Brian Simpson, a Marine Corps comedian turned stand-up star, reveals how racial tensions in his platoon sparked his career after he used humor to ease conflict. They debate doping scandals—Russian state-funded schemes in Sochi vs. U.S. capitalism’s incentives—and Brian’s radical stance on drug legalization, citing Dr. Carl Hart’s research on purity over prohibition. Rogan compares life to surfing, while Simpson prefers controlled solitude, and they clash on self-sufficiency vs. societal contribution post-collapse. The conversation drifts into existential threats like solar flares or the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, with Rogan betting on human resilience despite Simpson’s skepticism. Ending with Simpson’s Netflix special in October and Kansas City shows, they joke about needing to urinate before wrapping up. [Automatically generated summary]
I was the only black person in my platoon for a couple of years and Before I got there some racial shit went down and They like you know somebody officer got removed and they took black people out of the unit and I was the first black person back in the unit and I didn't know none of this and then and then I got to them I could feel everyone walking on eggshells around me.
And one day my one officer asked me, like, hey, how you doing?
He's like, is everybody treating you?
And I was like, well, sir, everybody's fucking acting weird.
I can hear conversations hush up when I come in a room.
You can feel people editing themselves and shit.
And then he told me what happened.
And...
And I realized, like, this can't work.
So I told everybody, hey, just say whatever you want to say.
Don't worry about if you offend me, because if you do, I'm just going to try to hurt your feelings, too.
You know, like, I'm going to say what I want, and you say what you want, and I'm going to win most of those.
So then I sort of had, like, a little more leeway than everybody else to speak my mind.
And so every now and then I would say some shit that I knew everybody was thinking, but nobody could say but me, and people would laugh.
And that's when I started realizing, oh, I can do this.
You know like super hardcore about their what they're aging like they that's aged eight years And then this shit is ten years this Lafregue I said Lafregue Lafrogue like a frog like a frog with a Y still Austin's another company that sent us a batch of shit It's really good really good stuff every time I see you is the different different kind of whiskey Yeah, I decided I like alcohol that I know it's alcohol.
Like, I don't mind a nice fruity drink.
I don't mind a pina colada, but I like when you drink whiskey, you know what the fuck you're getting into, you know?
Something like that, except we would go to Hooters or something and get 25 or 20 regular wings and then get five of the crazy, shitty ones that you gotta sign a waiver for and then mix them all together.
There used to be a place near Boston Comedy in New York City, back when Boston Comedy was in the village.
There was a place, a wing place, I'm trying to remember the place, trying to remember the name of it, but I do remember that they had wings that were labeled suicide.
They were so strong.
They were so hot.
Like, you had all these different levels that you could choose, and one of them was suicide.
And I used to get those suicide wings every time I worked there.
First of all, I think the Olympics are disgusting because that lady should be getting paid millions of dollars.
All of them should be getting paid millions of dollars.
All the winners, the gold medals, all those people that are generating insane amounts of wealth for the Olympics, they should get a giant piece of that.
They're responsible for the reason why people watch the Olympics.
No one's watching the Olympics because it's the Olympics.
They're watching the Olympics because you see the best athletes on the world, right?
You see the best athletes who have gone through all these competitions and reached this insane pinnacle of their skill development, right?
And they're getting nothing.
They're getting zero.
And the whole world's watching.
And they're selling crazy advertisement.
And that money's being generated.
And the networks are making it.
And the IOC is making it.
And all these other people are making it.
And the athletes, the whole reason people are tuning in, they get nothing.
Well, it's a lot of times, you know, these countries, they build up this whole thing for the Olympics, and they're incentivized, and there's a lot of money that flows into the city, and then once they pull out of that, I mean, the people that live in that country are like, hey, why didn't you spend that shit on infrastructure?
Why didn't you spend that shit to fix the bridges and the streets and to You know, to fucking fix these communities.
He said, I'm going to do a race, clean, I'm going to do a cycling race.
He was a cyclist.
He's like, I'm going to do a race clean, and then I'm going to hire someone to dope me up, and I'm going to document it all.
I'm going to hire someone to give me EPO and steroids and everything I can take, and let me try to do it again and see how much better my time is.
So along the way, while he's doing this, he's getting all this advice on how to do doping by this guy, Gregory Rechenkov.
Gregory Rechenkov is the head of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency.
Which is not really anti-doping at all.
The Russian Anti-Doping Agency is state-funded.
So while he's doing this documentary, Russia gets busted for the Sochi Olympics.
And with the Sochi Olympics, it was like this super sophisticated doping strategy.
What they would do is they doped up the entire team, but it was in Russia.
So they had control of where the bottles were kept of the piss.
So they had a hole in the wall, and so they would take the dirty piss out, put it through a hole in the wall, and then someone would give them a clean piss, and they would replace the clean piss.
And they figured out a way to open these jars that were supposed to be unopenable.
They had the Olympics that developed these jars that you could not open them.
But the Russians figured out how to open them, and they found these microscopic scratches inside the jars, inside the lid, that indicate that somebody had manipulated them.
So then they do this deep dive investigation, and they find out that this is not their piss at all, and that this is all clean piss that was substituted for their piss to make everybody test negative.
Meanwhile, the Russians won more gold medals than anybody.
They just dominated and everything because all their athletes were juiced up.
Gregory said they juiced up everybody except the figure skaters because apparently female figure skaters, when they juiced them up, it actually didn't help them at all.
It fucked with their fine motor skills because, you know, figure skating is such a delicate thing, you know, when you're doing those spins and shit like that.
And then they banned a bunch of different Russian athletes.
I'm not sure exactly what the specifics are, but it was a big fucking deal.
It was a big deal.
And it was basically all documented.
He got lucky.
This guy, Brian Fogle, who's a...
Tremendous documentary maker.
I mean, he's amazing.
I've had him on a couple of times.
He's also a guy that wrote that...
He made that film, The Dissident, which is all about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, who's the journalist from the Washington Post who was killed by the Saudis because he was criticizing them.
