Scott Eastwood highlights Made Here’s 90% domestic beer to contrast with foreign-owned competitors, then pivots to Joe Rogan’s weight struggles and the absurdity of celebrity culture. They debate UAPs via Commander David Fravor’s eyewitness account of objects moving instantaneously near aircraft carriers, while critiquing media politicization—Rogan cites COVID-19 and lab leak narratives as failures. Eastwood shares his father’s WWII-era work ethic, linking it to Rogan’s defense of hard work over systemic resentment, before dissecting prostitution laws’ hypocrisy and Oregon’s drug decriminalization. The episode ends at 4:30 AM, blending humor, evolutionary biology, and societal critiques into a sprawling conversation on craftsmanship, resilience, and systemic fairness. [Automatically generated summary]
Because I've been dealing with this back thing that you saw that I hurt myself doing jujitsu this morning.
Yeah.
I've been dealing with this to the point where I've been doing a lot of physical therapy- And over the last few weeks, I've been training pretty hard again because the back's been feeling good until this morning.
But I got out of a...
Because I was just trying to let everything relax, but I did not get out of a food rhythm.
My food rhythm went...
When I work out hard, I eat whatever the fuck I want.
But when I'm not working out hard and I eat whatever the fuck I want, I just start getting fat-faced.
Well, I feel like those people, I don't know them exactly, or maybe I'm just not aware I'm friends with them, they'd be the same people who resist change.
I even saw, like, the other day, I mean, you know, I was thinking about coming on your show, and I was like, oh, wow, this is crazy, because he's the center of the stratosphere, it seems like, what people are talking about.
And I was like, I saw something about Prince Harry contenting on you.
Well, that's the thing that people have the hardest time about with celebrities.
And I agree with them.
That's what I think about myself.
Why does my opinion matter more?
Because more people are paying attention to it?
I don't think my opinion matters more.
If you have an opinion and your opinion differs from mine, if you and I were having a conversation at a restaurant or a bar, I would listen to you.
I don't think my opinion matters more because more people listen.
But that's what celebrity is.
Celebrity is, there's a lot of people out there that voice their opinion and legitimately believe that more people should listen to them because they have 12 million Instagram followers or because they're famous or because they have a Grammy Award winning album or they won an Oscar.
It's nonsense.
We're all individual human beings, you know, irregardless of your connection to any racial group or ethnic group or social group or sexual, gender group, whatever it is, political group, whatever it is, geographic group.
We're just humans.
And the weird thing about celebrities is they're just humans, but they're humans that get a disproportionate amount of attention, you know?
And I think you could probably relate to that because you're not just a movie star, you're the son of one of the greatest movie stars the world has ever known, which has got to be fucking bizarro world.
And you kind of look a lot like them.
Like, I was watching Wrath of Man last night.
First of all, it's weird watching people you're friends with who are movie stars.
I'm like, oh, hey, Scott.
All my friends say this, by the way.
I've gone elk hunting with you.
You and I shared elk hunting camp, you know?
By the way, you were the first guy to kill.
You were the first guy to get an elk out of the whole group.
You and I did that podcast with Cam Haynes, greatest bow hunter ever, and we're hanging out with him, and then all of a sudden we're in camp with him, and you're the guy who comes home first with an elk.
It was amazing.
It was pretty dope.
But I know you as a human being, so to see you in a movie is odd, but I'm kind of used to it.
I'm kind of used to knowing people that are- Seeing them on the thing.
Yeah, like Post Malone's in that movie.
And I texted him, I said, I just saw you get whacked in a Guy Ritchie movie, LOL. You know, it's like, it's odd.
Well, I used to hear this funny thing all the time.
I guess it makes sense.
You fuck who you're closest to.
I mean, you know, not that, like...
You know, you're fucking every celebrity you know, but you're just, I think, by nature, you're around them, so because you're in movies with them, or you have to do press, or the thing, and so...
I had a conversation with a woman about this once, where we were talking about Brad Pitt, and Brad Pitt, who had gotten divorced from Angelina Jolie, and I said, I think you should just marry a waitress.
Just marry a normal person.
And this is the conversation.
It went like something in the...
I was...
I'm going to be honest.
I don't remember it completely clearly.
But it was somewhere in the lines of that would be a disproportionate...
It was something along the lines of the power in the relationship would be disproportionately towards Brad Pitt.
Well, even crazier than that, China is on the verge of developing some insane supersonic travel.
I think it's more for military applications, but there's a wind tunnel that China has developed that puts it way ahead of what the American capabilities are, at least what we know, right?
Whatever black ops and shit they're doing in the middle of the desert.
Do you think that that has anything to do with, because I just watched the 60 Minutes last night about the UAPs or identified UFOs, but they call them UAPs.
Jeremy Corbell is a good friend of mine, and he's the guy who's been releasing them along with George Knapp, who's the journalist out of Las Vegas, who is the guy who originally broke the Bob Lazar story in the late 80s.
And they've been...
It's interesting because they're basically a...
Go between.
It's there getting direct correspondence from people on the inside.
Sailors, guys like Commander David Fravor who saw that tic-tac-shaped object flying across the sky off the Nimitz that went from 80,000 feet above sea level to 50 in less than a second.
You know, there's the gimbal video and the go fast video.
And then there is actual video footage of the craft that Commander Fravor and the other fighter pilots saw.
It's a strange thing.
And whether or not it's China, you know, who knows?
We don't have any understanding of what the technology is.
When I say we, I mean like the general public.
I'm sure someone in the military has an inkling of what's going on and someone at the highest levels of physics.
But the thing is, it's a propulsion system that is...
It's alien, not alien, look for another world, but alien in comparison to everything that we use conventionally.
In terms of like a jet, you know, a jet burns fuel, it pushes out the back, the fuel blasts the thing forward because it pushes this way and it goes that way.
The same with rockets, same with jets, same with everything we use.
