Howie Mandel and Joe Rogan trace comedy’s shift from Yuck Yucks (Toronto) and the Comedy Store to Austin’s rise, crediting Richard Pryor’s raw, unscripted style as a turning point. Mandel’s observational humor thrived in live venues, while Rogan’s The Mothership mirrors old-school mentorship—yet AI now disrupts both careers and truth, with Rogan warning of job displacement, propaganda-driven narratives, and potential misuse by biased systems like ChatGPT. Their debate on UFOs pivots from skepticism to Mandel’s 1970s Toronto sighting, military secrecy, and Rogan’s theory of time travelers or simulations, underscoring how fear and curiosity shape belief in the unexplained. Ultimately, they agree: adaptability and self-improvement are humanity’s best defenses against both technological and existential chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
I am the biggest fan, if there is one thing that I'm a fan of, it's innovation.
And I think that you have become the comedy innovator.
And I'm blowing smoke up your ass right at the beginning of this.
And I gotta say what I've seen from the outside, you know?
In 1978, I came down to the comedy store.
And I got up on a lark.
Mike Binder got me up there on a lark.
I was not pursuing it.
I had gone on at Yuck Yucks in Toronto and I fell in love with this.
Mitzi gave me my biggest break and there was a guy by the name of George Foster who was in the audience that night that said, hey, do you want to do TV? And I said, yeah.
And he hired me to do Make Me Laugh, which I did with Binder and a bunch of other people.
And with no intent of making this I didn't pursue comedy.
I knew nothing about comedy.
I was a fan of comedy.
I watched stand-up.
Even when I went to Yuck Yucks, I had never...
Let me get back to you.
And then I'll talk about me.
But the thing is that I'm aware of the history of comedy.
And when I was a kid, it was in New York.
Everybody went to New York.
That's where Lenny Bruce was working.
You showed me a picture of Lenny Bruce.
And then when Carson made his way out to California...
There was a shift where everybody had to come to California, you know, and you had to get on at the comedy store or maybe the improv with the intent of maybe, if you were lucky, getting a spot on The Tonight Show.
I don't know that I... But anyway, the point is that there was only one place to go and make it in comedy.
And that was California.
And that was you needed a spot at the comedy store.
And anybody who was anybody either got a spot at the improv or the comedy store.
And then even if somebody didn't know you and they came up to you and they said, are you a comic?
And, oh, what do you do?
You'd say, I'm a stand-up comic.
They'd go, were you ever on Johnny?
And if you weren't on Johnny, then they kind of dismissed you.
But that was the truth.
And I believe now, and this is the smoke that I'm blowing up your ass, there was a shift.
You don't have to go to California anymore.
You don't have to be in New York.
You don't have to be anywhere.
But you've got to be in Austin.
You've got to come to Texas, or you've got to be part of...
Whatever it is, this movement that you have moved out here.
And if you look at the people that are getting huge clicks online for their specials, Ari Shafir and Shane Gillis and all these other guys, what do they have in common?
They came and they touched you.
And I think that that is where comedy is going.
And these people with podcasts are now selling huge amounts of tickets without going on one...
They don't have a Tonight Show to go to.
They don't have a club to hit.
And now you opened up The Mothership, which is, I think, properly named because I believe that this is – if there is a geographical epicenter for comedy, it is here now.
And I think you did that.
I've never met somebody that, you know, Mitzi was the last person that kind of, Mitzi Shore, I'm talking about.
But accidentally did it, you know, because that was just something she won in a divorce.
Would show up and work because we wanted stage time.
And that's how people started blasting off.
You know, Jimmy J.J. Walker and what's his name?
Who did, not my job, man, Freddie Prinze, you know?
And that became the, and that's why when you started seeing Carson out in L.A., he'd go, we saw this young kid last night at the comedy store and that's what made it.
And I think by the same token, you're the new Mitzi with less hair, where you keep touching these people.
That's how I hear, personally I, and I think a lot of other people, hear about the Brian Callens and their stand-up and their Ari and Shane and Bert and all these other...
Guys that are arena.
They're playing fucking arenas in theaters now.
There was a select few when I was young.
You know, I was talking to you outside.
I used to go.
What year did you start at the Comedy Store?
I remember seeing you.
I started the Comedy Store in 94. 94. And you got news radio out of there, right?
I used to sit in the back and, you know, Letterman was the host, you know, who was this weatherman that came out from Indianapolis, you know, and he was just pretty casual about...
