his book where he actually didn't read it. | ||
| He had a friend read it. | ||
| And then in between paragraphs, they discussed all the different events that happened that he talked about. | ||
| And he gave other details that weren't in the book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So the audiobook is essentially like an audiobook slash podcast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're not just getting a reading of the book, you're getting bonus material as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| I mean, there's no rules with that kind of stuff. | ||
| It's your book. | ||
| You can kind of do whatever you want. | ||
| You could even talk about how you feel now about that chapter. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You could always do that. | ||
| What I would change. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or how you feel about the material itself and how you interact with the facts that you uncovered versus before. | ||
| I don't listen to audiobooks much, but in the van last summer I listened to the Keith Richards autobiography. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Yeah, it was interesting. | ||
| He reads like the beginning, and then this actor who sounds like him, you know, has the same accent, reads most of it. | ||
| And then Johnny Depp reads a couple of chapters. | ||
| And then Keith comes back at the end. | ||
| Well, that was one of the weird things about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was Johnny Depp reading Hunter Thompson. | ||
| And then... | ||
| You know, honestly did a better job of reading Hunter Thompson than Hunter Thompson has done reading Hunter Thompson. | ||
| You know, there's that famous speech about... | ||
| Being there at the end of the 60s and watching the waves pull back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You know that? | ||
| It crested at the Rocky Mountains and then rolled back into the sea. | ||
| That's a fantastic speech, but the way Johnny Depp said it was better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever seen Breakfast with Hunter? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| He freaks out about that particular passage. | ||
| Who was it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex... | |
| Well, they were going to animate it. | ||
| They were going to animate it. | ||
| Yeah, and he fucking pulls out the gun and kicks him off the property and totally loses his shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're going to take the best thing I've ever written and make it a fucking cartoon! | |
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| That guy used to go off. | ||
| He was so crazy. | ||
| Did you ever meet him? | ||
| No, I'm angry. | ||
| Angry that I never met him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would have loved to have met him. | ||
| Yeah, and there were probably a few years there where you could have. | ||
| I could have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a few people. | ||
| Dick Gregory, he's one that I really wish I met. | ||
| I would have loved to talk to him about what it was like to show the Kennedy assassination footage on Geraldo Rivera like 10 plus years after the fact. | ||
| You know, the Zapruder film? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He introduces Zapruder film to the world. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dick Gregory's like a black comedian. | ||
| Yeah, slash activist. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| I remember him. | ||
| Yeah, he brought the Zapruder film to Geraldo Rivera and they played the Kennedy assassination on television. | ||
| Oh shit, it hadn't been seen publicly. | ||
| No, not only had it not been seen publicly, I believe Time Magazine owned it. | ||
| I think they bought the rights to it. | ||
| See if that's true. | ||
| And they shelved it for, I want to say, 12 years. | ||
| It was like 75 when it aired on television. | ||
| Somewhere in that range. | ||
| And the assassination was 63. Was it 63? | ||
| I think it was 63. I was born in 62. Yeah, I guess it was right after I was born. | ||
| And so no one had seen his head go back into the left until that footage. | ||
| And then people were like, wait, what the... | ||
| Really? | ||
| Which doesn't necessarily... | ||
| So how did Dick Gregory get the rights? | ||
| I do not remember. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Who else? | ||
| Have you met Werner Herzog? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| Are you into him? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He's a character. | ||
| Grisly Man is one of my all-time favorite movies. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| It's one of the best unintentional comedies ever, but I don't think it's particularly unintentional. | ||
| There's a fucking moment in that film where the sheriff, when the sheriff's talking about the body and carrying the body off in bags, he's like, what did you think? | ||
| Well, first time I heard about it, I thought he was retarded. | ||
| And then the kid just has a smash cut to the sheriff's face, and I'm fucking howling. | ||
| I'm howling laughing. | ||
| And I'm like, this guy did this on purpose. | ||
| There's so many cuts in this movie that are so humorous. | ||
| I gotta think that, and Werner Herzog, have you ever heard him on Eric Weinstein's podcast? | ||
| No. | ||
| Brilliant guy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Really interesting, intense guy. | ||
| Guy. | ||
| And very dark sense of humor. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's why I thought, I was like, this motherfucker did this on purpose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He made this a comedy. | ||
| So, do you think that, what was the name of the character? | ||
| Timothy Treadwell? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When I watched that movie, my feeling was this guy is closeted gay dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, you felt that too. | ||
| No question. | ||
| He brings up, if I was gay, it would be easy, but I'm not gay. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what he says. | ||
| Because you say, why can't I find a girl? | ||
| You know, he's like walking through the woods with this like lispy gay way of talking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's talking to the – for people who don't know what this documentary is about, it's about a guy named Timothy Treadwell. | ||
| And Timothy Treadwell was – Well, I guess you could say he was a bear expert, but not really. | ||
| Because the real bear experts were like, this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. | ||
| He should get out of there. | ||
| What he's doing, he doesn't need to protect these bears. | ||
| He's pretending that he's protecting these bears. | ||
| He's living with them. | ||
| I think there was a certain element of it that was suicide by bear. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| And he was walking through the woods, holding this camcorder, getting film, going, if I was gay, it would be so easy, but I'm not gay. | ||
| Right, talking to the camcorder as his only friend, because he was out there alone for... | ||
| Months at a time. | ||
| Yeah, every summer. | ||
| But no one who's not gay says, well, if I was gay, it would be really easy. | ||
| I've said that a lot, Joe. | ||
| But unless you're being funny with a friend. | ||
| Like, well, if I was gay, I would just hook up with some dudes. | ||
| But he's saying it like, why can't I find a girl? | ||
| If I was gay, it would be so easy. | ||
| No, it wouldn't. | ||
| You're still living in the woods with monsters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're going to get a bunch of gay guys? | ||
| Gay guys, they want to be in Boys Town. | ||
| I think they should remake the movie in a bear bar. | ||
| On Broadway. | ||
| That would be hilarious. | ||
| That would be hilarious. | ||
| Grizzly man. | ||
| Yeah, instead of doing it with the forest and actual grizzly bears. | ||
| In the West Village. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| If I was gay, it'd be easy. | ||
| There's bears everywhere. | ||
| I went to a bear bar with Andrew Sullivan and Dan Savage. | ||
| There's actually a bear bar? | ||
| Oh, there are lots of bear bars. | ||
| They call them bear bars? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And for people who don't know what we're talking about, bears are big, hairy gay guys. | ||
| Think Tom Segura and Bert Kreischer. | ||
| They do a podcast called Two Bears, One Cave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, do they? | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| But neither one of them is gay. | ||
| But if they were gay, they'd be bears. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Bears. | ||
| Dan Savage is a trip. | ||
| I've had him on the podcast. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| That was interesting. | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| He's super smart and funny as shit. | ||
| And he's armed with nothing but a sense of humor and a great intellect and a big heart. | ||
| And honesty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's changed the world. | ||
| He's saved who knows how many lives. | ||
| You know, he's beautiful. | ||
| I really like Dan a lot. | ||
| Yeah, when someone can just be themselves, again, you know, that's who he is. | ||
| Timothy Treadwell, if he had listened to Dan Savage, everything would be different. | ||
| Well, that leap, man, that coming out leap, fuck, it's got to be so hard for people. | ||
| I know several guys that are closeted and it's torturous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Torturous to see, and one of them, you know, I've talked to him and was like, just come out. | ||
| No one gives a fuck. | ||
| We don't care. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| It'll be a giant relief. | ||
| They worry about, especially actors, they worry about their careers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, when your career is more important than the integrity of yourself. | ||
| But I don't think it hurts. | ||
| I don't believe it. | ||
| I don't believe it. | ||
| The only thing that would hurt with actors is leading man roles. | ||
| Yeah, Rock Hudson kind of guy. | ||
| Yeah, that's one thing that's fucking real. | ||
| Like, I don't know if Tom Cruise is gay, but that's always been this stupid rumor. | ||
| Let's assume it's true. | ||
| If he did come out of the closet, man, nobody wants to go see a movie where he's a leading man, he's got a wife and kids. | ||
| You'd be like, that guy's sucking dick! | ||
| Like, he was... | ||
| He would never buy into it. | ||
| A gay woman, like Jodie Foster, could easily play a straight woman in a movie and no one would care. | ||
| It would be fine. | ||
| That is the fucking glass ceiling in Hollywood. | ||
| It's one of them. | ||
| When a gay man comes out of the closet, those roles, John Travolta, whoever it would be, I don't know if he's gay either, but if he was, that's where the buck stops. | ||
| You cannot be the leading man who's the married guy with kids or the hot man who's in a sexual relationship with a woman if we know that you're having sex with men. | ||
| But then it's funny, right? | ||
| We can watch straight actors pretend to be gay like Burkback Mountain. | ||
| That's no problem. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| No problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Very strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's one of the last open prejudices. | ||
| That we all accept, because no one's been able to bridge that gap. | ||
| Except, what's that dude's name? | ||
| That fucking, he's got three names. | ||
| Little skinny guy. | ||
| Used to be on a sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. | ||
| Neil Patrick Harris. | ||
| Yeah, that guy. | ||
| Doogie Howser. | ||
| Yeah, that guy. | ||
| He's openly gay, and didn't he play a womanizer on a sitcom? | ||
| I think on How I Met Your Mother. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I've never watched it, but... | ||
| But the thing about sitcoms is, they're like plays. | ||
| Those kind of sitcoms in front of an audience, they're horseshit. | ||
| It's not like a movie. | ||
| It's horseshit. | ||
| You know it's horseshit. | ||
| Everyone knows it's horseshit. | ||
| Anything with a laugh track, I'm very suspicious. | ||
| Or studio audience. | ||
| Like Happy Days. | ||
| I love Henry Winkler, but The Fonz. | ||
| That's horseshit. | ||
| No, wait. | ||
| Is Henry Winkler gay? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I always assumed he was. | ||
| Because he was so overcompensating with The Fonz. | ||
