Duncan Trussell and Joe Rogan dissect modern societal fractures—echoing LA’s pandemic-driven chaos, critiquing political tribalism, and debating censorship (e.g., YouTube’s suppression of COVID dissent vs. fringe theories). They explore psychedelics’ potential for healing, from LSD therapy to CIA’s MKUltra abuses, while questioning how power structures exploit conditioned morality. Trussell links human trafficking to slavery’s legacy, urging brutal truths over sanitized history, but Rogan cautions against unproductive outrage. Their five-hour conversation pivots to comedy’s rebellious roots (Mitzi Shore’s Comedy Store) and the need for open-minded collaboration over ideological rigidity, concluding that progress demands vulnerability—not just viral ideas—amid today’s polarized, tech-dependent world. [Automatically generated summary]
I keep thinking back to when we first became friends and the strange path Since from there to here and all our predictions and all the things that we we never would have imagined this you know specifically like that there would be this fucking global pandemic that we would suddenly be like Some kind of like,
refugee is way too dramatic a word for it, but suddenly just part of this diaspora of comedians pouring out of L.A. And not just comedians, but just people leaving, man.
But I was still like, you know, maybe we'll stick around and see what happens.
And then, like, I'd been getting all these, you know, the problem with me is, like, I get weird vibes all the time.
And, like, the last I was on here, I legitimately thought a meteor was going to hit the earth.
I really thought that, so I worked very hard on not listening to that part of me most of the time, but I was getting this real weird vibe from LA, and I'm like, come on, man, you're just superstitious.
It's probably nothing.
And then my wife would say, I'm getting a really weird vibe.
I don't know if we should stay here renting, if we should stay in the place.
And I didn't want to tell her, oh, I've been getting a weird vibe, too, because I didn't want to amplify it, whatever that was.
And then I got on the phone with Diaz, and he's like, yeah, I'm leaving.
Dude, it's like, yeah, it's not just any one thing.
You know, it's not just like some of the stuff I get, stuff had to get shut down, and because stuff was shut down, it got a little more weathered than usual.
And it's like, you know, the homeless encampments.
I was in Echo Park, man.
And I really feel like, you know, like the...
Red state people, one of the things they love to tweet is like, don't bring your liberal bullshit here, right?
Well, that's where I'm eating shit a little bit because I do still believe that we need to decriminalize drugs, that the drug policy's bullshit, the way we're handling it's all wrong.
There used to be a way that they could get people who are like camping out on the streets.
And a lot of the times that was possession of like illegal drugs.
And because that stuff got removed, suddenly you were witnessing like, holy shit, man, there's people who are making like real drugs.
A rational decision from the perspective of a heroin addict, which is they love heroin so much.
You know that Doug Stanhope joke, some things are better than life?
Like they love heroin so much.
They're addicted to it.
They love it.
And the shelters that are apparently available won't let them do drugs in the shelters.
Now, I could be wrong about that, but that is what I've heard is one of the reasons these people are staying out in the street is not because they don't want to be in a shelter.
It's because they don't want to be prevented from getting high.
And so this has produced this, like...
Situation in a lot of the big cities, which is we're seeing like massive tent cities.
And by the way, the tent city thing, aesthetically, it's not the best look.
But the stuff that I began to experience in Echo Park, man, I took my kid to the playground, right?
And there's like a dude that looks like he emerged from a time portal, from an apocalypse.
You know what I mean?
I'm not talking about like...
You know, run-of-the-mill, like, somebody who's a junkie, who's like, I'm talking like, covered in, like, soot.
Like, pure dilated eyes.
Not wearing, like, you know...
The disheveled clothes you might expect from someone who's been addicted to heroin for a long time.
He broke into wherever the costumes from Mad Max were.
Some kind of weird leather vest thing and creepy fucking cut-off shorts.
And he had a Machete.
And he's throwing it into the ground of the playground and pulling it out like he's practicing throwing a machete.
I'm with my fucking toddler, man.
And you know, it's like, so obviously we didn't go to the playground, but that was, you know, my, you know, it was not uncommon in that area to see completely naked people.
Living in giant groups of people, I think when it works great, It was wonderful.
When LA was working well, it was fantastic.
When the Comedy Store was packed, and restaurants were doing well, and the economy was doing well, and the crime wasn't high, it's great.
But when things go bad, there's no sense of community.
So then there's a sense of people capitalizing on other people who either own stores, or who aren't home, or whatever.
People who are desperate.
There's too many people.
If you're in a community that's a small town and something goes wrong, you can kind of bunch up together and help each other.
Because you feel like you need each other and you feel like you're a part of something.
People don't feel like they're a part of something here.
They're all transient.
Everybody's moved here from somewhere else.
Everybody thinks they can go somewhere else and they can and they probably will.
I mean, I, you know, we all came from, you were North Carolina, I came from New York at the time.
We all, everybody who comes to LA in show business, God, what are the percentage of, like, how many do we know that are just straight LA? Like, Christina Pazitsky, she's straight LA. Yeah.
I've loved that element of, like, just this wild vortex of artists and narcissists and people who've just gone insane.
And, like, it's a lot of...
The sparks fly in that kind of insane cauldron of identity.
All that stuff is super cool.
It's beautiful.
That's one of the things I loved about it.
It's like the place we all know this is a place where you make illusion.
That was the idea.
You make things that aren't real, seem real, and people like to watch that.
That's the whole TV movie industry.
The whole place is based on creating an identity that you somehow monetize or a studio monetizes your identity or something.
It was something magical and beautiful in all of that, but It seems like there's a real emperor-wears-no-clothes thing happening right now, not just in LA. I feel bad talking shit about LA because, man, she's been so good to both of us.
I am progressive on just about every issue across the board.
Gay rights, civil rights, women's rights, whatever, women's right to choose, fill in the blank.
Pro Medicaid, pro universal basic income, pro so many things.
There's a thing that happens in large cities, where large cities are always blue.
And I'm trying to figure this out.
Because like New York, and I used to think it's always because they're educated, you know, and educated people are more likely to be compassionate, and compassionate people are more likely to be Democrats.
But there's a balance that has to be achieved.
And when the shit hits the fan, you need law and order.
And I think that some people who are Democrats, who are progressive people, they don't understand that aspect of human nature.
Or they want to deny that aspect of human nature.
Like when the mayor of Seattle was dealing with that whole six-area lockdown, small little country that they had...
Put up barriers and shit.
Literally had armed guards there.
What was it called again?
Chop.
Chop or Chaz, right?
The mayor said, maybe this is our summer of love.
No, it's not summer of love.
Some people took over other people's businesses with force.
Just because they think the way you think, or they subscribe to liberal ideas like you, like you're a liberal too, so this is like your gang of thugs that you have to support when they take over other people's businesses?
No, we have to be able to call out everybody.
And just because somebody is on your side...
You can't let them take over city blocks and just institute their own government and then say it's the summer of love.
This is crazy talk.
And this is how...
This gets cities destroyed.
And this is what gets the police defunded.
And this is what gets people saying crazy things.
Like, we need to disband, release everyone from prison, and no more prisons, and no more laws, and no more police.
No!
The way things go well is you have to be safe.
The only way you're safe is if you have a strong military and a strong police force.
And there's something about liberals that don't want to believe that.
They see the bad cops, they see these videos, and we all agree.
We gotta get rid of bad cops.
They gotta reform the police.
They have to.
But those are not all the cops.
That's crazy.
You just only see the bad...
No one's filming excellent interactions with friendly cops and compliant people.
Well, I mean, the history of America is this beautiful, yet somewhat, like...
There's a mania, a utopian mania in the heart of, I think, the American spirit, which is like Americans identify with this.
George Carlin did a great job of desiccating it by saying it's called the American Dream because you've got to be asleep to believe it.
I love that joke.
But I love the American Dream.
And what's so beautiful about it is it's this idea of, like, I think together, We can do something new that's going to be better than anything that happened before.
And from that spirit, you get all great innovation that goes across all political ideologies, right?
So to me, you know, and they always call it, I've always loved that they call it the American experiment.
Fucking love that, man, because it's an experiment.
It's like, let's see what we could do here together.
And for an experiment to work, We need to be able to look at what didn't work in the experiment and improve upon it.
Now, that being said, it's like for me, I've been trying to like pull myself out of the even though I identify as a progressive, I'm going to vote Democrat.
That's just what I'm going to do.
But that being said, I try to pull myself out of that because I don't want to be cubby-holed, man.
And I have a lot of friends who are like hardcore conservatives.
And I know that there is this idea, and I think a lot of the idea gets perpetrated by people who are into tribalism, blue, red.
And so the blue people, they propagate conceptualization of the red people, which is kind of what you said.
Trump is such a polarizing figure and he doesn't seem to have much empathy, if any.
You don't know who he is really because you don't talk to him privately, but his public persona is that of a winner who doesn't give a fuck and you're fired.
I mean, that's a non-empathetic perspective.
And we associate people who support him with also lacking empathy.
Then you add into it children in cages at the border and you see those videos.
You know what bothered me more than anything about the kids in cages?
There was one video that really bothered me where Mike Pence went to visit.
Like he's on the ground, like next to the cages.
See if you can find that.
Mike Pence visiting the border cages.
Now, apparently these cages had been put up through Obama, and that's what's interesting about this whole border wall and border discussion and immigration discussion, because Obama, particularly when he was running for president, he was very tough on illegal immigration.
I mean, he said a lot of the same things that Trump said.
If you listen to the speeches that Obama said, people believed him and agreed with him because it wasn't a Republican talking point.
It was just a safety talking point.
And it was also a way that he could get people that were more like...
More concerned about the problem with illegal immigration.
He could tie that up with just saying, listen, we have to follow the rule of law.
They had these talks and they built these cages.
They did that during the Obama administration, right?
So here's this.
These are the guys that fled from Mexico and who knows where else and came through the Mexican border.
And then Pence is standing there in front of these guys.
So imagine, you're a dude, you live in Ecuador, and you make your way up through Mexico because you have a fucking dream.
America is the land where people can make it.
This is a guy who fights in the UFC. His name is Marlon Vera.
And he's a bad motherfucker.
And he just won this weekend.
And he's, I believe he's from Ecuador, right?
That's Marlon's...
Yes.
And he talked about it in his victory speech.
He was talking about, you know, how, hey man, you know, you can actually do it.
He came over here.
He was talking about it in the Countdown show, too.
He came over here.
He lived a year without his family, just building up money and fighting to try to get money to bring his family over.
And then he brought his family over.
And then as time has gone on...
He keeps winnings on like a seven fight win streak and now he's like a top ten contender in the UFC and He could have been one of those dudes.
That's right See this this this is not these are just people that are in a fucking terrible place They're trying to get out putting him in cages like it just it's a bad look and it's an even worse Imagine you're that guy who comes over from Ecuador and you're in this cage and you see Pence He could touch him You could touch him.
If that cage wasn't there, you could reach over and touch him on the shoulder.
He's right there.
The fucking guy who's second in line to the most powerful army the world has ever known.
Trump's the commander in chief.
That's number two.
And he's right there in front of a cage.
And he doesn't seem to care.
Like, play this.
It's weird.
I don't know how I want him to look, but he's not like looking at the people.
He's kind of like looking away.
He's kind of like ignoring the people.
I mean, I don't know what you're supposed to do.
Are you supposed to look at them?
Would they fill you with sorrow and despair?
Would you not be able to rationalize and disconnect yourself from the humans that are suffering?
When you think about All of us were basically the products of a fucking enormous chain of events.
Not one thing, but they have foil blankets, man.
