Neal Brennan and Joe Rogan explore psychedelics’ cult-like parallels, comparing charismatic figures to Netflix’s divisive "woke" content—like Cuties—and its stock fallout. Brennan shares stand-up struggles, including a Hawaii trip derailed by social media backlash, while Rogan contrasts his COVID-era pause with physical exhaustion resetting perspective. They debate misinformation, from Amazon’s anti-Semitic Hebrews to Negroes to Twitter’s fake accounts (80% suspected) and suppressed Hunter Biden laptop stories, critiquing both government overreach and corporate bias. Brennan’s Netflix special blends comedy with existential themes, while Rogan praises his balanced critique of left-right ideologies, concluding that trusted voices and discomfort tolerance—whether physical or intellectual—are key to navigating modern chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
that's not that's not physical it's like can you handle being in a incredibly abstract place and your brain doing shit it's never done before Yeah, that seems to be what happens if people can't handle it, is just the resistance of it.
It's just, it all, the same shit happens, it doesn't matter where.
I did a joke one time that every cult, at some point, the leader of every religious cult says, hey, God spoke to me and he says, I gotta fuck all your wives.
Without fail.
Every single, across the board.
All of them.
Yep, sorry guys.
I got that call.
Yeah, send your wife in.
I'm gonna fuck her now.
God decided, now's the time.
This one was different because it's a female leader.
And it was based on orgasms, but this one was like, you gotta fuck him if you're having a hard time.
It was like the opposite of HR, where it was, you know, if you have a problem with him, you gotta fuck him.
When he bought television time, like primetime television time, he was like, I'll just buy it at home an hour and gave the networks money so that he could run his speech and talk about how you're getting fucked by the IRS. People at home were like, what the fuck?
It literally was like one of the very first internet speeches.
He made himself go viral and he appealed to people that were not There's like a whole part of the country that's not spoken to by, I mean, mass media.
You can call it liberal media.
I don't even think, I think there's like a level that they just, people just don't want to talk to them.
It's like people that aren't especially rich or sophisticated or any of the stuff that people think is great and they want to, that advertisers want to appeal to.
How much did that one decision that that one manager make cost Starbucks by changing their policy and allowing homeless people to just linger around and smell like shit?
I read a thing last night that there's, it's like similar but different, where there's so many people quit working at hospitals that there's now incredibly long waits at hospitals, like now, and COVID's like low.
If you were the king of the earth, or let's say king of America, Which some would say you are.
If you're the king of America, how would you have handled COVID from February 2020?
Like, what would you have done?
Because I feel like we all have, like, I don't like that, I don't like that, I don't like that.
I don't know what the better solution would have been.
Especially when you consider stuff like hospitals and quitting and deaths and triage, like, wherein at one point Wuhan was gonna, they built that hospital in a week, which America just can't do, shit like that.
Then you have these people that maybe they're not obese, but they have terrible blood pressure and they eat terrible food, their immune system's shot, you know.
But the thing about COVID in that regard is that there's really no solution that made any sense.
When there was no vaccine and the medications were confusing, it was hard to know what was real and what wasn't, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and what about monoclonal antibodies and all these different things.
It's very dangerous whenever you have a new disease because you do have people trying these off-label medications, and some of them work and some of them don't, and then you have a lot of pressure from the companies that are producing vaccines because they want a binary solution because that's where all the cash is.
And then you have the emergency use exemption, which the only way you get that emergency use exemption is if there is no treatment that's available that works.
So if you are the person that's in charge and you stand to make untold billions of dollars from the vaccine, which they did, they suppress any information.
You just can't shut the whole country down and expect that everything's going to be fine when you start it back up again.
Disastrous results.
And whenever the economy crashes like it did with that, you have all these other unforeseen side effects of that.
And, you know, a big one is people's mental health and anxiety and, like, how is that going to affect the rest of their life?
When someone works for 20, 30 years on a business and you have a business and it's up and running and it's getting by and you're making a profit and then all of a sudden the government comes along and says, you have to shut this business down.
And maybe you've already had COVID and maybe you were one of the lucky ones where it wasn't that big of a deal and you got over it and you're like, okay, I got antibodies now, I'm not worried.
You could tell people that these are the best suggestions in terms of what we should do to preserve health, but the reality of respiratory viruses is you cannot contain them.
They've never been contained.
No one has ever successfully contained a respiratory virus.
If people are allowed to walk, and they're allowed to talk, and they're allowed to eat, they're gonna fuckin' spread it.
No matter what draconian rules they put down in Australia or in China, it fuckin' spreads.
It burns through the people, and then, and a lot of...
Virologists and people that are experts in respiratory diseases were saying this at the very beginning of the pandemic.
They were saying, listen, this has got to burn through the population, and most people didn't want to accept that.
They were like, no, there's got to be a better way.
No, there's no better way.
When you have a virus that spreads through people breathing on each other, it just burns through people.
You know, if you have the option To be on a ranch, if you've got a ranch in Texas and you got all your food out there and water and you can just fucking stay by yourself for two years, yeah, you'll be okay.
Yeah, I just didn't, it was, I, I, not like I felt bad for the, I just don't know what, I don't know who did it well.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, I don't know what country did it well.
Whenever I go Sweden and then you, all these things when you do, when you start clicking links, you're like, ah, it seems inconclusive or contradictory or, it always struck me as just we don't have the infrastructure for that many sick people.
Well, imagine if you're a person who's dedicated yourself to healthcare work, and then they come along and say, you have to get vaccinated or you're getting fired.
If you're fired because you're not willing to get vaccinated, why would you want to come back to that job if you could do something else?
If you could find another way to make a living, you'd be like, this is a thankless, shitty place to work and they ultimately don't give a fuck about you.
I have a friend who's a nurse and she was telling me how there's a weird coldness that some people in the medical profession get because they're just accustomed to people dying.
Do you find when you're doing a broadcast and they go, we're going live, three, two, one, are you like, do you tighten up even a little bit or are you just aware?