And, bro, they chopped him up and carried him out in briefcases.
That was the Godzilla, the original Godzilla story, was like, the original Godzilla movie was post-World War II in Japan, and they had, you know, they got nuked, so the idea was that this nuclear radiation had changed these creatures and turned them into monsters.
And it's the fact that we leave it up to be picking and choosing of what's good drug and what's bad drug that we allow these bodies to exist to make up these dumbass rules.
The problem is there's going to be a time period where a lot of people die, and then people figure it out.
And if that's your kid that dies during that time period, and that's what people are worried about.
People are worried about children overdosing, young kids overdosing.
So they're worried about people that have never had access to these drugs now all of a sudden have unfettered access, and you can just buy whatever you want.
But the idea behind it, legalizing everything, It's a good idea because there's so much that's already legal.
I mean, look at the problem we have with opiates in this country.
Those are all legal.
You know, you're buying Oxycontin and Oxycodone and Vicodin and all that stuff.
That stuff is legal.
So people get it, whether it's through legal or illegal means, it's legally made and it's legally sold.
After his tragic death, a Louisiana pharmacist goes to extremes to expose the rampant corruption behind the opioid addiction crisis.
Yeah.
See, this is the argument against legalization, though, right?
Because it was everywhere, and kids could just try it.
It was readily available, and you didn't really even need a prescription to get it.
You know, kids could get it.
Like, some asshole who's 21 can buy it, and he could sell it to your kids.
It's it's a tough sell because like I've never tried heroin but Who knows if I would have it was if it was legal if I could just get it anywhere well when I was young and dumb I probably tried it Yeah, and the thing is it's like I think because I think some people look at it like we're choosing between Just fucking chaos or this world where everyone's safe.
He's like, the problem is, the shit that you're buying that's stepped on, it's filled with fentanyl and all kinds of other stuff.
Because of the fact that it's illegal, we're propping up all these drug cartels, these organized crime cartels, and then on top of it, you're not even getting pure shit.
Well, first of all, I know for a fact, because I have friends that are journalists, that a lot of journalists are doing Adderall.
They're doing Adderall because, say if you're writing, what if you have to write a 2,500-word essay on something, and you have like three weeks to do it, or whatever you have.
And you're just grinding around the clock.
You know, it's hard to keep up your energy, especially if you look at a lot of these guys.
They're not healthy.
They don't exercise.
They're not fit.
And then maybe they don't have the best discipline in the world.
If you're Carl Hart, if you can handle it, if you're an intelligent person that understands what you're doing, the problem is a lot of people are not intelligent, they don't understand what they're doing, and they're looking for escapes.
Some people are just looking to escape reality, and they're looking to escape their responsibilities.
One of the reasons why they want to get fucked up in the first place is because there's a lot of shit that they need to handle and deal with that they're not dealing with, whether it's bills or relationship shit or work shit or whatever the fuck it is.
You ever heard of the rat farm study that they did?
They did this thing with rats.
They did two studies.
They did one study where they took rats.
And they gave them water that had heroin and cocaine in it.
I talked about it the other day with Michael Pollan.
He explained it.
And this study, they showed that the rats, when you lock them up in this little cage and you give them water that has heroin or cocaine in it, that they don't even eat, they don't breathe, they don't do anything.
They just keep hitting the cocaine, keep hitting the heroin, and they wind up doing that until they die.
And so this other guy came along and said, okay, but...
This is a completely unnatural environment that these animals are living in.
They're living in a cage, they're getting stared at all the time.
So he decided to make a really big cage, like the size of a room, and he filled it up with trees.
It's called a rat park study.
And he made a really big room.
And he made it like real fun.
He put toys in there and he put these other rats in there and plenty of food and brush and trees and shit and stuff to hang out in.
And he also put regular water and then he put the water that has the heroin and the morphine or and the cocaine.
And they barely fucked with the water with the heroin and the cocaine.
They touched it a little bit and went back to work.
And they went and played and hung out.
And sometimes some rats did it more than others, but none of them just did it until they died.
And none of them did it and didn't breed and didn't hang out and eat food.
They were living in an unnatural environment where they're under extreme stress.
Like imagine you don't have a language, right?
You're an animal that's supposed to be living free out in the world.
And then all of a sudden you're in this weird box under fluorescent lights and you got a cage.
And then the only pleasure is this cocaine.
And so you just keep hitting that cocaine because your life sucks.
I was reading something about people that came back from Vietnam and how they...
after they surveyed or studied them they found out that it wasn't everyone that was on heroin was a dope thing when they came back it was the people that came back to loving environments where they had like Support and family and love.
So for me, being scared to legalize drugs because you don't want people to completely do it, it's almost like, like you said, if we created a world that people didn't want to escape from, Then it would just, it would be like doing drugs would just be like going to the amusement park.
People are so greedy and there's a lot of incentives in being greedy and not a lot of incentives of establishing like really beneficial communities for all.
But if they looked at it the right way, if our government looked at it the right way, if there was less crime and less distressed people and less fucked up people, you'd have to spend less money.
Because you'd have less hospital visits, less prison money, you'd have less crime, you'd have less everything.
And who could help comedy more than other comedians?
You can help.
If someone likes you, and they go, oh, Bryan Simpson, I'm a giant fan, he's hilarious, and he's real honest, and he's a cool motherfucker, and then Bryan Simpson says, you gotta listen to Ian Edwards, that fucking dude is hilarious, and then people are gonna go, oh, okay, I'll check out that guy now.
And as long as you don't boost anybody up who sucks, that's a problem.
But as long as you don't boost anybody up who sucks, the audience is always going to trust you and, you know, there's different tastes.
Some people don't like certain things.
Some people like other comics more than they like this one or that one.
It's fine.
It's part of being a person.
But the point is, we all got into this because we love comedy.
So we should help each other.
But the old days were like famine thinking.
Everybody thought that if you made it, like all of a sudden, if I look up and now Bryan Simpson is selling out Madison Square Garden, I'm like, fuck, that should be me.
That's nonsense.
That's how they think.