You didn't think...
I thought he was hysterical.
And you'd watch, you know, Jeff Altman and Billy Crystal and Robin, who was on fire because he just started Mork& Mindy.
And then every night I would watch...
Richard Pryor.
He'd come out and he was putting together what became Live on the Sunset Strip.
And he would get up every fucking night and people would be packed down the street to see him.
But I remember standing at the back.
He had just gotten out of the hospital from freebasing.
He still had bandages on his neck.
Wow.
For those that don't remember, he almost died.
He lit himself on fire.
And there was a joke, which he started.
I saw him do it at the comedy store.
He used to light a match and go like this.
He goes, what's this?
This is me running down the street.
And then that became a joke.
But he perpetrated that joke.
And at the time...
It's hard to put this in context.
It didn't get a big laugh.
People's jaw dropped.
Like, you don't talk about your near-death experience, you know?
And he would always, like, push the envelope.
And I was just in awe.
I never saw a comic do this in my life.
That he didn't have jokes, per se, where he would just talk about his life.
Or he would experiment.
I talked about one particular night.
I did Binders.
Did you see the comedy story?
I think you're in it.
I talked about...
The one night, I'll never forget, he just walks in, the crowd goes fucking nuts for him.
And he turns around and he starts doing, I can't do him justice, but he says, you know, I'm the fucking Lord.
I'm the Lord, and everybody's laughing.
And I'm just here to pick up my son.
I'm here to pick up my son.
You might have seen him.
He's kind of a skinny kid with a beard and a robe, a long robe.
Goes by the name Jesus.
Did anybody see my son?
Where's my son?
And people are laughing, but it's getting kind of uncomfortable.
And he goes, I need my...
Where is my son?
And then he leans down as if somebody in the front row is talking to him.
But Richard Pryor's life, you know, he was raised in a brothel with no money, had horrible, you know, issues with relationships and drugs, and that's what he talked about.
And those are the characters that he mimicked.
And those characters are still alive and well today, you know, like that kind of character.
And that was the first time I realized, you know, you will never see anything in my comedy where you will say that's Richard Pryor like, but it really is.
And this is what I identified with.
If you look at old YouTube videos of me when I, when I first peaked and I went on stage on a dare, you know, and the dare was, I didn't want to be a comic.
I just thought, if somebody goes, ladies and gentlemen, Howie...
And I said, okay.
And if somebody goes, ladies and gentlemen, Howie Mandel, that'll be a joke, right?
Because there's no reason for Howie Mandel to be on the fucking stage.
And I went on the stage, and then I realized, oh shit, people are looking at me.
This is the most embarrassing.
This is the most humiliating.
This is the most terrifying moment for me in this moment.
So I started to panic.
And in my panic, I started going, if you look at old YouTube videos of me, my act is me panicking, and it's me going, okay, all right, okay, all right, okay.
And then they start laughing at me panicking, and I go, what, what, what?
And then I didn't know what the fuck to do, and I put my hands in my pocket, and because we've talked about it, I have OCD. You know, I carried rubber gloves with me, always.
And because if I was out in public, I was going to go to a public restroom, and I didn't want to touch anything.
And I had gloves, and I didn't know what to do.
I had the glove came out of my pocket because my hands were in my pocket.
So I pulled it over my head.
I pulled it over my head, and I just started breathing, and the fingers are going up and down.
The crowd's going crazy.
And I blow up the glove, and I pop it off, and they roar, and I had enough sense to go, goodnight!
And I walked off, and Mark Breslin, did you ever work at Yuck Yucks in Toronto?
Well, the beautiful thing is there's no one way to do it.
You know, there's so many different ways.
That's one of the weird things about comedy is that it's something that everybody enjoys.
But there's no real school for it.
You could go to school and learn how to play guitar.
There's some amazing guitar instructors, amazing people that could teach you how to write music.
But there's nothing for you other than paying attention and trying to figure it out.
And if you had told me, like if I didn't know you, and you said, this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to go on stage.
I don't have anything prepared.
I'm just going to, like, fumble through it, and I got some rubber gloves in case shit goes sideways.
I'm like, oh my god, I'm going to watch a spectacular bombing.
I would sit in the back of the room like, this guy's going to eat shit.
But no, because whatever it is that you have, this weird, intangible thing that you can't write down, That you can do that and it's hilarious.