I mean, this is crazy shit.
They're stacked in there, stacked on top of each other, wearing foil blankets.
Dude, he's, no, we got, we took our money to buy acid, and then he's like, we could sell this acid and buy more acid, and then, you know, we're like, yeah, let's do it, and then he sold the acid, I guess, and then we were going to buy more.
When I used to work at Newport Creamery, I'd work the register sometimes, and we had lessons on how to deal with flim-flam artists.
That's what they called them, flim-flam artists.
So they would teach you.
So we had to sit there and be taught how someone will fuck you up.
Something would cost three bucks, and they'll give you a 20. And they'll say, hey, can you give me a 10 and a 5, and then the rest in quarters?
And you're like, what?
How much is that?
And then before you know it, he's saying something else and talking over you and you think you owe him $40.
Like you're giving him more money.
It's like, I gave you a $50, so you give me the $20, that $20, and then what is it?
It was $3, so you owe me $47.
So before you know it, you're giving money away and you don't understand what's happening.
Especially when you're a kid.
I was like...
I think I was 16 when I was working there.
I was a monkey.
Basically a monkey.
These people travel all over the place and they do this to folks.
They just trick them.
They pickpocket them.
Watching David Blaine do card tricks from as close as you are to me.
I don't get it.
I don't know what he's doing.
He could get me every time.
He's going to trick me every time.
He's so good at it.
And there's guys that are, I don't know if they're at that level, but there's guys at a level that you or I can't perceive, and they'll steal your watch.
There's guys who can get your watch off.
They can get your watch off.
I don't know how they do it, but it's a known thing.
It's a known thing that guys know how to get your watch off.
But, man, I do recognize, like, how fucking entertaining he is.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's a very entertaining cult leader.
Similarly with Trump.
Not a fan.
You know, the moment he said, he implied you should shoot looters.
Look, we can go on and on with anti-bullying.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm saying the problem is that our tactic as Americans is not supposed to be we listen to the state And get our cues about how to be good people from the state.
As Americans, what we do is we have basic fundamental ideas that are really fucking beautiful.
One of them being that we believe that people have a right to be free and seek their own personal happiness.
That's beautiful, man.
We shouldn't have the state telling us different versions of what that is.
We have to be intelligent and autonomous enough to do that for ourselves and then from that really be a United States.
And what's happening now is these motherfuckers are not unifying us.
This is supposed to be the United States of America.
That's what it's supposed to be.
So if you're a government official here, and you're doing a thing that's making it all divided and fucked up, and you're telling lies, and you're shaming people for telling the truth, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat.
Whatever you are is, as far as I'm concerned, anti-American.
Which is like, man, Americans, and fuck anybody who gets mad at me for saying this, Americans are beautiful people.
We both tour, we get to meet people all over the fucking place and talk to them, and they're always generally wonderful.
If, like, let's say you're at the Venice Boardwalk and some son of a bitch dressed like Uncle Sam comes and asks you that, you're gonna, like, go the other direction.
Yeah, yeah, but he was actually somebody who's really into Buckminster Fuller, and I think that was something Buckminster Fuller put out there, which is like, this question is very important, and you should ask yourself this as an individual, because if you think world peace is possible...
Right.
Even if you acknowledge that maybe right now it's not possible, but if you can invent in your mind some technology, or even if you can invent in your mind like an X, like an algebra for a thing you don't have the space for yet, but it could be.
If there's any sense in you at all that world peace is possible, then from that point forward, You should be part of whatever it is that's going to make us have that great utopian ideal that transcends American borders.
That's the other problem, is the American dream thing.
It's not the American dream, it's the human dream.
The human dream is the intuition we all have that there's a way for us to be on the planet together that doesn't involve blowing each other up.
And I think it's possible.
I think it's possible.
I just don't know how to get there necessarily, but I think it's possible.
And one thing's for sure, whenever you get a Trump or any fucking pundit blowing out divisive shit into people's brains, if there's like a scale, one side's world peace, one side's chaos, they're dropping their pebbles on the chaos part of the scale.
The problem with him saying that is you can go, yeah, yeah, yeah, but he also called this chick he fucked a horse face.
And you go, oh yeah, that's not that nice.
He had...
He had a he had a thing there like a moment like an Eisenhower moment not quite as eloquent But when Eisenhower was on television he warned people about the military-industrial complex as he was leaving office That's to this day like one of the most profound speeches I've ever seen because yeah It gives me a chill because I think well this is black and white from how many fucking years ago?
Yeah, if this shit was going on then it's not like it stopped going on didn't stop See, one of the reasons why we're in such a fucked up space politically is because this is the first time where politics have been really exposed to the general public by the internet.
Like, you have a different access to politics than you never had before.
You have real-time things breaking.
You find out, like if someone, like Gavin Newsom said he was going to take a pay cut, he didn't.
Fox News print says it goes wild.
And you get all these stories like, oh, would you have known that before?
Cell phones and the internet?
I've never known that he didn't do that.
You would have to be a person who's really into politics.
And again, it's like, look, if you start playing the game, That you're the smart person in the room.
And that if people disagree with you, they must be dumb.
If people have different ideas than you, they must be stupid.
And then you start shaming them.
All you're doing is creating this, like, you're going to create a reaction to that.
And the reaction is going to be a celebration of every single thing with your great, vast, elite intelligence deriding, you know?
And so I think, you know, that's the problem.
It's like, it's just there's nothing worse Than when people who are legitimately smart, have read a bunch of fucking books, have got master's degrees, have not developed enough compassion to understand that just about every single person on the planet wants to be happy, wants to have a full stomach, Doesn't want to hurt anybody and would run into a building on fire to save somebody.
And these motherfuckers are shaming them and telling them they're idiots or they're stupid or this and that.
It's like, fuck you, man.
You don't know what these people came up through.
You don't know.
These people were born into houses filled with fucking methamphetamine smoke.
Whose parents were like, you know, absolutely fucking insane and they still managed to get out and get a job and have a fucking life and pay taxes.
And now your fucking ass is going to tell these people who didn't have the fucking trust fund that you had that got you into the fucking Ivy League University that they're fucking idiots.
Alex Jones, he's made some mistakes and some big ones.
But he's also...
Actually expose some real shit and he owns up to the mistakes he's made.
They're not good.
He doesn't think they're good.
There's a thing about finding conspiracies everywhere that's not good for your brain.
I really believe this.
I think that if you go looking for those things and that's all you look for and you look for them all the time, you can get real paranoid and real crazy.
And then there's also a bunch of people that are trying to stop you from doing that because you do expose some crazy shit.
You know, he was talking about Epstein a long time ago.
He was saying there was a fucking island and they take all these rich politicians and some celebrities and they bang these kids.
And I was like, come on.
He was telling me this a long time ago.
So he's also the one who told me about Bohemian Grove.
Well, I actually watched it.
I think this tape was actually made before I met him.
So he went and snuck in to this place where former presidents go.
There's a photograph of Ronald Reagan with Herbert Walker Bush and a couple other people all standing around.
And it's like these are the people that used to hang out at this place and they would put on robes and they would worship an owl god and they would burn an effigy.
And Alex snuck in and made video footage of this shit.
And no one's denying that it's real.
This really did happen.
So they're in with these bankers and former presidents, and they're dressed like druids, and some guy brings over something that's an effigy that's supposed to be a body, a wrapped up effigy.
It's also a bunch of sticks in a blanket, but it's shaped like a body.
And they drop it on the fire, and they're all worshipping an owl god.
Actually, what I've heard is the idea was to get a bunch of hardcore neocons together and then mix some artists in, in the hopes that, like, having, like, brushing shoulders with artists would in some way, shape, or form loosen some people up a little bit.
And I've also heard you have a tram that connects campsites there to other campsites, meaning you just get in the tram and suddenly you're hanging out with Dick Cheney.
Listen, I won't tell anybody.
I got a podcast.
I won't even tell Joe.
Let me in.
I'll worship Moloch.
I won't worship Moloch if it means hurting people.
But I don't understand why people are upset about fucking...
I was reading the book of Mark today regarding the parable of the sower.
But that being said, I don't think it's fair necessarily to tell people they can't worship an owl or burn an effigy in front of an owl in some kind of symbolic, magical ritual that represents the disintegration of your negative energy or whatever it may be.
I really don't know.
But to me, that's the other problem that's happening right now.
Superstition is running rampant.
I'm friends with lots of witches.
I know a few Satanists.
I know a few people who are under the occult.
And I don't know a single one of them that would tolerate child abuse.
I don't know a single one that wouldn't kill somebody.
Some of them would kill people.
If they thought they were hurting kids, and make it so that nobody found the body.
Some of the Satanists I know, they would kill someone probably.
I don't know for sure.
I'm not trying to throw any Satanists under the bus, but I'm just saying like this idea that we can't have alternate Pagan religions in our country without immediately being associated with human sacrifice or child abuse, I think that goes against the American spirit.
It's like, look, because people don't want to subscribe to your particular very popular global religion doesn't necessarily implicate them in something that is truly a horror, which is human trafficking.
So to me, this is the problem.
It's like, man, we got to be a little bit more nuanced in our conceptualization of these people.
Again, I don't know what's going on at the fucking Bohemian Grove, but from what I've heard, it's basically a summer camp for billionaires where they try to get artists in there to loosen them up a little bit.
And if these motherfuckers are doing anything that involves human sacrifice, hurting human beings, in any application of that, then it's the worst thing on Earth, and I'm so sorry that I said anything about it.
Stanley Kubrick had this quote once to Nicole Kidman, I think it was, and they were working on Eyes Wide Shut.
See if you can find what she said about the elites.
I know I saved it.
I can find it if I have a chance to look at my laptop.
It was something about him talking about the powers that run the world and that they all have something on each other and that's how they all can stay together.
They all compromise each other.
That's what Skull and Bones was about.
So he had a much more concise Yeah, man.
A quote on that, but when you see something like that, you go, well, maybe it's like fun that they do it that nobody knows they do it.
Like maybe it's like one of those rituals where you get together, your dad thinks it's hilarious, and you both put your hoods on, you go out there and you burn the owl, or you burn the sticks in front of the owl.
And what's fun is that you're not supposed to be doing it, and it's a secret, but nothing really is happening.
I know that my tendency whenever I have a question mark is to assign malevolence to it just out of a basic kind of weakness in my own bias.
If I don't know what a thing is, like when you're waiting for the doctor to call regarding some scan they just did on you, if you have the slightest fear of death or any kind of bias in you, then that space in between when you Maybe we're overlooking this.
Maybe it's like their version of renaissance fair and people just want to escape reality and pretend that they live with Moloch the owl god and throw a fucking hood over your head and yes please and peace be with you.
You know, and if you look back at like the history of paganism or hedonism, Terence McKenna does such a great job talking about the Elucidian mysteries and the, you know, all these like things that aren't really quite as accessible as the main religions of the world.
All the religions of the world, they have this beautiful...
Quality in them, depending on the religion, and generally one of the qualities that's so beautiful is a mechanism of self-forgiveness and a mechanism of purification, a general assessment of the human condition as being somewhat depraved.
The puking in ayahuasca, you're purging yourself from your darkness.
The confession booth in Catholicism, maybe you could say in Gnosticism like true Gnosis, or in Buddhism like connecting with the It goes on and on.
There's a way for us to ritualistically create, if you want to be a pure scientific materialist, a beautiful placebo effect.
That gets you to drop some of your neurotic qualities or at the very least reset your intention to make the world a better place.
And anything, whatever that, I don't care what the fuck it is, whatever it may be, if that's what it's all about is a recognition like, man, you beat yourself up every day.