I went several months, March, April, May, June, July, probably five months, four or five months, and we did one weekend at the Houston Improv, but then I got really high, and I thought, oh my god, what if I get COVID and give it to everybody and a bunch of people die?
Like, fuck.
So I stopped doing comedy.
Because I was like, okay, I'm just going to go to places where you can do comedy.
But that was like, no vaccine then.
No real treatments.
They didn't really understand what to do if you caught it.
And so it was kind of touch and go.
I was like, maybe it's wise to not do this and wait until it actually comes.
Because it was only like...
Texas, and there's a few other states, Florida, there's a few places where you can go.
And then I did it again in November.
So it was July, and then I didn't do any stand-up again until like, I guess, no, it was actually October.
Then Dave and I started doing those shows at Stubbs.
He's gonna retire then he got off stage and he just grabbed me He's like whatever the fuck we have to do.
We're gonna keep doing this.
Yeah, I It was amazing.
He was pulsating with electricity.
So from then on, we've been doing shows.
But the first ones back, it was weird.
I had to listen to recordings all day, and I went over my notes, and I had to think about transitions.
Fortunately, I was in a similar boat to you where I was kind of ready to film a special right when everything shut down.
So I had a lot of material that was pretty tight.
It wasn't like it was all new stuff.
Like, if I had to just do, like, if I already released a special, and then COVID came along, and then I hadn't done stand-up in six months, and then I'm doing, like, new stuff, oh, I'd be fucked.
In fact, no, you go out there called, which is interesting, because your first joke's either going to work or it isn't.
Sometimes they're primed.
I would say the first joke worked 80% of the time.
But sometimes you'd be like, okay, like you'd throw a punch and they just stand there and you're like, alright.
But there's some, you know, Cosby doesn't have an opener.
Right.
There's a way to do it where there's something appealing about it where if you don't have an opener, you just go like, yeah, the first two minutes will be a little bumpy, but whatever.
I did like eight minutes, and then just like, hey, just touching base, and then I'm going to come out, and then it's actually better than having like, when Neil comes out, I need you guys to roar!
It's a I was asking about stress because there was a point where the tape day I'm, you know, very involved in the production just because I can direct and I can do a bunch of stuff and I've done like my buddy Derek DelGaudio who's fucking excellent and has a show called In and of Itself on Hulu that's a magic show.
I don't even like to call it a magic show.
One of the best taped live shows you'll ever see.
What?
In and of Itself on Hulu.
It's fucking excellent But He's directing, he's only directed his special, so he's like, it's a lot of moving parts.
Like, they didn't have a lav mic for me, they had a handheld, and I'm like, I'm wearing a lav, and it's four.
And the audience is getting there, we gotta tape at 5.30.
And I'm like, the amount of just shit where you're like, I'm gonna fucking kill somebody.
I'm gonna fucking kill somebody.
I swear to God.
I had a funny observation, which is when you're, you know, when everybody gets the credit at the end, roll credits, if you get to give them all a grade.
Yeah, but I think everybody got that from Comedy Central specials.
Like, you had to be like Kevin Hart.
Like, there's only a few guys who did Netflix, or excuse me, Comedy Central specials, and just took off after 2000. You know, it was like, later, like, when you get to 2012, 2014, now you're dealing with streaming services, you're dealing with other things, and you just don't have as many people watching.
And it's also...
You've got commercials, which is the death of comedy.
I've heard that Shonda Rhimes and some of the people that have shows on there are a little bit pissed about It's like part of the reason they went to Netflix is because they wanted the shit to play the way they wanted to play.
But it was also – there was a very big public response to the woke bullshit that they were pushing and the fact that they would entertain that that special was in any way transphobic to the point where they had – they had apologized to people for this – what was essentially like a love letter to a dead friend of his.
To pretend that it was transphobic was fucking nonsense and a lot of people were upset about it I think it had and then Elon Musk talked about how so much of it was unwatchable Elon Musk talked about how it was unwatchable, the woke bullshit that's on there There was a narrative and that was exactly the time where it crashed Exactly the time where the stock crashed There was, unquestionably, there's a narrative that Netflix was fucking up.
And then there was Cuties, that fucked up show that they did about little kids twerking and shit.
Yeah, that's the, you know, when somebody dies, you just go, ah, it's fentanyl.
Like, now, if it's not Prince, or I'm sure the Aaron Carter kid who died recently, it'll be, if it's not directly fentanyl, it'll be drug use, long-term, you know.
I'm gonna stop I'm have to take a break and I have to get Jodie Foster went to Yale I think the girl from Harry Potter went to school if you make it concerted effort to do something else to do something else and you have and this is a big one you have to hope your parents didn't fuck you Monetarily.
But that's one of those things you just gotta fucking hope, dude.
You gotta hope.
Which you're...
You don't...
You handle your...
You seem to have not a lot of...
Outside, people, or you hide it well.
Meaning you don't seem like you don't have a crazy family, you don't have a crazy, like, there's not a lot of people asking you for handouts that I'm aware of, obviously.
I'm sure you get plenty of like, hey, do you think I could...
Like I did a thing with that guy Giannis Antetokounmpo, the basketball player, and he's Greek and like him and his brothers are all in the NBA. Or like they all are pro basketball players and it's like and I was talking I was like you're very lucky that you're all paid You're all like he doesn't have to worry about You know his brother it's like he doesn't have to worry about people That's
a real drag that family stuff because it's a real drag because it's it can you feel Bad.
You feel bad if you don't give it to them, and you feel bad if you do give it to them.
There's always someone who wants something from you, and they're angling towards that, and maybe they're not doing it today, but maybe they're doing it and setting you up for something they want to do in the future, and you sense it, and you recognize that the conversation is very slanted.
It's not very human and you're never gonna have like real conversations with those people because they're not if you they think you're being a cunt they're never gonna tell you if they want something from them.
So like you know if you're one of those guys that has like a bunch of sycophants that travel with you everywhere you go and they're always kissing your ass like you can get real delusional really quickly.
That's why a lot of these celebrities that start these things, they can't keep up.
They bail.
You know, like the Meghan Markle's and fucking, I guess she's doing it now, but Prince Harry was doing one for a while and Bruce Springsteen and Obama were doing one for a while.
