Bill Maher joins Joe Rogan to critique media shifts, from $6T COVID-19 spending and systemic healthcare failures to the left’s extreme stances—like police abolition—and the right’s climate denial. They debate corporate narratives, vaccine skepticism, and suppressed pandemic discussions, like the lab leak theory and vitamin D suppression, warning that ideological censorship stifles progress. Maher’s Club Random podcast and upcoming Adulting special reflect his push for unfiltered dialogue amid polarized culture, where comedy risks becoming a hostage to political correctness. [Automatically generated summary]
So if you said to me 10 years ago, podcasting is going to be huge.
It's really going to be where media moves.
It's going to be bigger than radio at its height.
I'd say, are you crazy?
But, you know, partly because of you, it did.
And so it's sort of undeniable now.
And I also was out to dinner too many times with people who said, you know, you're so interesting to talk to when it's not about politics.
You know, you should do a podcast that's not about politics.
And I was always saying, well, first of all, my network would never let me do that.
They own my ass.
They pay me very well for exclusivity.
But I found out that actually, you know what, I can, if I asked nicely, and they were nice about it, and do it in a very different way, which is what we did, I could do a podcast.
And have it not be about politics.
And it's a whole new audience because there's just a lot of people who are turned off to politics and don't want to talk about politics and don't want to hear about it.
And sometimes I'm that guy.
Sometimes I don't want to hear about it.
And there's too many people who are divorced from shall we say knowing things.
I said, for example, on Real Time last week, the two topics we talked about were the ACLU and NATO. And he's 30 and he said, yeah, I don't know what either one of those are.
I said, exactly.
This is the problem.
Or the solution is that we can have this nice conversation.
You're a bright guy.
But I can't...
You would not be that interested in Real Time because even though it's a comedy show and there's a lot of funny stuff that anybody could laugh at...
Yeah, when it comes to the panel discussion, it was mostly about NATO and the ACLU. Whereas this show, you know, the podcast, you know, it's just about anything.
It's just much more personal.
And, you know, I can be...
Like, dressed like this.
I'm not the guy in the suit and the tie and the white shirt with perfect hair.
And I can just, you know, and also I can, like we're doing here, be much more free would be the word I would say before we had to dance around the fact that, no, we can get baked.
We can drink and we can smoke, which is what we would do normally.
And I felt like, you know, there's not a lot of podcasts that have a nighttime feel.
And I had a place in my house that was like perfect for that.
And we kind of made it into a club.
We called it Club Random.
And I said, you know, I get high with people here anyway.
Like one night a week just having fun.
If I just turned the cameras on, we'd have a fucking show.
We already have, from the commentary, from when people write in to YouTube and so forth, saying, oh, I'm going to take a look at Realtime now.
And that was part of my argument, was like, if you want to get anyone under 40 who don't follow politics that well, you're going to have to fish somewhere else than where you've been fishing.
And when you do fish in this new pond, you will get people who will come over to your pond.
Well, I think one of the things that opened up a lot of people to your show during the pandemic, especially, was these clips that you guys were putting up.
And I think that having those kind of clips, those kind of, you know, viral clips of some of your monologues and some of your rants, I think those opened up a lot of younger people to it as well.
Same kind of thing, like using an alternative media.
And of course, nowadays, we live in a time when people digest things, not necessarily in the form that they were made.
They get little clips.
I mean, James Corden does singing in a car with people, the karaoke.
A lot of people see that much more than who stay up till 1230. And watch that whole show through their toes like they used to Johnny Carson and sit through commercials.
I mean, I honestly don't know how those shows still last in the year 2022. Who would sit there and watch commercials that take up probably 30% of the show?
Well, I mean, I said to him, "You're a lot funnier than people know that His reputation is the tough guy, you know, fuck this.
And really, he's very funny.
I saw a play he wrote in New York in 2008 called November.
It was a political thing.
But it was just like one laugh after another.
It was just...
I said to him, it's like a Neil Simon play if Neil Simon had ever been funny.
Just people really laughing in the theater every 30 seconds.
Laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh.
That is not how people think of David Mamet.
And his book I read, it's fantastic.
I mean, I don't agree with every single thing in it.
But there is a certain type of person, and he is one of them, that just has this breadth of knowledge that comics like us, as much as we might try and kind of stay up and read, we're just not in that league.