You're so hard on yourself.
You beat yourself up for all the shit you did in the past.
And we live in a world right now where there's not much tolerance.
There's not much forgiveness.
And anything that allows a kind of like steam valve From which all that shit can get released.
So from this day forward, you're born again.
You're brand new.
I don't care if it's an owl.
Man, if you think that's crazy, look at like Main Street Disneyland any night.
That's some crazy shit to watch too.
And some people's entire lives, I'm not being...
Like, change from like having a great night anywhere.
So, you know, to me it's like ritual is not scary to me.
What's scary to me, though, is anything that objectifies humans, enslaves humans.
It hurts kids.
Yeah, human sacrifice.
Any of that stuff.
And if that's what's really happening there, I truly don't know, then I completely apologize for any defense of it.
The thing about people saying things that other people disagree with when they want to silence those people is you don't think that other people are as smart as you.
You're thinking that's going to work on other people.
If someone's saying that the earth is flat and there's lizard people that control the sunrise, you'd go, okay.
You know what I'm saying?
It wouldn't work.
So why not let someone say it?
So if someone says it, it doesn't work on you.
But what are you worried about?
You're worried it's going to work on somebody else.
That's what you're worried about.
That's the weird thing about COVID, because it's the one thing where you're not allowed to do that anymore.
Because if you do anything that goes against the government bylines, anything that goes against what the World Health Organization thinks you should do or CDC thinks you should do, you get kicked off of YouTube.
You get silenced.
Everybody gets removed.
Whether you're right or wrong, it's the one thing where you can't talk crazy.
You can talk crazy about the Earth being hollow.
You could talk about beings that are made out of light that fly in and out of our consciousness, and that's responsible for all of our ideas.
And you could talk about how there's an application that's coming in 2023. It's right now being vetted by the NSA to make sure that we can use it so we can communicate with the aliens.
You can have all these wacko videos where you're making shit up and no one cares.
But if you say that masks don't help, And what we need to do is get healthier.
And never once in all my explorations in the early days of YouTube was I like, this could be real.
It was more like, wow, look at how all the different versions of reality that people are processing.
And it was a joy.
But I think what happened probably is like people realize like, God, like what we've got, like you talk about this sometimes, man, the nightmare when, and it will happen when primates Figure how to use friction to make fire.
You know so similarly like with the internet we have this new fire and like people who are like in the conduits of the fire or I think they're they're having this really rotten come to Jesus moment where they're like because I think a lot of these especially if you look in the Silicon Valley these people are freaks the early day like the people making technology they're nuts I've seen you that Steve Jobs thing with him in a commune or whatever these people are fucking crazy but I think they're recognizing that like The
And so and they're starting to understand that, like, because of them, because of their intentional manipulative coding, because of their deep study of B.F. Skinner and behaviorism, they produce this hyper seductive, semi sentient information dispersal device that is driving semi sentient information dispersal device that is driving people who don't have the immune system to data that you're supposed to naturally get from school.
And so people are going nuts because it's like, well, I had that with the addictive quality of technology.
Those two things together, the addictive quality of just looking at like your phone and getting information off your phone and then add it to all this stuff that you're saying.
And I think Google and YouTube and as much as like, you know, and I do think censorship's fuck.
I would hate to be in anybody's position there because on one hand, you're looking at like a very liberal, very beautiful idea, which is like everyone should be allowed to say whatever they want to say.
And then it's meeting like, well, but what about these hyper charismatic, seductive people who like Hitler?
You know what I mean?
So now you run into this terrible place of like, and also we know that there's people who don't quite have the ability to discern what's real from what's not.
My friend, Jimmy Fink, I think it was Jimmy Fink, his mom would, like, let us get in her car to wait for the bus.
It was wonderful, very sweet.
But also, I think, and I'm sorry, Jimmy, if you're out there.
I know we haven't talked in a long time.
I still love you, though.
But, like, and I'm sorry if it's not you and I'm getting confused here, but the, I just remember she smoked and we, like, there was smoke in the car.
My dad smoked.
I would ride in the car with him on trips and he would smoke and you'd breathe in the smoke.
And again, this is always the problem, which is clearly there has to be some regulatory principle in the world if there are people who steal watches.
That means there's going to be groups of people who get together and talk about better ways to steal watches.
If there's groups of people who get together and talk about better ways to steal watches, and then we create a way for them to form a thing called a corporation.
And then we start pouring money into people who are against tobacco, knowing if we can make tobacco illegal but keep the vape pens legal, we're going to become the new tobacco!
I know there's one guy that was selling them with MCT oil.
Okay, here it is.
Authorities in the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still aren't sure what's causing the dangerous trend, but theories range from issues with vegetable oil and vape juice to the idea that doctors are just now taking note of the Okay, so that was the speculation.
That people are using, like if you try to cook, okay?
And you try to like sear a steak and you do it with olive oil, you're gonna fuck it up.
Because olive oil, it's not like something that you really sear something with.
Like you put olive oil in, you don't want to get it that hot.
Olive oil is more something that you'd like to saute with, but other oils like avocado oil or beef fat, that stuff is amazing because you can get it really fucking hot and it has a very, very high temperature where it turns to smoke.
So it's healthier for you, the idea.
So if you're misting this stuff into your lungs, you don't want it burnt.
And you watch as the pharmacist dispenses the drugs, how careful he is, right?
They are so careful in their administration of these pills, because they know if for one second you give someone Xanax when they were supposed to get penicillin, you killed somebody, right?
So you have to be very careful.
But meanwhile, look at us right now, Joe.
Did you do a test on that bottle of booze?
Are these...
I didn't even...
Honestly, it was embarrassing.
I'm like, I don't know how to light this blunt.
But then, like, I'm smoking something called dadgrass.
I'm saying, like, the general, like, in America and anywhere, the general sense is, I'm gonna eat it if you give it to me, especially if it's in a colorful box.
Suddenly we have a hyper, a way to super connect with every single person on the planet, but not just connect with every person on the planet.
We have an artificial intelligence based on a neural network, I don't understand how it works, suggesting who you should connect with You know what I mean?
It's like, is the internet, the technological thalidomide, are we looking at- I think so.
I think we're on a spaceship and we haven't quite figured out how to slow it down or where the brakes are or how to go left or right.
But the spaceship is being propelled by thoughts and ideas and social media and world events and drugs and sex and politics and power and control and it's all just hurling through space and while it's all happened we haven't quite figured out where the brakes are or what's the best way to be Harmonious with each other.
So we're all in this constant battle for control thinking that once we get in control, we're gonna set this fucking ship straight and everybody's gonna be cool.
We're gonna be- finally we're gonna get along because your side won, but you're still gonna have half the fucking country that hates you, half the country that doesn't agree with you, half the country that has to like be really tolerant in order to engage you in any of your ideas and admit that you're right, right?
And this is what we're doing.
And it's not real.
It's not real.
I don't think it's real.
I think a lot of the people that have ideas in one way, if they could just talk to people...
In the realm of the area where they have disagreement, I bet they could work it out.
I think the problem is more people not talking than anything.
We're spinning a thousand miles an hour, and we're driving through infinity at a pace that if it was small and it passed by you, you would go, holy fuck!
If the Earth was the size of a baseball, and it whipped by you in real time, the way it's moving through the universe, you would be like, FUCK! That's what the Earth's doing.
But the Earth is huge.
It's huge, and yet it's tiny.
And it's surrounded by things that are enormous.
You've got a sun that's a million times bigger than us.
Just a fireball in the sky that all life on Earth depends on.
A very clear space between Earth and the sun.
A perfect balance.
Perfect balance between this unstoppable heat.
Just keep the water melted.
Don't boil it, man!
And we're hurling through infinity.
And while we're doing that, we're trying to pick who gets to be the leader to steal your tax money.
And that, that is why it's what you're saying is so beautiful, because it's the same thing, which is like, you know, like, this planet, we're so lucky to be on a planet going that fast.
And like, we're so lucky to get a chance a little Peephole into time.
Yeah, but to me, that is a problem and it's fucked.
The bigger problem is, okay, so you own an Applebee's or whatever, right?
And suddenly the government's like, okay, everyone can go back to work, but no one solved the problem.
You, the owner of the Applebee's, calls the general manager like, hey, dude, get the wait staff back.
We're open it up!
You're not going to be there.
You're going to have the general manager come in and you're going to have the waitstaff come in.
Now, the waitstaff have been living off of unemployment benefits supplied by the federal government that sometimes are more than like what they were making at the place.
That's not a bad thing.
But all of a sudden what happened is prior to a true reduction of this pandemic that Can kill you.
Most of the time it doesn't, but you might be the one who steps on the landmine.
All of a sudden, they've just decided, well, the economy needs to work.
So now your unemployment benefits get cut off, and you have to go back to work.
But they haven't solved the problem yet.
So you become the person who has to bear the weight of the failed approach to the disease.
And that's why it's fucked up.
Yes, you're right.
Man, my friend runs a new California barber shop in Echo Park, Brian.
He started off as my barber.
He became my best friend.
He's one of the coolest people I know.
One of the reasons I want to leave L.A. is because that shop can't open.
That's where I used to go to get my beard trimmed in my hair.
But it wasn't just that.
It's a real barber shop.
You have these great conversations.
You beat people.
He's gotten me into a sublet that I once, when I needed to be in L.A. for a little bit.
And like, it sucks because I loved going there and it's like, but you know, the thing is like a lot of people, it's not time to go back to work because if there is a true risk that from making minimum wage, you're going to get a disease that probably won't kill you because you're a waiter at Applebee's.
You're probably going to be okay.
You're taking your vitamins, but you might be living with your...
My aunt who has Alzheimer's disease and you're gonna fucking kill her because you picked up a little bit of it and the reason you're gonna kill her is because you had to go back to work because your benefits got cut off.
So it's like this is why it's a very complex fucked up problem that really it's like yes for me a person I'm doing great.
I want everything open.
I want to go to Guitar Center.
Guitar Center is open but I don't want to stand in line.
I want everything to be the way it was.
I'm probably going to be okay.
But again, this is a complex problem.
I don't buy into the idea that the whole thing is a scam.
I think we've got exactly what that asshole...
Why did I say asshole?
Too much booze.
It was actually the opposite of an asshole on your show.
I'm calling a doctor an asshole.
Remember the Joe Rogan questions everything?
The virologist who told us there's going to be another great pandemic.
I've talked about this before, but we should tell people.
Duncan and I were in Galveston, Texas, and we went to the Center for Disease Control and went to the very place where they experiment on Ebola and all these crazy diseases that kill you instantly.
And Duncan and I were in this building and we were watching.
We watched through a window.
That takes you there's like another window behind that that's like this plexiglass sealed room and they have like spacesuits on and tubes and I'm like hold on hold on so there's some shit in there that can kill everybody like a hundred percent Like it's right there and they were doing tests on it.
And so these people are wearing like space suits and they're walking around with these horrific world-killing diseases.
This was one that I really loved, because I didn't get a chance to be with you, so I got to watch it, you know, like from the clips and see what it was like when you went to that.
I would have totally done it, but I think it was when there was a bunch of things we were trying to film and we were short on time, so we couldn't do things together.
But remember we did the Skinwalker Ranch one together?
The problem was when we got there, right when we got there, we heard this preposterous story from this person who threw a cigarette on the ground after he- That's what set you off!
It's like, you know, most people when they do these shows, they're not going into it thinking like, I'm actually going to uncover something.
Yeah, of course.
They don't go into it thinking they're going to uncover something.