The best representation of what you would want if you want the rest of the world to see what is an excellent American like.
But can't be himself.
But meanwhile has all the money in the world and can't be himself.
How wild is that?
Can't just fuck around.
I mean, if Obama just fucked around, if Obama did a podcast and he had sunglasses on like Tim Dillon, and he's just sitting back and he sparked up a joy.
Let me tell you what I think about this electoral college bullshit.
I mean, it's like you can kind of talk about whatever you want and that's part of your business model.
If you're a person who is a former president of the United States, and you want to talk about getting your balls cradled, like, I just like the gentle cradling of the balls, just a gentle tickling, you know, no, no, no, no, no, you can't tell people that.
It depends on what the Controversy is, but generally I don't read anything About me.
I don't even now like it like if I see some article with some bullshit headline You know, I don't read it.
I'm not reading things about I'm not interested in people's opinions of me It's like you can't take in all that that is not good for you And that's like a learning process took a while to figure that out And if you stay offline and just communicate with people that you know and you meet in normal, real life, the world's fine.
The world's normal.
The problem that happens with people when they get locked up in a controversy is that they start Dwelling on all these different opinions on them and they start taking it in and considering it and wanting to argue it.
And I liked it, and I was telling somebody last night, I was like, you know, I really liked it, and then I was like, but this isn't, that's not me.
And I'm like, oh, it is, yeah, it is.
It is me.
I like the juice.
How do I... You know, I obviously, like, took it off my phone again.
Whatever, whatever.
Of course.
Obviously goes without saying took it off my phone again What?
But and then I think about the the III could feel the like Like patch like being a cunt coming up in me.
Just being like just being like well, yeah, I deserve it Just like and I'm and I'm I'm like a sore winner where I'm like you motherfuckers Like, I'm telling people off in my head, and just like, Mike Nichols, the director who was a comic, and he was Nichols and May, he said, being a performer, he transitioned to being just a director, and he said, being a performer brought out the baby in him.
Where he'd say he would be, like, he'd notice who had the bigger dressing room.
And I, obviously, it was 12 hours of being, I called myself a despot in exile, where I was, I'm like, in exile, and then I get, like, the country welcoming me back, and I'm like, there's gonna be some changes around here in 12 hours!
I became a fucking monster and I thought about you and I thought about Dave and I thought about guys who, Chris, just people that are, it's Adam, like, big attention, a lot of positive attention pointed at you and you must at a certain point go, I have to make a very firm decision about this.
But the idea that you should participate in their opinion when you don't even know these people, and you should take this in, and then some people treat it like gospel.
Like, some people's confidence has been destroyed by someone telling them they suck.
I mean, you really can fuck with some people's heads.
Yeah, it's like I did a, I wrote a joke with Blake Griffin, the basketball player, one time where it was like, they're asking guys, they're interviewing guys after they've just, they're trying not to, they're trying to get oxygen to their brain.
Where you're fucking exhausted and you want to just breathe and get your body back to like a regular, and you still have all that like exercise drain slash tingle.
There's the physical thing where you're wringing out the stress, which I think is very real.
It makes you feel better and it's easier to get by.
But then there's also the psychological thing.
Because to work out really hard is very difficult to do.
And you think things are difficult until you compare them to things that are very difficult.
Like very difficult things.
Like if you have – say if you're going on a hike in the mountains and you're going to backpack in and camp out and it's – 14 miles in, you have a 70-pound backpack because you have all your food, you have your bedding, you have a tent, you have all this shit on your back, you and your friends, and you're walking 13, 14 miles in.
That's fucking hard.
When you're 9,000 feet above sea level, you're like...
That's real hard.
It's not comments on fucking Twitter.
That's not really hard.
That is easy to ignore.
It's easy.
You have the option to ignore it and life goes on.
Yeah, you're getting like mental, like if you have, if you're doing like endurance work on a bike, like doing sprints on one of those airdyne machines, you are, you are not capable of thinking of anything else.
You're barely surviving those workouts.
You're like, fuck!
There's these things called Tabata sprints.
It's a great protocol for developing endurance.
And you do a 20-second sprint followed by 10 seconds of rest.
It's the shortest 10 seconds you'll ever experience in your life.
Because then right after that, it's another 20 seconds.
It was They'd never experienced anything like that before so it was interesting to see how they would handle it.
They handled it really well and you know again like when I made that video or the big one was like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and When I made that video, one of the things I really wanted to get out there was a lot of the things they were saying were misinformation.
That's a shit word.
It's a shit term.
We're talking about things that are proven to be true now.
But if you feel like you didn't express yourself correctly, or if you feel like there's something more to say about it, definitely do that, too.
But to counter all the different points of criticism, and also, that's a game dummies play.
There's a dummy game, and that dummy game is attack you so that you have to respond back to them.
It's like...
You're so clever.
It's trolling.
And you only do it when you don't have other things to contribute.
When people aren't really interested in your personality or your perspectives or the way you word things or talk about things, then you've got to just go start talking shit about people and starting shit with people and hope they respond.
And there's like a whole ecosystem of people talking shit to each other and responding and then becoming friends.
When you get stuck in a relationship where the other person likes to just berate you and badger you and insult you, which can happen male or female, right?
People that look at someone who's got money and you act like a predator and you get close to them and you pretend you like them and you date them and you fuck them.
It's like a very high level of prostitution that people engage in.
You know what's weird is that gold digging is totally legal, but there's no courses on it.
Like, you would think that, like, it's literally a form of business.
Like, if you really thought about it, there's certain businesses you go into where you're just going in to make money.
If you're selling, like, waste baskets, like, are you fucking passionate about waste baskets?
Are you just trying to make some money?
You're just trying to make money.
Well, there's ways that people teach people how to do all sorts of jobs, but there's no courses on gold digging.
Like, if you could talk a girl through, like, real psychological manipulation, getting close to, like, decrepit old men with shit piles of money, you could make a lot of money.
You think about every client, if you're a real estate agent, every client that you become friends with, and maybe they're going to buy a house in five years, maybe they're going to sell this house, maybe you make money on both those houses.