This doesn't do that.
It doesn't give off a heat signature.
They don't know why it can do what it does.
It can move thousands of miles an hour instantaneously.
They don't know if it's occupied.
That's the thing.
I mean, I've said that I think it's probably, there's probably, there's probably some sort of a drone, some sort of drone technology.
But even if it was a drone technology, the way it was explained to me is that when something moves that fast, anything that we have, that we've developed that moves that fast, like instantaneously, would break apart.
Like, we don't have anything that's like structurally, structurally...
Yeah, sound enough to take that kind of g-force, that instantaneous g-force to go, You know, 80,000 miles an hour, whatever the fuck it is, like, instantly.
The idea is that it's some sort of a gravity propulsion system.
That it doesn't work in a propulsion system like the conventional sense, where it pushes something out the back.
It works in a way that it bends gravity.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know how dumb you are, but I'm pretty fucking dumb.
This is a rough conversation to have.
Whatever the fuck it is, it's pretty clear that the government has reached a point where they've decided to start discussing it with us.
I had Christopher Mellon on from the Defense Department, formerly of the Defense Department, and he was talking about it and the way he described their interactions with these things.
Yeah, a lot of it's classified and a lot of it is people on bases of film things and they've locked it down.
Now Jeremy Corbell is getting a lot of attention because a lot of these people that have these videos, they reach out to him.
Because if you're someone in the military who's concerned about these things and you're like, look, we got to stop bullshitting the American public and the world.
And stop keeping this stuff secret and put it out there.
So let scientists look at it.
Let propulsion experts look at it.
Let, you know, engineers look at it.
And let them explain why we can't do this.
And explain how maybe something could be made if you had some insane amount of power, some incredible breakthrough in terms of technology that could allow some being, whether it's us, whether we don't know that some, whether it's Russia or China or whoever has this capability, or whether it's some being from another planet, or whether it's something that lives in the ocean.
You know, that's the weirdest one, man.
They've got video, one of the more recent videos that Jeremy released is what they call a transmedium vehicle, meaning it flies through the air and then goes into the water.
Yeah, and this is from, I believe it was from 2019, but this was another one of their breakthrough videos where this is, you know, this is also filmed, I think it was filmed from an aircraft carrier.
The shark's fin soup controversy happened where people saw that some people were hacking the fins off sharks and throwing them back in the water to die and the abject cruelty of that struck a chord and then the zeitgeist decided that sharks should be protected and that we shouldn't eat sharks.
But it does feel, it doesn't feel like if you are from a very poor country and that's all you have is fishing and that's your thing, that doesn't feel like it's doing the major dent in the ocean.
It's the massive trollers, the big corporations that take, take, take, take, take because they have to have whatever it is on their menu.
Yeah, I mean, how do you stop a country from overfishing?
I mean, they've had a hard time, like Sea Shepherd has had a really hard time stopping people from whaling, believe it or not.
In this day and age, what Sea Shepherd has caught is these countries that pretend they're doing it for scientific purposes.
So they'll kill a whale and they'll say it's for research.
They'll have a research vessel and they'll kill these whales and they'll have them on their boat and then they just sell them and use the parts and use all the stuff that they, you know, they use them for cosmetics and all sorts of weird things.
If you see a wolf eating an elk asshole first and tearing it apart and it's trying to get away and it's getting ripped apart, I'm not on team elk or team wolf.
What do I do?
I have to just accept that this is a part of the cycle of life.
If you shot an elk up there, what I should say, and it's like 6 o'clock at night and you're trying to pack it out, Come back in the morning.
Come back in the morning.
Yeah.
You know what they do is guys like pee around the elk and they'll take their clothes off and they'll throw the smell of their clothes on the carcass so the bears will hesitate.
Wow.
Yeah.
They'll throw like shirts, like sweaty shirts and shit.
It's not forgiving, but it's also the reason why there's enough resources.
I mean, it's a horrible thing to say, right?
But there's a reason why there's enough plants, there's a reason why there's enough birds, and there's enough grass.
Ground squirrels and all these, there's a balance to all this and it has to exist in this way.
You can't just let moose overpopulate the earth.
They'll run out of food and then they'll be wracked with disease and they'll be everywhere.
Like you need bears to kill the moose and you need, unfortunately, you need all these animals to, the only way to balance them out is something has to come along and eat them.
Well, look, we are certainly not perfect, but when it comes to conflict, We are the most evolved the world has ever known because we can we can protest this conflict like look at what's going on right now with Israel and Palestine Whatever side of the fence you fall on and I don't want to be political about this But I want to say that the world is watching and the world is watching what's happening in Gaza the world is and then people have their opinions one way or the other but Everyone is aware of
what's going on in a way that is unprecedented.
Like if you want to go back to World War II, we would get newspapers from World War II, right?
They would show, before movies, they would show news clips where you could see what's happening overseas, and people would kind of try to put together a sense of what's going on.
There's no real footage when they stormed the beach at Normandy, right?
Well, I think people are inherently wrapped in conflict.
I think we have been since the beginning of time because conflict is the only thing that's allowed us to survive, right?
Whether it's conflict, getting, you know, protecting ourselves from predators or conflict because of raiding tribes that were trying to take what we had.
I mean, if you're someone who's coming from a desert and you run into this oasis and this oasis is filled with people that have an incredible bounty of food, but they're trying to protect it and you have children to feed, you're going to war.
I mean, that's what's happened throughout human history.
People have always attacked the other, especially if the other speaks some sort of different tongue that you don't understand.
I mean, just think about how easy it is for people in this country to demonize the other when it comes to people in this same country as them that speak the same language that hold different political beliefs.
Crazy.
I mean, when Trump lost and Biden came into office and they started putting together lists Of Republicans that somehow or another aided Trump and they wanted to blackball these people and make sure they never worked again and make sure that they were ostracized and like, whoa, you're making lists?