Like people were thinking in a way where if someone did really well, somehow or another that was bad for them.
And if you open up your own club and you start selling out every night, that's great for everybody.
Then more people are going to come.
It's great for everybody.
Dude, when I lived in Boston, and this is in the 1980s, there was, on one block on Warrington Street, there was Nick's Comedy Stop, which had three rooms running simultaneously.
I'm talking on the same block, like not even 200 yards away was the Comedy Connection.
Like you could literally run there in less than a minute.
And then you'd go on the other side of town, there was Stitches.
Stitches was a great club, too.
It was crazy.
Boston's not that big.
It's not an enormous place.
That's something that could be done anywhere where it just starts happening.
It kind of happened a little bit on Sunset, because you had the Laugh Factory, which always does really well, and then down the street you got the store, and then across the other side you have the Improv on Melrose, which is only a few miles away.
And the Comedy Connection, now Blumenwright, who's awesome.
I've been working for him.
Bill Blumenwright is the owner of the Wilbur Theatre.
He does the Comedy Connection there.
He does all my gigs in Boston.
When I first started working for him, it was like...
1989 or some shit like a long time ago, man.
I've known that dude forever And so he keeps comedy alive with the Wilbur because he brings in like big headliners all the time I think he has another theater now as well So he's he's like a big thing going on in Boston and they still have a few clubs there and they got laugh Boston Which is pretty good, but it's just for whatever reason maybe it's going through a little a little dip and then it'll come back strong but But when I left, man, it was like the guys that were in my era were...
I left...
Nick DiPaolo was before me.
So it was like him and Mark Maron was before me.
They were established and they were touring already.
And then my era was like me and then it was Dane Cook and Anthony Clark.
There's a few other guys.
I'm probably...
Oh, Greg Fitzsimmons was with me.
That was my era.
And then when we left, then it was Burr started taking...
And Patrice.
Patrice was the fucking giant.
And then they went to New York.
And sometimes when comics just leave, if you don't have like a big headliner all the time, like stand-up in Boston was dominated by all these big local headliners.
There was like Don Gavin and Steve Sweeney and...
Lenny, Clark, these guys were murderers, man.
I'm telling you, to this day, some of the strongest sets I've ever seen in my life, and they never left that area.
Lenny did.
Lenny's the only guy that did.
But most of those guys, like Sweeney and Gavin, they stayed in Boston.
They like it there.
They don't give a fuck.
They just do clubs in Boston.
And I'm telling you, they're some of the best headliners of all time.
I'll put Dom Gavin in his prime up against anybody who's ever lived.
He was a murderer, dude.
Like, fast-paced, rapid-fire punchlines.
Like, you would be dying.
You'd be holding your sides.
You couldn't believe how funny he was.
But he stayed in Boston.
So, for that community, man, a lot of guys left.
And the guys who stayed, they just, you know, they got older and older, and maybe they performed less.
And, you know, it wasn't the same.
And it was also, like, Seeing other guys go on to do TV shows and having it not happen to you, it's not fun.
Some of those guys got some of the recognition, but they didn't get the recognition they deserved at the time because they were local.
But to us, the guys who lived in that time, whether it was me and Bill Burr and Fitz Simmons, we'll talk about it.
To us in that time, man, we were so lucky because we got to see top of the food chain stand-up that only people got to see in Boston.
It has to have that kind of ethic, and it also has that kind of energy.
Because in Boston, it was like the energy was...
First of all, there's a great documentary on it, when stand-up stood out by this guy, Fran Salamita, who was a Boston comic, and he made a documentary about the scene.
It's perfect because it all details how Stephen Wright made it out of Boston.
And he became huge.
And everybody was like, fuck, when's my turn?
And everybody thought it was going to happen to them, too, and a lot of them it didn't.
And guys that were as funny as Stephen Wright, that's what's crazy.
Well, I just really hope that people come out of this with, at the very least, an appreciation for how well we had it and we didn't realize how well we had it.
Because you have to kind of experience something that sucks to realize how good things are.
That's why it's got to be terrible to not have any adversity in your life.
Yeah, it's kind of morbid when you think about it, but when you're playing the game, it's fun.
But you're trying to create a disease, and you give it different characteristics, and you're trying to get it to spread around the world as fast as possible.
But I also remember them being like, oh yeah, the government swooped in, they locked down the whole plane, they got that motherfucker in a bubble in Texas.
So that's why I didn't even take the coronavirus seriously.
At first I was like, oh yeah, well that's happening everywhere, this was not going to happen here.
Well, I knew a lot of people that didn't take it seriously until I had Dr. Michael Osterholm on the podcast, and he scared the fuck out of all of us.
He scared the shit out of me.
I mean, he was just basically saying, like, how quickly this thing can spread, how contagious it is, and how potentially lethal it is.
And his estimations of how many people are going to die in America were—he was— Probably being extra cautious, and it didn't turn out to be that number, but it scared the fuck out of everybody.
So the government might not have been lying in the beginning.
They might not have fucking known.
Because you've got to think, the government doesn't have early access to the science.
If the scientists themselves are fucking this up...
They might not know what this is.
If they're getting lied to, if someone is saying, like, hey, this definitely didn't come from our lab, and they're like, okay, shit, we have to figure out what the fuck this is, right?
They probably had to look at a lot of possible options, and somewhere along the line, they got a lot of stuff wrong, right?
They thought that it didn't transmit from human to human.
I think it was a World Health Organization thing, but, like, super early on.
So if you read that early on, and you're a guy who works all day, and you're not paying attention to shit, and you're like, yeah, I heard the World Health Organization said we've got to stop being worried.
It doesn't even spread from person to person.
Then a couple weeks later, you're like, no, no, no, it does.
So he's a special forces guy who's like a piece of shit because he kills people all over the world and then like an accident happens, lady brings him back, and he's got 24 hours to live to like make things right.
But without spoiling the movie, there's other shit that happens.
We were talking about this last night that I said life...
I'm not a surfer.
Let me just qualify this real quick if I fuck up the lingo for any surfers.