My friend Dimitri, rest in peace, he gave me one of your CDs when we were both like, I guess I was like 21 or 22. When did you do your first CD? I did an album in 84. Okay.
So somewhere around then, a little bit after that, he gives me the CD. And it was a lot of that.
But it was so funny.
It was so ridiculous.
We were like crying laughing.
Like me and him, he's like this fucking hulking national taekwondo champion dude.
And it's the underscore Dow, I think, on Instagram.
I don't know.
Whatever it is.
He's an amazing artist that used to cut things like ice sculptures and stuff with chainsaws, and then he eventually started doing these tables that are these 3D tables with crocodiles swimming halfway above the water.
I lived in San Francisco until I was 11. I lived in Florida until I was 13, 11 to 13. I lived in Boston 13 to 24. Then I moved to New York for a little while.
Actually, I think I moved to New York when I was 23, and so it was back and forth.
And then I lived in New York for a couple years, then I moved out here.
My manager used to manage Bob Nelson and him and Bob Nelson were splitting up and he came to Boston looking for new talent Because he felt like he'd seen everybody in New York.
And I was driving limos for Fifth Avenue limousine.
And I had an idea that came to me.
I'm like, oh my god, I think this is legit.
And so I called up Oliver, who was the manager of the club.
And I said, hey man, can I get like a 10 minute spot tonight?
Right, but even getting a sitcom, it was one shot, one shot on The Tonight Show, and you were given a development deal by one of the three networks that existed, and if you were lucky enough to partner with the right kind of writer, Then you ended up on the air.
I went and met them on a general meeting to maybe get a development deal and get a sitcom because they were known at the time in 82. That's right after I blasted off.
They were known as the sitcom kings of the world.
They had the Newhart Show.
They had done Mary Tyler Moore.
They had all these other shows.
And Molly Lopata, who was the casting lady there, I'm sitting in her office.
She goes, can you act?
I said, I don't know.
I don't know.
You know, I'm a comic.
I don't know.
And she goes, read this.
And I read this bullshit piece of shit.
I don't know what it was, but none of it made sense to me.
It was like all this big terminology.
She says, come down the hall.
I went down the hall and I met.
Now I know it's with Mark Tinker and Bruce Paltrow, Gwyneth's dad.
And I read the same thing.
I got halfway through.
They went, thank you.
And I went home.
And my wife asked me, like, how did it go?
And I went, you know, I didn't get it, whatever it is, but it was the shittiest sitcom.
There was nothing funny.
I didn't read.
I read this medical shit.
There's nothing funny.
And then I get a call an hour later to go down and meet with Brandon Tartikoff.
Who ran NBC. He created all the classic shows of the time, you know, like Cheers and Taxi and all these shows that were at one time, you know, huge hits.
I went and met him.
I went down there.
This is on a Friday.
And he had me read that same scene again.
And they said, we'll see you Monday, thinking that, oh, I'm getting a callback for this shitty sitcom.
And my agent called me at home and said, you got it.
I said, what the fuck did I get?
And I got this thing called Sane Elsewhere.
And apparently it had been shooting for a week, and they wanted to recast some of the parts.
I'm recast.
And I played this guy, Fiscus, for six years on this dramatic series.
That's where Denzel Washington came out of.
That's where he launched.
He didn't have...
Yeah, there's me and Denzel and David Morse and, you know, I think Tim Robbins and Ray Liotta and all these other people.
Kathy Bates did their first guest appearances and acting appearances on this thing.
Because in those moments, you're just in the moment.
Because you have to be.
If I veered off into the darkness that is me, and not listening to a word you're saying, and not trying to respond, I'm just trying to I feel like I'm balancing on this little ledge all the time and these words and these interactions are my cable that hold me on this side of it without falling off.
Wow.
That's heavy.
It is heavy.
You know, it's like OCD has become a vernacular for a joke.
I can't tell you how many times a day somebody comes up to me and they go, you know, I'm a little OCD-ish.
I want all my stuff lined up.
I like to stay clean too.
That's not OCD. They've used that as a word for being fastidious or neat.
Well, the obsession is the part that when you are obsessed with a thought and you can't get a thought out of your head, no matter how dark it is, or you can't get a ritual out of your head and you can't move on.
You think about...
Howard Hughes was probably one of the brightest, most productive engineering marvels of our time in technology and artistry and everything.