| I think that was the character. | ||
| You meet him in real life, he is the nicest guy I've ever met. | ||
| He's so friendly. | ||
| He's in Barry now, right? | ||
| Is he? | ||
| Yeah, he plays an acting coach in Barry. | ||
| I haven't seen it. | ||
| I hear it's Barry. | ||
| I've never seen Barry. | ||
| He's a fly fisherman. | ||
| He wrote a book on fly fishing. | ||
| And I think the book's called, I Never Met an Idiot on the River. | ||
| Because there's something about fly fishing. | ||
| Fly fishing is a very weird pursuit. | ||
| Because a lot of it is catch and release. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which, as a person who enjoys the outdoors and enjoys eating fish that I catch, I'm very torn on that activity. | ||
| That catch and release activity. | ||
| I know it's fun and I have done it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But it's weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| You're sticking a hook through an animal's face. | ||
| I was going to say, it traumatizes the fish. | ||
| It's got to. | ||
| How many of them die? | ||
| Well, fly fishing, very few. | ||
| Because you're dealing with barbless hooks, for the most part. | ||
| So it just goes into this cartilage in their mouth they don't really feel, and then allegedly don't really feel. | ||
| I don't know if they feel it. | ||
| And then, you know, they pull it out and they're fine. | ||
| But there's some catch and release, especially with like three-pronged barbed hooks where the animals definitely die. | ||
| You know, they get caught in their gills and they start bleeding from their gills and then you have to release them anyway. | ||
| Because, you know, in some places the regulation is catch and release. | ||
| But people love doing it. | ||
| They find like peace, like drifting a fly past this area where the fish is lying dormant. | ||
| And then you pull the fly and then the fish grabs it and then you got him. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| But you're tapping into this sort of primal reward system that you have in your DNA that makes you want to catch these fish, but then you're letting it go. | ||
| But it gives you a reason to be out by the river, out in the morning. | ||
| Normally it's morning or dusk when the flies are landing. | ||
| I've been hunting since the last time you and I spoke. | ||
| Yeah, bow hunting. | ||
| You went bow hunting? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, on Hawaii, Big Island. | ||
| Oh, didn't you go with Kyle Kingsbury and Ben Greenfield and all those guys? | ||
| That was a deer, Axis deer trip to Molokai. | ||
| You have a bow? | ||
| I do. | ||
| How often do you practice? | ||
| Since I went hunting, not much. | ||
| But before I went, every day. | ||
| Yeah, I was into it. | ||
| Did you have a coach? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I had some friends who, you know, helped me out. | ||
| And I watched some, you know, Cam, your buddy. | ||
| Yeah, I watched some of his videos. | ||
| But yeah, it was an interesting experience. | ||
| So first I went on that trip with Peter Atiyah and Ben Greenfield, like all these podcast human optimization guys. | ||
| Who set that whole thing up? | ||
| My buddy Kyle Tierman, he's a big wave surfer. | ||
| He spends a lot of time in Hawaii and he knows a lot of people there. | ||
| Jeff Healy, I think. | ||
| Big surfer dude. | ||
| Anyway, so he knew all these people and I guess... | ||
| And Aubrey and some other, those guys sort of asked him to hook them up with a trip. | ||
| And so he put it all together. | ||
| And then at the last minute, I think Aubrey couldn't go, I think because you were coming down to Austin and he wanted to coordinate with you or something. | ||
| So they said, yo, Chris, if you want to go, it's all paid for. | ||
| And I'm like, helicopters? | ||
| Hawaii? | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| So did you have to practice leading up to that, or were you already shooting a bow? | ||
| I was already shooting because Kyle Tierman and I had already planned a trip for like three weeks after that. | ||
| So I was already practicing for that, which was going to be a pig hunting trip on the Big Island. | ||
| But then I went on this deer thing, but mainly I went on the deer thing just because it was an opportunity to fly around in helicopters and see Molokai, which is amazing. | ||
| But I didn't hunt on that, because I didn't... | ||
| Honestly, I didn't want to hurt anything. | ||
| You didn't feel like you were competent enough with it? | ||
| Or you didn't want to do it at all? | ||
| Well, the deer are farther away, and they're much harder. | ||
| They're much more aware, and socking them is a lot harder. | ||
| So I just basically hung out and had a good time. | ||
| They're so hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That animal, axis deer, is an animal that evolved to get away from tigers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're the fastest thing I've ever hunted, by far. | ||
| Super alert. | ||
| I hunted them with Cam Haynes. | ||
| On Molokai? | ||
| No, on Lanai and John Dudley just before you guys went. | ||
| And we were there between the time we were there and when we were there the last spring. | ||
| There was 150 hunters that went there to bow hunt. | ||
| One was successful. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Everyone else pulled out a rifle. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Everyone else was like, fuck this. | ||
| Because you can't get anywhere near those goddamn things without them jumping. | ||
| But if you can get your stalking skills down, or you can sneak up on an axis deer and kill one with a bow, holy shit. | ||
| That's black belt level stuff. | ||
| Well, the dudes I were with, Peter Atiyah, he got two or three, I remember. | ||
| He's very, very, very into it. | ||
| He's a super, super smart guy. | ||
| Yeah, he is. | ||
| He's cool. | ||
| I enjoyed hanging with all those dudes. | ||
| But then the next, you know, three weeks later, we went, Kyle and me and Simon Rex, I don't know if you know him, he's an actor. | ||
| Slash comedian. | ||
| Slash comedian. | ||
| Dirt Nasty. | ||
| Dirt Nasty rapper. | ||
| Yeah, he's a good friend of mine. | ||
| Anyway, we went on this pig hunting trip, and that was interesting. | ||
| That was... | ||
| I wanted to have the experience because I'd never hunted. | ||
| I'd never killed anything. | ||
| And I eat meat, so I felt like I have this responsibility to have the experience and confront it and all that. | ||
| And I was actually the first of our group to kill a pig. | ||
| And it was strange. | ||
| I didn't feel sad or traumatized. | ||
| I felt heightened awareness, you know? | ||
| Like... | ||
| But I think I might hunt again. | ||
| I'm moving to Colorado. | ||
| I just bought land in Colorado. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| What part? | ||
| Sort of south central. | ||
| It's a tiny little town. | ||
| Yeah, it's an interesting area there. | ||
| But anyway, there's a lot of elk hunting there. | ||
| And I'll probably do some elk hunting with local people. | ||
| Are you going to do it with a bow again? | ||
| No, I think I'll use a rifle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's the way to go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you're not going to be completely obsessed and do it every day. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I don't do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, you know, the thing about a bow is, and maybe this is what you're implying here, if you're not really good, the chances of you... | ||
| Of an elk running off or a pig running off with an arrow in its ass and dying a slow, horrible death is quite high. | ||
| If you hit him with a rifle, high-powered rifle with a scope, you know, and you're in the right range. | ||
| You can still wound him, but you're much more competent with a rifle. | ||
| And it's a better... | ||
| It's a better meat gathering tool. | ||
| It's a good way to describe it. | ||
| And Colorado has, I think, twice as many elk as any other state or country. | ||
| Colorado is one of the best places in the world to elk hunt. | ||
| So that's a good spot if you're looking. | ||
| And also, you're taking a life, you take an elk, that's a lot of meat. | ||
| I shot this pig, it was about, you know, it was a yearling, I think. | ||
| It's not a lot of meat on a pig that size. | ||
| So, yeah, but it was interesting. | ||
| Are you living in this van? | ||
| No, I have an apartment. | ||
| I still have an apartment in LA, but I'm about to give it up, I think. | ||
| Just to just be a nomad? | ||
| Yeah, because, I mean, I was in the van five months, and it's like, okay, I'm paying rent to what? | ||
| Like, to leave my clothes there, basically. | ||
| Like, I don't really need to be doing that. | ||
| No, I admire that sort of nomad sense of life. | ||
| I don't ever see myself doing it, but there's a romantic aspect to it that's undeniable. | ||
| Well, your life's different, man. | ||
| You have kids. | ||
| You have a life here that you've built over a lot of time. | ||
| I just got here a few years ago. | ||
| You're kind of a prisoner to that, though, in a certain way. | ||
| You're a prisoner to all your obligations. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| That's one of the things that's romantic about this nomadic thing that you're doing. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| You know, I have to come here. | ||
| I have a certain amount of podcasts after a week. | ||
| But you don't, Joe. | ||
| You don't. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I was thinking that we're talking about the closeted gay actors. | ||
| What is money worth if you can't buy your freedom with it? | ||
| Your freedom to be who you are, right? | ||
| As a closeted gay person, right? | ||
| Let's say... | ||
| What is it good for? | ||
| I mean, that's the first thing. | ||
| I think with the closeted gay folks, the real problem is the feeling that you're going to be rejected if you come out. | ||
| I think that's entirely different than someone who gets wrapped up in jobs. | ||
| One of the things that I could say about the jobs that I have is that I really do enjoy them. | ||
| I'm enjoying this conversation. | ||
| I love talking to people. | ||
| I love doing stand-up. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| And I still enjoy doing the UFC. Those are my three jobs. | ||
| And I don't do the UFC as much as I used to. | ||
| Would you do them all if you were making $100,000 a year total? | ||
| I mean, I certainly obviously could live off $100,000 a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If that's what I made a year. | ||
| So the money isn't what makes them fun. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| It's the thing itself. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Well, that's what's made the money. | ||
| What's made the money is my, I mean, I think, right? | ||
| I think it's my enjoyment of the things that's made them interesting. | ||
| Like, one of the things about podcasts, and I think... | ||
| There is a parallel in stand-up, is that genuine enthusiasm, like real, legitimate enthusiasm, is contagious. | ||
| And if you're genuinely interested in talking to people, genuinely curious, it's interesting to listen to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, you do your best to get out of your own way, and you do your best, I do my best, to not be annoying. | ||
| And I fuck up sometimes. | ||
| There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. | ||
| I'm a human being, and I've done 1,500 of them. | ||
| But you cop to it when you do, which I think is another thing that's endearing and... | ||
| I mean, you're a really interesting case, as I'm sure you know. | ||
| And I've watched you, even since I've known you, like, your profile has moved much closer to mainstream American, you know, popular. | ||
| You were mentioned on fucking Saturday Night Live a couple weeks ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, we're. | |
| Right? | ||
| You know? | ||
| And there's some article about Joe, where was it, in Harper's or the New Yorker's? | ||
| Something recently that I read, like, super mainstream. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| But you're really interesting because you're like this man's man, but you're also vulnerable. | ||
| You know, you're also, like, you admit when you fuck up. | ||
| Like, you had someone, the Twitter guy on, and you're like, yeah, I wasn't prepared, I fucked it up, and you had him back, and that's cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's... | |