Well, whenever you're experiencing life from the moment a child is born to them having conversations with you, it's weird.
It's very weird.
It's like you remember when there's no baby, and then there's a baby, and then all of a sudden they're talking.
It's like you're keeping up with their development, but you're not really developing that much.
And you're just watching these creatures.
I mean, you are, but not like they are.
Like, they're learning how to talk and walk, and they're learning games, and they're playing sports, and they're doing different things.
They're learning musical instruments and stuff, and you're like, whoa!
You're watching these little sponges of information evolve and grow before you, and then the next thing you know, like, they're teenagers.
And that experience, like, if you're not there, And see that experience, like watching a human being go from being a baby to being a young teenager, I don't think you're ever going to appreciate it.
We like to think of people as static things.
It's like a weird thing we do.
Where if I know you and you're 43 years old, I say, oh, Neil's always been 43. This is 43-year-old Neil.
But I didn't know you when you were three days old.
I didn't see this arc that you went through to get to where you are.
So I think because of that and because we're so egocentric and we're worried about ourselves right now, We often see people like, this is how you've always been.
This is who you always are.
This is how you are with everybody.
The way you are with me is how you are with everybody.
And I don't think we...
I don't really appreciate the arc of development that human beings go through unless you're there for it.
Unless maybe you have a younger brother or sister and you get to see them grow up in front of your eyes when you're already...
But I think that that does aid in people's decision making.
Like if you're a sister and you're the oldest sister and you have to babysit the younger one and you really like it and you like taking care of kids, well that's a good sign.
Maybe you should have kids.
But when you're watching your own kids grow and develop, it's like very eye-opening.
It just makes you really take into account All the various factors that are involved in making a human being and developing a well-rounded, healthy human being.
Well, I think you want your children to be able to make decisions for themselves, but it's like how many and how far?
Like, at what point do you feel like, you know, you need to impose some guidance or some discipline if they do something fucked up, like if they break into your liquor cabinet and steal all your booze and their 13-year-old buddies are blacked out on the floor, like, hey, we got a problem here.
You've got to communicate with them, but their kids are going to do kid stuff.
They do the same stuff that we did when we were kids.
We check your father's drawer for joints.
You steal Playboys.
You know, you do, it's normal stuff.
Kids are these little human beings that are growing and developing.
And I think one of the most important things is having conversations with them like they're regular people.
That's not hard to do.
Like, you just talk to them like they're a regular person, and instead of trying to talk to them like a little kid, I mean, I'm very loving, but I'll oftentimes have conversations with them.
I'll try to explain things, like the way I can explain to an adult, and I try to get them to explain things to me.
I've been doing that as if it's like all the things we sexualize, and I'm just in terms of women, and then I go like, she doesn't walk that way because she wants her ass to shake.
When she was two, she just started walking that way.
I mean, you got to think of having artists boycott it.
And, you know, being able to explain, like, what do you mean by misinformation?
Because I know people say things like that.
And they say things like misinformation.
But how much do you actually know about the subject?
And that's why I wanted to say in that video, this is what I actually know about the subject.
We're not talking about quacks.
We're talking about one of the guys who has nine patents on the invention of the mRNA vaccines.
These aren't nutty people.
They're like the leaders of their field.
Peter McCullough is the most published doctor in history in his field.
These are like very prominent physicians and doctors.
And so saying they're misinformation, you're buying into the bullshit.
And you're upset because you're old and vulnerable.
I get it.
And you don't want anybody denying science and spreading a virus.
I get it.
I get where you're coming from.
But what they're telling you is not true.
And what they're telling you about this being misinformation, if you have someone on who wants to go into in-depth discussion about whether or not this is a gain-of-function research lab virus that got accidentally released onto the world, there's a lot of evidence points to that.
But that shit would get you removed from YouTube just a year and a half ago.
They would pull you from online.
You wouldn't be able to say that.
But that's pretty much accepted fact.
There's like a 90-something percent certainty.
I think the last time they polled, is there a poll?
Let's find out if this is true, because I think I've read this on Reddit.
What percentage of people believe the lab leak hypothesis is the origin of COVID? Oh, I'm interested in that.
Is there, in terms of information, misinformation, AI, deepfakes, that whole field, And even what Elon Musk running Twitter now, right?
Where do you fall on?
Because it's one of these things, like, I believe in...
There's got to be some sort of...
For lack of a better term, board, jury, some system in place for what is true and what is not true.
And when I talk these things out to people, I always end up in like, we all agree that there needs to be some board, we can't agree on who should be on the board.
They're gonna come out with that Neuralink thing, and along with it, as it improves, and there's a bunch of different human neural interface computer things they're working on, different companies they're working on.
I think it's gonna be one of those things where the benefit of having it is gonna be so huge, and it's gonna really fuck with this whole haves and have-nots thing.
Because the people that get access to it quicker in the beginning, if it really does increase— What do you see this machine doing?
The way Elon describes it is increasing the bandwidth in which you can access information.
And he said, you're literally going to be able to talk without words.
What this is going to do is turn you into a new thing.
If you can get something that actually increases your intelligence, increases your capacity to think, to calculate, to access information, that it's all in your mind anytime you want it, and through whatever kind of interface they develop, if that becomes real, you'll have such a massive advantage in business and all these different things that require calculations and Well, that's like the AI thing.
Like it's going to get to the point where there's, if there's an, that art thing, the one that won the competition, it's a fucking really nice painting or whatever the fuck you call it.
Put all the information of human history into an AI. All human psychology, outcomes, and it would be the competition of, well, what, are we doing Howard Zinn's History of America?
Are we doing the textbook's History of America?
Are we doing critical race theory?
Are we doing whatever?
All of the, that's where the fight would be.
But that, to me, is getting to the point of, like, There's a lot of fucking human error, and it's a lot of dumb, he's tall shit that could be prevented by some form of...
I mean, I guess it's artificial, but I don't know.
No one was ever saying NATO was going to invade Russia.