They go into it thinking, this is all a bunch of bullshit, and I'm going to be like, or maybe they think maybe it's real or whatever, but the main thing is, they...
And what was really funny was the last thing the sci-fi network wanted was for you to actually begin to realize that maybe we're not going to find UFOs.
And they started getting unhappy, I think, with the situation.
I don't remember that because I was already given up on that point.
I noticed a pad, unfortunately, and I feel real bad, but it was really a personal thing because I was dealing with my own nonsense.
My own inclivity, my own inclination to believe ridiculous stories, even today, like with the Pentagon story about them having recovered a craft not made from this world.
I'm like, please don't let it be a misquote.
I don't want to read the misquote, man.
I don't.
So I know that there's a real pull to believing in bullshit.
There's a real pull to manipulating the actual facts of Roswell so that it appears the government absolutely 100% colluded to keep the alien crash from the general public and there's no way it could be a weather balloon.
I don't know if that's right, man, because I know it in myself.
Because I see it in myself.
I see that dirty little asshole that wants to believe in Bigfoot.
That stupid fuck.
They're like, hey, hey, hey, maybe it's a bear!
Maybe it's not a lost monkey species, but I want to believe so bad.
Yeah, that's the funny thing about the human sentient projection into time.
It's like, we're probably like the little toe of the universe, you know?
Like, we have just enough realization to know that we're something, we're this hilarious intersection of like, you know, meat and what appears, like a real feeling of like, you know, I do feel like, bias aside, if there isn't a part of you that hasn't like really come to the conclusion that there seems to be a part of you that doesn't Get touched by reality, some eternal part of you that has met time and space.
I feel like most people get that sense.
Kids feel that.
They know that.
They just actually know it.
But, you know, to me, I think maybe what we are in this little temporary, whatever it may be, whether it's an aquarium, whether it's a training facility, I think it's probably a training facility, I don't think it's that.
There's a steady push towards ultimate technological innovation.
That's the steadiest push.
If you look at the human race in terms of what it makes, What does it do?
At the end of the day, if you have these bees and they have all these different social things they do and all these different things they do for covering territory and ground and all these different aspects of being a bee and laying the larva inside the honeycomb, what do they do?
We got stuff written with fucking ink from charcoal, you know?
That shit's like in the archive somewhere.
What we do is we make better shit.
Every year we make better shit.
And our goal is just keep making better shit.
And I'm obsessed with better shit.
I'm obsessed with cell phones, and I'm obsessed.
I love Unbox Therapy or any of those shows.
Marcus Brownlee, when they're doing these Unbox videos and talking about the newest, latest, and greatest technology, and they're showing these 120 hertz screens and these fucking cameras with 100x optical zoom.
We're moving ourselves closer and closer to some kind of technological superiority.
And along the way, we're losing our humanity.
And that's the weirdest, most ironic part of it.
Along the way, we've never been in a greater technological era.
If you look in terms of the things that are consumer electronics that get released right now, whether it's laptops or iPhones or Samsung Notebook, 20s or whatever the fuck they are.
These things are insane, right?
Never been in a time like this before.
This has peaked also, when have we ever had a time where there's riots in every city?
Every city, all across the country.
And a lot of it is things that most people agree with, right?
Yeah.
Especially if you say something like Black Lives Matter.
Let's have a vote.
How many people don't agree with that statement?
Forget about what everybody wants, oh, the Marxist thing and these people, they want to destroy the nuclear family.
I don't know if they do or they don't, but most people, I bet, who are a part of that movement don't even know what that means.
They don't know all that shit.
They just don't want people to get killed by cops.
That's it!
Michael Che has a great bit about it where it says, that's not even asking a lot.
Matters?
Black lives matter?
Just matters?
And people are like, man, I don't know.
This is the strangest time for us socially because of COVID. This is the strangest time because of the economy.
The strangest time because Trump is president and there's chaos and the guy who's running against him is older than him.
And you're like, this is madness.
What is happening here?
And no one knows when the fuck people are going to be able to go back to work and there's all this chaos and all this anxiety.
I think that if you think about a cell phone, right?
I mean, obviously there's a collaborative effort involving a lot of people that understand all sorts of different aspects of technology, but ultimately it has to be an idea.
Someone has to have the idea to come up with the original Motorola phone, the fucking brick, and then they had the idea to innovate and keep getting better and better.
And these ideas eventually lead to this thing that can open your car door, turn your lights on, your house, you can FaceTime your kids.
It's a crazy, crazy, crazy thing, and it's all coming out of ideas.
Which is like, listen to like Kid Charlamagne by Steely Dan.
It's all about one of the great Owsley, one of the great LSD chemists of our time, who I met his wife and I asked her this question, like, why is acid not as good as it used to be in the 60s?
And her response was, people aren't perfectionists anymore, honey.
But the good news is, at least at the very least, they're letting people look at what it is and how it affects the brain.
And they're beginning to understand that everything we all knew There's no point getting resentful about it, but we all knew this.
We all knew this.
It's being validated, thank God.
It's very sweet because it's a healing drug, especially when used with therapy.
It's healing.
It's a very powerful Beautiful, wonderful thing that exists on the planet that anyone could have access to, especially if they, like, stop this ridiculous prohibition and lifted the prohibition.
The whole time he was Greg's neighbor, he was working on this book.
Now, Greg never brings someone to me.
Never.
Never says, dude, you gotta have this guy as a guest.
Ever.
So, out of all these years, Greg's like, dude, this guy you need to have on.
This guy researched Charles Manson for 20 fucking years.
He was originally just writing an article.
He was writing an article, but as he's writing this article, he starts uncovering more and more crazy shit, and he goes deeper and deeper into this, where 20 fucking years later, he finally puts out this book.
And this book is basically detailing a CIA LSD operation where Charles Manson was getting dosed in prison, allegedly, and he was being treated at this free clinic in Haight-Ashbury that ran for more than 50 years and closed three months after the book was released.
They ran this fucking free clinic where they were dosing hippies!
And they were testing them.
They ran Operation Midnight Climax.
It was all part of MKUltra.
He's detailing step by step all these people that were directly involved in not just Charles Manson, but in fucking Jack Ruby and all these other political figures in history.
And it's like, what in the fuck?
All these mind control CIA LSD experiments that were real.
It's just specifically what they did to allow Manson to run free and build these murderous hippies and get them high on LSD. This was all a part of this thing to sort of demonize the anti-war movement.
unidentified
There was all these different strategies they were doing to demonize the anti-war movement.
Yeah, because you take LSD and war seems ridiculous.
You take LSD and money seems ridiculous.
You take LSD and anything that doesn't have to do with love seems insane.
The problem is, all the psychedelic bullshit aside, if you just look at basic Buddhism 101, Prior to this pandemic, my favorite conversations were in Ubers, man.
And I'm riding this Uber.
And this Uber driver, who's clearly a Buddhist, he's got a Buddhist statue on his dashboard.
So we started talking about Buddhism.
And we're talking about it.
He said the coolest thing I've ever heard of regarding Buddhism, which is he's like, do you know how you look at letters and you think that they're a language?
So it will drop you under all of your apps that are running on the operating system of your consciousness for a little bit.
Some people hate that because they so identify with the apps that the moment they can't cling to the app, they become this thing before the language.
Which is why some people on a lot of apps can't talk.
They talk like babies.
What's happening is you're encountering original sentience prior to conditioning.
And that's dangerous to any kind of power structure.
If I'm trying to implement a hierarchy, I depend on your consciousness flowing into these rivulets that are language, morality, ethics, the entire structure of whatever I'm trying to tell you is the way things are.
And if I can do that, Then I can own you, because suddenly your morality isn't real morality.
Your ethics aren't real ethics.
Your idea of what's right isn't necessarily what's right.
It's what's right for capitalism, what's right for communism, what's right for this or that.
If I can tell you, if I can make your moral compass point away from service in any way, shape or form, I can control you forever.
And so anything that gets in the way of that is really like generally like delegitimized by power structures.
I just watch these fucking people in Portland beat the shit out of each other and kick some guy in the head when he's sitting on his- he's sitting down when he apparently drove too close to these Antifa guys and they made him get out of the car and they're searching his belongings.
This guy runs up behind him and kicks him in the head and knocks him unconscious.
I was reading a post today that somebody sent me, and I don't know if it's verified or real or whatever, where a girl was saying that she was headed to a bathroom at a gas station somewhere.
And someone, she noticed that someone had their camera turned around, so they had the selfie camera on while they were on FaceTime, and they pointed to this lady, and they said, what about her?
She heard her say, what about her?
Do you like her?
And the girl looked at them, and the lady turned and looked at her, and she ran back to her car, got in their car, and the guy who was with them went and ran up to the side of the car like she thinks they were trying to kidnap her.
And the funny thing, not funny, but what's ironic about the sudden horror at human trafficking is a lot of the very same people who are...
Fighting against this thing that they're they're realizing is happening in the country simultaneously Don't want to look back into the history of the United States which was a hundred percent based on human trafficking hundred percent our country's foundation is human trafficking they fucking kidnapped Black people and made them work for free.
And somewhere in between that horror and now, people have gotten this delusion that that stopped.
It didn't stop.
Our country was literally founded.
George Washington, did you know this, was the number one slaveholder in Virginia, wherever the fuck he was, he was the number one slave.
Supposedly his wooden teeth thing, it was slave teeth.
The poor and enslaved had been selling teeth as a means of making money since the Middle Ages, which were sold as dentures or implants to those of financial means.
So, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein sourced teeth from some of the young girls he was fucking, and it was actually common for the young girls to sell their teeth for money.
That right there is the root of the fucking problem.
George Washington was a human trafficker who had in his mouth the teeth of people that were kidnapped that he was making work for free.
Maybe we should educate people on why you feel so strongly about the George Washington statue or even the Thomas Jefferson statue.
A lot of people are arguing that Thomas Jefferson, that he's a piece of shit and we shouldn't respect him either.
Do you think that all those statues should come down or do you think it's more of an imperative for us to understand that In the world of 1776, or in the world of whenever, when did Washington get here?
What was George Washington's first years in America?
I'm not in any way, shape, or form giving anyone a free pass on owning slaves.
Either take the statue down or put around it the number of slaves he had.
Build statues for all the slaves he had.
So if George Washington had 4,000 slaves, there needs to be a field of slave statues around the George Washington statue that you have to walk through to get to the George Washington statue.
Like, if you're gonna have a guy who victimized I mean, everybody did it back then.
Everybody of wealth did it.
It was a normal thing to do to have people that you owned.
As crazy as that sounds to us.
Dude, I think that the world before mass communication, before the post office, and certainly before any kind of boat travel, when everyone was just either on foot or on horses, was undeniably...
Impossible for us to understand because they were so savage.
There was very few rules.
People were just dying of syphilis and every other fucking disease that came around the bend, whether it was the flu or the plague.
There was no sanitation.
Everyone was a rapist.
It was just a...
A wild, barely human thing that would occasionally paint cool things and write things down and compose music, but lived in a savage environment that's almost unrecognizable for us today.
The idea I've heard, and this may not be, I didn't look into it, and I apologize to the people who told me about this idea, because I wish I'd researched it more, but I'm going to put it out there, is that Africa, Was a really ancient culture that was...
When I saw that he was suggesting that his name should be on Mount Everest, or not at Mount Everest, Mount Rushmore, I was thinking immediately, like, oh my god, he's moving them into Checkmate.
In this madness, with all this crazy, there's no such thing as gender world, for a guy to come around and say, I'm going to put my face on Mount Rushmore.