| And it's probably, I don't know, is it hard for you to maintain that kind of humility when you're getting all this pressure and opportunities and all this stuff coming at you? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| No, I think that's just being honest. | ||
| You know, if you've... | ||
| I mean, I think if I'd stopped... | ||
| If I fucked up and I stopped admitting that I was fucking up, it would all go off the rails. | ||
| There's no way... | ||
| I couldn't maintain who I am. | ||
| I would be thinking about it all the time. | ||
| You'd be like... | ||
| Back to the closeted gay dude, right? | ||
| Yeah, you'd be closeted... | ||
| You'd be a bullshit artist. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, you'd just be pretending you're cooler than you are. | ||
| I think part of being a human being is making mistakes. | ||
| It's a messy thing to be a person, you know? | ||
| And I mean, I'm also big on forgiveness. | ||
| And I think you have to be because human beings are fallible and like we're saying, we vary from moment to the next. | ||
| And to try to hold someone to who they were six months ago or a year ago or five years ago or what they said or what they did and not accept it and hold a grudge To me, that's crazy. | ||
| Do you want people to do that to you? | ||
| What kind of life is that? | ||
| What kind of civilization are we creating where people hold grudges and don't forgive people for things of the past? | ||
| But you also have to be able to forgive yourself. | ||
| I struggle with that way more, believe it or not, than I struggle with forgiving other people. | ||
| I can forgive other people pretty easy, for whatever reason. | ||
| I've always been able to. | ||
| So what's the difference? | ||
| I'm super self-critical, and I have definitely some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder that allows me to get really good at things because I obsess. | ||
| You know, it's probably unhealthy, but I manage it. | ||
| But, like, the mania that goes on in my mind, I just figured out a way to put it to use. | ||
| It's like, okay, I got this fucking engine. | ||
| Like, what do I stick it on? | ||
| Let me stick a thing in there, and I could drill a hole with that instead of just having it going, blah! | ||
| Which a lot of people do. | ||
| A lot of people don't find a focus for whatever mania they have going on in their mind. | ||
| So I've found various things. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why I don't ever see myself not doing anything. | ||
| I don't have enough time. | ||
| That's my issue. | ||
| There's a lot of things that I love to do that I just don't have the time for. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| 52. Do you feel like you're sort of figuring things out? | ||
| Always. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Always. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like, I have this sense, 57, I have this sense that, like... | ||
| Like, I don't know, like, I finally learned to dance and the party's almost over. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's a great way to say it! | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| It's like, I'm finally figuring this shit out, and I'm almost 60. Well, I remember when I was, like, 26, 25, and when I first came out here, I remember thinking, boy, by the time I'm 52, oh, fucking everything's solved. | ||
| There's arbitrary numbers that we have in our head of who you should be at 50 or 60 or whatever the number is. | ||
| You're just alive, man. | ||
| You're just alive. | ||
| And while you're alive, you better forget about all those numbers. | ||
| I remember thinking like the year 2000. When the year 2000 comes... | ||
| Like, what's that gonna be like? | ||
| Wow, I'm gonna be so old and... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Dude, it's almost 2020. I know. | ||
| It's gonna be 2020 in a couple months. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That is such a nutty number. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's why I love living in the van, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I've... | ||
| You know, so much has... | ||
| Since you and I sat... | ||
| I don't know, a year or so since we've seen each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My dad's died. | ||
| I'm living in the van. | ||
| This book's come out. | ||
| Like, all this stuff's happening. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| But I've spent most of the time sitting by a campfire looking at the stars, you know? | ||
| The times that I get outside, like when I elk hunt every year, and I spend time, particularly in Utah, in the mountains, the place that we go, it's just, it's cleansing in a way that is so hard to describe. | ||
| It's so hard to describe what it's like just to be out there in the woods and be in the forest and be with the wild animals. | ||
| You're home. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what this book's about. | ||
| I don't mean to push the conversation to the book, but that's why I wrote the book. | ||
| We are designed by evolution to live. | ||
| Civilized death. | ||
| Available now. | ||
| Available at all your local bookstores near you. | ||
| And Amazon and all that other stuff. | ||
| We're designed to live in that world. | ||
| So that's why it feels so good. | ||
| That's why golf courses look the way they do. | ||
| Even fucking old executives love being out there on the grass and the water and the undulating hills. | ||
| It's the African savanna. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Even when it's manicured, right? | ||
| It still feels good. | ||
| It still feels good to be connected to nature. | ||
| It feels good to be on a lake. | ||
| Lakes are the best, man. | ||
| To be able to sit on the dock of a lake. | ||
| There's a feeling of like... | ||
| You know, you look out, you see trees. | ||
| Have you ever been to Coeur d'Alene? | ||
| Yeah, I was there this summer. | ||
| I haven't, but a friend of mine has a house there, and I saw a picture of the water, and you look all the way down, like 100 feet deep. | ||
| Down, you see the bottom, like it's a piece of glass. | ||
| This is bananas. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't take a shower for about three months. | ||
| You must have smelled amazing. | ||
| I smelled great, because every morning I jumped in a river. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| That counts. | ||
| That counts, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Did you use soap or not? | ||
| No, I haven't used soap in a decade. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| But you smell okay. | ||
| How weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My microbiome is working. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's fine. | |
| Well, there's articles that have been written about that by people that say you shouldn't use soap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, a lot of them, because you're disrupting your microbiome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I use deodorant. | ||
| There's Coeur d'Alene. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sandpoint's really nice, too. | ||
| Idaho's great. | ||
| Idaho's gorgeous. | ||
| I love Boise. | ||
| Yeah, and Montana, Western Montana. | ||
| Oh, yeah, man. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look how pretty that is, though. | ||
| God damn, that lake. | ||
| And when you have a boat on a lake, it's like you have a car, but there's no road. | ||
| Everything is a road. | ||
| It's all flat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you can go wherever the fuck you want. | ||
| Same thing with airplanes. | ||
| It's amazing what you can do. | ||
| That's even crazier. | ||
| You into flying? | ||
| Well, my friend Bill has a helicopter license. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, Bill Burr. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| He took me around his helicopter. | ||
| That's pretty wild. | ||
| I thought about that. | ||
| I was like, that might be a cool thing to get into. | ||
| That's hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He spent a lot of time learning how to fly. | ||
| And it's expensive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But a single-engine airplane, you can – $100,000, you get a decent single-engine airplane, and you can go wherever you want. | ||
| My uncle has an amphibious plane, so he lands on lakes. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, and he used to... | ||
| Could he land on ground, too? | ||
| Yeah, so that's amphibious. | ||
| So it has wheels and floats. | ||
| Does he have to switch things up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you have to change out the... | ||
| No, no, you just push a button, the wheels retract. | ||
| Oh, no shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He forgot once and flipped it. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| So you don't want to forget. | ||
| How many people fly drunk? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I bet they do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, if the weather's good. | ||
| Wasn't that like a Patrick Swayze thing before he kicked the bucket? | ||
| What are you laughing about? | ||
| What are you laughing about? | ||
| You're laughing about something, huh? | ||
| Harrison Ford? | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Was he drunk? | ||
| Harrison Ford might have been. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Might have been. | ||
| Or maybe he's an old dude. | ||
| Old dudes look drunk all the time. | ||
| And babies. | ||
| That's a great way to achieve privacy, too. | ||
| If you're a guy like Harrison Ford, it must be hard for that guy to go anywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's probably real hard for him to go to a regular airport. | |
| Yeah, I've got the perfect amount of fame. | ||
| I was thinking about this today on the airplane, flying down from Portland. | ||
| I was in the front row, so I had extra leg room, but I wasn't in business class. | ||
| That's where I am in fame. | ||
| I want to stay right there. | ||
| I've got a little extra leg room. | ||
| You can be normal, stretch your legs out. | ||
| Some people recognize me, but they all like me. | ||
| If you don't like me, you don't know who the hell I am. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Yeah, so you're at a different level. | ||
| There are people who recognize you who are like, fuck that guy, Joe. | ||
| Me? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I mean, you get mostly love, I'm sure. | ||
| Remarkably, though, most people are nice. | ||
| Even people that don't like you, they don't really know you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If they knew you. | ||
| It's some image they have. | ||
| I'm nice. | ||
| If you know me or you meet me, I guarantee we're probably going to get along. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And if we don't, I'm going to work hard to make it not uncomfortable. | ||
| The thing about people liking people and not liking people, a lot of it is this severely limited way of communicating, especially when it's one way. | ||
| If you're putting out a podcast or you're putting out books and they're reading your shit but they don't get to interact at all, that builds resentment. | ||
| There's a lot of weird resentment that people develop when they listen to you and they don't get to interact. | ||
| Especially if someone like me Who's always talking shit, right? | ||
| I talk shit for a living, basically, and I'm always giving my opinions, and some people have maybe even a strong point that I probably even agree with them. | ||
| And they don't get to say anything. | ||
| So they're sitting at home listening like, fuck this guy, I'm tired of this bull. | ||
| Yeah, you occupy space in their lives. | ||
| Yes, but they don't get to interact. | ||
| You owe them something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes, yes. | |
| That makes sense. | ||
| It's a crude way of communicating. | ||
| These one-way methods of communication are very crude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I was thinking my buddy Simon and I were in a restaurant in Venice and the woman recognized me and like, oh, I love your podcast and gave me your number and I was like, yeah, I'll give her a call sometime. | ||
| And Simon's like, dude, I would never do that. | ||
| You never, never, you know, interact with your fans. | ||
| And then I was like, no, but Simon, you don't get it. | ||
| She actually knows me. | ||
| Like, in Simon's case, like, he was in Scary Movie 3, 4, 5. He was, you know, he plays these characters. | ||