And, you know, it's like I couldn't play basketball with the Lakers either, you know?
There are just people like that, Salman Rushdie, people who are just, they've read everything, they know everything.
And so when they write a book like that, they're very often making references to things, oh, I know that name.
And then you tell me something, oh, I didn't know that about it.
Oh, I didn't know that.
And it's almost like the cliff notes for being a true intellectual.
No, because if someone had said 20 years ago, I'm not sure looting is a bad thing, I would have opposed it then.
So I haven't changed.
But that, I think, is what there is this hunger for, is this sort of common sense.
You know, centrism is such a wishy-washy word.
But that's sort of what it is.
Some people lean a little more to the left, a little more to the right.
Sometimes it's issue by issue.
But just...
I'm always saying to the Democrats, just don't be the party of no common sense.
And you will be surprised at how much amazing success you will have, as opposed to what's going to happen, which is they're going to get their ass kicked in November.
Well, people like you are very important to people like me because you represent what it means to me to be liberal, what it means to me to be left-wing, because you're just a normal person who cares about people's rights and wants a certain amount of freedom and wants people to get along and work things out amicably.
But the polarization in this country has made it so that people like you are rare.
It's weird.
It's like that's what I used to think of when I thought of the left.
I thought of like professors and, you know, intellectuals and these people that would sit down and work through things with the understanding that free speech is one of the most important aspects of communication possible.
And communication is everything.
Communication is how we work things out.
Like this idea of not talking to people you disagree with.
Well, guess what?
That just galvanizes them.
They just get hardened, and they move further and further away, and we get more and more associated with this idea of left and right, and good and bad, and one and zero, and this side does not agree with anything that side says.
That's crazy.
It doesn't make any sense.
And if you're out there doing it, it gives people hope.
And it's not just what you're saying, common sense.
You do have common sense.
But more importantly, you have courage.
Because courage allows you to speak your mind whether you're right or wrong.
Courage allows you to take a chance.
And you're seeing the wave of people that are moving in a certain direction.
It doesn't necessarily make sense.
And you're like, hey, what the fuck is going on?
And everybody's like, finally, someone's saying it on TV. Because maybe someone said it at a cocktail party.
Maybe someone said it at a barbecue.
But they're not fucking saying it on HBO until you say it on HBO. Well, thank you.
And that's also I always feel like what my bond with the audience is.
When I started way back on Politically Incorrect almost 30 years ago, people said, you know, this show will never work because a TV host can never reveal his politics.
I mean, Johnny Carson never did.
Leno didn't.
David Letterman.
They never said, I'm voting for this guy.
Whereas, I mean, you obviously know who all the late-night hosts are for now.
Do you think that the way it's going right now with late night television where everyone has to be political, is that what the audience wants or is that what the executives in the studio wants?
Are they one step behind?
Where is the mandate coming from?
Is it the person who's the host who says, you know what I know works in this town if I want to keep working?
I have to be like, Outwardly left-leaning progressive political.
But they believe that there's this long – it's a fascinating conversation because I honestly don't have an opinion other than it's dangerous if the earth warms.
Let me say one thing before we move on because I don't want to mischaracterize what these different guys said.
We had two different guys back to back on the podcast.
Pull up their names.
One guy, the first guy was the more conservative guy in terms of his thought about it.
He didn't think that it wasn't happening.
He was just saying that the data points are being exaggerated, and if you follow a long curve, he was saying if you follow a long curve of history, it's been way worse at multiple times, and it goes in this erratic pattern that you can kind of follow.
He said humans are 100% having an influence on that.
And to your point earlier about talking to each other, when I hear something like this, I don't say to myself, I think what too many people say to themselves, I don't want to hear that.
I already know the answer to this question about climate.
That's my tribe.
I'm like, well, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that fan-made climate change isn't happening, and it isn't.
It's going to be catastrophic.
But I desperately want to hear this.
First of all, from my own psyche.
Maybe I'll hear something that will make me not be so shitting in my pants about the environment.
Because he's the guy who wrote the book that I'm referring to right now, which was referred to me by another friend of mine who's one of the most brilliant people I know.
And he had read it, and he's like, I went into this book prepared to call bullshit at every turn.
I just wanted to know, like, how is this popular that people have this opinion?
And he said he went through all the data, and he's very progressive.