That's what's beautiful about you, is you're not afraid to admit something that I think is really important to admit, which is like...
Dude, there's a continuum of reality and there's swaths of that continuum that are amazing.
I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where maybe you're in a kind of relationship that's not great.
But there's a piece of that relationship that is so fucking hot and so sexy and so beautiful in the midst of all the madness that it almost like makes the madness make sense, right?
That's a, that's a, or certainly like there's certain like substances I imbibe that if you look at what they do to my body, it's like terrible, but like that sliver of whatever it is is great.
So anyway, what I love that you're not afraid of doing It's like putting out there like look man It's not like people are one thing Here's the thing too.
I'm not a willing Victim of gaslighting you can't you can't do that to me, right?
I'm not interested, you know, I don't need anything from you I'm not interested in you gaslighting me.
I know when someone's putting on a show I had an email from a guy who I like Who told me to stop talking about Joe Biden because all the problems are because he has a stutter.
I'm like, listen, man, when you're 74, or however old he is, he's older than that, right?
The reality of the situation is, like, Biden, I don't like his policy regarding drugs, and I'm very resentful of a lot of the things he's done, and I'm also very resentful of the fact that...
That's what I'm like being...
That's the binary that I'm being forced to contend with here.
Bernie came on my podcast, and I did a very lukewarm endorsement of Bernie.
Look, I can't do stand-up right now, so I'll just tell you this.
Bernie did this very lukewarm...
I said, I'll probably vote.
I had my friend Barry Weiss on from the New York Times, and she said, who are you going to vote for?
I said, I'll probably vote for Bernie.
I said he makes sense.
I like what he stands for.
The guy's been rock solid his whole life.
It would be good to have a change where someone gets into office where you go, this guy really believes in justice.
He's not greedy.
He's not beholding the corporations.
They ran with that.
And then all these people that were in competition with Bernie started pulling shit that I've said on the podcast, drunk, high as fuck, stand-up comedy, put it in content.
And I said, having a strap-on thinking it's a dick is like having a lighter and thinking you're a dragon.
Plus, everyone knows that lesbians lack the proper lower back muscles to fuck a woman correctly.
It was like, I was in this sparring match, this verbal sparring match with this crazy lady.
That's what I said.
You can't just take that part out and put it in quotes and say, I really believe that lesbians lack the proper lower back muscles to be in a loving relationship with another woman who's also a lesbian.
That's not what I said, bitch.
I can't trust you on anything.
How am I going to trust you with Russia or climate change or anything when you lie about jokes?
Because they didn't want a guy who wasn't beholden to the system.
Bridget Phetasy, who's one of my favorite people to talk to, she said that when she read a diary that she wrote or a journal that she wrote when she was 24, she's like, Jesus Christ, I was AOC. And now she's much more of a centrist.
In fact, she's always mocking woke shit.
And she's like, but I was like full on woke when I was 24. I get it.
It's a thing of a person being a good person who's compassionate, who wants to do good for people, who thinks they're moving in the right direction.
But the problem is it's not in a line with the understanding that we have currently of psychology and of how people behave and of laws and the idea of punishment and crime.
You have to have some of that stuff.
You have to have incentives for people to do well, but you also have to have disincentives for them.
They have to be punished if they commit crimes.
You have to have law and order, but you have to have compassion.
You have to have goodwill, but you have to have law.
So there's like real, like, there's like a true, like, to me, there's an eternal sort of path in, like, looking at what good parenting is across cultures.
And you realize, like, you know...
You're an idiot if you think that people in the vast number of humans on earth, if you think that people in that vast number aren't insane, like what percentage are insane?
But people that I know that have really needed it are people that got hurt and then they got prescribed pain pills and the pain pills is what got them.
I know quite a few people that have turned to the Ibogaine.
Two good friends that have turned to the Ibogaine and it knocked them right off of the addiction and right back on path.
And it's really disturbing to me because it doesn't seem to be killing people and it's not legal.
And I think going forward in this country...
We're going to have to come to grips with a bunch of shit.
One of the things we're going to have to come to grips with is we've got, and this is not a bad thing, okay?
If any company is allowed to donate to a political candidate, any company, a fucking, you know...
Any company.
Chocolate company, a company that makes cars, then a drug company probably should too.
If they're allowed to sell drugs, maybe they should be allowed to give money to corporations or give money, rather, to politicians that are running for government.
Why not?
Everybody can do it.
Who's to say they can't and the fucking guys who make cars can when they're polluting the air?
Okay?
Who knows?
But at the end of the day, we have to go, yo, there's a lot of people getting hooked on these pills.
There's a lot of people ruining their lives on these pills.
And we're turning a blind eye because there's a lot of money involved in these pills.
And it's weird.
It's weird.
It's weird like the cigarette thing.
If we're so worried about 170,000 people dying of COVID, why aren't we worried about half a million dying from cigarettes?
Why aren't we worried about all the people that are not just dying, but losing their sanity on opioids?
How many people in this country are hooked on fucking pain pills?
Do we even know the real number?
Because how many people are functional?
Where they're hooked on it, but they're just taking one or two a day, and they're just going to work every day?
And they just stay in a steady haze of fucking working for fucking Hertz Rent-A-Car, and they've got a prescription, so it's all good.
A lot of things happen afterwards that people will say, did those things that happened afterwards happen because, and this is my belief, my belief is that All the things that happened after 9-11 in terms of the Patriot Act and all these other things, they happened because people were taking advantage of an opening where they recognized that a lot of people were scared, and then they started implementing these ideas that they would love to do during peacetime, but they would never be accepted.
Some people are under the impression that they actually orchestrated the event and then Afterwards, implementing these new rules and everybody went along with it because of the event they orchestrated.
Now, I'm not saying I know that that's not the case, and this is what's the scariest fucking thing to admit.
When you know about Operation Northwoods, you know that the government in 1963 was literally planning on blowing up a jet airliner and blaming it on Cuba.
They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay.
They're going to do whatever they could to get us into a war with Cuba.
Doesn't that technique and using it in that way point to this thing that we're really worried about?
What we're really worried about is there's this underlying narrative that's going on where these elites are battling it out and these warlords and these evil sociopaths that run the world are battling it out.
They don't just have a guy just fucking blow his brains out on the airplane and then just jump right off on the tarmac and then he gets rescued by the Russian police and then nobody says anything about it ever.
Was it ever confirmed that that whole thing where they said they found the very Dwayne Reed pharmacy in New York City where he had been taking amphetamines?
There was one thing that I wanted to make sure when we decided to go to Spotify.
One of the first things I thought of is Duncan Trussell has to be episode number one.
That was a legitimate thing, I thought.
Because there's something about my relationship with Duncan that's very unique.
He brings things out of me.
When you're around certain friends, they put you in a state of mind that you don't go into when you're not with them.
When I'm with Joey Diaz, one of the things I love about Joey Diaz, I'm always smiling when I'm with Joey Diaz.
First of all, because he knows I love him.
I've loved him forever.
We've been friends forever.
Every time I see him, I hug him.
So because he knows I love him, when we're around, he just starts talking shit.
He gets loose because he knows that I'm his number one fan.
Another person like that is Duncan.
When I'm around Duncan, there's something we do to each other.
We're like some sort of a weird epoxy where you mix it together.
Where he puts my mind in a place that it doesn't ordinarily go to automatically.
I genuinely believe there's ideas that I form when I'm talking to Duncan.
Like ideas popping in my head when I'm talking to him that they don't get there anywhere else.
And it's...
It kind of goes in with what we're talking about about that other guy's idea of thoughts and my concept of ideas that maybe they're a life form.
Maybe they're just like E.coli that lives in your gut or the flora that's on your skin and that different people have different combinations of those things.
Just like some people, you just don't vibe with them.
You talk to them.
You just want to get away from them as quick as possible.
You're like, oh, this person's so annoying.
And you can't help it for whatever reason.
It's like they say that women, vermon-wise, like women can smell a man's clothes and they can sort of I don't know if this is true, but I read that they can accurately depict, if they smell a man's clothes, whether or not they should be attracted to that man, whether or not they're genetically, they match up well with that man.
But that gets fucked up when they're on birth control.
You know, as dudes, we're always like, well, we make the cum, and there's a sperm that makes it to the end of the race, and that's the one that makes the baby.
So in our minds, we're like, it's like a sperm that won a marathon, gets into the egg as a reward for winning the marathon.
But now the idea is the egg actually is like the sperm are running to the finish line and the egg sends out chemicals to destabilize certain sperm and picks the one that fits best with whatever the plan of the egg is.
Humans spend a lot of time and energy choosing their partner.
New study by researchers from Stockholm University and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust shows that choosing your partner continues even after sex human eggs.
They would inject coke in him and testosterone in him.
There's a legendary story about how Mussolini wanted to talk to Hitler about pulling out of the war.
And Hitler showed up...
Shot up with cocaine and testosterone and just Yeah, I don't even Mussolini know what the fuck he was saying, but he sweated on him until Mussolini relented Dude, McKenna used to talk about alcohol in this way like like we survived alcohol Well,
he talked about alcohol being the differentiation between the ancient psychedelic cultures that worshiped the cattle, which shat on the ground, the mushrooms grew from, and they had all this mushroom iconography, to when they started preserving things, and preserving things in honey, which meant fermented honey, which meant mead, which meant alcohol, and then they switched to an alcohol-based society when they couldn't grow the mushrooms anymore because of climate change, or because they were moving, and moving in different directions.
Have you ever heard of alcoholics' feelings where you say to them, hey, you're an alcoholic, and you see that look in their face where they recognize that you're telling the truth, that it really hurts, and they get mad at you?
One of the things about alcohol is it sort of narrows reality.
If you think of one of the things that I really, really enjoy about edibles, there's a thing that I enjoy where I get so paranoid and so freaked out that I don't think I'm going to make it.
And then I come down from that.
And I get to this place of humility.
And that's one of my favorite places to be as a person.
When I'm coming down from a horrendous edible high, and then all of a sudden I'm real thankful that it's over.
I just want to be friends with people.
There's that space.
The world broadens.
Your danger broadens.
Your humility, your humanity, your vulnerability broadens.
And then it comes back to a manageable level, and you recognize that it could be so far worse than what you're experiencing currently.
And it's just your perspective that's fucking things up.
Because right now, with you and me right here, no people have ever been more comfortable in the history of humanity.
No!
We're both in love.
We both have children.
We're both drunk and high.
We both love each other.
We're both making each other laugh.
Anybody in this position that looks at things incorrectly.
But like...
Our problem is always perspective.
Our problem is always not recognizing how good we have it when we have it.
Dude, this is like, there's a Buddhist teacher, Jack Corfield, who says, tend to the part of the garden you can touch.
And also Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in one of his books, one of the things he said was, look, it could, and he meant it, it could be there's an ism That's good.
There's an ism that's the right way to be.
Like, it could be socialism, communism, who knows?
He didn't say that, but there could be an ism that works.
Look man, like to me like it's like the whole that that whole ball of wax man is like Dude like after once I started like the thing is like when all this shit happened And as a comedian, I was really afraid to get into even a little bit of studying the shit people are upset about.
Because no comedian in their right mind wants to be identified with some woke-ass comedian.
Because it's embarrassing.
But then when I started looking into it, then I found out about the George Washington shit.
Is there real value in getting outraged at shit that happened hundreds of years ago or is it an acknowledgement of First of all, the fact that we all agree we can do better.
The turmoil exists, all of it, social, economic.
The turmoil exists because we haven't really come to grips with whether or not we can all get together and be cool with each other all the time.
So there's always some sort of turmoil.