Didn't we learn anything from the McCarthy era?
What are you doing?
But it's like this other.
You're not treating them as people that have a different perspective than you do that maybe you can come to common ground with and just have a conversation and we're all here For a short amount of time.
We want our children to be happy.
We want our communities to be safe.
We want our families to be healthy and people to be educated and to do well and prosper, right?
You'd think so, though, and then you see, like you said, you know, making lists or trying to take people down because they did something or they said something.
You know, that they didn't like and they're trying to get them fired from their jobs and take away their ability to make money.
Well, everyone has the ability to do it now, right?
People have the ability to voice opinions and attack people and even express opinions that are silly.
And other people will agree with those silly opinions because they're silly as well.
Like I was watching this video the other day where this woman was saying...
That if you are not willing to date someone because they're overweight, she was this enormous lady.
She was saying if you're not willing to date someone if they're overweight, then you're a bigot.
And that things you share in common with someone, you know, the differences of opinion should be like, I like this kind of food, I like that kind of food.
But if you're not interested in someone who's overweight, that's like saying, I don't like people because they're a different race than I am.
That's racist.
Or I don't like people...
Because they have a handicap that's ableist.
She's like, if you're saying you're not attracted to someone because they're overweight, then you're fat-phobic and you're a bigot.
It's one of the wildest videos because people were freaking out and laughing at it and mocking it and getting angry about it.
But my point about it was this is a perfect example because...
What the internet has done is allow people that most people wouldn't listen to them in the real world.
Like if you were working with some lady and she was like, the only reason why men are not attracted to me is because they're bigots.
It's just people have found their tribe now, and their tribe, but maybe it's not good to find other mentally ill people and get together and decide that you guys are right, and the rest of the world that's subjective in reasoning is that they're the ones with the problem.
It's like, hey, you can think that all these people are bigots, and I can think this, and maybe we can find a common ground that, okay, maybe not everyone's a bigot.
I think it's just a fully dedicated person to whatever it is, whether it's playing chess or painting or anything.
Just fully dedicated to something that in five years' time, and he just uses that as a rough time frame, but it's an established time frame, like many people have done that within five years.
No, but he's good at anything he puts his mind to because he's so disciplined.
Whatever that tenth of a second is or whatever that thing is, he just does and does and does, and then it transfers to anything, whether it's golf or, you know, bowling, beach in anything.
For whatever reason, it says the world record is 75 feet or something like that, but then right below it it says there's someone that surfed a 101.4 foot wave.
I don't know if I should talk about it on the air, because I don't want to encourage more similar type of situations.
But let me just say this, that from the Spotify thing, things have ramped up considerably.
Not just ramped up, but when you're talking about the scrutiny that I experience and the criticism that I experience, But also just the amount of people that think they have to talk to me.
Because at the beginning, I didn't do it because I wanted it to be huge.
I did it because I enjoyed doing radio.
I enjoyed doing Opie and Anthony.
I enjoyed doing Howard Stern.
I enjoyed doing local radio like Kevin and Bean in LA. And I was like, radios, it's fun to just talk shit.
And comedians...
When we get together, like, some of my favorite times as a comic were hanging out with comedians after the show, in the green room, just laughing, making each other laugh, talking shit, and I was always like, I want to record this.
I want to figure out a way to show people that half the fun of being a stand-up comedian is hanging out with other stand-up comedians.
When I'm getting together with Tim Dillon or Mark Normand or Joey Diaz or Ari Shafir, any of these savages, it's just half the fun is the hang.
It's like half the fun.
So I was like, I've got to figure out how to make that hang.
Record it.
That was the idea.
Just to do some sort of a thing where you could sit down and just let people feel what it's like to be in that conversation.
It's fun to do and it gives me an excuse to hang out with my friends.
Because, like, some of them would be on the other...
Like, Duncan was always on...
He's lived on the east side, and, you know, and some of my friends would live over in Venice Beach, and it's like, I gotta get them all together.
What's the best way to get them all together?
To make a thing where they had to come in, sit down, shut your phone off, and we just hang out together.
And we smoke some weed, drink some beers, and make...
Have some fun.
Make a podcast.
And it became what it is organically.
In the most pure sense of that word.
Where I never anticipated it.
I never had any idea it was going to be what it is.
If you have an enormous platform like the Today Show or whatever it is, these platforms have all these interests that are involved in the platform.
You have all these advertisers, you have executives that want to keep their jobs secure, and then you have the zeitgeist.
You have the zeitgeist where people believe one thing or another and they want that reinforced and you have to figure out how to navigate those while having a successful show.
So oftentimes these successful shows, they're not necessarily based on someone's actual opinion.
They're based on what they think the opinion of the general public is and how do we make those people feel like we're on their side.
I have all these opinions that are real rock solid.
I'll stick with them to the day I die.
But then there's other opinions that I have that are like, hmm...
You know, what should the speed limit be?
Like, hey, you know, there's a lot of them about insurance and why do people get saddled down with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans when you're 21 years old?
That seems kind of fucked.
There's a lot of opinions I have about debt and about minimum wage and about foreign wars and about...
Yeah, it's a very good point, man, because it's how a lot of people with mortgages and families and very involved jobs, that's how they get their information, and it's not necessarily 100% exactly what's going on.
And one of the ways we're finding that out is right now because of the lab leak hypothesis that was openly dismissed.
I mean, it was one of the things that I was mocked most about when they called me a conspiracy theorist is that I had people on that were discussing the lab leak hypothesis and they were saying that I was promoting dangerous conspiracy theories because there was no evidence whatsoever that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.
I got another one.
Thank you.
But now they're thinking that it probably did.
And even Fauci's saying he's not convinced that it came from the wild.
So it's a really...
So when all these people on the news were mocking anybody...
Well, for the most part, what they're doing is they're reading off a teleprompter, and they're reading notes that have been prepared by producers and executives and all these different people that have an agenda.