What they were saying was that by them moving their missiles closer to Russia, it made an initial first attack much more convenient, and it also violated the treaty that they signed.
What was it?
There was a...
What was the agreement that they had?
It was like there was an agreement somewhere around, I want to say 94 or something like that, where they discussed making sure that Well, what's funny is the counter is...
And then there's a super, it's like, it's a bit like self-driving where it's like, self-driving, I don't believe it will happen because self-driving algorithms will have to decide, run over the old person or the baby?
What a hair suit that is to put on apparently like a lot of people have left but more people have come on and Yeah, I don't know what their expectation is.
Well, I don't know what their expectation is either.
But what he wanted to do was have a place where people could actually debate things and talk about things and not worry about being censored just because you have a different political philosophy.
You have different perspectives on worldviews and events and things.
And I think that's valid.
But whether or not you can do that at scale and not have any content moderation at all, what would the content moderation be like?
Would it be like exactly what Twitter had in place?
Because you use AI for a lot of that stuff.
They flag words and things like that.
Or do you do it in a different way?
Are you more lenient?
And if you are more lenient, what are the consequences of that?
And then what are the consequences of the advertisers?
What if the advertisers decide they don't want to use you anymore because they're not confident of their products being advertised on a website where people don't have restrictions on what they can say?
Well, it's also, it's like, you know, we're talking about the negativity of reading comments, and even the positive comments are probably not good for you.
I think that applies to everybody.
And I think it applies to everyone with 149 million Twitter followers.
You're interacting with too many minds.
As smart as he is, and he's probably the smartest man alive, I don't know if anyone has the capacity to be normal while interacting with that many people.
Online and like reading tweets and responding to tweets and and take I just I think he lives in an extreme world meaning wealth Input yeah, he's got a probably not even probably he's got an extreme brain.
He's got an extremely powerful brain.
Yeah, he's got extremely powerful influence.
He's just got it's at all extremes and You know, he likes the juice.
That same personality that makes music to just powerful, bang, bang, bang, that coming out with just words, it's like sometimes the wrong words come out and then you have to defend those wrong words.
It's like how much reading and thinking are you doing on these subjects and how much you're just used to espousing your opinions on things with full confidence all the time.
In some ways, I think, with Kyrie Irving and Kanye, I told somebody it's like algorithmic personality disorder, where you start off a little, and then you go, right, eh, further right, further right, further right, because you watch.
Amazon said the film did undergo review before becoming available online, though it declined to provide details of the review and how it concluded that the film did not violate the prohibition on hate speech.
Mr. Irving tweeted a link to Amazon for a documentary called Hebrews to Negroes.
Hebrews to Negroes wake up black America, which includes extensive anti-Semitism, such as claims that Jews control the media and that millions of Jews did not die during the Holocaust.
Yeah, but I think guys like that go, it's not my place to know.
It's like...
It's too easy.
The information is too easy to attain now.
You used to, in the 90s, you had to go to a store.
You gotta go to a library.
I don't even think it was a library.
It was more like an independent bookstore, like a weird kind of hippie, and they'd have a UFO book, and they'd have a DMT book, and they'd have a Bigfoot book, and it's basically your podcast.
Do you think we just have to be open, like something of a free-for-all?
Whether that's misinformation...
Holocaust denial, right?
Just as like a thing.
Because this is the thing that Zuckerberg said.
If somebody posted Holocaust denial on Facebook, he'd accept it.
And then a couple years later, he was like, you know...
I've had a change of heart.
I think I would try to get rid of it.
Do we do a free-for-all?
And if that leads to the demise of humanity, so be it?
Or do we have some mechanism?
Because that seems to be the argument whenever – because people go, I don't think – I think Alex Jones should be able to say whatever he wants.
I think whoever can say whatever they want and then they – and we have to let the chips fall where they may because I don't trust any human being to be in charge of this.
So we just have to see where this takes us.
Because there was a thing with WhatsApp, for example, owned by Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, and there was a thing.
There's a lot of misinformation on WhatsApp.
They'll just blast people.
They'll just blast numbers.
And in the Myanmar Civil War, there was a thing.
If you look this up, it'd be great.
Because there was a thing where they blasted misinformation.
And a bunch of people went to some location and were slaughtered.
They posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes as they flooded Facebook with their hatred.
One said Islam was a global threat to Buddhism.
Another shared a false story about the rape of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man.
The Facebook posts were not from everyday internet users.
Instead, they were from Myanmar military personnel who turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing.
According to former military officials, researchers, and civilian officials in the country.
That's another problem with social media, is that there's a very distinct real number, whatever the number is, where those accounts aren't real.
Whatever the number is, they know that hundreds of thousands of them Are fake and come from these Russian troll farms and there's people that use them to manipulate you with with Businesses and I mean even Howard Stern was calling for that remember there was that video that came out about him or saying hey make a bunch of fake Twitter accounts and and text and tweet to celebrities right and that's you know,
it's like Donald Rumsfeld said that's the cost of living in a free society freedom's messy the question is is The you read more that people got fucking yeah thousands people maybe tens of thousands yeah based on fake posts yeah, what's what I'm saying is like There's all sorts of ways people manipulate social media.
The fact that you could just communicate to people, like, instantaneously, it's really magical, pretty amazing.
But the problem that comes along with that is that you're going to get people manipulating it, and you're going to get people that can really have a great deal of impact on the way people see and think about things.
And you could do that for your own best interest or you could do that like they did it and slaughter a bunch of people.
You could do that to try to make people aware of a situation, to sell a product, to do it.
If you did have an account, if it only cost you eight bucks, To create a whole new account, and you use that account for propaganda, and you could- Money well spent.
You know, Alex says that they're crisis actors in Connecticut, and then those families' lives are ruined three times worse than they would have been ruined.
There's free speech absolutists, and there's people that are willing to forgive people for past mistakes, and there's people that will never forgive you for anything, and they want you punished and removed from the air if you made a mistake, or if you say something incorrect, or if you, you know...
You give out misinformation.
They're talking about mal-information now, which is really wild.