| So when people are like, yo, Simon, like, they don't know him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's this, the face they recognize, but they don't know the dude. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's a different kind of thing. | ||
| I really, like the van trips, the vanthropology thing, I'll say, okay, I'm going to be in Boise at this beer pub Thursday at 8, and people show up. | ||
| 50, 100 people show up. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But it's mainly so they can meet each other. | ||
| So when you do this, do you do live shows? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you do live shows? | ||
| I've never done a live show. | ||
| I've done, like, Duncan's a couple times with him. | ||
| You know, we've done... | ||
| We did the... | ||
| What was it? | ||
| A couple years ago, we did the keynote at the float conference in Portland. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That was a good audience. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's a tuned-in group of people, right? | ||
| But I don't do the shows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just... | |
| Keynote at a float conference. | ||
| With Duncan. | ||
| Yeah, it was great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| That sounds perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's really just to build community. | ||
| That's what I want to do. | ||
| I want them to meet each other because they're all beautiful weirdos. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Hopefully. | ||
| Yeah, they are. | ||
| I've never met anyone through the podcast that I didn't really actually like. | ||
| What kind of numbers do you get? | ||
| Like, what kind of downloads? | ||
| How many episodes? | ||
| You know, it's hard to know, but probably 50,000 an episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's perfect. | |
| Something like that. | ||
| That's perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a good number. | ||
| Between 50 and 100. Like, you know, when you and Duncan were on, when we were doing the shrimp parade thing, it would, you know, peak because it's you guys. | ||
| Do you use advertising? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| For five years it was listener-supported only. | ||
| Patreon-type deal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then this friend of mine who has this company, Mudwater... | ||
| He was sort of launching that and he was like, dude, I want to advertise on your podcast. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, I love you, buddy, but I don't do that. | ||
| And he sent me an email chain where he was negotiating with another podcast that has roughly the same audience numbers as mine. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm leaving that much on the table? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| At this point, I only do ads for companies that I really like and that I use their stuff. | ||
| So I don't have a broker or any of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I think the subscription model, like when people are paying, like a paywall, the problem is the growth is so limited. | ||
| So then you could either just do it for free and put it out there and maybe just sell books or sell T-shirts or, you know, in my case, tickets to shows. | ||
| That would work. | ||
| I'm going to be in Cleveland this weekend. | ||
| And Detroit. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| What's it like to play Detroit? | ||
| Is Detroit coming back? | ||
| I love Detroit. | ||
| They're good people. | ||
| They're fun people. | ||
| They're happy you're there. | ||
| Detroit is not necessarily coming back to where it used to be. | ||
| It's a bit like, what is a comeback? | ||
| It's never going to be an auto industry. | ||
| When you get back in shape and you're 70, guess what? | ||
| You're never going to be who you were when you were 20. It's never going to be what it was. | ||
| I mean, it was the richest city in America at one point in time. | ||
| During the peak of automobile production, I believe it was one of the richest cities in America. | ||
| And it's a far cry from that now. | ||
| And it's strange when you drive through the town and you see these boarded up buildings and factories with all their broken windows. | ||
| And you could buy a house for like $100. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| But then there's also a lot of craft restaurants and these businesses that are building up and these hippies that have kind of moved in. | ||
| And they're kind of... | ||
| you know making stuff there and there's a lot of cool shit cheap enough to get in and do stuff yeah yeah which is you know if you're a young person growing up there you know like you can make something happen and with the internet the your ability to establish a business and your ability to you know to actually get something off the ground it's so much different than it ever has been before yeah and and people love a good comeback story so detroit like a bunch of detroit made | ||
| things could be exciting for people like yeah look at that detroit i'll buy that yeah detroit made you know there's a company called shinola if you ever heard yeah the watches really nice watches american-made watches they make a bunch of other stuff too like bags leather goods things along those lines but One of the things they proudly say is made in Detroit. | ||
| And they make cool shit, you know? | ||
| So there's something to that, you know? | ||
| But the place I'm working at is the Fox Theater. | ||
| And it's just like really fucking cool old theater. | ||
| And what's interesting, there's columns. | ||
| And it was back when people used to be able to smoke. | ||
| They smoked in there so much that all the columns are like... | ||
| They have that orangey nicotine sort of tint to them. | ||
| But one of the columns was replaced by... | ||
| So this one column is clear and smooth and clean, and the other ones are fucking orangey. | ||
| It seems like you could go up to them with a butter knife and just scrape the nicotine off of them. | ||
| But it's a beautiful old building that was made... | ||
| Way, way, way back in the day, and they said that when it was first made, it was one of the only buildings in Detroit that had air conditioning, so people would go to see movies there, and they would pay to see movies just so they could fall asleep. | ||
| They'd go in there in just the cool air, and they'd fall asleep during the summer, because people would just be sweltering in the heat of the summer. | ||
| I've done that in Bangkok. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just gone to a cinema just to get out of the heat. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| I fucking love Thailand, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I really, really enjoyed Thailand when I was there. | ||
| You went recently. | ||
| Yeah, last summer. | ||
| It's like, people are so nice. | ||
| Food's great. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| It's the one country I'm comfortable recommending to just about anyone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because the sort of confluence of convenience and safety and ease, and it's still exotic and really interesting and very foreign... | ||
| You know, I wouldn't recommend India to everyone or Indonesia, but Thailand is like, whatever your tolerance is, you'll find something there that works for you. | ||
| Yeah, I know a lot of fighters who've gone there for camps, for training camps, and wound up either moving there or starting camps there or starting gyms there. | ||
| They just love it so much. | ||
| I feel like it's a part of their home. | ||
| Yeah, I've been there a lot, probably 10 times over the years. | ||
| It's real cheap, too, in terms of food, eating, lodging. | ||
| It's the best food in the world, as far as I'm concerned, Thai food. | ||
| I love spicy food, so to me it's excellent. | ||
| And it's balanced. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| It's not just like, blast your face off spice. | ||
| It's really nice. | ||
| Did you go to Laos at all? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's an interesting place. | ||
| Really good. | ||
| I heard Vietnam's amazing. | ||
| That was Bourdain's, one of his favorite places. | ||
| Yeah, he loved it. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| I was there for three months in Vietnam. | ||
| I didn't dig it that much. | ||
| There's some really beautiful places, but I found, I was traveling with Casilda, my wife, who's dark-skinned, and there's a lot of racism in She got harassed a lot because everyone assumed that she was a local. | ||
| And with me, makes her a prostitute. | ||
| And dark skin makes her low class. | ||
| So there was a lot. | ||
| A dude punched her. | ||
| A guy punched her? | ||
| Yeah, an adolescent kid ran up. | ||
| We were on a motorbike in his rice paddies. | ||
| And this kid just ran up and punched her in the back and then ran off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| A young kid? | ||
| Yeah, like 15 or so. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty heavy. | ||
| She got, like, physically accosted three times in Vietnam. | ||
| How long were you there? | ||
| Three months. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so I didn't dig Vietnam that much. | ||
| Then we got to Laos, and it was, and there was like, I mean, it's a tough country. | ||
| They've had, I mean, a shitstorm been going on there since the 40s, you know, or even before that, the French occupation and all that. | ||
| So I'm not blaming anyone. | ||
| Isn't that a big part of the heroin trade, Laos, as well? | ||
| It was during the Vietnam War. | ||
| Now I think heroin's more coming out of Afghanistan. | ||
| And Mexico. | ||
| They've got the cartels. | ||
| Do you see the fucking shit that's going down? | ||
| Where the government and the armies have backed down and let the cartels run everything? | ||
| Yeah, well they took El Chapo's son back, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How insane is that? | ||
| I mean, how is that going to play out? | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I'm going to Mexico in a couple months, but I'm going to a different part of this. | ||
| Where are you going? | ||
| Chiapas, way down south, on the border with Guatemala. | ||
| I really love it down there. | ||
| There's a town called San Cristobal de las Casas that's up in the Ponderosa Pines, maybe 4,000 feet. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| Indian villages around and they come down on market day. | ||
| I'm going to go down there and work on another book. | ||
| What are you writing now? | ||
| You know, it's kind of under wraps because I talked about this book way too much and it slowed me down. | ||
| Is it all about Neil Young's bed? | ||
| I can get a guy in trouble for saying that. | ||
| You remember the first time I was on this show, how fucked up it was at the beginning? | ||
| Were you even aware of that? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| So the first time I came on the show, I didn't know you, right? | ||
| And I didn't know anything about you because I was living in Spain. | ||
| And Duncan, I had done Duncan Show. | ||
| It was the first time I'd done a podcast. | ||
| I didn't know what a podcast was. | ||
| I came to LA to visit my parents. | ||
| I had this email from Duncan. | ||
| I'm a comedian. | ||
| You want to do a podcast? | ||
| I'm like, sure. | ||
| Never met a comedian. | ||
| Don't know what a podcast is. | ||
| So I did it. | ||
| We had a good time. | ||
| And after, he's like, you know, I'd love to introduce you to my friend Joe Rogan. | ||
| I think you guys would get along and you could do his podcast. | ||
| I'd never heard of Joe Rogan. | ||
| Right? | ||
| No insult intended. | ||
| I lived in Spain. | ||
| I never watched Fear Factor. | ||
| Your whole thing was happening over here. | ||
| I didn't know about it. | ||
| And then I went back to Spain. | ||
| I was like, okay, Duncan's friend Joe... | ||
| Does this podcast in his living room the way Duncan does, I assumed, right? | ||
| And I went back to Spain, and I was talking to my buddy Voodoo, who's a tattoo artist. | ||
| And he's like, so how was LA? I was like, yeah, cool. | ||
| I did a podcast with this comedian. | ||
| It was really fun and interesting. | ||
| And he's like, oh, you should do Joe Rogan's podcast. | ||
| I'm like, dude, how do you know Duncan's friend Joe, right? | ||
| It was this whole weird thing. | ||
| He's like, no, dude, Joe Rogan. | ||
| So I tried to tell you that story the first time I came. | ||
| And the point of the story is I'm an idiot, I don't know what's going on, right? | ||
| I'm oblivious. | ||
| But we got to the point where I said I didn't know you, and you were like, so what did you do, Google me? | ||