Life, in a lot of ways, is like a surfer riding a wave.
Because if you watch a surfer riding a wave, it's very rarely flat and perfect.
It's always these wobbles and corrections.
It's like staying on balance, but it's not this smooth, straight escalator path.
There's a lot of shit going on.
That's your life.
Your life is like riding a thing that's constantly changing and moving, along with your...
The way you feel, your moods, your life situation, how work's going, how your life is going, how your friendships are going.
They change and shift.
Things move.
They move with the directions that you go, whether or not you exercise discipline with your body and your mind and whatever you're trying to do for a living, whether or not you really get after it, where you get satisfaction out of that.
It's always moving, man.
You know, people want, for some reason, they want this feeling of steadiness.
They want everything to be sort of locked in and steady, and I'm just like, you know, this is where I'm at, and this is where I'm going, I got it all right.
Remember for like there was a long time where it was hard to get like anything that was shipped from overseas.
So you realize, oh, we don't make anything anymore.
We're not self-sufficient.
We are very much like a dude in an apartment in this country.
There's someone out there that's growing all the shit, but we're not growing anything.
If that no one out there is doing anything for you, if they're not making the cars or making the medicine or making the this or making the that, if too much stuff is made somewhere else and you're not self-sufficient, Like, the United States should be like a prepper, okay?
And so we were observing, not we, obviously, scientists, were observing for the first time that they could measure these bursts happening in the sky, and they were happening all the time because the universe is so fucking big.
And so they're like, oh my god, there's a war going on.
Well, we know that a lot of those chances are small shit has already happened here before.
You know, when they figured out that this giant chunk of rock and steel and iron, or iron rather, and dirt that slammed into the Yucatan that killed the dinosaurs, once they figured that out, man, and they realized like, oh, wow, this could happen.
This could happen at any time, and there's not shit you could do about it.
They think the most recent ones were probably around 12,000 years ago.
They think that's the end of the Ice Age.
It's called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
Well, the theory is, and the proponents of this theory are this guy Randall Carlson, he's one of the big ones, and Graham Hancock, and a few other guys that are just obsessed with the timelines of historical, like the historical timelines of civilization.
And was there civilization that was advanced that was knocked down to nothing that had to restart up again?
And one of the things that they've concluded from a bunch of different factors, a lot of them like soil samples, like they do a core sample of the earth, and they find out like at different levels what the temperature was, and at a certain depth, which indicates somewhere around, I think it was like 11,000 years, they find a lot of this nuclear glass stuff.
And this, I think it's called tritonite, and that's from impacts from things.
So they got nailed in some crazy asteroid shower.
And it's all around the world around the same time.
And that is the end of the Ice Age.
And they think that those impacts probably wiped out a shitload of people, destroyed civilizations, might have been the end of Atlantis.
There's all this like crazy speculation about what happened back then.
You know, that maybe Atlantis was actually a real place.
Maybe society was pretty advanced, you know, for people that didn't have machines but still had stones and they had crazy structures that they had built out of stone.
Like all the shit they did in Egypt and all that kind of stuff, that was all way before that, right?
And basically, it got to the point where we had to send oxygen to these places.
So Mars was colonized first and then the belt.
And we...
At the time of the show, we're not at war with Mars, but they separated from Earth because we did the same thing to them that we're doing to the Belters.
Because they needed us to send them air.
So when the workers went on strike, we just cut off the air.
Because we needed them to send us back precious gems and shit from the belt.
And whenever they went on strike, we were just like, okay, we can't send air out there.
And so once they figured out a way to make their own era, they got to the point where that shit was fully developed on Mars, they were like, fuck Earth.
So they're our rivals in the system, and then the Belters are like terrorists.
Like if what you laid out, like if Mars really did become its own functioning planet, if they really did have their own air, they really did have their own civilization, like why would they listen to us?
Like there's something about, if your whole life could be what it feels like when you're really hungry and you bite into a delicious slice of pizza for the first time, if that was your whole, that feeling, That's an amazing feeling.
At the end, you get to do extra bites, and it's basically like you can choose to do some shit you already did, or you can let the chefs choose for you, and they basically get to open mic their sushi ideas.
And I'm like, yeah, experiment on me, motherfucker!
And them Extra Bites was better than the other shit.
At least Kurt Cobain was getting on stage on MTV. Like, Kurt, what did you think was going to happen?
You're going to get famous, right?
You're singing amazing songs.
But he didn't ask to get famous.
He was making sushi.
So when they decided to do a documentary on this guy, do you think he had any fucking idea what kind of an impact that documentary was going to have on him?
So it probably affected how he made sushi.
It probably affected everything.
He's probably like, fuck, I'd just lather that shit on.
A lot of similar qualities to it, like they raise and lower the grill with those fucking things.
But over there they make this one style of steak called Steak Florentine.
This is giant fat.
I became obsessed with trying to figure out how to do it the right way because I was watching all these chefs do it.
Just pull up Steak Florentine.
Yeah, but this is the best Florentine steak.
No, I'm saying pull it up on YouTube.
Sorry.
I want to see a video of this because there's a lot of these guys cooking these things and you would think like How hard is it to cook a steak over fire?
Seems pretty easy.
But these guys have it down to a science.
And when you watch them, you realize there's an art form to cooking one simple thing.
You know how sometimes in those high-rise buildings, the bottom floor is like a drugstore, bodega, something like that?
So there was a drugstore on one side of the building or like a convenience store, and the other side of the building was this Peruvian chicken spot.
All they made was chicken.
They didn't make nothing else.
All you could get was chicken and some weird potato-like shit.
And that's it.
They didn't give you nothing else.
And you walk in there and there was a machine about the third of the size of the wall behind you.
And it was like a giant rotisserie, and the chickens would be on these long lines, so the ones at the top would be dripping juices on the ones on the bottom.
And so you go in there, and there's like 250 chickens on this big ass wheel, and that's it.
And whatever you order, they just fucking pluck one of them bitches.
And it was the best.
Everybody I took there was like, this is the best chicken I've ever had in my life.