And maybe that agenda is to distribute the actual facts of a case and a situation, a story, and maybe that agenda is political.
Maybe that agenda...
The problem is when Trump was in office, people fucking hated him so much that anything that he talked about...
There is a level 4 lab in Wuhan that's doing the exact kind of gain-of-function research that's working on these kind of diseases and juicing up these viruses and making them more contagious.
And three people from that laboratory, it turns out, actually did get sick in November of 2019. Has anyone interviewed the people from the lab or is that not a thing?
That's a good question.
They're probably in a fucking foundation of a building right now in China.
It does seem reasonable, but it doesn't benefit the people that are in power currently, ever, right?
So if the people that are in power currently are Democrats, There's no way they want to censor CNN and MSNBC. If the people are in power that are Republicans, there's no way they want to censor Fox News or OAN or Newsmax.
You know, it's like people have these perceptions based on whatever their ideology is and they don't want to relinquish the ability to sort of manipulate these narratives.
It's unfortunate.
The news should be completely independent of ideology.
The news should be, here's what we know about this.
Here's what we know about pollution.
Here's what we know about overfishing.
Here's what we know about climate change.
And it should be completely apolitical.
And everyone should be deeply invested in making sure that it's apolitical and looking at things completely objectively and saying, okay, look, I voted for Biden, but I think this is wrong.
And it has nothing to do with whether or not I think the Democrats should be in control of the House.
It has to do with the facts, the facts at hand.
Or I voted for Trump, or I voted for Ron Paul, or whatever the fuck it is you voted for.
They got fucked so hard that in California they were closing outdoor businesses for no reason.
They were closing outdoor restaurants.
There's fucking zero evidence that it was being spread outside.
And they were closing those people down.
And they were dying on the vine.
And the thing about it that infuriates me is that the people that were in power didn't lose any money.
If you're in charge, like if you're a mayor or whatever you are of a city, and that city loses a massive amount of income, and businesses go under based entirely on your decisions, and those decisions are very debatable, and then you look at how it is in other parts of the country where they've made different decisions and they've had massively different results and much more beneficial, Results for those businesses.
Your pay should be completely dependent upon how much money is generated by the people in your district.
It's interesting because I don't hear people saying on the other side, it's like, you know, if you want to wear a mask or you want to do a thing, like, that's your choice.
I support that 100%.
Like, I don't care.
And maybe even in a common place, like, say hospitals, right?
I wouldn't even care if they were like, hey, you know what?
Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of wearing masks in public places, specifically indoor places, but it's really weird when you look at the rules.
In Texas, I love the fact that you go to restaurants, but I always found it so bizarre that you wear a mask until you sit down, and then you take the mask off.
In comparison, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago.
So, there's a good argument there that some of the things that we did during this season...
We're good as general practices, whether it's distancing or whether it's Maybe it's fucking vitamins, too.
Here's a big one.
There's a doctor that...
I was watching this lecture by this doctor that was making the argument that the reason why flu season exists, he said, is because in the winter months, people have no exposure to sun and they have very low levels of vitamin D. I would agree with that.
He was freaking me the fuck out.
I would try to agree with that, but I'm too stupid.
I went to Seattle once and they had this sort of education thing about salmon where they're explaining how salmon got fucked over because they made these dams back then.
And I forget when they made the dams.
But when they were damning these rivers, they didn't understand that salmon would not be able to breed and then the salmon just went to the dam and died.
And they had like a massive crash in the salmon population that also affected the orca population because the orca, some of the orcas only eat Chinook salmon.
Like they have a specific population of orca that live in the Puget Sound that only eat salmon.
Really?
Yeah, they don't eat mammals.
They don't eat seals and shit like that.
They just become so accustomed to eating salmon that that's it.
It's something maybe about, too, the elk having a completely wild, perfect life, and then if you do it right, you kill an old bull, and that elk has lived this great life, healthy life, done a lot of fucking, done a lot of reproducing, had a great life, and then, I don't know.
Freezing cold and snowing and you're hiking for miles and you're going up into 8,000 feet above sea level and you're encountering these Gigantic, wild fucking forest horses with swords growing out of their heads who fight each other to the death.
They fight each other to the death up there, stabbing each other with these fucking spears that grow out of their head.
We have to release that arrow where you have to make sure that you're not flinching, you're not moving at all, and I have a whole shot sequence that I go through in my head, and I have to make sure that I go through that shot sequence and I have to stay as calm and blank as possible.
And then once the arrow's released and I see it hit the mark, it's like...
It's like huge relief, excitement, but also this huge relief that you did it.
But doing that work when you do have that meat and you do cook that meat and you feed your family and feed your friends, it's a totally different feeling than just hot dogs, you know?
He was in the army and he was doing a flight somewhere.
He had done some like a training flight or something.
They said, oh, you need to hop on this thing.
And he said, okay, cool.
Last minute I'll go do it.
He was in a plane crash.
The crash landed outside of San Francisco Bay.
And because he ultimately ended up there, I think one person died, him and the pilot or co-pilot, I can't remember, had to swim to shore, like, at night, over two miles, I want to say something crazy.
And, you know, there's tons of sharks, tons of shit out there in San Francisco.
And this was, you know, 1950. So, at the time, my grandmother...
They had told my grandmother that he had gone down in a plane crash.
She thought he was dead.
And there was no cell phones, there was no social media, there was no anything.
It took a week for him, by the time he got back and he got back to the thing, to be able to call her after, I don't know, maybe I had to go to the hospital, I can't remember.
For him to be able to call his mother and say, hey, I'm alive.
And that is what kept him from going to the Korean War because he was supposed to be deployed, but because he was in this plane crash, he had to stay and testify and do this whole thing, and they had just deployed without him.