| And I was like, well, not really. | ||
| And then we had to do a sound check, or you had to do an ad or something, and the story got interrupted, and I felt like you thought I was trying to diss you or something. | ||
| I definitely didn't. | ||
| Yeah, well, I was paranoid. | ||
| Then you lit up a joint. | ||
| And he passed the joint around. | ||
| And I'm like, fuck, if I don't hit this joint, then I'm confirmed asshole here. | ||
| So I hit the joint even though I hadn't smoked any weed in months. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it was this, like, California weed. | |
| I'm holding, literally, I remember, I'm holding the bottom of my chair, trying not to fall out of the chair. | ||
| And we start talking, and I'm telling this story about a dude that I had met on an airplane, and he was super into Sex at Dawn, and then we were going to do a movie together and whatever. | ||
| And then his wife took the book away from him. | ||
| Do you remember all that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then I was just like, oh fuck, I shouldn't have told that story. | ||
| You know, this whole, I'm fucking everything up. | ||
| And I said to you, can we just, because we're like five minutes in at this point. | ||
| And I was like, Joe, can we just like cut this and start over? | ||
| And you looked at me and you said, "It's live, bitch." You don't remember any of that. | ||
| I do now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I do now. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I knew the guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I knew the guy. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And you were like, say his name. | ||
| And then I said his name. | ||
| You're like, no, he's a friend of mine. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, shit. | ||
| I shouldn't have said his name and the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, and then I left, Casilda was here in the studio, and we left, we got in the car, and I said, man, was that as awkward as I felt? | ||
| And she's like, that's the worst I've ever seen you. | ||
| You were great! | ||
| Established a great friendship. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No issues at all. | ||
| I don't know, maybe you enjoyed watching me suffer, I don't know. | ||
| I do enjoy watching people get too high. | ||
| It's not a suffer thing. | ||
| It's like, I've been there. | ||
| It's a commiseration thing, I think. | ||
| One of the things about these Sober October things is you realize there's so many things that are so much easier when you're not high. | ||
| It's almost like you handicap yourself by getting baked. | ||
| I was talking to Brian Redband about this. | ||
| We were talking about how the early days of podcasts, we would get obliterated before we do the podcast. | ||
| For years, up until maybe 2013 or 14, I had a volcano. | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| Those vaporizers. | ||
| It fills up this bag. | ||
| And you take these big, deep hits off this THC vapor. | ||
| And then as soon as you put the bag down, and we go, okay, let's get going. | ||
| Let's start the podcast. | ||
| And be like, oh my God, what have we done? | ||
| And it was this feeling every time we did the podcast was, oh my God, what have we done? | ||
| And you'd be in the middle of saying something. | ||
| And as you're saying, like, what am I talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't even know what I'm talking about. | ||
| And then you would say, oh, no, no, no, it's not that. | ||
| You would screw things up. | ||
| You'd get scrambled in your head. | ||
| When there's no pot at all, that never happens. | ||
| I mean, you might make mistakes, but you know what you're talking about while you're talking about it. | ||
| When you're really, really high like that, there's a lot of times where you're talking about stuff where you literally don't know exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like that split personality thing we were talking about earlier. | ||
| Marijuana has so many pros, but it's got some cons. | ||
| Like everything in life. | ||
| Like love and good things and bad things and food and sleep. | ||
| There's pros and cons. | ||
| And then the cons become very evident when you're not doing it. | ||
| I still think every time I do these Sober October things, I always think, well, I'm going to cut back. | ||
| I'm going to cut back on some weed. | ||
| And I think I did last year. | ||
| Like after October, I was like, I am not going to do it as much as I used to do it. | ||
| Do you drink? | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| Like wine, beer? | ||
| I love wine with meals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I have a nice meal, I love a glass of red wine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like a cold beer on a hot day. | ||
| Love that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I lived in Spain 25 years or something. | ||
| And like over there, wine is like water. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You have wine with breakfast. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's just part of life. | ||
| It's like olive oil. | ||
| It's on everything. | ||
| That's funny, because I just saw a restaurant. | ||
| I was at a restaurant. | ||
| I was using the bathroom, and they had a sign up that said, a meal without wine is called breakfast. | ||
| So that's Italian. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In Spain, they're like, fuck it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, not everyone's doing it, but workers, like you'll see workers in a bar, you know, they have their sandwiches and a glass of wine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some coffee with little Baileys in it. | ||
| Nothing wrong with that. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with it if you can handle it. | ||
| Well, you know, when I got to Spain, I remember talking to people like, wow, alcohol is everywhere. | ||
| And it's not like liquor licenses here. | ||
| Like every cafe is serving wine and beer and whatever. | ||
| You can just sell it. | ||
| It's everywhere, yeah. | ||
| And kids are there, and it's just, you know, it's not set aside. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the Spanish guy said to me, you know, in Spain, we have many alcoholics but no drunks. | ||
| And it's true. | ||
| Like, you don't see people puking in the street, you know, raging, drunken lunatics, like, you know, in the US. What about, like, sports events, like soccer games? | ||
| They sell beer, full-strength beer. | ||
| I don't remember if they sell wine. | ||
| And, yeah, I mean, Barcelona is a special place. | ||
| I don't know what it's like in Madrid. | ||
| I never went to a soccer game in Madrid. | ||
| But Barcelona, the Catalans are sort of dry, very self-contained people. | ||
| So, you know, there's no raging. | ||
| And right now there's rioting going on, but that's a political thing. | ||
| What are they rioting over? | ||
| Catalan independence. | ||
| Didn't something happen today in Hong Kong? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've been out of the loop today. | ||
| Hong Kong protests have been going on for so long now. | ||
| It's months and months and months. | ||
| It's like Intense. | ||
| And chilly now, too. | ||
| In Santiago, chilly people are rioting. | ||
| Yeah, shit's getting interesting. | ||
| It's heating up. | ||
| Yeah, it's a strange time to be alive. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Across the board. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I feel like we're at an inflection point. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Hong Kong frees murder suspect whose case led to protests. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Trying to take the air out of it. | ||
| You ever read Joseph Campbell? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the hero with a thousand faces, his observation that societies all over the world have basically the same origin myth, which is the odyssey, right? | ||
| It's the person goes out and has all these challenges and faces their fears and learns all the stuff and then returns home with the knowledge that they've gained and they realize that what they were looking for all the time is actually... | ||
| I feel like, as a species, we're at the point in that journey where we're turning toward home. | ||
| That's sort of the overriding narrative of this book, that where we are now is we've learned enough that we can go back to or go toward a way of living that replicates in important ways where we came from. | ||
| So you're doing it. | ||
| You're hunting. | ||
| You're spending time in nature. | ||
| We're looking at different ways of raising kids. | ||
| We're looking at paleo diet, fasting, controlling the frequency of the light that comes into our eyes at night. | ||
| There's this awareness that the way forward requires an understanding of where we came from. | ||
| So I kind of feel when I'm having a good day, I feel like we're at this point now, this crisis point where these institutions, central institutions of Western civilization are collapsing around us. | ||
| They're just government, Wall Street, religion. | ||
| It's all just like being exposed as incompetent and useless in many cases. | ||
| But we've learned these really interesting things like birth control and passive energy and different ways of living on the earth without destroying it. | ||
| And so the sort of metaphor I use in the book is that we're going to live in zoos, right? | ||
| But do we want to live in the Calcutta Zoo or the San Diego Zoo? | ||
| And I feel like, you know, what we're seeing now is we're clearly in a moment of massive global change. | ||
| And I hope that what the opportunity will... | ||
| That's being presented is to redesign human existence in a way that's more in accordance with our nature. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| I'm struggling to be optimistic. | ||
| I'm optimistic, too. | ||
| I always wonder if the numbers are just unmanageable. | ||
| Well, that's why I mentioned birth control. | ||
| We know how to reduce global population. | ||
| But people want babies. | ||
| But why do they want babies? | ||
| What's the incentive? | ||
| For women, I think there's a biological need. | ||
| There's a feeling that not all women, but many women have, where they have that biological clock. | ||
| It's telling them to have a baby. | ||
| When they have a baby... | ||
| I mean, you've seen women that have children. | ||
| It's the most intense bonding, the most intense release of oxytocin, the most intense love and feeling of connection with another living creature that... | ||
| I've ever experienced that I could ever explain to someone. | ||
| And it's a natural part of being a human being. | ||
| It also changes who you are as a person when you are responsible for these little people and then you have love for these little people. | ||
| Like Dave Chappelle said to me once something that really resonated. | ||
| He said, not only has it changed how much I love, it changed my capacity for love. | ||
| And that resonated. | ||
| I was like, that's what it is. | ||
| It changes how I feel about other people. | ||
| And the experience for a man is entirely different than it is for a woman because the woman literally creates the being in her body. | ||
| A baby is growing inside a woman's body and then she gives birth to it. | ||
| With a man, you do what you always do. | ||
| You fuck her. | ||
| But now you have a baby. | ||
| And it's undeniable that you love the baby, you love your child, but you did not have the experience of having it grow inside your body, which I think is a connection that no man is ever going to understand. | ||
| I don't think it's possible to understand what a woman experiences when she has a baby grow inside of her body. | ||
| But then... | ||
| What had changed for me, which was a big one, was it made me look at people Instead of looking at them like static beings. | ||
| You see the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, I looked at them. | ||
| I was like, oh, that was a baby. | ||
| Christopher Ryan used to be a baby. | ||
| That was cute, too. | ||
| Yeah, I bet you were adorable. | ||
| And now here you are, grown-ass man. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is something that's missing in our experience when we're not there and we don't see that little person become a big person. | ||
| That's missing. | ||
| I feel like I've gained, you know, this is part of what I was referring to earlier where I said, like, you know, we're learning to dance and the party's almost over. | ||
| I don't have kids. | ||
| I've been around kids. | ||