And when you look at turmoil in terms of whether it's financial turmoil or social turmoil, We're always trying to figure out, like, who's being the asshole?
When you see anything that's happening, like when you see a government getting overthrown, when you see war, you're always like, who is being the asshole?
And is it possible that most of this shit could be avoided?
And what's stopping most of it from being avoided?
When you look at any kind of, anytime a government, like any kind of country invades, anytime a country invades another country, anytime bombs are being dropped from drones, like, what can be done to avoid this?
By the way, I had a little bit of booze, so forgive my impetuousness that I would suddenly interrupt you, but you do have a history of finding young comedians who are like, and you do help us a lot, and we are eternally grateful to you.
And I don't care if you don't acknowledge it.
You won't acknowledge it, because if you did, you're afraid you'll go crazy.
I'll tell you from my perspective, it's not that I'll go crazy.
It's that I have to do it.
There's no if, ands, or buts.
It's a path.
It's like if you're going down, if you're on a fucking one of those water slides and you're going flying down, you're just going that way.
If you're a good person and you love comedy and you love comedians and you have friends and you want to see them happy and you want to see them successful.
And you know they're good.
And you know it benefits not just them, but you to elevate them.
I'm like, hey, check out Annie Letterman.
Hey, check out everybody, whoever it is.
It's like, I want them to know that my relationship with them, anybody who's listening to this podcast or anybody who listens to my stand-up or watches it, it's genuine.
That's who I am.
So if I find someone who's awesome, I want you to know about it.
I don't want to get paid for it.
If I find a great band, I start talking about it on Instagram.
The world deserves it, but like I remember going to do any when I want to be Annie and Whitney when I went to do Annie Letterman's podcast I won't give anything away any what happened I'm not I can't say it.
It's not legal, but like I remember like Leaving there being like Wow Like I remember leaving there just thinking like whole not just that not whatever I'm saying right now I'm saying like realizing like I've always loved chatting with Annie Letterman.
We have great conversations, but I remember like getting into where she lived and looking around and Realizing like well, she's formed some kind of cult.
I don't know what it is.
She's really funny, man She's so funny and like that like just that moment of like wow like you're you're like Both of them.
Dude, when you and I became friends, we should tell people, you and I became friends because I would call into the Comedy Store and I'd say, hey, I'm here Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
And you'd be like, cool, man.
Hey, did you fucking see this thing?
That they're saying is happening in Nepal where all these people are getting together and they're all seeing these...
We'd have these crazy conversations that go on for hours.
You'd put me on hold, you'd take another call, and then we would talk about fucking Terrence McKenna and Graham Hancock.
I just don't, I don't think anyone can understand what it's like unless they've been there to get off stage at the Comedy Store.
And you have a good set maybe, but you're working on a joke and you get off stage and suddenly Whitney Cummings, who's like a very rightfully successful, brilliantly funny person, stops you and says, hey, what do you think about this addition to your punchline?
You know what I mean?
Like those moments are so so like so like cuz cuz in that moment there isn't like a Hierarchy like in that moment.
There isn't like look I made like a shows for network TV to one of my proudest moments as a comic I was at the improv and this was like 2003 or some shit like that and Louie CK sits in the back of the room and takes notes and And then we get off stage, and he actually asked me before, he goes, do you mind if I watch and give you some notes?
I go, dude, I'd fucking love that.
And then afterwards, he had a bunch of really funny suggestions.
I don't remember if I'd wind up using any of them, but it was just so fun, so fun to hear him and I talk about bits, and the fact that he would sit down and watch these bits.
Biggie Hypnotize seems like 95, because I was on news radio.
And I remember driving to work, what year?
97. 97?
Yeah.
So, okay.
I was on news radio from 94 to 99. So, I was on news radio, and I remember driving to work and hearing that going, whoa, they just cracked through some new level.
And most people who do these big tournaments, like even the Olympics, they teach them to have a surprise release.
It's a psychological trick, where you're using a certain type of release, where either you have your finger on a trigger and you don't push your finger, you just let your back muscles pull it because they're crude muscles, or you use what's called a hinge, where you slowly pull on the hinge, and the arrow goes, but you don't know when it's gonna go.
Whereas a trigger, you know exactly where it's gonna go.
Where there's something about knowing exactly where it's gonna go, where you just fucking, you tense up, you twitch.
And it's hard.
It's hard to keep your mind in order where you just go, especially if you're shooting in a tournament, you're in the Olympics, gold medal round, ha!
So very few people in the Olympics allow their brain to decide when the shot goes.
There's the mind of no mind, the ability to get out of your own way.
And for archers, the best way to do this is either in the hinge release or a release with a thumb where you pull through with your back muscles and it makes the thumb trigger go up.
That we don't make our decisions based on compassion.
We make them based on beneficial markers of improvement, whether it's financial improvement or land grabs.
That's the problem.
The problem is...
That we have these things in our head where this is what's the most important, and this is what's not as important.
Like, love is important, but if you see two people that are, you know, they're in love, but you don't like either one of them, do you feel like that's the same kind of love as two people you admire that are together?
She was a super athlete in volleyball and he's like one of the greatest big wave surfers the world's ever known.
I'm friends with them.
And when I talk to them, if I talk to them either on, like, we did a little FaceTime the other day, and I get out of it, I go, that, I want to be somebody who makes me feel, or I want to be somebody who makes somebody feel the way I feel when I talk to them.
And I said to myself when I got off the phone with them the other day, they're really nice people.
They're genuine people.
And this is one of the things that happens, and it's a weird thing that happens.
When you become more and more famous, you get more and more comfortable talking to other famous people.
So you talk to famous people and you realize, oh, they have a hard time talking to people because other people think they're weird.
So they have to find famous people that are also nice.
And so that's how I feel about them.
So I get off the phone with them and I'm like, You can be Gabriella Reese and you can be Laird Hamilton and still come out and be a really cool, friendly, inspirational, genuine person.
I'm like, I want to make somebody else feel the way those people make me feel.
If anything has ever come out of this podcast that's been good, It's that it's given people a perspective where there's a potential where that maybe their limited ideas of what they're capable of in terms of their own personal happiness or their own success and whatever their chosen endeavor is.
Maybe it's not really limited.
Maybe they can just shift their consciousness and through effort and focus they can change their destiny.
Well, you know, the reason I say centralization is because like the first and a very natural reaction to being associated with a body would be that you would centralize on the identity that you're in.
You know, if I step on your, if I stomp on your foot, you're going to feel pain.
So why wouldn't you centralize on this identity that you're in?
And again, like right now with the science we have, it can't show us, I think it will eventually show that our sentience isn't limited to the body, that we're a field of consciousness that's kind of getting associated with particular quantum clouds of meat that we call it.
And they interface with other sentient bodies in a way that makes them unique To the relationship between that person like I bet you're different with your wife than you are with anybody you've ever met that that is true Yes, but that's also like one of the great like right now one of the big Ideas such a cool idea too is like on stage off stage.
Actually, I'll tell you some other great things about COVID. It taught us that we can telecommute and businesses still work, and that transforms the landscape.
But the on-stage, off-stage idea, or the way Cho Gyumtri for Rinpoche puts it is, some people, at the end of the day, they go home and they sit on the couch, and they go...
But they only let themselves do that at the very end of the day of work because they've produced in their mind a situation where this is me relaxing and this is me working.
Here I am with my family.
Here I am with my co-workers.
So this differentiation produces a kind of neurotic kind of split personality way of being which is like really all those you don't need to wait to get home to sit on the couch to go That's where you're at now.
That's actually every single thing.
But the story you're telling yourself produces moments where this is a relaxing time and this is a non-relaxing time.
But it's just a story, Joe.
That's the idea.
And compassion is, I think, the beginning of recognizing, you know, how many people have you met?
And I know my life changed when I went to the doctor.
With my swollen fucking testicle that, by the way, before I went to the doctor, I would look at myself in the mirror and think, man, if they were symmetrical, I would feel awesome.
Like, it felt good to have a big ball.
There was like...
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I literally was like, goddammit, if they were both...
Listen, man, I tell everybody, if there's one human being that's the most important human being in comedy ever that wasn't a comedian, it's Mitzi Shore.
Like, can you imagine, like, if you really think about it, you get robbed at gunpoint by a comedian, and you still give him stage time, What the fuck is that?
When I was an open-miker, okay, I had gotten obsessed with comedy for six months before I could ever do an open-mic night, because I erroneously assumed that you had to be 21 to be able to get on stage.
It turns out you can be younger, but you just can't drink to watch you.
But you can be a 19-year-old and do stand-up.
I didn't know.
So August 27th, 1988, When I turned 21, I went on stage.
And when I went on stage, I remember thinking...
I remember really clearly thinking, like, how weird is this job?
There's a bunch of people out there that can just talk.
Like when you look back at those times, like how do you feel?
You feel like it's not even you.
I met that lady when I met Mitzi Shore.
And when Mitzi Shore passed me at the Comedy Store, I remember thinking when I was in 1988 in Boston that there was this Mecca.
There was this place you had to go where Richard Pryor filmed live at the Sunset Strip, and Sam Kennison used to do stand-up, and fucking Howie Mandel went up, and Rodney Dangerfield, and David Letterman!
Goddamn, I gotta get to the Comedy Store!
That's all they wanted to do.
I didn't want to get anywhere else.
There was one part of me that wanted to go to Houston, because I had heard that Sam Kennison did these wild shows in Houston.
I wanted to go to Houston.
But the big thing for me was I got to get to the store.
And when I got passed by that lady, dude, you know, it's one of the reasons why I feel so compelled to help people on this podcast.
It's because I feel like when that lady passed me, I was like, holy shit.
I remember Ari's gradually unraveling into his comedic self.
And I remember Ari smacks Bobby Lee.
There was a fight between Ari and Bobby Lee.
And I remember as the talent coordinator, that was when Mitzi starts kissing.
He's now a comic somewhere in that like in that like throwing off of Rationality and that I don't know what it was man like in you know you though Here's the most important part of Mitzi.
Because let me tell you, man, as a talent coordinator, there are plenty of times Where people wanted to film some shit in the main room, where they wanted to pay a lot of money.
I mean that was all like the thing about Mitzi was like No, like imagine like the best thing to think of is like think of your most like outlaw comedian Then imagine a person who built a saloon within which those comedians could be grown to be more of an outlaw.
But then the most, to me, like with Mitzi, and she would never allow this, she'd already, if she heard me saying any of this shit, she'd be like, you're fired.
But like if you were gonna write a Mitzi Bible and you wanted to like base the whole Bible on one thing it was something she told me so many times as a talent coordinator and I like to fantasize she thought I was funny but as a talent coordinator something she told me over and over and over again regarding comedians was you don't need them they need you That was her like core thing,
which is like the moment that a comedian starts thinking that they need this system, then they degrade themselves.
They have to understand that their Comedic ability and who they are as that persona, which she would say is like, they're iconoclasts.
She meant like, you're not gonna find anyone like this ever again.
And that's who she was trying to find.
She would say, therefore, it's supply and demand, which is like, there is nothing like you, but there's a lot of things like them.
So if you think that you need them, you will degrade yourself as an artist.
That was her main core truth, which is don't get caught up in the thing they're going to try to teach you, which is you need them.
You don't need the manager.
You don't need the agent.
You don't need the studio.
You don't need anything because you're funny.
You're the fucking nuclear isotope generating energy.
And if you get lost in this insanity that you require the system to be great, not only to degrade yourself, You do great in art.