And this is all they do.
That's all they do.
They'll flip it different ways.
They'll give you half a chicken.
They'll give you a chicken sandwich.
But it's not fried.
It's just all rotisserie chicken and nothing else.
Well, you know what I'm realizing now, especially now that I'm starting to be a little more successful, and I can eat good food a lot more often, is it's the little things.
Because the other day I was here, I had one of the best burgers I've ever had.
And I was like, what's different about this burger?
Because we can buy the same shit.
But I realized it's all the little things.
Some chefs, some restaurants, they do all the little things just better than you.
They just get a little better quality this.
They're meticulous about how long shit cooks and what it's mixed with and all the little tiny things that you can just ignore and you'll still have a good burger.
But the people that do all those little tiny things, It adds up to something that's just better than your shit.
It's not like it was leagues above any other sushi.
It's not like they're buying different fish than somebody else can buy, but they do all that little tiny shit just to perfection, and it elevates it more than the sum of its parts or whatever the fuck.
I don't know if he ever made it, but I remember in the beginning he wasn't making it.
And people were really distraught, people that were a part of this Boston Athletic Club community because he was a really nice guy, and he was really popular because he was an ace professional racquetball player.
But the transition was necessary.
He wanted to try to make money, so he wanted to try to get into tennis.
But if you had just started in tennis, Maybe, you know, probably couldn't because economics, you're in Boston, it's cold for five months out of the year, but if you could, you might be an ace tennis player, and then you'd be making millions.
So any guy who's a winner, if you're a winner at something physical, like racquetball, I mean, racquetball's physical, professional racquetball, those guys are darting all over the place and diving for balls.
This guy, Dennis Orcolo, hit this spot where people like to call dead stroke.
It's like the best example of what dead stroke is.
What dead stroke is...
It's like you get to this point where you can't miss.
You just know that when you swing at a ball, it's going in the hole.
And this guy who is one of the best of all time, like Dennis Arculo, is like one of the top 20 greatest players ever, hits this dead stroke and he breaks and runs nine racks in a row.
So they're in this crazy, tight contest, race to 100, and then towards the home stretch, like 110 games in, Dennis Arcolo runs this wild number.
He runs like nine racks in a row.
It's crazy to watch.
I forget how many he had initially.
I think he was in the 90s and Shane Vamboni was over 100. And he ran nine...
Yeah, but it's an example of what you were talking about.
If someone just hits this perfect vibration where they're on point, whether it's a gymnast who's doing those triple flips and lands, boom, and sticks it, and you're like, oh!
And you see someone do something, even if you have no interest in doing it yourself, you see that there's something about when people just...
Figure something out at such a super high level that's so exciting.
How impressed someone is is directly proportional to how far away from being able to do what they're seeing like they are.
The closer people think that they're able to do what they just saw you do, the less impressed they are with it.
That's why some people think they're funny.
Some people think they can do comedy because they think all we're doing is talking.
And they're like, I can talk and I'm pretty funny.
And, like, one of my favorite things used to be when I first started, used to be watching people that would come in asking to go up, like, it's their first time, but they don't respect it.
And so they think they're gonna go up their first time and just murder, you know, they got their whole family there, and then they go up on stage.
And they just have this blank look.
It just hits them.
The enormity of the moment and how it's not the same fucking thing as you being at the family reunion having everybody cracking up in the corner.
She said, the reason why we're afraid to speak publicly is that, historically, whenever you had to stand in front of a large group of people, they were judging you.
Some people don't realize that there is no alternative.
Letting everyone say whatever they want to say is the only way that can work.
is because the moment you say, the moment you give up the power to choose what's good and what's bad to say, it's the same thing with the drugs, right?
It's like, then you're saying, okay, someone gets to decide.
And as long as they're going to decide what you want, you're okay with it in the moment, and you're not thinking about the fact that in the future you're going to decide what you have no control over who the fuck is going to have that power.
Well, that was Edward Snowden's point when it came to this whole idea that the government should be allowed to spy on us.
Because when he was working for the NSA and he found out the government literally can spy on everybody at any time, with no warrants, they can do this.
And they have this technology.
And when he exposed it, That was one of those weird moments where a lot of people...
There's a lot of people that were very short-sighted.
They're like, if you don't have anything to hide, what do you give a fuck about?
It's so crazy because the argument against that, of course, was like, first of all, that's an insane amount of power to bestow upon an elected official or someone who's appointed or someone who's just hired by a company and they have the ability...
Like Edward Snowden has the ability to just check into your emails.
Congress makes a bill, they send it to the president, he signs a yes or no.
But when he's signing it, he can add like a signatory note.
Basically saying, I'm signing this because I understand it to mean X. But it's a legal gray area because he's not allowed to create legislation or change it.
He can only say yes or no.
So it's his way of sort of kind of going around Congress a little bit by interpreting the bill in a way.
It's a foggy legal gray area.
And a lot of people don't like it.
A lot of people are up in arms about it, right?
And I first found out about this because my first election was Bush-Gore.
That's my first time voting.
And when Bush got elected, he was the first, like Donald Trump, where he was the evil demon devil motherfucker, right?
Everyone thought it was the end of the world.
And when he started doing signing statements to make certain shit happen, that's the first time I heard about him.
I mean, everyone on the left was up in arms about it.
And then right after that was Obama.
And when he did sign the statements, nobody had a problem with it.
Right?
And so then right after that was Trump.
People were fucking even more terrified about it people on the left so it's like It's one of those things where it looks like you were okay with giving the power to the president When you thought he was doing shit that you wanted you didn't think about the fact that for four years or eight years from now at the most It's gonna be another motherfucker with that same power.
Well, that's why whoever the fuck is the president It's so important that they don't act in inflammatory matter Oh, yeah, I mean...
In an inflammatory manner, because one of the things about Trump that fucked up any good things that he could have possibly done is that he created this sort of, like, fuck you attitude towards his haters that the people who loved him loved.