| But I feel like when I was in my 20s, let's say, I sort of worked this out recently in relationships that I think there are three things. | ||
| There's attraction. | ||
| There's compatibility. | ||
| And there's love. | ||
| And I look at a lot of my relationships with women, they had two of those. | ||
| Always love. | ||
| Sometimes the sex was great, and sometimes the compatibility was great, and very rarely all three of those. | ||
| But I used to think love was a really limited, scarce experience in life. | ||
| And the older I get, the more I feel like, no, I could love anybody. | ||
| If I spent enough time with them and got to know them, I'd feel love for them. | ||
| That's not hard to find. | ||
| It seems it's everywhere. | ||
| When I was young, I thought it was really hard to find. | ||
| Well, for some people it is. | ||
| Some people it's hard to find someone who loves them and some people are burdened down. | ||
| You're very free in the sense that because you have this unusual way of making money and you don't have a lot of needs, you don't need a lot of material things. | ||
| Some people are very burdened by these needs and they're not free and they're confined to a job and it's very difficult for them to meet anybody. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And then you're also stressed out all the time because of bills and horseshit and then work politics and work dynamics and dealing with the fucking environment of the office. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you got a boss that's an asshole who's like, you know, you have board meetings and shit and everybody's got to sit there and get cancer while this asshole talks. | ||
| You know, are you imagine sitting at a board table and some guys, what we got to do with this company? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The Matrix? | ||
| I need you to be here after work. | ||
| You're here 9 to 5, I want to see a real commitment. | ||
| We're a family. | ||
| Yeah, when I'm leaving at 7, I want to see you still here working. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| And then it's hard to meet somebody. | ||
| It's hard to find love. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Certainly you're right about that. | ||
| I didn't really mean in a dating sense so much as just like a compassion sense. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That everybody's lovable. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, like one of the things that I love doing in my podcast is meeting somebody who's never told their story before and never even thought of their life in terms of a narrative, and in the course of the podcast, having them realize how fucking interesting they are and having them realize how fucking interesting they are and how interesting their life is. | ||
| I've had people break into tears and stuff, you know, because they've never thought, like no one's ever asked. | ||
| Everybody's interesting. | ||
| Everybody's got some kind of bizarre story to tell. | ||
| Often they don't know it, you know? | ||
| And I feel the same way. | ||
| Like, everybody's lovable. | ||
| I'm not talking about romantic love. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| I'm just like, yeah. | ||
| And you reminded me of when you were talking about seeing the full person's life. | ||
| Sometimes I've looked at, like, women that I was with who were, you know, 35 years old, and I see the old lady in them and be moved by that. | ||
| You know, like, you're going to be a beautiful old lady. | ||
| I'll be dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll be gone. | |
| You're a weirdo. | ||
| I see that, and I'm like, I've got to get out of here before she becomes an old lady. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-oh. | |
| I see menopause coming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get me out of here. | |
| I don't want anybody angry at me for shit I didn't even do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I know what you're saying. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| And, I mean, everybody's lovable to somebody, right? | ||
| I mean, unless you're a fucking psychopath. | ||
| I had another thing I put on my list here I wanted to mention, almost as a public service, sleep apnea. | ||
| I have sleep apnea. | ||
| Do you know about this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you snore? | ||
| I have a mouthpiece. | ||
| Do you have the CPAP machine? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Oh, you do the jaw thing. | ||
| No, no, it's different. | ||
| It holds my tongue down. | ||
| It keeps my tongue from sliding back. | ||
| It made a world of difference. | ||
| Changed everything. | ||
| Dude, that's why I wanted to mention it. | ||
| Like, anybody who's got, like, I was not breathing for 20 seconds at a time. | ||
| And, yeah, this woman I was sleeping with, like, actually counted, you know? | ||
| And she's like, dude, like, you're choking, you're suffocating. | ||
| So I went and got a test. | ||
| It's super easy. | ||
| You take it home and hook this thing in your finger and all that. | ||
| And they told me, I think it was like 25 episodes per hour is considered severe. | ||
| I had 74. Every minute I was suffocating to the point where I sort of woke up and like my throat tissue, you know, the muscles contract so you can breathe again. | ||
| So you're like always at the surface. | ||
| I got one of those machines. | ||
| Dude, I'm like sleeping again. | ||
| I'm dreaming. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| Now, do you have a hard time putting that thing in your mouth? | ||
| No, it's no problem. | ||
| It's like scuba diving. | ||
| You got a regulator, you know? | ||
| I mean, you have the full face one that goes over your nose and your mouth if you tend to breathe through your mouth. | ||
| Or they have them that just go over your nose. | ||
| Which one do you have? | ||
| I have both. | ||
| I started, because I used a nose one and then I was breathing through my mouth and that's all weird, so then I got the big one. | ||
| But after a month with that, now I just use the nose one. | ||
| Now that pumps air, right? | ||
| What it does is it creates air pressure, but just very – it's adjustable. | ||
| It adjusts based on your reaction to it. | ||
| And so when you are – when you're breathing, the air pressure keeps the passages open. | ||
| So it can be anatomical. | ||
| It can be your tongue falling back. | ||
| That's what it is for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it keeps the passage open. | ||
| It's just a slight pressure. | ||
| And it's really nice because it's like you take a deep breath and it fills your lungs because there's just that little extra push. | ||
| And it's totally quiet. | ||
| There's all this stigma around it. | ||
| People think it's really gross or loud or whatever. | ||
| The new machines are great and they have a humidifier in them so you can adjust the... | ||
| How do you power it up when you're camping and stuff? | ||
| Well, I've got an electrical system in the van and I also have a backup battery, a little lithium battery. | ||
| That's all you need? | ||
| Power the whole night like that? | ||
| Yeah, if you don't use the humidifier. | ||
| If you use the humidifier, it sucks up more because it's a heating thing. | ||
| Does the humidifier help? | ||
| Yeah, it's great, because you can adjust it. | ||
| You know, like here in LA, we're in a desert, it's dry, so you can turn it up. | ||
| If you're, you know, I was in Seattle, I'd turn it off. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| So it's just changed the way you feel? | ||
| I feel so much better. | ||
| I'm like sleeping through the night. | ||
| I dream again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't, I mean, I feel kind of evangelical about it, because, you know, I know a lot of people have this, men and women, And there's this weird kind of shame around it, and I'm just trying to be like, hey. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird thing to be shameful. | ||
| Yeah, fuck it, man. | ||
| Sleep. | ||
| You gotta sleep. | ||
| It's really important. | ||
| It makes everything better. | ||
| You're like 50% more likely to have car accidents if you have sleep. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It'll fuck up your job. | ||
| You won't get hard-ons. | ||
| It'll ruin everything. | ||
| Some people, it's really bad, too. | ||
| And it goes on for years and years and years, and they don't even know about it. | ||
| I was on a plane once, and there was a guy behind me, and I would hear... | ||
| And I turned around and I was like, oh, this poor bastard. | ||
| He was a big guy, like very overweight. | ||
| And I mean, I was watching this guy lying there with his mouth open like this for a long time. | ||
| And then finally he would jostle and catch some air. | ||
| And he woke up and I said, hey man. | ||
| And I said, do you know you have sleep apnea? | ||
| He's like, what do you mean? | ||
| And I said, okay. | ||
| Let me tell you what's going on. | ||
| And I showed him my mouthpiece. | ||
| I'm like, I have this thing that I have to sleep with. | ||
| Because it was a long flight we were on. | ||
| And I said, you got to go to a doctor. | ||
| Get that checked out. | ||
| And he goes, oh, okay, thanks. | ||
| I go, no, no, no. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got to go to a doctor. | ||
| I go, this is going to, it'll change your life, man. | ||
| Heart disease. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, a lot of bad shit can happen. | ||
| It also affects people's dietary choices. | ||
| Because when you're exhausted like that, I know how I am. | ||
| Like, last night, I was tired. | ||
| I came home from the improv. | ||
| It was like 1 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| I should not have eaten. | ||
| But I was like, fuck it. | ||
| And I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at 1 a.m. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I definitely shouldn't have had that. | ||
| Where's the jalapenos, man? | ||
| Well, I just felt like peanut butter and jelly. | ||
| Yeah, gotta do it. | ||
| It's a bad choice. | ||
| But when you're tired, you make bad choices. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You make bad dietary choices. | ||
| It's very, very common. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When people are exhausted and overworked. | ||
| And I think that has to apply to people with sleep apnea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where you're always exhausted. | ||
| Like, throughout the day, you're just sucking down coffee and trying to stay awake. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My dad had it for sure. | ||
| And he never had it treated. | ||
| And yeah, maybe that's another reason that I'm sort of evangelical about it because it's like it's so easy. | ||
| So many of the things that mess up our lives are really hard to address. | ||
| Like, you know, the litany of things you were talking about, board meetings and all that. | ||
| But, you know, if you can get a good night's sleep for, you know, a visit to... | ||
| A doctor. | ||
| I mean, this thing cost $800 for this machine I have. | ||
| Yeah, it changes your whole life. | ||
| Your whole life solves the problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| Like, that's pretty cool. | ||
| It's pretty fucking cool. | ||
| Some people have a problem with those CPAP machines, but maybe it's just the kind they use. | ||
| Joey Diaz changed his life. | ||
| He started using that thing. | ||
| He brings it. | ||
| He's got a portable unit. | ||
| He brings them on planes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Brings it everywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| I mean, I wish every problem were that easy to solve. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| What else you got there? | ||
| On my list? | ||
| I made a bunch of notes. | ||
| Oh, the Motherfucker Awards. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Do you know about that? | ||
| So my buddy Kyle and I did it last year. | ||
| So the idea is we were hiking one day in Topanga and we were talking about how he's an environmental activist as well as a big wave surfer. | ||
| Kyle Tierman Show. | ||
| He's a podcast as well. | ||
| Everybody has a podcast. | ||
| Everybody's got a podcast. | ||
| He's a really good guy. | ||
| He's like one of these – I think he's 28. He's like super earnest. | ||
| And he's the kind of guy like you're having a conversation and you mention a book. | ||
| And a week later, he's like, hey, I read that book you mentioned. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| It's like – All right. | ||