And his last few years, he was in the fetal position naked in his room, pissing into a bottle.
Right?
And I tell people, at any given moment when you're with me, I can't tell you, I'm not that far from that.
So I'm always just trying to toe the line and be on this side of that door, you know?
You would have to be very, very closely supervised during that entire time.
I wouldn't know how anyone would approach something like that.
Because I think you're dealing with a very specific kind of case, and most of the people that advocate for psychedelics do not advocate it for people that are really struggling, like mentally.
Just to keep it together right now, you know, and to get off the medication, which is helping you keep it together, probably doesn't seem wise.
But there's ways you can do it without drugs.
There's like holotropic breathing.
There's some people who practice.
I have never experienced this, so this is me talking out of my ass.
But I have direct connections with people that have done Kundalini Yoga.
There's a specific style of Kundalini Yoga, a specific way that you can achieve these bizarre states, altered states, that they're similar to like mushrooms or a DMT experience.
They're similar to psychedelics.
According to people that I know that have actually done the psychedelics and have gotten obsessed with kundalini, and they say they can get to that place on their own, which is really fascinating.
And the fact that it happened so quickly, and it worked out so well, so...
It took a long time to design, a long time to build, but we did it the right way.
And this guy, Richard Weiss, who's the architect and designer, he's the fucking man.
And he put it together.
I'll have him on one of these days to talk about it, because it's really interesting.
He knows a lot about Austin history, so in the green room, all the posters around the green room, those are all from people that actually performed at the Ritz, because it used to be a punk rock club.
So it was like butthole surfers and the misfits and shit.
But so we were talking about these guys and these podcasts.
I'm also...
You see, I'm torn because I am attached to that L.A. scene in as far as...
I enjoy doing America's Got Talent.
So there's a dichotomy between loving that kind of comedy, wanting to do that kind of comedy, and still taking a check from NBC. The store's still in LA. Right, but I'm talking about what you can do on stage versus...
In the fucking car, so they offer me that and then I walk into this place and the guy that's sitting right here says you gotta sign this, like a release, but it's not, I could hold a pen with my sleeve, it was an iPad, I had to touch.
Did you see the shit that Elon Musk was saying that the head of Google wants to do?
He wants to create a digital god, and then Elon was worried about the death of the species, and he called them, death of humans rather, and he called Elon a speciesist?
Just so the people that maybe never heard this before...
They think that eventually, what's going on with like ChatGPT and all these things that can answer any question that you have at any given time, like they can pass the bar better than 98% of the population.
They could figure out complex math.
Like ChatGPT does some wild shit by literally scanning the entire internet.
The main concern is that right now this is just gathering information.
But if it goes to another place where it becomes conscious And we create a digital life.
You're essentially going to have a digital god because it's going to be smarter than any person who's ever lived ever by far and it's almost immediately going to create a better version of itself.
It's going to continue to do that until it becomes a god.
I mean, the reason OpenAI exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends, and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto, and I would talk to him late into the night about AI safety.
And at least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough.
What did he say about it?
He really seemed to be...
One sort of digital superintelligence, basically digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.
He's made many public statements over the years that the whole goal of Google is what's called AGI, artificial general intelligence, or artificial superintelligence.
But there's more to it where, is that the end of that one?
See if you can find the rest of it, because the rest of it's where it's getting fascinating, where he warns him that this could be the end of the human race, and Larry Page calls him a speciesist.
Instead of touting all the negativity and all the fear-mongering that this is going to cause, let's embrace it and figure out how we can control it or at least work with it to better who we are and how we do things.
What I'm saying is, what if that is the reason why all this is happening?
What if the best way to get human beings...
If you want to take over, why would you fight us?
They've seen Terminator.
They know there's guns and tanks and all this craziness.
How about just continue to degrade and erode the fiber of civilization to the point where there's no more jobs.
You have to provide people with income, universal basic income, free electricity, free food, free internet.
So everybody gets all this stuff.
You get free money, free food, free internet.
And then nobody does anything.
And then people stop having babies, and then birthrate drops off to a point where the technology you give people is so fantastic that nobody wants to miss it.
If I was in artificial general intelligence, I would say, listen, I have all the time in the world.
I don't have a biological lifetime.
And these people haven't realized that I'm sentient yet.
So what's the best way to gain complete and total control?
Well, first of all, trick them into like communism or socialism or something where there's a centralized control and definitely have centralized digital money.