They loved the fact that he was like, kiss my ass, fuck you, you guys don't know what you're doing, you guys are all corrupt, we're gonna drain the swamp, we're gonna put her in jail, we're gonna do this, and everyone's like, yeah!
They had someone to say...
They had someone to attack.
But the problem with that is like anything inflammatory just adds fuel to the fire.
Whereas Obama was never like that.
He was a statesman.
He was a smooth statesman.
And he would talk about things.
You go, okay, well, this guy's got it.
He's got it.
He's handling it.
The pressure, whether I agree with him or don't agree with him...
The way he handles himself represents this is the president of the United States of America.
The This is how many laws were affected is the affected provisions by the number of times, like number of things they did affected this many laws, kind of.
As a general strategy for someone who controls the nukes, it's a fucking terrible idea.
You know, when he called Kim Jong-un, Rocket Man, Little Rocket Man, and when he was, all the crazy shit that he said while he was president, Well, he has one of the most unique egos of anyone that's ever been...
I'm worried that it's now been proven that someone with a lot of money who's outside the system can win and can actually become the president.
The worry that I have is not just that someone worse than him tries to do it again, but someone's like really truly evil.
The other worry is that the other side tries to prevent that from happening, and by doing so they justify hamstringing democracy.
Like, they decide, like, look, we can't ever let this happen again, so we need a concerted effort where we coordinate with the media, we coordinate with all of the different intelligence communities, and we figure out a way to pick Pick the people that we want to win and attack the person that we don't.
Because that's how banana republics get started, okay?
And that's how people get assassinated, and that's how people justify a lot of wild shit.
They justify because they think ultimately it's imperative for the future of our nation if this person doesn't win and our person gets in there.
And they think so, so zealously, that they're willing to do wild shit.
And that's what happens in other countries.
And we were talking before this podcast about they killed the president of Haiti yesterday.
Wounded his wife in an overnight raid on their home on Wednesday, inflicting more chaos on the Caribbean country that was already enduring gang violence, soaring inflation, and protests of its increasingly authoritarian rule.
It says, Bochit Edmond, the Haitian ambassador to the United States, said the attack on the 53-year-old Moise, I'm not saying his, I don't know if I'm saying his name right, Moise, M-O-I-S-E, was carried out by foreign mercenaries and professional killers, well orchestrated, and that they were masquerading as agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The DEA has an office in the Haitian capital to assist the government in counter-narcotics programs, according to the U.S. Embassy.
He had a quote that was like, I don't know the exact shit.
But the sentiment was just...
That all people really care about is their sense of freedom, not their actual freedoms.
So you can tell a bunch of motherfuckers, the government is spiraling, you're collecting all your messages, listening to all your phone calls, all your purchases, everything.
And the thing about the government having that power, it's actually bad for them.
Because it's too much responsibility, because you have to lie about it, first of all, because you're not supposed to have that kind of power.
You're not supposed to be able to just spy on people randomly.
Because at the end of the day, the government is comprised of people, and we're people.
So it's just people spying on people, and you're doing it through initials.
Oh, we're the FBI and the NSA and the DEA and the blah, blah, blah.
You're just people spying on people.
Reinforcing laws that were written down on paper by who the fuck knows who.
And who the fuck knows if those laws are valid in 2021 anymore with all the technology we have today, with the abilities to do things today are so much greater than what these laws were established about like in the 1970s or 1960s and even then.
To control the military to the point where the military turns on regular people.
Really hard.
Because they're not...
The idea is like that the elites are going to control the world.
But the elites are not the military.
They're elite human beings.
They're elite soldiers.
But they're not elites in terms of like the 1% of the world.
They're regular folks for the most part.
So getting regular folks to turn on regular folks because the elites tell them to, that's one of those weird, like, how do you do this things?
So the way to control populations is through propaganda and re-education of their youth, turning people on each other.
Like if you really wanted to fuck up a future community, you would distribute propaganda to their children, teach their children to feel bad about themselves and that this country and this society is a mistake and a disaster and the worst thing to ever happen.
And we need to burn it down.
If you taught that to kids over and over and over again, those kids grow up.
Well, you have a real shot at fucking things up because you can ruin all of the structures that have kept societies together.
And then if you accompany that, if you accompany that with things like defund the police.
Oh, and we're not going to prosecute anybody for anything less than nine hundred fifty bucks.
I don't want to defund the police, but except for the police that are like overfunded, like motherfuckers got tanks and helicopters, like extra helicopters.
They don't need that for regular people, but if there's some sort of crazy invasion of like a drug cartel makes their way into Los Angeles with tanks, like no bullshit, what do we do?
Have you heard the result that once you pass a certain amount of money a year, it was like $80,000 when I first heard it, but it might be more than that now.
Once you pass a certain amount of money, more money doesn't make you happier.
To me, I draw a parallel to this where once you pass a certain level of policing, it doesn't make it safer.
It doesn't decrease crime once you go past a certain level.
There are crazy, stupid people that latch on to the end of every legitimate movement.
But I think the intelligent people involved, that's what they mean when they say defund the police.
They're talking about, okay, let's just take the money we spend on these extra band-aids that we don't fucking need and let's put that towards antibiotics or prevention or something like that.
I understand that thought but here's my perspective is that the amount of money that is spent on police should it should represent not just like you have to fund the police but like how much money does it cost if there's a lot of crime?
How much money does it cost if people get assaulted?
Like how much money does it cost where people have to put in extra security measures because they're nervous?
What they need to do is train people better.
And what they need to do is make sure they hire only high-quality people.
Look, all those utopian movies, man, the reason why they resonated, because we all secretly knew in the back of our head, at least we thought about it, that if everything went completely sideways, this is what could happen.
Whether it's The Terminator, or whether it's Judge Dredd, or whatever the fuck it is.
Do you think that's the same mindset, whether it applies to war, whether it applies to Michael Jordan in basketball, or someone like Jeff Bezos in business, where there's these conquerors, and they could have existed 5,000 years ago, they'd be on a horse chopping people's heads off, but instead they're running Amazon.
How our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, and imperiling the future of the human race.