| All young people should be like you, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's really, like, smart. | |
| Yeah, and serious about stuff. | ||
| Anyway, we're talking about how hard it is to get people to pay attention to environmental issues because it's such a downer, you know? | ||
| And I was like, man, I know all these comedians. | ||
| It would be cool if we could find a way to get comedy into the environmental thing. | ||
| And we came up with this idea where we flip everything upside down and we say, we have an awards ceremony to honor the companies that are doing the most to fuck Mother Earth. | ||
| And the awards are accepted on behalf of the companies by comedians. | ||
| So we did it last year and it was fucking wild. | ||
| It was so great. | ||
| So the presenters were people like Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone and the guy who was the founder of Greenpeace and environmental people and sort of political people. | ||
| And accepting on behalf of these people, like Leo Flowers, if you know him, Jake Johansson, Moshe Kasher, and Natasha Leggero did this incredible bit where they were incestuous brother-sister couple. | ||
| Yeah, I think they represented Chase Bank. | ||
| Yeah, and Brendan Walsh. | ||
| He was fantastic. | ||
| He looks like Dennis Miller there. | ||
| Yeah, he does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it was great. | ||
| We wore tuxedos and we did this whole thing. | ||
| Where did you do it at? | ||
| At a theater in Inglewood. | ||
| The Miracle Theater in Inglewood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, it was great. | ||
| And it's funded by various people, but the Nell Newman Foundation, Paul Newman's daughter. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| She's a big supporter. | ||
| When are you doing it again? | ||
| December 3rd. | ||
| Ah, cool. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| Same place? | ||
| Same place. | ||
| If you're free, come accept an award. | ||
| Yeah, let me find out. | ||
| I think I'm out of town. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| We're lining up, like, Brian Callen. | ||
| Oh, beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, he wants to do it, but it depends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lots of people. | |
| We're working together tonight. | ||
| Oh, good. | ||
| We worked together last night. | ||
| I had dinner with him a week ago. | ||
| Yeah, we did two shows last night, and we're doing two shows tonight. | ||
| I like that guy a lot. | ||
| I love him, to death. | ||
| He's one of my favorite people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he's also real down-to-earth. | ||
| He's a real dude. | ||
| People often ask me, like, I guess I'm like a conduit to people like you and Brian, and it's like... | ||
| What are they like in real life? | ||
| They're like they seem to be. | ||
| I don't think you could do as many podcasts as he does or as many as I do and be somebody else. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't think. | ||
| It's too much work holding up the facade. | ||
| I don't think it would work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't think you could hold up a facade that long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I mean, again, everybody varies. | ||
| You vary who you are, depending upon the day and the stresses and the influences in life. | ||
| But I don't know anybody who's full of shit. | ||
| Like, I don't know anybody who's doing a podcast who's got, like, a totally different persona. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I bet a lot of those self-help fellows probably, they're rocking that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a full of shit industry. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's one of those... | ||
| It's like, there's people that are real self-help people that are doing real work, and they really are committed to it, and they love it, and they really love helping people. | ||
| And then there's other people that find that as like a niche. | ||
| It's a way to get in. | ||
| It's a little greased path. | ||
| It helps you like... | ||
| Slip on in. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And sometimes it's hard to tell who's who in that world. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird world. | ||
| It's one of the weirdest worlds. | ||
| The world of constant motivation, where you're constantly motivating people and trying to find some new way to say things you've already said a thousand times. | ||
| And what's it all boil down to? | ||
| You know? | ||
| It all boils down to the same simple shit again and again. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Experience over possessions, forgive yourself and others, love yourself and others. | ||
| But sometimes they can say something that resonates. | ||
| Some people can say something that resonates. | ||
| But those people have to... | ||
| There has to be something unique about them, like their life experiences. | ||
| They have to have accomplished something. | ||
| There has to be some actual meat behind their words. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And there's a lot of people that are doing it that are just doing it. | ||
| They're not really doing anything else. | ||
| They just do that. | ||
| That's very strange. | ||
| It's very strange because they've tapped into this need and this feeling that people have where they need to be motivated and they need someone to say positive spiritual things that resonate with them. | ||
| So these people have sort of found that as a way to become popular or famous or insta-famous or whatever, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it's like buying a membership to a gym and then never going. | ||
| Or what I do sometimes, I love to buy camping gear. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| I don't really camp very much, though. | ||
| But I love camping gear, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like high-quality tents and backpacks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I go to REI. I have grand plans. | |
| I need stakes. | ||
| I need those little fucking aluminum stakes to get the tents into the dirt. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| Yeah, the spiral ones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| They're really good in sand as well. | ||
| I got them. | ||
| I got a special hammer to put them in, and then it's got holes that you hook and pull them out. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I've used it maybe twice in five years. | ||
| If you're lucky. | ||
| Yeah, I bought one of them fucking, what are those things called? | ||
| Those little stoves, the little propane stoves, little thing that sits on top of it. | ||
| Never used it. | ||
| I was like, I'm going to use this on our next trip. | ||
| But when civilization collapses, you've got that in the garage. | ||
| That's really important. | ||
| When civilization collapses, you really want flint and steel, and you want some tinder. | ||
| I mean, you can't count on any of that shit, because you don't know how to make a lighter, so you can't count on lighters. | ||
| You've got to be able to make a fire without a lighter. | ||
| Also, when civilization ends, you're not going to want to live. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| It's just too hard. | ||
| There's no way to really prepare for it. | ||
| No, it's too hard. | ||
| I guess if that's all you've ever known, if all you've ever known was living in an incredibly primitive way and hunting and gathering, you'd be fine with it. | ||
| Well, hunting and gathering is easy for hunter-gatherers. | ||
| If you live in a fertile place. | ||
| Even if you don't, in the Kalahari Desert, the Kung San people work roughly 20 hours a week. | ||
| And what we're calling work is hunting and gathering. | ||
| What are they hunting? | ||
| I guess there are some sorts of antelope, rabbits. | ||
| Rats? | ||
| Desert rats? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't spent much time in the Kalahari Desert. | ||
| Speaking of rats, there's a fucking crazy article about these monkeys that are eating rats. | ||
| Makaak? | ||
| Makaak? | ||
| How do you say it? | ||
| Makaak monkeys? | ||
| Look at this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Makaak. | |
| Killer rat-eating monkeys stunned scientists in Malaysia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I saw that yesterday, and I was going to tweet it, but I was like, alright, I've tweeted too many fucking crazy things today. | ||
| Whenever I read something really bonkers, I tweet it. | ||
| But that one, I'm like, I'm saving this one for tomorrow. | ||
| But look at the size of that goddamn rat, and these monkeys are ferocious predators. | ||
| And they thought of these monkeys as being primarily fruit eaters. | ||
| But no, they really favor eating rats, and it's holding this goddamn rat down and eating it head first. | ||
| That's a hell of an image. | ||
| Fucking A, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you ever been to- A popsicle or something. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a sandwich. | ||
| It's like he's eating a hoagie. | ||
| Yeah, a foot-long rat. | ||
| Fucking A, man. | ||
| Look at the distant look in his eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| Just eating a rat head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You ever been in a place with wild monkeys? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, Costa Rica. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| We were worried. | ||
| Do they come right up to the... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were staying at this resort, and one of my kids wanted to feed the monkey an Oreo. | ||
| And my wife was like, oh, he probably shouldn't. | ||
| It's not good for him. | ||
| And then I said, let's give him one fucking Oreo. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| I bet he's already had an Oreo before. | ||
| I forget what the conversation was. | ||
| Anyway, the monkey takes the Oreo, opens it, and eats the white frosting. | ||
| I was like, that little motherfucker's eating a lot of Oreos. | ||
| He knew exactly what to do. | ||
| He turned it, just like everybody does, and started scraping off the frosting and looking right at you. | ||
| Yeah, there was different kinds of monkeys, too. | ||
| There was howler monkeys, and there was big monkeys and little monkeys. | ||
| That's a crazy place. | ||
| Costa Rica's wild, man. | ||
| Crocodiles and shit. | ||
| That was another interesting place I visited. | ||
| The crocodiles are a trip, man, because we were in a boat, and we went on this sort of tour of this river system. | ||
| And you go on a tour of the river system, and I'm watching this fucking 15-foot crocodile slide into the water from the bank. | ||
| I'm like, fuck! | ||
| And you see the crocodile slides all over the banks, because these rivers are just filled with crocodiles. | ||
| And so anytime my kid would come anywhere close to the railing of the boat, I'm like, hey, hey, hey, let's stay over here. | ||
| Let's stay in the middle. | ||
| What the fuck away from the monsters? | ||
| I met this dude a long time ago. | ||
| I don't remember where I was, but we were sitting around a fire talking about, like, bizarre experiences we'd had traveling, whatever. | ||
| He was from, I think, New Hampshire, and he had a thing, like you and Marshall go running every morning, he had a thing where he and his dog would go down to the lake and take a swim every day at dusk. | ||
| When he got home from work, he'd take the dog for a swim. | ||
| It was a black lab, I think. | ||
| And he went to visit his brother in Florida. | ||
| And he drove down there. | ||
| And his brother was out when he arrived. | ||
| And it was around dusk. | ||
| And he's like, ah, let's go for a swim. | ||
| There's a lake. | ||
| And he jumps in the water with his dog. | ||
| And they're swimming across the lake. | ||
| And it's quiet, right? | ||
| And he hears this... | ||
| And he's like, what was that? | ||
| That's a weird sound. | ||
| And then he realizes, I'm in fucking Florida. | ||
| I'm not in New Hampshire. | ||
| There are alligators here. | ||
| What the fuck am I doing? | ||
| So he turns around and starts swimming back. | ||
| And he's swimming along, trying not to panic. | ||
| And the fucking dog goes, dog's gone. | ||
| Fucking alligator came, or croc came up and took his dog. | ||
| Never saw the dog again. | ||
| What? | ||
| It could have been him, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of my favorite alligator stories from Florida is there was a high-speed chase. | ||
| Guy had a stolen car, and he gets to a bridge. | ||
| The cops are chasing him. | ||