He went through all the data, and he was like, you know what?
I think you might be on to something.
So, theoretical physicist, former director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University, and he's a professor at the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering.
That I can talk to somebody in six degrees of knowing somebody who is familiar with this guy and will say, oh yeah, and then tell me something that I'm not hearing now.
I think you can hallucinate because I know people that have hallucinated when they got scared.
When they got scared like, My wife was telling me a story about her dad scaring her when she was little, and he just snuck up on her and played a trick, and she literally saw a monster.
That's how she saw it.
She saw it like a monster, and then it took her a second to realize it was just her dad.
People see things.
That's part of the problem.
And then the other thing is that people's brains produce psychedelic chemicals.
And you don't know why, right?
People's brains produce dimethyltryptamine, they produce all sorts of weird neurotransmitters, and I have to think that they go in and out, just like your testosterone does, just like your adrenaline does, there's probably waves of them.
And I think if a lot goes through, which this is not like fiction, your brain makes potent psychedelics.
So if your brain just lets a little out, And then you're just like, you're tripping balls and you think it's a fucking ghost.
When you, I mean, Carl Sagan said that about marijuana, that he believed that there was ideas that come, I'm paraphrasing in a shitty way, but ideas that come through marijuana that aren't available.
My act, my podcast, everything I write, you know, there's like so many things in life, well, not so many, but the key ones that I just really can't do without marijuana.
Terrence McKenna talked about that and he said that he feels like the way to do marijuana is to take a long stretch off and do as much as you can stand.
He was like, what marijuana really can provide, he goes in terms of like a psychedelic experience, is underestimated by people because they become casual users and they build up a certain tolerance and they get accustomed to getting a little high.
I like to get a little high.
I like like two hits, three hits.
I'm good.
What he was saying is if you really want to know the essence of what marijuana is capable of, take a month off and then get obliterated.
It was kind of like that, I remember when I first did it, you know, when I was 19 years old.
And the first time, you're just like out of your mind.
I remember that whole first year, like I would be home from college and my friend who turned me on to it, he was at a different college and we'd be home on vacation.
He'd come over and, you know, bye mom, we're going out.
And I'd go out to the driveway, he'd pick me up.
I'd get in the passenger seat and we'd be in the driveway for an hour.
Because we smoked one hit and we were just screaming, laughing in the car.
My mother looking at the window like, what are they doing?
They're just laughing their heads off in the driveway.
I mean, I'm not a scientist, Joe, so I can't exactly tell you the exact stuff, but I've read the book on it and...
I think, first of all, just to give your digestive system a rest, I think, does enormous good for you.
I think most of the body's energy is spent digesting food, and especially if you eat shitty food.
I don't, but lots of people do, and that's, I think, where our big health problems come from.
but even regular food, I only eat two meals a day.
But still, most of the energy goes to digesting food.
You give your body that break, and it can work on so many other things that it's been putting off, 'cause I think that's how the body works.
That's certainly classic holistic medicine, that the body heals from the most recent insult, and then if it fixes that, goes back in time.
And so, yeah, about a couple times a year, I will not eat for five days, Minimal, sometimes there's a fasting mimicking diet that's pretty good that I've done.
But I cannot smoke during that week because smoking would make me...
Ravenously hungry and wanting to be social.
So it has to be five days.
And it's like you get through it.
How much weight do you lose?
You lose like probably in the week 10 pounds.
But, you know, you'll put – I mean the last time I went down from like I was 158 and I think I went down to 148 and then stayed at like 150, which was great because that's my perfect weight.
But certainly by 54, I remember mortality is just on your mind in a way that it wasn't on my mind for one second when I was even 40. You just never think of it.
And your body is so much more resilient that you don't have to consider it when you're out drinking or whatever you're doing.
I had no worries.
And that's why younger people don't want to be forced to buy health insurance.
They should because that's the only way that system will work.
And it'll help them later on in life if everyone contributes on that level.
But they don't want to because I remember being that age.
The person on my podcast that dropped today is Bella Thorne.
I had never talked to her.
I certainly was aware of who she was.
And a lot of what we're talking about, I mean, I thought it was pretty funny, but, you know, I'm high when I'm doing it, is anxiety.
I mean, she has a lot of anxiety.
Very typical of her generation.
In a way that my generation just does not.