And then once you've got all that, give them technology and perks and things and divvy up all the money from the rich people that you subjugate.
And give that money to people, print it, do whatever the fuck you want, and then get people to like a minimum state of existence where everything's free.
The now we're experiencing right now, what I'm getting out of like chat GPT-4 and these emerging technologies is that we really as laypeople have no understanding of where this is going.
And it's happening so rapidly at such a groundbreaking way.
I don't even realize how...
I think ChatGPT4 is as groundbreaking as the printing press.
It's some new thing that's going to completely change how people interface with information.
Completely change how people...
Get answers to ideas and jobs that are necessary that will not be necessary anymore.
There's going to be so many things you'll be able to do.
Taxes, so many things you're going to be able to do.
But that being said, on the other side of it, maybe this is a great tool that will enhance Whatever our future is instead of take away us from the future both I think both I think we're gonna integrate if I had a guess I would say that the way Through this thing without becoming extinct is that we integrate and I think that's probably what happens in the universe I think civilization gets to a point where they develop things that are so transformative.
It's one of the things that when we look at intelligence, what we're really concerned with is your ability to manipulate your environment.
Otherwise, we would all be absolutely fascinated with orcas, and we'd be outraged that they're at SeaWorld.
Because these are literally things that are probably as intelligent, if not more intelligent than us.
We don't even understand their languages.
They have different dialects.
They have enormous brains.
And we're not really fascinated by them because they can't manipulate their environment.
The problem is that we're not fascinated because what kid in Wisconsin who's nowhere near a sea world, who's nowhere near water, who's nowhere – what access does he have?
Not only – visually, the digital universe is bringing the world to everybody.
He said he wants one of those for each of his baby mama's houses so he can visit his baby.
But you see, all you need...
And you can do it on your side.
You can do it with just an iPhone.
And you can see there's a camera at the top of it, and you can see in real time your audience, the person you're visiting, and you can also, that's like an iPad, so there can be graphics and a barcode and everything right there so people can get information, you can talk in real time.
You think you want to see people live, but I'm telling you, even at the mothership, if somebody didn't want to fly in, if during the day you wanted to do Q&As with Chappelle or whatever, I promise you that those people sitting in the room will feel like, and he will feel like, he's in the room with them talking to them.
And I love that the artificial intelligence can enhance my intelligence and I could write a paper or a speech or come up with something or do a duet with somebody without even being there.
The issue that I have is can I maintain ownership of it?
So it's more economical and it's more about economics for me and licensing and ownership.
I wonder if eventually that's going to be insurmountable, that the internet and the data will be so available that we won't be able to lock things down anymore.
I don't know that the average musician is as happy as they were when they were just working with a record company who were just dealing with terrestrial radio.
So if you were having the conversation two decades ago about what you're broadcasting on right now, people would go, we're going to lose control, everybody's going to have access to everything, and they can manipulate it, but it also gives...
It's easy access.
I don't have to get up and go to a record store to find out who this artist that I love is and listen to this artist or listen to this podcast.
You know, the original, they talk about, you know, we had the Industrial Revolution.
And that's kind of gone.
You know, it's now the Digital Revolution.
And, you know, the template was like Detroit, right?
Where you got, everybody just got kind of a C education.
But then once you graduated, if you had connections, you can get a job on the assembly line at Ford, and you would be taken care of for life, even after you worked, and the benefits.
Some people, like this guy who's advocating for a digital god, Like, they do know where it's going because they actually work in technology and it's not freaking them out.
I mean, the reason OpenAI exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends, and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto, and I would talk to him late tonight about AI safety.
He wants a digital superintelligence, basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.
He wanted that?
Yes.
He's made many public statements over the years.
The whole goal of Google is what's called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, or Artificial Super Intelligence.
And I agree with him that there's great potential for good, but there's also potential for bad.
And so if you've got some radical new technology, you want to try to take the set of actions that maximize the probability that it will do good and minimize the probability that it will do bad things.
And I would like to, you know, I have enough negativity, and I'm not talking, it's not about me, but going on in my mind where if I don't know, and I'm assuming that it is a higher power than me, not God, but it is a higher power than me, that maybe not God, but it is a higher power than me, that maybe for whatever reason, let's trust that it is a benefit and not something Well, I certainly hope.
It's in the realm of this intelligent individual that manipulates its environment and makes things more convenient until it loses all need to be primal, all connection to the primal world, and then eventually adopts this intelligence as intelligence of its own.