That's the weird thing about this pandemic is that We're forced to come to grips Prematurely with the possibility of our life expiring and people are worried about this external threat this thing is a virus that could prematurely end your life but when the dust settles and One of the good things about any sort of adverse or any
sort of negative moment in life is that when things do pass, it makes you realize how good you've got it when you're not experiencing these bad things.
One of the things that I'm realizing now...
With comedy shows and shit, is that people are so happy to be out.
They're so happy to go outside.
They're so happy to do things.
It's a different feeling.
They're just so enthusiastic and so pumped up.
It's like they've realized that it could all go away.
For a year, everyone's locked down and scared and things shut down and no concerts and no movies and no this and no that.
And then when it lifted, I think this is going to be the roaring 20s of the 2000s.
That's what I think.
And I think it's very similar in that the Spanish flu was in 1918, and that took like a year and a half to resolve, right?
I don't think I'd want a guy to fuck me, but I would like to be a woman for a day.
I'd like to feel it.
If there was a mind swap thing, where you and your wife could swap brains, and you knew that in 24 hours you'd go back to being you, but you could feel what it's like to have a woman's, and not, you know, obviously all women are different, but at least one woman's perspective on life.
One woman's, the way they feel.
Men have testosterone and we're prone to violence and prone to aggression.
It would be interesting to feel what it's like to be around them and not be one of them.
It's interesting to be around women.
We can only imagine what it's like to want to have a baby inside of our bodies.
It's literally just...
You're just guessing.
I have no...
I can't imagine.
But so many women want to have...
There's a reason why there's 7.5 billion people.
Because these women have this urge and they want to have children.
You talk to so many women.
Not all of them, obviously.
But a lot of women want to have children.
There's not a single man that I know that wants to have a baby grow inside of his body.
So, like, if there was women all around, just hanging around, there's a ton of abundance of women everywhere, and it was, you know, would we be calmer?
There's a lot of ways to look at this, but I think one of the ways to look at this is that the reason why things keep getting better, like in terms of more innovation, in terms of the progress of society and culture, one of the reasons why, and there's many reasons, but one of them is competition.
And I don't think men are ever going to stop competing.
I think if there's more women, you're going to want a specific woman.
You're going to want the best woman.
You're going to see this woman that maybe this other guy has, and you're going to think, why does he have her?
And you're going to say, well, I need to get better so I can be more attractive to her.
I need to get more wealthy or stronger or whatever it is.
I need to become more interesting.
I think that's the reason why...
I mean it's a big part of why men are – why men are really good – some men are really good at conversation and really good at – it's not just – it's one of the reasons, right?
There's many – like some – conversation is interesting.
It's interesting to – like when I talk to a guy like John Donaher or something like that, it's really good at conversation.
It's fascinating.
I love it.
I enjoy it very deeply just from an intellectual standpoint.
But I think there's something impressive about someone who can do that.
A guy who can do that at a party or something like that.
So I spent some time in Hawaii growing up, and it's interesting to see, because it's an island, or because you're on an island, that There's limited resources.
And in turn, I find that it's a slightly more warrior society still.
And I wonder if that's just a female-male, like, strictly, like, hey, there's less females here.
It's just a matter of numbers, right?
If we had an abundance of females, then would we be, like, so postured and wanting to Well, they come from a warrior culture too, right?
And in the beginning, they were like, get the fuck out of here, Howley.
And I was young enough where they probably couldn't kick me off the team.
So I stuck around.
And when they sort of saw that I was part of the team and I was willing to put in work...
Then they started accepting me.
But then what was weird was we would go to other schools to play other games against other teams, and those teams didn't know me, so they were like, fuck you, Howley.
Yeah, tribal shit is unfortunate, but it seems, again, to be a part of that whole competition aspect.
You know, the competition...
This component of human life where people are trying to compete over resources and trying to win, trying to get ahead.
Especially if you look at it generationally, right?
When you're young, you're trying to be better than the other kids that you're growing up with.
As you get older, you're competing against other adults.
When you're a young man, you look at a successful older man, like, I want to do what that guy's doing, and there's, like, this comparative thing and this competition thing, and it's just an inherent part of human life.
When someone sees a very successful person, it's so difficult to attain.
Like, if you see, like, you know, fill in the blank.
You see Kanye West, right?
You know, flying around on private jets, doing these giant arena concerts, and it becomes this thing where you're looking at, like, how does one get to where that guy is?
It becomes this goal that doesn't seem to be attainable.
But for a guy who is one of the richest men alive and one of the most brilliant people that's ever lived and one of the most innovative in terms of...
The guy's running multiple businesses that are completely evolutionary simultaneously.
I mean, he's running a rocket business while he's running an electric car business, while he's running a business that makes tunnels under the earth to try to eliminate traffic congestion.
While he's putting satellites in the sky that's going to give high-speed internet connections to the whole world.
But he's real friendly.
He's easy to talk to.
He has zero ego.
He's easy to talk to.
That's the best way I describe him.
Since he did my podcast originally, we've become friends and I've hung out with him a few times and hung out with him at comedy shows and all kinds of other stuff with him.
The last time he did the podcast, he was like real loose and silly with me and fun.
But it's also that it's an unusual, there's an unusual thing happening, right?
That this has never happened before where independent people, an independent, what they call this podcast, a media entity, whatever you want to call it, is as big as anything else that's out there.
It's not normal.
Usually those things that are independent are small and they're like underground.
They're like weird little things that people might like or might not like and you tell your friends about it.
It's kind of cool to pay attention to.
But it's not something that has the same kind of impact that...
You know, an NBC show has or a CNBC show.
It's weird.
It's weird for them.
They don't know what to do with it.
So they get upset that this one person can say cunt and they can't say cunt.
If they say cunt, they get fired, you know?
We can discuss all kinds of different taboo words and use them and say, why is this word okay?
Like how crypto is becoming this weird controversial thing where it could possibly shift the internet in the sense that you no longer need like a middleman.