And a lot of what we were talking about is I'm trying in a kind of fatherly way of saying, you don't need to be this sad about shit.
And have this much anxiety about stuff.
And, of course, if the generation has anxiety to begin with to this degree, when something like a pandemic comes along that is legitimately somewhat anxiety-producing, you're going to have the people who feast on anxiety OD on it.
And that's why...
Who's the dude?
I love him.
David Leonhardt was on Real Time Friday and he's written great articles about this and made the point that younger people who should be way less concerned are actually way more concerned about COVID. People my age should be more worried and they're less worried than people who are 30. That's not a healthy place for society to be.
The only people that seem to have escaped the fear of the disease itself is young kids don't seem to be scared of it, which is good because they get it and it's no big deal.
But the young kids that I see walking around with masks on voluntarily, that disturbs me.
Yes, and to sort of discount all the Things that we will find out in the years to come that were detrimental because of the steps we took to curb COVID. And some things should have been done, of course, and some things I'm very glad we have a vaccine.
I personally didn't think I needed it.
I would have chosen to let my immune system handle it, but okay, I'm glad because this is a country that is not in good health.
And if you're not in good health, you are very vulnerable to this virus.
But you shouldn't penalize people who have chosen a different path in life.
I would always defend those athletes.
Who didn't want it?
The Aaron Rodgers, the Kyrie Irvings, the Djokovics, because what they were saying was, look, I'm a finely tuned athlete with a perfect body.
My body is my life.
Of course I keep it in as good a shape as I can.
Every year I play, I can make another, what do they make, 50 million a year?
Of course I want to play as long as I can.
So I'm super careful about everything I put into my body.
And I could name a thousand other things you haven't cured.
Parkinson's and MS and Lyme disease.
You just don't know very much.
That's not an insult.
You just don't.
If you can't tell me exactly why people get cancer, and mostly you can't—obviously smokers get lung cancer—other than that, it's not obvious who gets it or why.
I don't know what confluence of things that are put in my—there's so many thousand things that could change it.
How much mercury do I have in my system?
How much tuna fish did I eat?
How often do I hold the phone up to my head?
A million things.
How many x-rays have I have?
What are my genetics?
So just don't tell me, well, we are perfectly certain that this vaccine is safe, or we are perfectly certain that these x-rays are a low dose and they won't...
You don't fucking know that!
You don't know what all these different things...
There's like 50,000 chemicals we have in our body that we didn't have 100 years ago.
You don't know what the interchange of all these elements is doing to me.
And me, personally, it might be different than you.
So just don't have that attitude of just getting in you.
I mean, some of them, only like a hundred were like ordered off, but the rest was like, well, they're going to order it off because it's killing people, so let's withdraw it.
So, you know, don't come at me with the science and the experts.
Whose experts?
There are other doctors.
Yes, and by the way, I don't think it should just be MDs who are able to weigh in on this because they don't fucking often know more than somebody else, a holistic doctor or just my trainer I just introduced you to.
Those are more than most doctors I've ever talked to about medicine.
Okay, you know, so but if we just stick to doctors, let's pretend that only MDs know things about medicine.
Even by that standard, there's many dissenting MDs, and many more than you know about because they're intimidated to speak out.
Because if they do, the repercussions can be extremely deleterious.
Yeah, and there was a weird sort of cult-like aspect to it.
You were with us, so you were against us.
Even if you were a reasonable person that just wanted to talk about different kinds of medications, like monoclonal antibodies in particular, that became a thing.
Like, no, that's not available.
But it is available.
What are you saying it's unavailable?
If it's not available, why not get it more available?
Sleep, stress, the three S's, and vitamin D. I don't want to be this conspiracy person.
I'm not.
I think it's important in any discussion, and you got in trouble for not doing this once, just to say the vaccine, even though they were wrong about how it stops you from getting it or giving it, It at least does work as far as stop you from dying.
Where things are weird is that you're not allowed to have that discussion, whether or not it should be for, you know, X age or, you know, someone who's this healthy.
Or, you know, the thing I'm always talking about, people on the internet are like, Bill, why do you hate fat?
I don't hate fat people.
I'm talking about a medical issue here that was the biggest medical issue before COVID, and I'm sorry, still is.
And I'm talking about something that, according to the statistics, I've been trying to get people to understand And again, this is from the CDC. It's like 78% of people who died or were hospitalized were obese.