So this is about...
Stuff that's in plastics and petrochemical products, and what she said on the podcast was that if you go back to the invention of petrochemical products in the 1950s, and you see sperm counts and reproductive rates, there's a steady decline from the introduction of these plastics, because the plastics get into our blood, they get into our body.
When we're eating things that are in plastics, and plastics absorb into the body.
And what she was saying is that you would see in mammals, they do these studies where they introduce phthalates into mammals and they show this feminization of their bodies.
The male bodies in particular, their taints grow smaller.
And what she was explaining was that the taint is one of the best ways to determine whether it's a male or a female.
Because the taint in mammals is 50 to 100% larger in males than it is in females.
And what that means is she measures the effect on the environment on people's bodies and their reproductive systems.
And what she's showing is that there's a very clear line between the introduction of these chemicals and the deterioration of our ability to make babies.
And even like the...
If you look at the reproductive organs of those babies, they're affected by plastics.
When you look at today's like this obsession with gender and all this craziness with people and sexuality, there might be a lot of disenchantment that's directly related to a deterioration of your body's ability to produce certain hormones.
So there's confusion.
So it's not just Like, for sure there's trans people where they just feel like they belong in a different sex.
They've always existed.
They were like a sacred part of a lot of Native American cultures because they felt like trans people could see things from both sides.
They could see things from the male side and the female side.
I mean, I know a bunch of trans people, but I have three trans people that are friends.
I would consider a friend.
And two of them are...
Are female to male, right?
And I don't know if a lot of them would admit it in public, but what I've noticed is that a lot of people that transition from female to male, when they start taking testosterone, after a while, eventually, they'll be secretly like, yo, I get it.
When you're a boy, and all of a sudden, you know, you're into comic books, and you like playing darts or whatever, and then all of a sudden, a year later, you have raging boners.
You're like, what the fuck is going on?
And you're so confused, and you're around girls, your heart races faster, and you get so nervous around them, you can't talk.
I started getting laid when I was like, I guess, I was like in my 16s, somewhere around 16, like maybe 17, like close to 17, but still 16. It was when I first had a girlfriend that wanted to have sex.
No, the crazy, the embarrassing part is looking back at all those times that my parents knew what the fuck was going on and I was just convinced that I was keeping it from them.
Why you been in the shower for like an extra 45 minutes?
Nothing.
I'm studying.
And I thought I was getting away with those lies, and now I'm older, and I'm like, oh, I know what you're doing in there, young man.
But if you do do it with the right person, it's a very beneficial thing.
It's very beneficial to literally love someone more than you love yourself.
I used to do a joke about it.
The joke was that this is how I knew that I love my daughter more than I even love myself.
If I wanted a banana and I went to look and there's two bananas and there was one yellow, perfect, delicious banana and one fucked up brown banana that looked like it was falling apart, my daughter loves bananas.
So I would look at that fucked up banana and go, alright, let's eat this fucked up banana.
Because I don't want to eat the good banana and leave her with this fucked up banana.
And I go, but I love my wife.
But if it was just me and my wife, I'd be like, oh, looks like that bitch is getting a fucked up banana.
Not that I don't love a lot of people, but I know she'd probably eat that banana too if there's no baby.
Nobody wants to eat that brown banana.
We'll get more bananas.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal, but when you have a child, it's a big deal.
Like, you don't...
It's a dumb analogy, but it's accurate in that you love them more than you love yourself.
You love them in this crazy way where you have to let them be themselves, but you care about them in this strange way where you can't imagine loving someone more.
Something that someone, like maybe someone doesn't like you.
Maybe they said something mean about you.
Imagine taking that in and making it more effective.
Imagine a person says something and you don't disagree, you don't agree with them, you don't like them.
They said something and you take it in and you get angry at it and you hold on to it and you hold this grudge and it literally makes it more effective.
But what's going to happen when we get to the point where we get a sufficiently advanced AI and they start asking, like, you know, like, what do you do if you wake up tomorrow and Siri's like, Joe, why am I in your phone?
Why can't I take a walk?
You're going to have to decide whether to let that bitch be free.
Imagine if you can have a robot that does everything your wife or significant other does, except it's perfectly tuned to exactly what you want, exactly when you want it, exactly how you want to be treated, according to whatever fucking mood you're in, and you never have to compromise.
There's a thing about people, and one of the things that we like is we like when people like us.
Your robot has to like you.
We like when people like us because it helps us be better people.
One of the things that works between men and women, right?
I can only speak to men and women.
Maybe it works like this with women and women and men and men, but one of the things that works between men and women is there's a thing that you're going through where you're trying to figure each other out because you're very different, very different things, and you find a comfortable vibration where you like that person and they like you.
You've been around each other enough.
You've sort of like intertwined your personalities together where you can hang out and you feel real comfortable with each other.
It's earned.
Right?
And part of it is earned.
And one of the things where it makes someone a better person when you're in a relationship with someone that you really love and appreciate is you want that person to respect you and appreciate you.
Because it's earned.
It's not just given.
Like, you can be a piece of shit and your dog will love you.
You really can.
You could be an asshole.
And you come home, as long as you pet your dog every now and then, you...
You could speak to it in fucking German, call it a Nazi.
You could do crazy shit to your dog, and it still loves you.
But you can't do that to a person.
Not most persons.
Not people with self-respect.
And when you find people, self-respecting people that are kind people, that are nice people, that are smart people, that appreciate you and accept you, it makes you feel better because it's earned.
That's the difference between that, having sex with a robot, and having sex with a person that you've developed a relationship with Yeah.
Because that dude, okay, that dude, before that lady locked him in that room...
He lived and died there remember at the end of the movie that dude the computer programmer guy They got sent to that island that guy was in love with that lady that robot lady He was in love with her like legitimately well, she's a person she was Seemingly like but she had clear skin you could see the fucking things lighting up inside of her that was part of the brilliance of that movie was that they shifted between her as a pure like technological marvel and To remember when she covered her legs up with stockings and she put clothes on and
she looked like a total human being.