But you know, this is one of the things about recognizing what Mitzi Shore did and A lot of Bud Friedman, a lot of people who own clubs, Rodney Dangerfield, is it's not just about the ideas and getting the ideas out in a way the audience can digest.
It's setting up a club.
It's bringing people in.
It's setting a standard where people know, hey man, David Letterman came out of here.
Robin Williams came out of here.
Okay?
Bill Hicks was a fucking doorman here.
Sam Kinison came out of here, okay?
This is the motherfucking comedy story.
This is standard.
And that's a factor too, man.
You can't let the artists completely be in control because one charismatic artist with a lot of fucking song and dance moves can trick people into thinking things that aren't necessarily accurate because of charisma.
If Mitzi Shore was alive today, if we could somehow or another go back in time and grab Mitzi Shore from 1974 and bring her to 2020, she would just be running shit.
She would just be running shit.
First of all, she would have 100 girls under contract for OnlyFans accounts.
Well, it's really just some sort of weird canyon ladder in between two fucking cliffs between this and what is gonna be available for people in just a few years.
If the girl really did love that part of you, that would be extraordinary.
See, that's the beauty of alcohol.
Alcohol is, you're hanging out with a girl who's got a, like, Hello Kitty tattoo in between her thumb and forefinger, and you guys are drinking, you're having a good time, and you're like, I love you, and she's like, I love you too, and you just give each other a hug.
I think we can, but I do want to, like, the reason I'm going to speak up for Buddhism in general...
and i agree with you and what i love about buddhism so much is that man what's great about it is it invites you to reject it it says to you the first part of it is like reject this if you can like if you can find a flaw in the thing Reject it.
And also, if you can find a legitimate rejection, then we will add that to the, like, what Buddhism...
We're gonna fight against centralization so that we don't have to get chained to shitty cities.
Like, that's the whole point is like, look, if anything happens after COVID that's beautiful, it will be that all the commuters say to their bosses, wait a minute, for the last six months, I've been zooming in for these fucking conferences, And your business is doing just as well as it did when I was driving an hour to get there an hour back.
And then the moment that happens, we break the back of addiction to being in a metropolis.
Now we have a global society.
Now it's not just that you have to have some person who's like living in an Angeleno.
It's like you could have someone from any part of the planet.
Centralization seems to be the fundamental problem in the sense that It worked.
What happens is you become a woman who actually feels the way a woman feels when she's attracted to a man and a guy with a dick like a battering ram is just gonna send it home.
No, it's the experience that literally made them exist on the planet.
They feel like if they were to feel it, it would be something against who they are, which is insanity in the sense of the very feeling of a cock blowing cum.
Whatever the fuck it is that you think is limiting your ability to experience pleasure on the earth is Satan.
And it's like, if that thing is telling you that you're a dude and this is the only way you can feel joy, but simultaneously you're hanging out with a guy who's the same gender as you and you're falling in love with him, and then you're pretending you're not because some devil voice in your mind is telling you, that's Satan, man.
That's evil.
That's fucking evil.
It's dark.
It's dark.
And I'm not deriding Lindsey Graham's sexual proclivities.
Christina Pazitzky's Instagram, she does these like fucking hilarious TikTok clips that she recovers from TikTok.
And there's a whole genre of TikTok of these creepy fucking pervs who are like showing how they lick pussy.
And like the whole TikTok is based on them like going...
It's so fucked up, but it's like a guy will, in the masculine sense, will go down on a girl, yet the concept of having a dick in your mouth is considered to be, like, fucked up.
Like, you must be, like, a complete, like, something about you is weak.
You know, and I think we're gonna have to contend with that.
Her, by the way, her Instagram, the TikTok she does, like, she should do a whole show based on her, like, she, like, curates the most fucked up TikToks you've ever seen.
Lowering the boundaries, like dropping down the boundaries for people to be able to enter into the world of expressing whatever weirdo idea they have or video of them doing backflips onto a fucking whale, whatever they're doing.
Because it lets you realize that as much as we're at each other's throats right now, I don't know how much of it is our fault.
And I think we could have been a lot better off if someone decided, instead of trying to make money, that they would recognize that this strategy of Whether it's social media, likes, or Twitter, you know, Twitter, Facebook, or whether it's showing you the things you get angry about and you comment on Facebook or YouTube, like, whatever we're doing, like, ultimately, we're changing the path of the way people think.
We're way more malleable than we like to think we are.
And I think people that have a voice, whether it's you or I or Ari or Bert or Tom or anybody who has a podcast in particular because...
If you have a podcast, at the very least, no one's telling you what you can't talk about.
Duncan, I love that segment.
But when you're talking about people not conforming and trying to figure themselves out, people are thinking you're non-binary or somehow or another you're not woke.
Well, the most important thing, I think, in this storm, and it's easy to forget, is that you and I and everybody we run across, I have yet to meet somebody who's a real monster, man.
Anytime I feel like this is where I'm attuned to this.
Anytime I get the sense someone's wanting me not to express myself, that's where I get really locked in.
And I get the whole anti-woke thing because nobody wants some fucking liberal Baptist piece of shit to tell them how to be.
But, you know, man, the moment on my Instagram I did a Black Lives Matter thing, That's the only time anybody told me to shut up.
No one told me to shut up before that, but the moment I did a thing that was in alignment with Black Lives Matter, there was all of a sudden this weird similarity of people hitting me up, being like, you fucking woke me up.
No, not 30 just enough where I really I'm gonna say like five fifteen fifteen enough where like I realize how many Instagram followers Do you have I don't remember dude, I can look it up right now like not 200,000 or something.
I No, but I know what you're saying, but I realized that my thinking regarding being even remotely a political activist was being shaped by my fear that a tiny percentage of my audience would reject me.
And that's what I'm saying.
I was letting my ship get steered, not by my own intuition, or not by my own sense of like, fuck man, that fucking George Floyd video, that's unforgivable.
I mean, to me, like, you know, that's why I think so great about the fact that you got to be the person that you are, that you got to be the spotlight, got to be on you as it is, and the reason it's on you, and the reason I take such...
Not much offends me, man, but when people start attacking you, I have to fight against my offense because I know you.
And so when people are fucking at arms against you, I feel really depressed because I know you.
And you are one of the most progressive people I've ever met.
And so when people start falling upon you because you have fucking nerds like Ben Shapiro, Which, by the way, you shouldn't have that guy on anymore!
And, like, that dude is, like, an embarrassment, but I don't think what people admit when they look at Ben Shapiro is, like, there's a piece of you that's like, I'd have fun with him.
Look, as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to create what I think could be created by humanity, We have to create the engine, not of rejection, but of acceptance, meaning that if you've got a charismatic Finn Shapiro avatar in the video game, in the simulation that we're in, there's a way to reabsorb him into reality that isn't like the way people currently see him.
Look, if you figure out a way to do something that helps you pass most of the people that you're competing against, but ultimately hinders you against the people who learn your lessons plus other lessons and aren't hampered by ideology, and they pass you.
There's a moment we have to figure out when you're gonna let go.
When people get mad at me that I talk to them, I'm like, listen, just listen to what we're saying.
Listen, he's not a bad guy.
You might not agree with him, but me and him are having really good conversations about why I feel like you can't tell an 18-year-old kid just pull your pants up and don't shoot anybody.
We're having these really nuanced conversations and he's allowing me because he knows I like him.
So if he and I are sitting right here, and we talk about stuff, he knows that if I don't agree with him, it doesn't change my feelings about whether or not I'll hug him or I love him.
We're all facing this problem where we identify with ideas.
Whereas, I think we can just do our best to make good with where we stand right now as a human, and when we encounter other humans, let's take ideas and put them in front of us.
And let's cross our arms and let's go over these ideas without any attachment.
That's where it gets hard because most of us don't have enough personal satisfaction and our own accomplishments to relinquish this idea that our ideas are not ours.
That our ideas are just a mathematical problem.
It's a fucking Rubik's Cube.
It's a fucking game of Clue.
Like, who knows who did it?
Is it Charlotte in the fucking library with a rope?
We don't know!
So this thing that we're doing as people today Is we're scared.
And one of the things that happen when people are scared is they pull back.
You pull back, you put up fences, you wall off, you protect your tribe, you decide what you can say, what you can't say, and decide who's the enemy and who's good and who's bad, and everybody walls off!
My thoughts are that's a trap and that is just something that we've been involved with forever from the beginning of time from single-celled organisms to Small mammals to human beings.
We've been involved in this weird trap of competing against each other in the wrong way Competing against each other in a way where ultimately somebody gets victimized.
I think The best competition is keeping the other competition alive, competing against each other while helping each other.
And everybody gets by.
Everybody gets better.
And even people who are not doing well, you tell them why they're not doing well, that will force you to do better.
Like and also anybody who's gonna like do that you like feel like they negate whatever their philosophical ideas by attacking the thing, who gives a fuck?
If I was his best friend If Ben and I were sitting around, he's like, you think you're supposed to us?
I'd be like, okay, yeah, you probably should, because ultimately, people are going to fuck with you, but my position is it's better if you have vulnerabilities.
If there's something you've done that's really stupid, it's probably better for you when you shit on things.
And I think that's a good argument for coming out against wet-ass pussy.
Like, really, it's like, you know, the reality of it is, is like, we are in a very bizarre period in time, which is that you and I, we became friends on the phone having these same conversations, and now you say a thing that flies in the face of the particular, like, default reality of our time, and you start trending on Twitter.
The way I know you right now is like you trending on Twitter where I'm like, what the fuck happened?
Yeah, but you have to watch out because people are going to like try to exploit you.
That's the main thing is like people recognizing what you are, who have political agendas, will infiltrate your shit and then start blowing out their radioactivity into the world, right?
And I think many of the things he says, he says because he's rewarded for saying controversial things on the internet and many times make sense in a logical way if you don't take into account all the different situations that lead to a person becoming who they are in 2020. Right.
Slavery and Jim Crow laws and all these different things we all have to deal with.
But I think he's a good person.
I really do.
I think many times the things we say, we're half defensive and half promotional.
You're saying things because you think that people are going to react in a certain way.
You don't necessarily mean it.
And you also say things because you've seen the contrary to that poorly worded and you decide you don't agree with that until you want to counter it.
But I think the problem is in ideologies.
More than anything, if I'm really being objective, I always feel like our problem is purely in ideologies because we just get committed to one side or the other and ideas to one side.
You're right or you're wrong.
And I think if we could just divorce ourselves from ideas and divorce ourselves from all ideologies and just look at something like honest, like you come to me and I come to you and I go, Hey man, what's up?
I go, what are your intentions?
My intention is to live a harmonious life with my neighbors.
And I said, mine as well.
Okay, good, beautiful.
And you hug each other, and you go, what do we have to do about taxes?
Man, if we lived in a community where I felt like, hey, if I pay more in taxes, people will have their kids in a better school, and the water will be purer, and there'll be less crime, I would fucking 100% sign up for that.
But what I'm saying is people in the left will say, you're a monster that you would have Ben Shapiro on, and they completely forget That you gave one of the great potential socialist presidents of our time a platform that you supported.
I want bad motherfuckers to have completely Separate ideas of how the world should or shouldn't work, what is wrong or isn't wrong, what's right or isn't wrong, what's privilege, what's bullshit.
I want everybody to come to the table clean.
I want everybody to come to the table warm.
I want everybody to hug.
I really do.
And I think we're all scared.
And I think it fucks up everybody.
And if everybody who wants progress Doesn't want people to feel good about running into each other and talking things through.
We're going into this thing with the wrong energy.
The right energy is going into this thing going, listen, I didn't ask to be born.
You didn't either.
unidentified
Here we are, 2020, trying to figure the world out.