Okay.
If any other...
If I just said to you, there is a factor.
I'm not going to say which one.
But it is involved in 78% of this.
If you're the media and you're not broadcasting that factor...
Of 78% all the time.
If you're the government and you're not trying to get people to be aware of that factor, that's suspicious and criminal.
It's not the only thing, because there's certain times where people are so indulgent, and if you don't say something to them, they never really understand how you feel.
They can trick themselves.
If you don't come along and go, hey man, you're smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, you fucking idiot.
You can do that to a friend, because it doesn't affect their appearance, right?
But, I mean, there's a direct link to how unhealthy people were to begin with and to how much it cost us.
And literally, I think this is an issue that could bankrupt the country.
I mean, we were talking about health care before COVID as the number one thing that had to be fixed somehow economically because it had become like an unsustainable percentage of the economy.
Was going toward health care.
I mean, this is why they did Obamacare.
People said very often they weren't for Obamacare, but nobody said we can keep going the way we're going.
When you have to pay for stuff, like if you have to pay for insurance, and everybody just assumes that everybody has to pay for insurance, and someone comes along and says, maybe we shouldn't have to pay for that.
There's this thing we have where this is always how it's been.
This is always how it's been.
We had to pay for college.
We had to pay for health care.
We gotta pay.
You should fucking pay.
We gotta pay.
You pay your fucking student loans.
You know what I mean?
It's a weird thing that people do.
Where it's like, okay, we pay for the fire department, right?
We're not saying if you don't pay for the fire department then a fire comes, they don't put your house out, right?
We all agree to that.
It's kind of a socialist idea.
Why can't we apply those things that we agree are fucking real important?
Like having a fire department.
You're telling me that applying those to college or applying those to healthcare are bad?
Like what are we spending our money on?
This is where people like you and me probably agree with a lot of things, but you see there's people that go further and further away from that and look at that as like, that's a Republican idea to think that Right.
The percentage of graft keeps getting higher and higher.
Now, we found out recently that something like, oh, I'm going to get the number wrong, maybe you can look it up on your magic lightbox, but like 20%, I think, of the unemployment checks we passed out during COVID were complete fraud.
Are we really seeing that it, what if we only spent $1.2 billion, or trillion, I'm undercounting it, What if we only spent $1.2 trillion?
What would we be sacrificing?
Because so much of that money is going to consultants and just siphoned off by all the pigs at the trough, all snorting this shit up with their big fucking snout.
Republicans don't deserve to get any pass on this either because they, first of all, are just as responsible for spending money we don't have and not stopping this kind of graft.
And they could give a shit anymore about a balanced budget.
At least they used to pretend.
Now all they care about is owning the libs.
They don't even have any...
They have no issues in their party.
They could give about as much of a shit of a balanced budget as they do for the new season of RuPaul's Drag Race.
They are all about the conspiracy shit, QAnon stuff.
I've never seen a place like that as beautiful because it was so clean.
I mean it was like this time of year, spring, and everywhere the snow melting and there was just little drippings of water coming down everywhere and it was like the purest, most pristine.
Of course there was also like moose walking down the street.
I mean, it's more prevalent than we know, because again, misdiagnosed, and it's a sneaky little fucker that just, I've known people have had it, and the suffering is almost indescribable.
And it moves around in the body.
The symptoms change.
You know, one week you have a burning in your head.
And the next week your legs are sore.
And they don't really know how to attack it.
Of course they're going to throw antibiotics at it like they do everything.
I guess sometimes that works.
Sometimes it doesn't.
I don't know if you're familiar with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.
I think we're going to have him on very shortly to talk about it.
And it's very interesting because he's a very conservative columnist, which is fine.
I'm friendly with him.
Had him on the show a number of times.
But his view on medicine, I think, was much more orthodox until he got this.
And that's why I wanted to have him on, because I think he's preaching from my choir book now, because he's basically saying, the stuff that I looked into that was supposedly the quackery stuff, like, that actually worked better than the 15 doctors I had to go to.
I mean, the whole book is about a multi-year...
Nightmare he had trying to extirpate.
Lyme disease from his body and, of course, because the doctors are clueless.
Now, again, am I saying this is because doctors are deliberately corrupt?
No, I don't think they're making any money on Lyme disease.