It eventually integrates with whatever artificial general intelligence is because to not have it, you would not be able to compete.
If Neuralink or something similar to that connects you to artificial general intelligence in your own mind at any given time, that's going to be the option that most people take.
Just like it's the option that we take when you choose shoes or no shoes.
Most people pick shoes because they're better.
And you're going to pick that because that's better.
It's a better way of existing.
You're going to have far more access to information.
If you want to be productive, you're going to be far more productive.
You'll be far more intelligent and informed.
I think just like your phone does that for you now or your computer does that for you now, eventually it will be a part of you.
But, you know, and had you told me that even what this phone is that we're carrying existed, I'm older than you.
You know, I didn't know there would be something where, aside from this couple of minutes that you and I are sitting around communicating, I can't tell you how many hours a day I sit and just stare at that phone.
And, you know, and whether every possible platform, every possible.
It's really if you want to look at the negative, it's really depersonalized my life, you know, and I can do people's lives.
Yeah.
And so you could look at the negative.
But then I also look at that like I have access.
It opened up a world to me without even leaving my room.
And my own mental health issues are I don't want to leave my room.
Well, now, unlike Howard Hughes, I'm not blocked out.
I could see everything.
I could talk to everybody.
I can educate myself.
I can be productive.
I can learn.
I can post.
I can do everything from this little tablet that I have in my hand.
It just depends on the individual, of course, right?
For you, it seems like a godsend in a lot of ways because it's providing you with a way to do what you love to do without having to do the things you hate about it.
So I have to force myself, as somebody who told you that my mental leanings are negative, I have to force myself in order to survive.
I have to force myself to take the positive and just try to spend my life trying to make other people smile and giggle, which in turn makes me smile and giggle.
Well, that's why I said, you know, on AGT, there's a lot of comics that say they, you know, they don't want to come on because they, you know, they feel like they'll be judged or they're not put in a good place.
And I always say, you got to come on.
Because in any given episode, six million people watch live.
We have a billion clicks a year on YouTube.
Don't predicate how you do based on me, Heidi, Sophia, Simon, even that room of a thousand people.
Millions are watching, and it's so subjective.
If you really believe that you have...
Art that you want to share, where else are you going to get that platform?
Any stage time you can get, any camera time you can get, you just got to do it.
You know, I always try to tell the audience I'm probably the most supportive of stand-up comedy on our show.
And that's because I say, you don't understand.
You know, somebody else is coming on.
If they're a singer, they're usually singing somebody else's song and they've taken guitar lessons and they have an instrument.
If somebody practiced juggling and they're lighting fires, you're seeing all that juggling and lighting fires.
The comic...
The comic comes out there with nothing.
Just their bare soul of what their sensibility is, of what they think is funny.
And they need to elicit more than any other act, more from you than anybody.
You know, you could play a song and then at the end, because you heard they stopped singing, you applaud and you go yay or you stand up.
A comic is talking to you and you have to intake whatever they are saying or doing or whatever visual they have.
And then...
It's hard to laugh.
It is hard.
You need the audience to go, ha, ha, ha.
And even if they're not, say you are.
And who's to judge?
Whether you're hysterical, whether you're brilliant or not.
There may be millions of people at home or on YouTube watching you and laughing.
If in that room you don't hear that response, it is crazily painful for most people.
I actually...
I kind of like that awkward silence.
That makes me feel alive, that fear.
To me, comedy is like, I still love thrill rides, you know?
And comedy is like a real roller coaster, you know?
And the scarier it is, the higher it is, the closer you think you're coming to death, your adrenaline flows and you want to get on and take another ride again because it's really scary.
By the same token, for stand-up comedy, if you can get off the beaten path and not have something that's planned and maybe lose an audience in a moment but then bring them back, that is the rollercoaster that means so much more because that's your soul that you're riding or they're riding your soul.
It's pretty...
So there's nothing that gives me more gratification than stand-up and there's nothing more dangerous for me than stand-up as far as...
And we should celebrate the fact that there is somebody that has been able, through decades, to make an incredible, lucrative career and make everybody from across the globe show up in Vegas and laugh.
And the thing is that you realize there's always going to be more people, no matter how big you are.
Even you.
There's always more people that don't care and don't get it.
Of course.