I think that's what the future is going to be more of that because there's a lot of like really quality people out there that are doing the same kind of thing that I'm doing but better and that they're doing it in very specific ways like I'm a generalist, right?
I'm talking about all kinds of shit and I'm not really an expert and I'm an expert in a couple of things.
If you want to talk to me about MMA or stand-up comedy, I can give you an expert opinion.
If you want to talk to me about some other things, I'm just talking shit.
I don't know what I'm saying.
But there's going to be a lot of people that are experts, independent experts in all sorts of things.
I think competition is always, like people always try to take down competition, right?
Like if someone is, if you're competing for resources, someone's always going to try to take down competition.
And if you're one of those legacy media outlets and you see some independent organization that is thriving and now does much, like Rising with Crystal and Sagar, which is like one of my favorite internet political shows.
They do three times the numbers of conventional television shows.
Yeah.
But it's not discussed.
But if you look at the numbers on YouTube, you look at the numbers that they pull in, they do crazy numbers because they're independent.
Yeah, it was supposed to just be an alternative to Patreon that the porn industry took over because they had a lot of problems with receiving money through credit cards and other websites.
Elliot Page, who used to be Ellen Page, is now Elliot Page, took a topless photo, the first trans topless photo as a trans man, and everybody published it.
It's okay.
The same nipples that would have been absolutely taboo.
It's a really interesting way to address this, right?
Because the same nipples that existed on him when he was a she are now okay to see.
Because I know that's a fact because I saw a woman with one of those in one of these cosmetic surgery fail videos where this female bodybuilder had fake abs.
I think you're going to be not just trans, a trans woman, like where you still have XY chromosome.
I think eventually, one day, science will be able to change your actual physical sex, not just your gender, like how you recognize and how you identify, but you'll be a woman.
I think we're going to overcome a lot of the boundaries of biology.
Because I think that's just part of the thing that scientists are...
When scientists are examining life, right?
And they're trying to figure out, like, what makes this happen?
What makes that happen?
What can we manipulate?
And CRISPR has allowed them to Start to breach this, start to go through this barrier of manipulating biology and changing genes and changing the way genes express.
And initially they're going to do it for all sorts of positive reasons, like to be able to eliminate Alzheimer's and various diseases.
But I think eventually they're going to get to the point where they can manipulate people and make them super athletes.
And then they're going to be able to manipulate people and change their gender.
The science doesn't exist currently, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that it could happen in 50 years or 100 years from now.
If you go 100 years ago, bring someone an iPhone, they'd think you're a fucking wizard.
They'd be like, who are you?
What have you done?
Go 200 years ago.
Show someone a big screen television.
Show someone that TV. They'd be like, what the fuck is this?
But if you went 200 years ago from like 1500 to 1300, there ain't much difference.
And it's amazing that people are so much smarter than us.
That's what's really amazing.
Like when I talk to someone like Elon or someone like, you know, someone who's like a real genius, It's so interesting to talk to someone whose brain works so much better than yours.
Like, wow!
Like, look at you out there contributing to the future of mankind.
Japan plans to release treated radioactive water from Fukushima into the sea in two years.
Oh, good idea.
That's how Godzilla got started, you fucks.
You guys made Godzilla, and you're going to do this?
The decision, long speculated but delayed for years due to safety concerns and protests, whoops, came at a meeting of cabinet ministers who endorsed the ocean release as the best option.
The accumulating water has been stored in tanks in the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Since 2011, when a massive earthquake and tsunami damaged its reactors, and their cooling water became contaminated and began leaking.
The problem is a lot of these reactors, and I've talked to people that actually understand nuclear power, a lot of these nuclear reactors are old technology.
And that there's been a hesitancy of adopting nuclear technology that's better and more innovative.
I don't know what I'm talking about, right?
But according to people that understand it, what they said to me was that it's a better way to get electricity.
So it's, you know, I'm trying to right now, I'm trying to just soak up every piece of knowledge I can from him, listen to him, sit with him as much as possible.
Because I know he's not going to be around forever, and that's...
It's terrifying, you know, to think about.
But it's like, oh man, I've got to spend every moment I can.
People would think about you just because of whatever, and they're like, oh, well, he's just this thing.
They don't know about your personal life.
They don't know about how you are with your kids, how you are, you know, how you think, you know, esoterically about things, and, you know, when you're speaking to your wife, like...
He's like much different than just that.
He's got a lot of shades, and he's very, I think, middle of the road a lot of things.
He looks at issues and says, well, this is that, and this is that, and maybe there's a middle ground, and I don't know, you know?
Well, that's the way you find out if anything's any good.
You have to put yourself in these weird pressure situations.
I remember when I was first starting out at the comedy store, Damon Wayans used to come there.
And one of the things that Damon used to do, Damon is...
Probably one of the most underrated comedians of all time, in my opinion.
Because I've seen that guy when he was at his peak, and he was a monster.
But then he went on to do a bunch of sitcoms and movies and stuff, and he kind of...
People don't think of him as a stand-up anymore, but stand-ups do.
They think of him as like, he's one of the greats.
He really is.
And what he would do is he would go on stage, and he didn't give a fuck if there was 100 people in the room, or 1,000 people in the room, or 10 people in the room.
He would go on stage, and he would just work out ideas.
Didn't worry at all whether or not those ideas were bombing, and it's like people were waiting for him to say something funny, and then he would catch fire.
He would find something, and that thing would become hysterical, and we'd all be crying, laughing, and then...
He would fuck around with it, and then he would come up with, you know, and then he would have, like, these other lulls where he was trying to work some stuff out, and then he would catch fire with that.
But he recorded all of his sets, Damon is recorded.
I had a conversation with him about this at the Improv in Hollywood.
He said he's recorded all of his sets since the 90s.
So every set he's done, he brings a camera on a tripod.