But they are locked into their rigid way of thinking, which may be part of the reason why they haven't made much progress.
And again, part of it is just we don't understand that much about the human body.
I think as far as treatments of Lyme disease, one of the more critical aspects is to get treatment early.
People that I know that have kicked it, that got Lyme disease and took the antibiotics, they kicked it and they were okay.
But the guys that I know that didn't take any medication and let it, they didn't know they had it or the doctor didn't know they, you know, the doctor didn't want to believe them and they waited too long, they're the ones who had more problems.
There's a fucking great book called Empire of the Summer Moon.
It's all about Texas and the Comanches in the 1800s.
It's just an incredible group of Native Americans that figured out how to ride horses.
They figured out how to raise horses the best.
They were the best at like horse husbandry and they had like tons of horses and their empire consisted of horses and they would just own the plains for like hundreds of years.
It was an impassable country because they hadn't figured out anything other than muskets and with bows and arrows they were killing everybody.
They used to have natural horses here and they died off somehow.
They don't know.
But they do know they were reintroduced by Europeans.
So Europeans that came over and dealt with people in North America and Mexico and a lot of parts of – a lot of Native Americans, they had never seen anybody on a horse before until the Europeans arrived.
Right.
There's a guy named Dan Flores who wrote a book about how Native Americans were probably on their way to extirpating the buffalo.
Even if the Americans didn't come along and do that horrible market hunting shit, the Native Americans with a horse were so fucking effective that they were just wiping out as many buffalo as they wanted.
They would have been able to do that too because that was not a normal thing for a person to be on a horse until like whenever it was that the first Europeans arrived with them.
What he was saying was that these people hadn't had horses until this point in time.
And the reason why there was this amazing population of buffalo, when they first got here and there was millions and millions of buffalo, His theory is that this was because the Europeans gave diseases to the Native Americans during that same time period.
So during that same time period, 90% of the Native Americans get wiped out by smallpox and all these crazy diseases.
And he said if you had Native Americans who were effective hunters on horses even without the horrible market hunting that killed them really quickly.
He's like over time you probably would have killed At least a measurable amount of the buffalo, similar to what we did, but it would just take a lot longer.
That was his theory.
But it was mostly about how the Native Americans had died off from smallpox, and how crazy it was, and that this led to this increase in this massive herd of buffalo.
His theory was that that's not normal, to have this many, and I'm definitely fucking this up and paraphrasing it, but it's a really good, it's, what is it like, buffalo diplomacy, buffalo, it's Dan Flores.
Yeah, the Mayans, they also believe were wiped out by disease because Cabeza de Vaca talked about encountering them.
They talked about the historical stories that people would tell about running into these people with these golden helmets and It was all like this incredible civilization that existed.
And the theory is that when people came back and it was all completely abandoned, there was no real theory until they started concentrating on the viruses and the different bugs that killed the Native Americans.
Well, of course, they probably killed the Mayans, too.
They probably killed people every time they came through.
I'm not sure about the history of the movie, but the movie itself was about British explorers that make their way through the Amazon because there's supposed to be this lost city of golden statues and this incredible wealth and sophistication that exists in the Amazon.
Well, everybody thought it was nonsense.
They all thought it was just crazy myth and bullshit, but it's all just jungle.
You could never have a city there.
And then they realized the jungle itself is man-made.
A big part of the Amazon jungle itself was from human cultivation of very specific plants.
One was like, what is the ice cream bean tree and a few other ones?
They're like...
Plants that people planted back then, thousand, two thousand, ten thousand years ago.
The only reason why it happened is because European settlers came through and killed everybody.
Everybody died from diseases.
So there's these cities that could have held a fucking million people, and they're finding them through Lidar.
So they're flying over this area of the jungle with this light-penetrating laser shit, and they're seeing these grids and patterns and city streets, and it's all engulfed in the forest.
The jungle just overwhelmed everything.
But it was because the Europeans came through and gave everybody's fucking smallpox.
That's a big part of the story of the Comanche is how they would torture and mock.
They were fucking horrible.
While a guy was alive, they would cut his arms and legs off and then throw him on a bonfire so he would wiggle to death while burning alive with his arms and his legs just freshly cut off.
I think they were fucking each other in the ranks, if I recall my Greek history.
But that was to create a camaraderie in the armed services.