So many people are going to know people's secret feelings about them, or know their intentions, or know that they'll have a plan to stay with you for seven years and then take you to the cleaners.
People are engaging with independent people, whether it's Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi, independent journalists, that will tell you what they really feel about things.
And that is what's emerging from this confusion that's promising to me.
For being biased and being woke and all the horseshit that they say, when they know it's like at least partially inaccurate, when they do that, it diminishes their value as the most important news sources in the world.
These people that are, like, real independent journalists who adhere very closely to the ethics of journalism.
And a lot of them get fucking torn apart for it, like Alex Berenson.
Sued Twitter.
Got back on.
I mean, that's wild, right?
Sued Twitter because they were saying what you were saying is misinformation for COVID misinformation.
Everything he said was from peer-reviewed studies.
All of it.
All the data.
All the things he was saying.
He's reporting on things in a way that's factually inaccurate.
It's accurate.
It's accurate.
And they kicked him off and then they had to put him back on because of that.
Those guys are valuable.
Because if they're not doing that, who's doing that?
And you might not agree with him.
And you might say, you are causing vaccine hesitancy and you're causing people to not think this is a dangerous virus.
You might be correct.
You might be correct that that influences some people in some way, in that way.
It didn't influence me in that way.
It would influence me in a way where I'm like, ooh, this is very strange that I'm getting all this information from this one guy.
And why is this?
This seems to be available, like, this should be on NBC. This should be on CBS. Everybody should be talking about this.
But they're not.
So they have a very specific narrative when it comes to this thing where they're not trusting that you can make good decisions.
They want to guide you in a very specific direction.
Of ideology or because of a corporation or multiple corporations that are behind the advertising for that show, which is most certainly the case on television, they get Suspicious.
They don't want to listen to you anymore.
They'll take some information like, oh look, there's a bomb went off over there.
I would just say, I hope people are aware that there's trade-offs.
Because the thing that...
The argument for the Post and the Times and legacy media is, while biased, there was a level of stability to it.
Yeah.
But it feels paternalistic, or it feels like people don't want to be guided, like you said.
But, fucking society?
Civilization, there's gonna be some thing, and there is, at this point, there's gonna be some mechanism of guidance, whether it's the government, the church, media.
I have a feeling people would have found a reason to start those wars without religion.
I just have a feeling.
I think people say, you know, Christianity has done some horrible things.
I think so, yes.
But also, if they weren't Christians, they probably would have done the same shit.
I think it's a human thing.
I think it's a human thing, especially back in the day, man, when life was brutal and horrible and everybody had syphilis.
You killed each other with swords.
People were fucking ruthless.
And you could blame it on a religion...
But I think the thing about having some sort of a structure, and most importantly moral and ethical, like the way you treat each other, the way you talk to each other, like, you know, what you're trying to do in life, I know a lot of Christians that are like the nicest people.
If they're real Christians, if they're like real, practicing, believing Christians, some of the most charitable- You name any religion and I know a lot of people that are- Exactly.
They found the guy who they assume is the first guy, and he's very skeptical of the new Q for some reason.
Oh, of course.
The new Q boots on.
The new Q, that's not the guy, though.
That's not the original guy that did it.
That's the guy that came along.
That's the guy that took it over, and the dad is the guy to the left.
They're fucking characters, man.
Yeah.
Hilarious characters, but they were fucking...
Like, high-level trolling people in a way that one of the posts that was made, the only way someone could get access to it, like, was when the forum got shut down.
So the forum comes back up and this post is up there.
Like, how the fuck does this guy have access to it before everybody else unless he's this kid who's running the forum?
Yes, and January 6th, just like all this shit, you got light, and you get someone that can benefit from it, a human actor, a malicious human actor, and it can create...
Right, well, and if you watch the January 6th stuff, you know the story about the guy who was most likely some sort of a government agent who's trying to talk people into going in?
He's out there, we gotta go in there.
I don't give a fuck what happens.
We gotta go in there.
And what is this guy's name?
Ray something?
Ray Epps, they've found him.
They know who the guy is.
He's facing no charges, no consequences.
And they grill the FBI about this guy.
I forget who it was, Ted Cruz?
Grills the FBI about this guy and won't answer any questions.
Won't answer yes or no whether or not he was an agent, whether he was involved with them, whether he had anything to do with them.
I'm of the mind that it's negligible in that every time I read, again, I'm reading, so who, but I don't, but I've never been in an election where people are like, I didn't fucking vote for that part.
I've never been compelled to think that an election was rigged.
I've always, like, questioned it.
I remember that HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, where they took these—I think they were Diebold—make sure that's true.
I think they were Diebold computers, and they found out that there was a third-party ability to enter third-party data that they could utilize, and they could affect the outcome.
So they ran a study, or they ran a test with this machine where they manipulated it, and they got different results than they should have gotten.
They got results where it favored the client that this program was set up to do.
Because it's a natural human inclination to cheat.
Especially when it comes to...
We know how much money is involved in being president.
How much power is involved in being president.
God damn, there's so many fucking factors.
So many influences.
There's so much of an incentive for someone to do something.
If you are a person who's very invested in politics, so much so that you're working for a polling place, you know, and you're like really, you know, hardcore one way or another, hardcore right wing, hardcore left wing, if you can get away with shit, I'm sure you're going to do it.
But the question is, like, how many can get away with it?
And whether or not that actually can affect elections.
And like, what about provisional ballots?
What about people that don't have ID? What about people that are here illegally and vote because they feel like that's the trade-off for being able to be allowed into the country?
That's the argument about why they're letting so many people into this country.
But it's interesting to hear your take on this stuff because...
You're a part of it.
When people talk about this sort of not legacy media, not legacy information streams, you're a big part of it, and it's funny to hear that you're like I'm just trying to figure it out like everybody else.
The problem is everybody wants to come to a conclusion when they're not necessarily sure.
It's more convenient to have like a clear conclusion.
And there's a problem too when there's a narrative that floats around and if you question that narrative like you're a kook or you're a bad person or you're a conspiracy theorist or you're contributing in some sort of a negative way.
I do not like the idea of forced compliance.