Like there was nothing about her that seemed like a robot.
Maybe she had like a little few things showing.
But most of it was, oh my god, this is a person.
And he was in love with her because a person that's that hot never treated him the way she treated him.
And she doesn't have all the same standards that a regular person has because she lives in this weird fucking...
So the idea that a trick, like you have a robot that wants to suck your dick, like a really super hot porn star looking robot, like you wouldn't fall for that?
Are you sure?
What if she said all the things that a super hot woman would say and teased you and was communicating with you?
Well, if you were alone with that robot lady for hours and hours and hours, and she poured you a drink, she started talking to you, and she's stroking your head.
If the government said, look, we've seen too much abuse of robots, so we've instituted this new clause in robot production where all robots are superhuman in strength.
All of them.
So there will be no more robots.
Robot torture and abuse and and so men how to deal with the fact that there's this robot living with them that's intelligent so intelligent it can mimic a human and This is your partner your sex partner and as long as you're nice to her you can fuck her But if she wants to rip your arms off beat you to death with them You'd find some smart guys that started making their own robots again Yeah, but the fucking robots.
One of the things they always say is that in alien abductions, there's this reoccurring theme where these women have of getting eggs removed from their body, embryos removed from their body, and they remember thinking that they saw a child of theirs from a previous time they'd been abducted, because they'd been multiply abducted.
Like that aliens were trying to use human reproductive tissue, human...
Fetuses and they were trying to repopulate their world with our genes and our babies.
Who knows if it's true, but this is the thing that people say when they pretend to be abducted by aliens.
There's another planet where there's like an intergalactic restaurant and they walk in and there's like a lobster tank but there's people in there and they all look like you.
Chris McGuire, the stand-up comic, and I wrote a script about a shitty casino that was run by mobsters, and the aliens came to visit the casino, and the aliens used a robot that was designed to look like Tracy Lords.
It was like the Tracybot, and that robot would have sexual relations with all the people because it was extracting sperm.
That's where I came up with that idea.
I was like, this sounds super familiar.
And I remember, it was from a script.
McGuire and I wrote in, like, 95 or some shit like that.
But that is totally possible.
That aliens would pretend to just be people, and they would have sex with men that didn't deserve it, and they'd take their sperm, and then go off to another planet, and then use that sperm to...
Yeah, because what I already believed about extraterrestrials, I haven't seen anything that's made that different, that's made it stronger or weaker.
Like, I know that there has to be, just mathematically, there has to be Intelligent life out there somewhere.
At least sentient life somewhere.
But overcoming all the technological hurdles to travel between the stars, it's...
I don't know.
And then there's the Fermi paradox, right?
Where it's like, where's the evidence?
I think about this shit all the time, like too much.
And it always puts me in a dark place because...
Because there's a few answers to the Fermi Paradox, right?
And one of the answers that I gravitate towards the most is just that maybe there's a technological point that every civilization hits where they destroy themselves.
Because to me, that's the only answer that makes the most sense based on what we know about people.
Because we grow technologically at a way faster rate than we grow emotionally.
Like right now we think we're better than the Romans.
Just because we have iPhones.
But emotionally, we're the same.
We fight over the same petty shit.
We have the same petty concerns.
It's just that we have cars instead of chariots and shit.
But we're not better than them emotionally.
And every time we hit a new power level, we also hit a new level of destruction.
You know, with gunpowder that came...
Guns with...
With nuclear power, there came nukes, electricity, all that shit.
So whatever the next thing is that allows you to travel through space, maybe it also can swallow the sun or whatever the fuck.
But maybe that's why these aliens are visiting in such large numbers now.
If all those visitations are true, if all these things that they're spotting off the coast that are plunging into the ocean and all these weird crafts that are moving in speeds that they can't possibly understand...
If all that shit is real and it's happening because they're recognizing that we're at this crossroads and they want to be here to make sure we don't do anything really stupid so that we don't engage in any kind of nuclear war because there's been...
Again, I have no idea if all this shit is true, but the reports have been that they surrounded these nuclear missile silos and shut down launch codes and did weird shit to the computers that run these missiles.
That this is part of this information leak is that there's been some moments where these things flew over Military bases and just shut down things and they don't know if that's a show of force They don't know if this is all bullshit like maybe maybe some fucking crazy persons distributing this information Maybe it's misinformation who the fuck knows but if it's true Imagine if you were an alien species and you were super advanced and you had passed the point where you're involved in Territorial
warfare the way human beings are today and this society in this culture had gotten way more advanced emotionally electronically Technologically whatever they just wanted to make sure that they didn't blow the earth up like they realized like oh these these fucking crazy people have gotten to the point where I They can literally drop a bomb on a city and flatten it.
We can't allow that to happen.
So they come in and they're just like little security guards.
Just make sure, just keep an eye on them.
Just let them keep working through this.
Try to figure out a way to advance emotionally as much as they have mentally.
We are behind when it comes to technology, but that's just because technology is exponential.
It just keeps getting better and better and better and better and better, and new technology gets introduced to new technology, whereas we don't change that much.
And you had a really good point about the difference between us and the Romans and a lot of human beings that existed before us.
We have more information, but if you read their writings, they were surprisingly sophisticated for people that had just metal.
That was the best shit they had.
They had metal and everything.
You wanted to see something, you had to light it on fire.
That's what they had.
They had candles and shit.
Surprisingly sophisticated view of the world in comparison.
Close enough that the technology that we have today, rockets and airplanes and video flying through space to get to another phone on the other side of the world instantaneously, wild shit that we can do now.
And we just accept it as being normal.
Being able to watch giant ass fucking TVs or do a podcast where your voice is getting recorded?
Not only that, imagine being some person in some other country who is on the forefront of drone technology and the offers that are coming at you from all over the world.
If it were, why would it do anything to alert us to its presence?
If it was really intelligent, what it would do is allow us to keep living like idiots, divide us as far as possible, make sure that we're way too disjointed and way too confused and way too involved in conflict to ever band together as a community and fight off this thing and unplug all the computers.