He sets it up in the back of the room and he films all of his sets and he edits them all on his computer.
So he has hard drives filled with all these sets and then he goes over them and then he goes over them and he dissects those brilliant moments where he catches fire.
He'll take those and he'll turn those into bits and then they'll become like these killer chunks on stage.
His HBO special, The Last Stand, is in my opinion one of the greatest specials of all time.
And it's one of those things where he just would work out all that material and then find these beats and then take those beats and dissect them and put them aside.
But when he was on stage fucking around like he was trying to accomplish something and it was like trying to find where's the funny and he was thinking out loud in front of an audience.
And then you would see him do a set where everything was tight and polished.
It would make you realize the wisdom of his approach.
Because he would go and do this set where everything was tight and polished and would just smash.
And he had these brilliant ideas and they would all be condensed and shortened and the economy of words and he knew where the beats were and then he'd be like, wow!
He turned it into magic.
He figured out how to do it.
But very few guys would do...
Chris Rock used to work out like that too.
He used to go out on stage and just like let these uncomfortable silences exist and find the beats and find the jokes.
It's just like people, they just have different expectations because of the internet.
Like back then, you couldn't have a set.
Like back then, you could have a set and you could do that set for years.
Now you can't, because you do an HBO special, or you do a Netflix special, and now everyone knows that material.
So you have to have new material.
So now everyone turns over their material much quicker, and they're much more aware of people watching.
So I think they spend more time polishing these ideas up before they initially bring them to the stage.
And I think Damon's workout methods and Chris Rock's workout methods were just do these things in front of people.
And people knew.
The connoisseurs The guys that love comedy would sit there and watch, knowing that eventually this was going to be on an HBO special.
And you were there to see it.
And Richard Pryor did that, too.
If you go back and listen to Richard Pryor's old cassettes, there's some of them that are available from the Red Fox Comedy Club, and you can find them online.
But I bought them from a gas station one day in the 90s, these cassette tapes.
And they were all like him at Red Fox's Comedy Club.
And it was just him, like, you could hear drinks clinking, you could hear things in the background, ice and shit, and you could hear people talking, and it was just like this small crowd where he was just fucking around.
And that's where a lot of his most brilliant bits came from.
Because, like, he went back and made, like, this...
I mean, he did, obviously he did all those great spaghetti westerns, all those amazing, and they call them spaghetti westerns for people who don't know because they did them in Italy.
That's right.
Yeah.
And so he did all these American western films, but they were all done in Italy.
And they were all like, people didn't think those were going to be like real successful at the time, right?
It was his movie that was catching fire in America.
And so he's like, oh, I gotta go check this movie.
And he realizes it's his movie that had caught fire.
It was an overnight sensation.
And then, yeah, he just kind of just, I don't know, fell into doing those movies.
Did a few of them.
Yeah.
And then he did his own.
Then he started directing and doing his own westerns.
But bringing it back to Unforgiven, what's really, I think, most interesting about that film is that it is...
It's an amalgamation, or it's the whole history of his westerns, but really looking back as what would it be like to be an older man and having regret, having...
Things he did wrong, looking back.
And so it's kind of using the history that he had created and talking about what it's like to look back at life and one last ride to do things different for his family.
There has to be rules and laws, but I think part of the problem that many people have when it comes to prostitution is that if you keep it illegal, what you're empowering is organized crime.
It's the same thing, the same argument for keeping drugs and all these.
You're empowering sex trafficking.
You're empowering all these things if you keep it illegal.
Because then you're going to have people that are going to sell it, and oftentimes it's not the people that are actually doing the sex act that are getting the money.
It's the people that are controlling the people that are doing the sex act.
It's like fucking Antifa's trying to burn down the state house building every night.
The fucking mayor of Portland, who's like this super hardcore lefty, is now asking people to turn Antifa into the police.
He's asking them to get license plates.
He's recognizing that the war is at his shores.
Finally!
After, like, more than a year and a half of this shit going down and him being in support of them, him going out and marching with them, he realized, like, oh, this is anarchy.
This is the end of society.
This is a bunch of fucking losers who are trying to burn everything down.
Like, we have to stand against this.
But they've been directing traffic and pulling people out of cars and beating the shit out of them and lighting things on fire and...
It's a weird place, man.
What they're trying to do up there is sort of restructure society.
They're trying to tear it all down and restructure society in their ideals.
But it's more like what we were talking about before about the internet, about finally there's people that can find other people that think the way they think.
Because if that guy was at your job, if you worked at UPS and there was a guy who's like, Man, capitalism is bullshit, man.
We don't need money.
Everyone should be making the exact same amount.
He's like, shut the fuck up, Tyler.
Just put the packages on the conveyor belt, you asshole.
But then Tyler got online and Tyler found Milton and Marvin and Mike and they all think the same way.
And they're like, we're going to get together in Town Square.
We're going to burn it down.
And then the mayor's like, I support you.
I think you're amazing.
And the next thing you know, you got chaos.
And they don't know how to turn that chaos down.
Turn it back, rather, because now it's become a part of their culture.
It's like a part of society.
It's happening so often.
I mean, how many protests have happened in Portland over the last year?
Let's find that out.
How many, air quotes, protests have happened in Portland to the point where the fucking mayor, who's, he is like the most hardcore lefty in America today in terms of mayors, and even he's like, enough!
Yeah, I was paying attention to Gordon Ryan's Instagram, and he said something kind of cool the other day.
He says, hey, instead of complaining about not being successful, why don't you just try to get good at something you want to do, and then hopefully you'll be successful.
You don't become Jimi Hendrix unless you are obsessed with playing guitar.
You don't just become Jimi Hendrix.
Jimi Hendrix practiced constantly.
He was obsessed with the guitar.
You don't become anyone who's great at anything without a massive amount of dedication and focus to whatever that thing is.
The problem is a lot of people see people that are very successful and they equate their success with somehow or another someone else getting fucked over.