I do not like the idea of buying into a narrative.
But that's a thing that didn't really exist before the internet.
Not the idea of forced compliance, but just like, I don't know, this is what we're doing.
You know what I mean?
Like, and then it became kind of weaponized of like, you're a sheep and you're, it's like where I say like, I believe most of what's in the New York Times, you sheep ass bitch.
I don't necessarily agree with you because even during the Vietnam War, that was an issue.
I mean, that was the division of society in the Vietnam War is that people knew that the Vietnam War was bullshit and they knew that they were being fed bullshit by the government and they're sending human bodies over there to just to go and die.
And that changed culture in its very radical way because people just rejected all the norms of society.
And this also came about the same time as the introduction of LSD. So people are doing acid and they're tripping and they just want to drop out of society.
So that was going on then too.
It's a normal part of human beings to question the people that have power and to reject their authority.
And the thing is, like, you shouldn't be expected to get the news in an hour, especially today, because you're dealing with the news of eight billion people simultaneously, and you're only hearing the bad stuff.
You're hearing the bad stuff about typhoons and fucking hurricanes and a new disease and an Animal attack and a lady got ate by a crocodile and you're just never gonna sleep.
You're never gonna sleep.
It's coming at you 24-7 all the time and some of it's bullshit and you got to figure out what's what and what's not and you know in some ways you can leave that to other people and but the problem is then some of those people aren't real and then you find out some of those people are hired government misinformation agents that are designed to push a very specific narrative to get people talking about things online.
I mean, if you're like a small Lutheran church and you serve the community and you put on charities and do a bunch of great things and you're like a real asset to the community, there's a lot of those churches and they should be tax exempt.
It seems like it's real similar to what goes on in a lot of religions, in a sense, because there's a lot of religions that force people to work as missionaries, and there's a lot of religions that ask things of people, and you have to tithe 10%.
I feel like there's some sort of trend in life and in the cosmos of things getting more complex and, you know, I'm not the first person to point this out either, but with human beings in particular, Everything is about technological innovation and things becoming more and more complex and information being more and more accessible and being more and more connected with each other.
It seems like a really really obvious trend and if you play that trend out You know a thousand years a hundred thousand years a million years like where where is that going?
And is that going on all over the universe?
And is that what God's doing?
Is God all about this constant state of improvement that it goes on forever?
Well, if you think of amoebas, if you think of single-celled organisms, they eventually become multi-celled organisms, they develop the ability to move around, and they come on shore, and they evolve and change, and this goes on forever and ever and ever.
And then one day in 2022, they're us.
That's what we are.
We're the most advanced form that we're aware of, of that thing.
If that keeps going, Maybe that is what creates the universe itself.
Maybe the universe is making itself through us.
We're just in this amoeba stage, and we can't even comprehend it.
To us, it's like, what are you talking about?
We're going to change the world?
Like, imagine an amoeba being born in the bottom of a volcano silo, you know, in the bottom of the oceans.
I think we probably all are a version of that in comparison to this ultimate thing that we're going to become.
If we do keep evolving, if evolution is a real thing, and it did go from single-celled organisms to what we see now in human beings, if you just keep going, that should get to some place of impossible Energy and power and maybe the universe itself like maybe that's what it's made out of maybe that's how we make things like stars and Maybe the universe itself is born out of this and we're just this really tiny
stage This amoeba like stage that will ultimately become the God force of the universe.
Maybe that's our ultimate Transition between a physical being into this thing of energy and love and light and power and indifference in many ways to our own plights because it's necessary to achieve this purpose.
Like all of our bullshit and maybe all of our struggles and maybe all of our debates about things and trying to figure out what's white and what's wrong and whose philosophy is correct and whose behavior is correct.
Maybe all of that is just trying to get us to that ultimate stage where we're going to be and that's what happens everywhere in the universe.
That's the universe creating itself everywhere all over the place when things get and they have a certain amount of Troubles that they have to deal with whether it's tribal invasions or super volcanoes and Figure it out get to a point where you can become the next thing Yeah, I mean on and on and on and on and on forever.
Yeah, I mean that's I would if my Especially my Emmy my five MEO Experience was about having no sense of order whatsoever Meaning I was an amoeba.
I didn't know what breathing was.
I don't know what direction was.
I don't know what sight was.
I didn't know fucking Anything yeah, and I was I was drowning on I don't know any I don't know what a thought is and It was really incredibly difficult.
The human animal is like working out in this new territory that we're dealing with, with the internet and with the connection that we have now and the awareness that we have to all the potential dangers of the world and the cosmos and like we're constantly inundated with new threats.
You know, the economy is collapsing, the fucking global warming, Jesus Christ, and overpopulation, and it's like never ends.
And it's constantly like getting into your mind.
And I think that's a stressor and a test.
And I think the human animal has to figure out how to navigate this world and become better at it.
And then as it evolves and changes and grows, it's eventually going to be normal.
And it's not normal for us because we grew up without it.
Look, I think banning people for using his picture as a parody and saying he likes to drink his own pee, not a good look for all this free speech stuff.
But the idea behind the free speech absolutist mentality is that there's no place where people can have these discussions and exchange these ideas.
Without there being extreme bias for one political party and about how that's dangerous for democracy.
Trackable definition and that's also it's not real.
Yeah, and that's the that's the thing with even with free speech is like There's so it's like a multi-tentacled it's an octopus with fucking a hundred and thirty two tentacles and yeah like it is It's contradictions and yeah, but yeah, but and you're like yeah, this is I I don't know the solution Yeah, I don't think there's a clear solution and I think that's part of the work that we have to do.
We have to work things through and figure things out and I think that people that you can count on to tell you the truth are very important.
I think more of those will emerge and I think that'll replace these corporate control things as long as they can stay actually independent because that's one of the things that happens to politicians where politicians are all about for the people and then they get in there and then you got to play ball.
But do you know the reason why I did that Neil Young one in particular, because I wanted to tell that story about how I quit my job as a security guard because of a Neil Young consequence.
And, you know, the problem is that information itself is...
It's so hard to get a 100% answer on anything complex.