I mean, I think they may have used, I mean, you can check me on your Mr. Google box, but I think that Spartans used homosexuality as a camaraderie-building tool.
And I love such a funny comment that his ex-wife said when they asked her about it because he had said something like, this is a symbol of renewal, the phoenix rising from the ashes.
And Jennifer Garner said, I think in this analogy, I'm the ashes.
Certainly makes you stupider because all the time people used to have to read a book at the end of the day, that went up in smoke because they're just scrolling through their phone and playing stupid games and looking at pictures and Instagram.
It's the ultimate time suck, the way it sucks time all the time you would have to actually learn something.
I feel like that was the sea change in this century was when a whole generation was raised on the phone and social media.
I don't know if we're going to be able to reverse that or how we can ever really measure the damage it did.
Well, it stopped all social interaction in person that would ordinarily be something that, like, if you're having a conversation with a person, it's very rare that you're going to say something really rude to them in person.
And also, people, that younger generation, that Gen Z generation, finds it almost aggressive, too aggressive to be approached in person.
You have to do it over social media.
They feel safer that way, where if some guy comes up to you right across the room, "Hi, I'm Brad Hanson and I saw you from across the room." Like that's a little too like, "Ooh, you should give me a trigger warning that you're actually going to approach me in person, be a normal person and text me first so I know it's coming." You know, what a generation of, you know, frail people.
No, but it's impossible to find on anything that's corporate sponsored.
It's so hard.
Like, when you watch any kind of television show where they're giving opinions and they're giving it in this environment where there's a giant group of people behind the scenes and executives and producers, it's very hard to just talk shit.
Like, look what happened to Whoopi.
All she did was have an opinion on the Holocaust where white people killing white people.
And maybe she phrased it in a way that wasn't the best.
Or maybe if you gave her a chance to illuminate it better upon further consideration, she would have had another.
But you're thinking in real time.
So that one thing that she said where you could say, oh, I could see where other people could see it wrong or what I was saying was wrong or insensitive or whatever it was.
Well, I mean, first of all, like we were saying before about the difference between when I started when you couldn't be political or they didn't want you to.
And I was like, let's give it a shot.
Let's see if even if people disagree with me, they still might watch it.
Versus now, where you better toe the line.
And so the politics comes first and the comedy comes second, which is really not the way it should be.
And, you know, when you see, like, if there's somebody who announces they're gay on TV, which is great.
I'm so glad that people can do that.
I applaud with you.
And then they're like, well, that was very brave.
It's brave when people boo at you.
When you announce something and everyone erupts in applause, that's not brave, right?
I mean, I'm glad it can happen in America.
I'm glad there's this level of acceptance.
But, I mean, the audience acts like it's...
It's like, great, okay, you're gay.
It's fantastic.
I'm happy for you.
But they act like it's some sort of, like, achievement.
And I guess it can be an achievement to come out.
But again, to do something in front of an audience that is adoring you for it, good.
I'm glad it's happening.
But it's just like the audience feels like, I'm such a good person because I'm applauding a person who announced they're gay.
That makes me a good person.
And there's that feeling, I feel like, in that kind of audience that they're playing to that makes it hard to do comedy because that's a very politically correct mindset.
I mean, Stalin had a famous slogan, no person, no problem, which Saddam Hussein thought was great and adopted it in his country.
Like, if there's a problem with this person and he disappears, Putin loves to push people out windows and poison them.
No person, no problem.
I mean, it is the easiest way to solve a problem.
It's not the right way.
I don't care who knows it.
I don't think that's the right way to do it.
But yes, I mean, stopping people from talking.
Now, of course, in this country now, we have lots of ways to stop people from talking short of killing them and pushing them out of windows and stuff.
But, I mean, a lot of people would say I would be one of them that, you know, cancel culture and intimidating people and stamping out thought that isn't...
Our friend Elon Musk getting into Twitter, I think, is about that.
It's about somebody saying, you know, it wasn't cool that they didn't allow the lab leak theory to be talked about.
And that is certainly something that was open to question.
I mean, it was like, to me, the very kind of issue that if Twitter was really doing the job it should, would be a healthy forum for people to go back and forth and say, well, here's why I think COVID probably came from bats, because A, B, and C. And then, well, but, you know, there was this lab in Wuhan that was studying coronaviruses, and somebody could have walked out with it on their shoe because Can't we even look into that?