What we need is romantic tension between a 24-year-old, like, super...
A super liberal, super attractive woman, and like a 32-year-old Navy SEAL, who's also married, and no one cheats on anybody, but they have this sexual tension, and they keep it together, and they work their way through veganism, and...
I'm trying to fucking fix the world, Duncan.
I'm trying to tell you that all the things that we see, pros and cons, pluses and minuses...
I'm just trying to figure out like we got to the election and suddenly it's this erotic romance between this 24 year old- That's so much better than a fucking guy with fake hair and some dead man weekend at Bernie's with a cop shoving her hand up his ass and walking him to the aisle.
And also, in that moment where I was living with you, it wasn't like...
Some kind of like National Lampoon vacation thing.
You were like really serious with me and you were not serious all the time.
We had a few like really serious talks and in those serious talks you like helped me realize that like I had to stop being so flippant with my life and it was really good and you weren't fucking around and it was cool and it was very sweet and I'll never forget it man.
When you see someone who is at a bump in the road, many things can happen, right?
And for you, I wanted you to know that you can most certainly get upset along the way, or you can be almost I'm almost immune to all the bumps in the road.
It's really how you decide.
And if you decide you're this fucking Peter Pan character and just like float through this, there's ways that you're lucky and ways that other people that live in Afghanistan and the Congo will never understand.
But you and I, when we were hanging out together, I was like, I remember the moment you called me, there wasn't even a half a second between you saying, I was like, yay, Duncan's going to live with me!
And like, I'm not trying to, like, your perception of it may even be different from mine, but like, one thing that happened, I have a few memories of that incredible gift that you gave me.
One of the memories is, riding up to your house, I don't even know how you got into my car, that you would be in my Mini Cooper, which was red at the time.
So all of a sudden I'm in a mansion where there's a piranha tank and Eddie Bravo I remember because I was going up to hide smoking because I was addicted at the time.
Well, there's a thing where you can do, where you can protect people temporarily from their emotions, but you won't protect them from the consequences of their actions.
That you see that maybe they don't.
And I think we're all responsible for our friends' blind spots.
And when we see blind spots, we go, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!
Well, gang, subscribe to my Patreon, forward slash DTFH. We have a Tuesday, we have a meditation.
Wednesdays, we're doing a Dune book club.
It's amazing.
The book Dune by Frank Herbert is incredible.
Fridays, we have a family gathering.
It's just us hanging out, but join us there.
You know, the truth is it is a simulation, you know, and we told you that before you linked into the thing and we told you it would wipe your memory and that you would feel like you are helpless in the sense that the thing you are right now, you don't know what The power that you wield.
So you chose that, just so you know.
And we said that in this moment, we would do a thing where we alerted you of the fact that you had been, you had intentionally decided to dive into a simulation, making you limited.
You're very powerful.
You're Thor.
In the human world that you're in right now, you're actually Thor.
You're a powerful Norse god that has gotten sucked into a very temporary magic spell that isn't even that powerful compared to the powers in the world you come from.
But right now you have become convinced that you are a limited Identity in the mortal realm, which you requested, by the way.
You said, I want to be an insurance agent, real estate agent, school teacher, psychologist, fireman, cop.
I wanted to be a pilot, somebody who was a flight attendant, someone who worked in a museum, a teacher, somebody who was a historian, a failed writer, a failed comedian, and you became this temporary thing, but the truth is you're a god and you're confused.
Listen, you have helped me in many steps of the way because you and I, as friends, You know, we came from different backgrounds, but we're both very compassionate and very interested in exploring alternative ideas.
Both of us.
You and I have had so many conversations where you said something to me and I went, hmm, damn, maybe, huh?
And I've had to reconsider the way I was focusing in on something.
And because I respect you, and this is something I've said of Ari as well, and Joey, and even Eddie Bravo, and Jamie, and all the people that I'm around, if you say something to me, I consider it like I'm thinking of it in a different way.
Like if you say, I don't think that's a good idea because of this, I go, Huh.
The Yugas are a period of time that one of the ways to like But if they get represented, it's like, imagine a dove flying through the sky with a silk scarf and the beak, and the tip of the scarf brushes against the peak of the Himalayas.
So the amount of time it takes for one of those peaks to get pushed down to a valley, that could be considered a yuga.
In Hinduism, it's a period of time, and people argue about that length of time.
Yeah, dude, but we're not packing ourselves up because of some like Tonner S. Thompson thing.
We're packing ourselves up because the country we were born into has fallen into the throes of a really dark period induced by a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic.
We were talking about defunding the police and defunding ICE and all this nonsense that people are like, let's just figure out a way to be nice to each other.
I'm stammering because it's like telling you why it would reveal where I'm headed, and I don't mean to be all magical about that, but the main thing...
I'll be involved with anything you're involved in.
Let's do it.
Let's have fun.
By the way, not to go back to Eddie Bravo apologetics, but I didn't finish my point back then.
And I think it's an important point to make.
He said to me something that was so fucking weird when he said and this was on top of him taking on a missionary stance with my inhalation of tobacco smoke so by then I was already like over a little defensive I was defensive and I didn't I was like I was too dumb at that time to like recognize like shit man this guy's got a fucking like He's a jiu-jitsu master.
So what he's saying is not coming from a place of someone who hasn't worked really hard at a particular...
It was like, when he said it to me, it felt culty.
It felt fucked up.
It felt like, it felt crazy.
And it was I remember him saying it to me and like being like man Here I didn't say it cuz I'm afraid of him You're fucking crazy you would think that But you know, it's weird that he's right.
You know, that's what's weird about it.
It's like, this is your first episode on Spotify.
And it's crazy, man, because like, I get, and I'm honored, deeply honored that you invited me on.
No, you didn't hate me, but you were irritated by me.
Cause like, you don't remember when we first met, was in the ballet room, I was with Princess Cory, Cory Como, and like, I was trying to, at the time I was really into like, It wasn't even called trolling them, but it was like saying a thing opposite to what you should say.
You were a contrarian.
I was being a contrarian.
Something came up about marijuana.
You mentioned marijuana.
I'm sitting with Cory Kilma.
I was already nervous around you.
Because at the time, you were still in this incredible trajectory.
I made a stupid joke about how weed was, like, bad.
You know, I'd come from, like, I was like, you know, there's never been a time that I haven't been high for years, and, you know, especially then...
But I made this dumb joke about how weed was bad and I remember you looked at me with such such like a scathing look of like because you had just started like understanding how wonderful marijuana was and you really thought I meant weed was bad and I remember Cory gave me this look of like no Duncan no don't don't do the joke It was a terrible moment!
Because you weren't in a place where you could even, like, you weren't tolerating that because you were getting high and starting to realize that it wasn't probably what you...
And I'll never forget that, right back from the Irvine Improv.
I'll never forget it because, like, I'd never heard that Terrence McKenna speech.
I knew about Terrence McKenna roughly from, like, you know, I had encountered him in my earlier years as a psychonaut, but, like, something about that particular lecture that you're playing, something about leaving something as weird as a comedy show, And this idea that he was saying,
and this is the part that still sticks with me to this day, which is, you know, look, we are heading towards a point Of concurrence of events that is known as the singularity and that the closer we get to it, the more we're going to experience these things, tachyon particles being blown backwards through time that will produce these events in history that we call novelty.
And something about that ride back and just that moment, me listening to it, I started thinking, it wasn't like I even thought this isn't real.
I thought that is real.
And so here we are now, 2020. In the middle of a pandemic, you've become what has been described as the Oprah for men.
It's like the problem is like where you're kind of in a bit of a bind is that all this human attention has been placed upon you and you have to wrestle with your identity because...
But like in Dune, I'm reading this great book Dune by Frank Herbert.
It's so good.
And in this desert world, there's these beings called the Fremen.
They represent complete attunement with nature.
And so...
At this wonderful point in the book, this imperial, galactic representative of this imperialism is like sitting in a canyon with all his wounded men.
They're almost done.
And the Fremen, one of these tribal beings, is saying to them, you have to make a water decision.
And what they mean by that is your wounded men you have to pick one of them to die and will render their body into water because in this world there's no water so you have to make a water decision and the fremen is interacting with a being in this pure way which is the only way you can act if you're truly into a nature you're innocent and it isn't like dark or anything it's like you have to make a water decision and the being is saying to him Like hesitating and the Fremen is saying
to him, do you want me to make the water decision for you?
And they don't mean it in an aggressive way.
They mean like, would you, you love these people?
Would you give up the decision to us?
Wouldn't you be enough to make the decision yourself?
Fortunately in the book, one of them dies.
And they're able to, like, rend their body into water.
But what I'm saying is, like, the position of power in the whole series of Dune is based on this problem.
Which is, like, if you get saddled with any kind of power, even if you want to pretend it's a kind of clownish power, You are still in a very difficult situation because you have to make a water decision.
Like, you will have to, like, if you're Trump and you're a clown president, or if you're Obama, you're some advanced president, or Wayne, you are lost.
Yeah, and then from this, you can have people on who are real pundits or whatever.
I mean, look, man, anyone I've ever talked to, anytime I've ever been in this situation where people are talking shit about you, or like...
Questioning my friendship with you because you had this person or that person on.
If I'm friends with you, something's weird with you or me or whatever, I always and will forever stand up for you, man, because I know you.
And to me, it's like, look, you got into this ridiculous predicament.
Like, you're in a bind, man.
You are.
You are in a bind.
And it's a beautiful bind, but it's a real problem.
But like, because of your heart, which is very open and very sweet, you allow this like...
You allow a lot of people on your podcast that don't make sense according to the zeitgeist.
And some people get mad at you!
And they pounce!
And I always feel so rotten about that.
Because it's like, man, you don't understand.
This is a real progressive.
Like, you're looking at someone who is exactly the being that you would hope...
Would be the like result of like great government and great education and you're fucking attacking an ally.
That's the part that gets me up where I get really bummed is it's like man you have to understand that person look you should if you ask me I feel like Duncan should I have Ben Shapiro on?
I feel like no no there's so many better people to have on than that guy but it doesn't mean you can't have those other people on too Well, if you listen to me!
But I would say to you, I go, listen, man, I know what you're saying, but if I just took you to dinner, you, me, and Ben Shapiro went to some fucking kosher joint.
And I feel like Ben Shapiro, he enters into all discussions with good faith.
He's not an insulting guy.
He and I have a...
Interesting conversations about gay marriage, interesting conversations about all sorts of aspects of society, racial relations, Black Lives Matters.
And he and I have talked about it in a very respectful way, even though we disagree.
There's been no insults.
There's been no shittiness.
And I think that's the problem with putting a guy like that on some sort of a standard traditional talk show.
You have him on and some social justice warrior and they argue with each other and you got a host and you break every seven minutes to go to commercial.
You don't find out what he's about.
He's not a bad guy, man.
And he gets shaped as much by those seven-minute segments where you're battling it out with someone, trying to get sound.
As you and I do by three-minute spots at the Comedy Store trying to pass open mic night.
And the reason I brought up Eddie Bravo is only because, like...
I think what you're doing is really sweet and good, and I think your heart is in the same place it was when I met you a while ago, which is pretty bizarre.
They would somehow maintain a thing that's integral.
You meet people out here who go through rough patches, and they're not who they portrayed themselves as initially.
They're actually con artists or fuck-ups or bad temporarily.
I think people get better, but sometimes they're bad temporarily.
You really like have like maintained this I think a really beautiful kind of North Star regarding your ethics and your consideration of things.
So, yeah, man, I'm like, I'll do anything for you, really.