Like the climate.
We had a climate guy in yesterday that says, yes, the climate's bad, but there's a lot of things that are worse, and everyone's kind of overreacting to this world being very myopic in our viewpoint, and we really need to look at this in terms of there's a lot of problems that we could create a lot less death and a lot less suffering in the world.
We focused on them And there's also solutions that are being implemented that they think is going to mitigate the effects of climate change.
So this conversation is like so long and so complex, and most people don't have the time to sort through it.
And if you do, you don't have an expert to talk to, so then you're forced to go just try to read shit online.
So what do you do?
You go to MSNBC. They say, we're all going to die in 12 years.
Like, okay.
We're all going to die in 12 years.
AOC says we're fucked.
We must be fucked.
And then that's your opinion.
And then you argue that at the pub and you fucking argue that at work when there's the guy with the Trump hat who doesn't believe it.
Yeah, I mean, and then you have, if you have family members that you're close to, and you're helping them out with things, and then you have friends that have problems, you have calls you have to make, you know, where's your time?
How do you have the time to go research whether or not QAnon's real?
It's not like the guy's saying, hey, I'm gonna go blow up this fucking building, and then they swapped his bomb out for a fake one, and then, you know, it was his plan.
If the government had full control and they could just tweet whatever they wanted to and not get fact-checked, which they kind of have been able to do before, If they do that, and they're the ones in charge of information, and they can say what can and cannot be said, they'll decide in their best interest.
That's why you can't give it to people that are in power.
And it's better, although it's chaotic as fuck, to give it and leave it to the people.
It's better.
It's better than giving it to people that are in power, because all they would have to do Is institute some sort of a social credit score system, which would be easy to talk gullible people into doing.
And next thing you know, everything is tied into this in terms of what you can do and not do, what you can say and not say.
And every time you say something that's out of line, you lose social credit score.
Maybe you can't fly.
Maybe you can't buy a house.
And that's real.
And that's why you can't give them access to information.
Because if you do, they'll limit the amount of information that stops them from implementing ideas like this.
It's just, what we're ordering for is just the wrong, we're ordering for more people, more commerce, more, more, more, more, more, instead of like, moderation, protect the tribe, this is about the right amount of people we should have, we'll respect the earth, we'll respect the, but it's just, you just need an order, it's just multiple, it's like multipliers that are so far out of control.
And some people are losing their fucking minds because of it.
And I maintain that the people that are engaging primarily in online discussions, like online tweeting and online Facebooking, they're the people that are really losing their minds the most because it's a super unnatural way to interact with the world.
And then at a certain point, I think he realized, like, fuck, alright, this is a bit of a responsibility, and I need fact checkers.
There's a guy who works at The Daily Show named Chods, who's like the fact checker guy, and he'll go like, actually, if you're writing a thing, he'll go like, that's not true, that's not true, that's not true, right?
And whenever people form these boards, I think they try to form one of Facebook, and I remember a lot of people like Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher kind of rolling their eyes about, like, these fucking people.
And this guy, Bjorn Lomborg, his assertion is that what we need to do is take care of all these people economically, and that the people that are dying in these places are people that don't have access to air conditioning, don't have access to refrigeration.
And if we raise them up economically, then you could solve most of those people dying.
Yeah, he actually talked about that and actually showed the deaths of malaria dying dropping down considerably because of medication because of modern medicine and So there's, you know, I think his really interesting point is that there's a lot of other things that are really bad that we should be concentrating on as well.
And we're very narrow-minded in our focus on this.
And it becomes the cause of the day and everybody like, you have to be all on board with this.
And if you really wanted to save lives, he's like, there's a lot of other things that we could do and we can implement very quickly and easily and save lives.
And we also would probably elevate people economically, which would in turn allow them to have Measures in place to protect them from environmental situations like extreme heat and drought and things like that and he thinks a lot of it can be done with innovation.
Well, I think the idea is you bring their economy up somehow.
And if you bring their economy up, then they can afford things.
That's what he's saying.
He's saying, like, there's these places that have, like, they're completely economically disenfranchised and they're fucked and they have no hope and there's no options.
If we created options in those places and helped, you know, were incentivized to help these people, then their way of life would improve radically.
And as their way of life improves radically and the economy improves radically, you have way less deaths.
You have way less deaths from disease, way less deaths from crime, way less deaths from a lot of these things.
He was like, none of these solutions are easy, but these are other things that we should be...
If our concern is quality of life and raising up people's quality of life and giving them more of a chance to live, making life safer for them, making things easier for them, he's like, this is a good way to go about doing that.
And in turn, it will greatly reduce the deaths.
And these are all preventable deaths, and we can greatly reduce those.
And it's a real cause and effect thing.
You could actually get to doing that.
So if our main concern is loss of life, we should really be concerned with that as well.
That's what he's saying.
He's not saying at all that climate change isn't a problem.
He's definitely not saying that it's not caused by man.
Well, it's obviously short-sighted and it's obviously people that started doing things a long time ago that they didn't give a fuck about the future or the other people that I deal with the consequences or they didn't realize it was causing those consequences.
He was a little flippant about fracking.
I was like, man, they seem to read a lot about the pollution that's caused by fracking.
It seems pretty bad.
And he was like, well, relatively speaking, you know, there was a lot of like Glass half full.
So I guess I get it's important to hear that position too.
But yeah, ultimately it's a fucking shame what we've done to the environment.
It's a shame.
You know, he's also saying that a lot of the stuff that's floating in the ocean is not simply like our stuff that washes the shore.
He's like, it's these freighter ships just dump their shit in the ocean.
Just dump garbage.
It's like, that's what countries have done.
You know, that's how the whole, the Somali pirates, do you know how that all got started?
They call themselves the People's Coast Guard of Somalia.
That's what they originally started calling themselves.
Because I'm pretty good at writing that kind of heavy shit, and I talk about mental health stuff and people like when I talk about it, so it just seemed like a use of things I can do.
Like, I'm good at that, and I'm good at that.
So let me just kind of mix them into a...
So it's not just...
I would say most stand-up shows are like a press conference.