No, it's like, you know how hard that person had to work?
Like you're talking about Gordon Ryan.
In the gym, every day, probably eight hours a day, whether it's conditioning, all the things he's doing, and then going home, probably dreaming about it, thinking about it.
Like some people are successful because they've fucked other people over.
That is a thing.
There are some businesses where they're taking advantage of poor people or they're taking advantage of people that are disenfranchised or don't have any power and they're using their power to dominate these people and extract wealth from them.
That's real.
That is real.
But that needs to be addressed in a different way.
You can't just have this blanket approach to anyone that's successful.
You know, this whole eat the rich thing.
Okay, you gonna eat Paul Simon?
Does it taste good?
I don't know.
Are you going to eat Ringo Starr?
What are you going to do?
Come on, it's crazy.
You can't just say, eat the rich across the board.
I don't want anybody to not get medical treatment because they're poor.
I don't want to live in a world like that.
I want to live in a world where I pay more taxes so that people get medical care.
I'm fine with that.
I like that.
But I also realize that you have to have competition with human nature.
People need incentives.
And one of the big incentives for people is finances.
Whether it's right or wrong, it's just a part of being a person.
People are incentivized by finances.
They're incentivized by wealth.
Even if they don't want to be rich, they want to do better.
And one of the ways that they get to do better is to work harder.
And if you just say that you've got to work harder for the state, they're not going to work harder.
You're not going to get innovation.
You're just not going to get that.
You don't get that in these countries where they're controlled by dictators.
It's a different kind of innovation.
They don't have the same incentives.
And that's just part of the human experiment.
This place right here is the fucking best place in the world for that.
And that's a fact.
It's one of the most beautiful things about America is that you really can come from the bottom.
And figure out a way through this wild maze.
And everybody's got their own path.
And it doesn't necessarily mean it's definitely going to work out for you because fortune plays a big factor in how well people do and don't do in life.
But there's a lot of people that were very unfortunate that are now incredibly successful.
And that's through this wild path of freedom that we have here.
Some people want to change things to make things more fair, and I completely understand that thought process.
I really do.
I get they're just being compassionate.
They want people to do better.
I think we need social parachutes or social nets that catch people and help people when things go badly so that they don't wind up in abject poverty and they don't wind up without health care and they don't wind up You know, starving to death.
But I think other than that, we need to encourage competition and discipline because it's a great feeling that you get when you accomplish something that's difficult to do.
And there's a lot of people that go through life and they don't experience that.
They don't experience that great feeling of overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds and becoming the best version of you that you can be.
I think part of the problem is we associate work, in air quotes, work.
With doing things you don't want to do, right?
Like, work is schoolwork, where you're studying something you don't give a fuck about.
Or work is a job that doesn't, they don't respect you, they don't care about you, you're just a cog in the wheel, you just have to show up every day.
We think of that as work.
But that's the worst kind of work.
There's other work that can make you feel satisfied.
When you do a great film, and you're done with that, and you get to sit in the theater and watch it with a bunch of people, and you know those long hours on the sets, and you know the practice and rehearsals and all the shit, and you're like, here it is.
Sometimes you can have an incredible experience doing something, like when you're hanging out with your friends or whatever, but the end product might not be that great.
Or, on the contrary, sometimes you can have...
A terrible experience.
Like, everybody on the set, you know, there's not a negative energy.
There's some actor who's a jackass who thinks he's, you know, God's gift to Earth.
I try to always have people like, no, no, no, no, no.
I got my own thing.
I appreciate it.
And sometimes, you know, that's their job.
So they're there to bring you a sandwich because you have to stay in this place and you're rehearsing with the camera crew and you're doing the whole thing.
But as much as you can strip all that shit down and go, we're just doing this creative process altogether.
Yeah, if you don't have one of those pieces, it doesn't work out right.
It's like if you don't have salt, the meat doesn't taste as good.
Is the meat the most important thing?
Well, it's not as good without the salt.
You need butter, bitch.
Where's the butter?
Where's the this?
You've got to have all the ingredients.
And I would imagine, I mean, I've only done a couple of movies, but the dynamic on movies is...
Everyone's paying attention to the stars like the stars of the main focus because that's where the cameras on so You're really grounded and you're really down-to-earth which is super unusual for actors and I always make fun of actors, but It's not all of them like you're like a right like if people didn't know you and they didn't know you're a movie star They were like, oh, your friend Scott's really nice.
They always just think you're a normal guy.
And then I'd be like, hey, yeah, I want to go see him in a movie.
They'd be like, what the fuck?
He's a movie star?
They would never believe it.
And I know you're here, so it's weird to tell you this, but some people you can fucking tell.
He was so not the kind of guy who did the LA thing at all.
He was like, this is a job, and you're lucky.
You're lucky if you get a job, son.
Literally lucky.
You better treat that with the utmost respect.
People are out there starving.
He grew up in an era where There's a story that has stuck with me forever, and it was when he was about 12 years old, and it was in the middle of World War II, 1942, and his mother, my grandmother, Ruth, who's now passed away, They were very poor.
And they were living in Oakland, I believe.
And someone had come, knocked on their back door.
And my grandmother was freaked out because it was someone they didn't know.
And he said, hey, I'm here to...
Can I do anything for work, you know, for you?
And she's like, no, we don't have any money.
Like, we don't have any money.
And my dad was there.
He was watching.
He was a 12-year-old kid.
And...
He said, I don't need any money.
I'll do anything for a sandwich.
The desperation in his eyes and just like totally vulnerable.
My dad said he never forgot that.
Ever, ever, ever.
It burned a hole in his ethos.
And he's like, dude, you're so lucky if you get a job and you better hold that job and you better be the best at it and you better be nice to people and you better do all these things because it could go away like that.
And I don't know, so maybe that's how he imprinted me that's how lucky you are.