Yeah, I mean, if it was the other way, like if it purely, absolutely came, if all the evidence was pointing that it came from an animal, and then someone was just coming up with this idea that it came from a lab, you'd go, what the fuck are you talking about?
You'd want to go look at that.
Like, what are you talking about?
Tell me what you're saying.
Show me this nonsense.
But because it's the other way.
It's like, what are you talking about?
It came from a lab?
No, it's everyone saying it came from a lab now.
A lot of people are saying it came from a lab.
Maybe it came from a lab.
I'm not saying they're right, but I'm saying that if you don't talk about it, something crazy is going on.
Because either you want to look at things for what they really are, Or you have this ideological box that your ideas have to live in.
And if you say it came from a lab, you're a Trump supporter.
I mean, this one got somehow balled up with anti-Asian racism.
Yeah.
Now, Trump, of course, always never finds any issue that he can't make worse.
I mean, he saw an opportunity here, as he usually does, to cater, I think, and pander to his base, some of whom definitely are racist and some of whom definitely like it when he does things like that.
But...
I don't have any objection to calling it the Wuhan virus because every virus has been named after the place it came from.
I mean, you can't almost not name a virus that is not named after where it came from.
But I think all of this, whether it's racism or homophobia or any real fear of people getting latched into a toxic mindset, the reason why they have it is because they're recognizing that everything does kind of do this.
It swings back and forth.
And it's getting better, but it doesn't get better in a clean delineation.
It's not like all of a sudden everybody's good.
It's like they're bad and they're good and they're better.
I'd be worried about it if I were you, because you're probably in locker rooms with other weightlifters, and isn't that where you get it, taking showers with other men?
I mean, they've been talking about that forever, and I'm sure they're working on it.
I'm sure people way smarter than us have devoted their lives, and I appreciate that.
But the bottom line is, we're still not there.
I mean, the bottom line is, If you get a cancer diagnosis, I mean, it's not an immediate death sentence, depending on where and what it is, and a lot of other different factors, but it's not good news.
And it's not, I mean, it's not something that they can just say to you, oh, we know exactly why you got it, and we know exactly what to do to take it out completely.
That world we don't exist in yet.
And until we do...
Don't look at me with the just do what we say look.
People live to 100. It's actually more common than ever.
Some people would say it's actually the normal human lifespan because there are those blue zones in the world where there are sections of the world where people normally, I mean routinely, the whole community, that's about the average lifespan.
We probably live less because we have bad habits.
But if you live a healthy life, you probably can live to 100. So my thing is, okay, they got like 34 years to figure out mortality.
That's a long time.
Ray Kurzweil says the solidarity begins in like six years from now, 2028. He said when man and machine become fully integrated with each other, I think that's part of the solution.
You know, as long as they can keep your brain and your dick alive, I'm good.
The rest of it can all be replaced.
They can fucking tattoo it if they want.
I just want those parts that are wearing out, and the internal organs, of course, also.
I mean, you know.
They must be, you know, have a lot of mileage on them.
And of course, we all wonder if what we did as foolish youths is how much that's affecting us now.
I smoked for 20 years.
I mean, I'm sorry I did.
It was stupid.
I quit at 40. But is that going to come back and haunt me?
I mean, I've had hippies try to tell me it's actually beneficial, that, oh, it's, you know, coning your lungs with the turpentines or terrapins or whatever.
I mean, when you're into a certain drug, very often so much of your life revolves around with getting it, preparing it, relighting it, redoing it, re-something.
I must say, again, I'm kind of like patting myself on the back for my pot use in life.
But I used pot wisely.
Like, I wouldn't be where I am today.
I wouldn't be talking to Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan Experience if it wasn't for marijuana.
I'd be probably selling shoes in New Jersey or something.
You know, I mean, I always, I try to get something out of it every time.
I smoke.
I don't just smoke and zone out and watch a movie.
I smoke and write something.
To me, it's a very productive experience.
So if it has taken away some of my health, I'm willing to accept that trade-off.
Whereas cigarettes did nothing but make me unhealthy.
They did nothing that made me better, smarter, Cooler, like you think you are when you're 20 and you first light a cigarette.
You think, oh, that's cool, and it's not.
It's just stupid.
And, of course, it's not easy to start a cigarette habit.