| Guy jumps out of the car, jumps off the bridge, gets eaten immediately by an alligator. | ||
| Literally landed in front of the alligator. | ||
| And the alligator just snapped. | ||
| They don't eat people that often, but they definitely will. | ||
| Yeah, in Africa they do. | ||
| Well, crocodiles. | ||
| Alligators are less aggressive than crocodiles, and there are crocodiles in Florida, but they're much less frequent. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| American alligator is a smaller animal. | ||
| They have a longer, pointier snout, and they have more exposed teeth. | ||
| An alligator has a blunt, more rounded face, and they... | ||
| They get much larger than American crocodiles. | ||
| American crocodiles are pretty small. | ||
| American alligators get pretty fucking big. | ||
| So in Africa, do they have crocs and alligators? | ||
| No. | ||
| Africa is just crocodiles. | ||
| Just crocs, okay. | ||
| They have much, much, much more aggressive crocodiles, too. | ||
| They have Nile crocodiles. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You see them take those water buffalo and stuff. | ||
| Yeah, it's terrifying. | ||
| Saltwater crocodiles. | ||
| I thought I'd seen video what you said, so I googled it. | ||
| Four different times, at least in the last couple years, this has happened. | ||
| One guy lost his arm. | ||
| Two people died. | ||
| The Florida thing? | ||
| Getting chased by the cops and ended up getting eaten by an alligator. | ||
| It's not just one time. | ||
| That's fucking Florida, man. | ||
| Florida, man. | ||
| Florida is so wacky. | ||
| That is the place where all the refugees and the outcasts, they all go to Florida, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, more than once. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| You jump in the water, man. | ||
| You're risking it. | ||
| Just because alligators don't eat people as often as crocodiles do in Africa, it doesn't mean that they wouldn't. | ||
| They don't have a rule book. | ||
| Like, oh, that's a person. | ||
| Shouldn't eat them. | ||
| They don't give a fuck if you're a dog or a person or a kid. | ||
| There was an alligator ate a baby at Disney World. | ||
| Oh, I remember that. | ||
| Yeah, like three years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, fucking two-year-old baby playing by the water. | ||
| The alligator just slides up on the bank, snatch, pulls it right under. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| That's a bad day, yeah. | ||
| When I lived in Florida, when I was a kid, we lived in Gainesville, and there was alligators everywhere, and I remember one of them snatched some lady's dog, and I was like, Jesus Christ, I didn't know they killed people's dogs, because you would see them floating around, and they seemed so innocuous, because they were almost always still. | ||
| They very rarely moved. | ||
| There were signs, they didn't want you to feed them marshmallows. | ||
| People would throw marshmallows, and the alligators would eat marshmallows. | ||
| And they just don't want you to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
They don't digest them well. | |
| Because they float? | ||
| The marshmallows float, I guess? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they would just chew them up and swallow them so people would throw marshmallows at the alligators just to see it. | ||
| That was back when alligators were endangered. | ||
| This was in the late 70s. | ||
| And they're not endangered anymore. | ||
| In fact, you could kill as many of... | ||
| Like, you can get a commercial hunting tag for 500 alligators. | ||
| I watched that on that Swamp People show. | ||
| I've never seen it. | ||
| This is a show about alligator killers. | ||
| They're just killing alligators. | ||
| Do you know the last Indians to be pacified? | ||
| I hate that phrase. | ||
| In the United States, the last tribe to finally give up was Seminole in the Everglades. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, after the Apaches and the Sioux and all that? | ||
| Yeah, because, man, that would be a weird life. | ||
| Yeah, fuck. | ||
| To live in the Everglades? | ||
| Well, the Everglades are another thing that human beings ruined because of white trash people in Florida. | ||
| Because releasing pythons... | ||
| There's literally nothing left alive in the Everglades. | ||
| All the deer are missing. | ||
| All the raccoons are missing. | ||
| All the marsh hares, gone. | ||
| Everything's missing. | ||
| These scientists and biologists have done these surveys of wildlife, and the difference between 1980 and 2019 is so unbelievably stark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's so crazy and it's all those fucking dorks that want to keep pets and then they release them. | ||
| They release them out there in the wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pythons. | ||
| But it's not just the Everglades, right? | ||
| I read recently like 30% of all the birds in North America are gone in the last 40 years. | ||
| A lot of that's house cats. | ||
| Have you ever seen the numbers of how many house cats, how many birds house cats kill? | ||
| Billions. | ||
| Billions just in United States. | ||
| But they're cute. | ||
| Adorable. | ||
| Fucking billions, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Killers. | |
| Billions of birds. | ||
| Like, scientists were baffled when they did the actual survey and they found the real numbers. | ||
| They're like, this can't be real. | ||
| This can't be right. | ||
| Billions. | ||
| You have a cat, right? | ||
| Yeah, two cats. | ||
| Oh, you had a whole bit in your stand-up about a cat, I remember. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I like cats. | ||
| I love cats. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're interesting creatures. | ||
| I had three of them in Spain. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| They had their own little world, you know? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Three of them did what they wanted to do. | ||
| The only bummer is litter boxes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I had them outside. | ||
| Gotta have them outside the house. | ||
| In my neighborhood, you cannot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Coyotes. | ||
| Yeah, no coyotes in Barcelona. | ||
| Owls and coyotes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those owls are a motherfucker. | ||
| They'll snatch them up just as quick as anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have big owls out here. | ||
| So if you were going to die from an animal attack, what animal would you like to die from? | ||
| You'd like a big cat because they would kill you before they'd eat you. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A bear would just eat you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Black bear will eat you. | ||
| Grizzly bears sometimes... | ||
| Grizzly bears will eat you too. | ||
| Well, they'll fuck you up. | ||
| Anyway, this is what I was told when I was in Alaska, that you play dead with a grizzly but never with a black. | ||
| Well, hmm. | ||
| Because some grizzlies, if they think you're dead, they'll kick some dust on you and come back a week later when you're fermented. | ||
| They're like French people. | ||
| They want it to stink, you know? | ||
| Like old cheese. | ||
| That's not totally true. | ||
| It depends on how hungry they are and whether or not they're old. | ||
| But you are more likely to be attacked by a black bear for predation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A friend of mine was attacked recently. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he had to shoot a black bear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he tried to chase it off and he stumbled upon, there was a smell, he's a rancher, he stumbled upon this smell and the smell was a dead cow and this black bear had been eating this dead cow and he tried to chase the black bear off and the black bear decided to try to go after him and had to wind up shooting it. | ||
| He had a rifle or a pistol? | ||
| I think it was a pistol. | ||
| But it wouldn't stop. | ||
| It wouldn't leave him alone. | ||
| He's trying to say, hey, get the fuck out of here! | ||
| Waving his arms, and it woofed at him, and then it turned around and came at him from another direction, and then it literally ran up within like 20 feet of him. | ||
| He's like, okay, we're done here. | ||
| That happened to me with a monkey once. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you shoot the monkey? | ||
| I didn't, no. | ||
| Did you feed him a rat? | ||
| This was in Malaysia. | ||
| I was in botanical gardens in Penang, Malaysia. | ||
| I actually told this story at the beginning of Sex at Dawn. | ||
| I was with my girlfriend at the time, and like your situation in Costa Rica, she wanted to give some peanuts to these monkeys. | ||
| These guys at the entrance were selling little bags of peanuts. | ||
| And so she – there was this baby monkey hanging by his tail over the trail where we were and she pulled out this bag of peanuts and like opened it and that attracted all this attention from other monkeys. | ||
| And while she was handing a peanut to the baby, this other monkey jumped out from the bushes, leapt on her, took the bag of peanuts, and was gone, like in a flash. | ||
| It happened so fast. | ||
| She's screaming. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| It was just like, holy shit. | ||
| We're surrounded by these monkeys. | ||
| They're everywhere. | ||
| And that's when we realized all the local people had these big sticks. | ||
| And we thought they were walking sticks or something. | ||
| They'd like to keep the monkeys away. | ||
| I didn't have a stick. | ||
| So I got like... | ||
| I was triggered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I got like, fuck you, monkeys. | ||
| You know? | ||
| You leave my girl alone. | ||
| He said that like Joe Dirt. | ||
| I was not into it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And yeah, I felt like, you know, all this testosterone and adrenaline. | ||
| And I was like, ah! | ||
| Hulk smash. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we, you know, 20 minutes later, we're in this sort of field, and there's a tree in the middle of the field, and there are more baby monkeys. | ||
| And by now, she's totally forgotten about it. | ||
| She's just like, oh, they're cute. | ||
| So I have the peanuts now, and she wants to give more peanuts. | ||
| So I pull out a bag to give to her, and this monkey comes out of the woods, sort of a big one, and he's, like, looking at me. | ||
| And I'm just like, fuck you, dude. | ||
| Like, I'm three times your size. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| And he sort of, like, moves, you know, sort of does this thing, and he's looking at me, and there's a branch, and I picked up the branch and threw it at him, right? | ||
| Kind of like what your buddy was trying to do with his bear. | ||
| Like, hey, get the fuck out of here, you know? | ||
| And this monkey just looked at the branch land in front of him and looked up at me, and he was like, you fucked up. | ||
| And he leapt over it and came charging at me with these fangs, just coming straight at me. | ||
| I went nuts. | ||
| I turned into a monkey. | ||
| I just started going... | ||
| And I was like jumping up and down and spraying spit everywhere. | ||
| And he stopped and we're like, ah! | ||
| And my girlfriend's screaming and we're like 10 feet away. | ||
| And then he just like backed up. | ||
| Like, yeah, fuck you. | ||
| And left. | ||
| Primal moment. | ||
| Very primal moment. | ||
| And you didn't plan that? | ||
| No. | ||
| If I'd had a stick, it wouldn't have been necessary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| So the moral of the story is, carry a stick when you're all monkeys. | ||
| Walk softly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Carry a big stick. | ||
| Dude, I gotta wrap this up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's go take a nap. | ||
| I got shit to do. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Civilized to Death, The Price of Progress, Christopher Ryan, Tangentially Speaking. | ||
| And what's the other one? | ||
| I've been talking about it forever. | ||
| The first book, Sex at Dawn? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| What do you call your podcast from the van? | ||
| It's still just tangentially speaking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| It's still tangentially speaking. | ||
| It's just hashtag vanthropology on social media. | ||
| Always good to see you, brother. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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