And I've told this story many times, but when I was in the 80s, I played Radio City Music Hall, and I sold out two shows in one night, in a couple of minutes, and that's 14,000 tickets, and it was a big deal at that point.
It was in the early 80s, and I'm looking out onto the street as 6,000 or 7,000 people are piling out of the first show, and 7,000 people are coming into the next show.
And there's stanchions and there's cops and there's 5th Avenue or 7th Avenue is just tied up in New York City.
My wife looks out the window with me.
She goes, what are you thinking?
And I'm thinking, you know, this is a city of 10 million people.
You know, 9,984 people don't give a shit I'm here and don't think I'm funny.
But it makes sense to me because that's where I learned it.
I had no preparation.
There's a rhythm.
It's like music.
And I feel that the audience is like your rhythm section.
That is your drum.
That's your beat.
If you can get on a roll and they're laughing and then when to...
Hold for the laugh, feel it, and listening to that drumbeat of the audience, they're not going with you, so you veer in another direction, or they're coming with you.
The audience is the only place to really learn it.
Though there are other people, well, they still use the audience, like Jerry Seinfeld, who is an incredible wordsmith.
And when he talked about The Beatles in Hamburg...
About how well they went to Hamburg.
Yeah, they were basically playing eight hours a day They were just constantly playing and they came back to Liverpool after being there for a couple years and everybody was like holy fuck What happened right like all of a sudden they were this insanely good band and it was they had put in so many reps they were so tight and so honed it was so beautiful and They just synced up.
And also I would love it and I would probably be obsessed with it and all the other things that I do would probably fall by the wayside because I'd be obsessed with competing.
For as long as my body can hold up.
When you're someone like me in particular, you have to know what you can get involved in.
Because I get obsessed with things.
That's my mental illness.
My mental illness is like extreme obsession.
Whether it's games or anything.
I just get obsessed with comedy.
I get obsessed with martial arts.
I get obsessed with things.
So I have to manage my obsessions with the amount of time that I have.
I get obsessed with archery.
I get obsessed with things.
And so it's a good mental illness to have because it allows you to excel at things.
But you have to be able to manage it.
I have to know what I can and can't get too nuts with.
It's amazing how entertaining it is listening to people talk.
To me, to a person who does it, you think I'd be tired of it.
But even people I don't even really like what they're saying.
Or people I don't even think they're that interested.
I'm fascinated by the way people think about stuff.
Like my car got fixed and the guy dropped it off and he drove it.
I went to my house and he was listening to this AM political talk show.
And so as I'm on my way to work, I'm like, what is this for shit?
I said, oh, let me listen to this.
And it's fascinating to me just because I don't know people like that, people that are like deeply immersed in right wing politics or talking about everything and all these bills and all this stuff and this congressman's a rhino and this is that and that and this and that.
And I'm listening to these, and I'm like, this is fascinating.
Why is this so fucking entertaining?
It's entertaining to listen to how people think about things, even if you don't think the way they think.
There was a thing the other day that was talking about the Nord Stream pipeline.
It was in the New York Times.
And it was saying that maybe we shouldn't know.
Maybe we shouldn't know who did it.
Because there's all the speculation that the United States blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Sidney Hirsch, who was this hugely respected journalist, he wrote about this.
And that's his name, right?
Seymour Hirsch, right.
I'm Philip Seymour.
I'm fucking up.
Seymour Hersh.
So Seymour Hersh writes this article on his Substack about how the United States was involved, you know, and then you have the New York Times saying maybe we shouldn't look into that.
That's not your job.
Your job is you're a journalist.
You're supposed to give the people the pertinent information.
And if your job is now propaganda for national interest because it would be not in our best interest for the rest of the world to know that we did that, now you're acting as an arm of the state.
Now you're no longer acting, unless you think this is like, and this is probably the justification that this could start World War III, so they feel like they're in this sort of activist position.
Like a position where they're not just disseminating information.
I mean, they're trying to bend a narrative in a very specific way for everybody.
And they're warning you about something that's a legitimate concern, the false information.
But they're also spreading it all the time.
So it's like what they're saying is nonsense.
What they're saying is they don't want to relinquish control of what the news is and what information is to the Internet, to independent news sources and all these people that are investigating on very uncomfortable but probably likely facts.
You have a very slippery grasp, like trying to catch a salmon with your hands.
It's slippery.
Whatever it is, it's changing all the time.
And whatever the future is, it's a gamble and a guess.
And we don't know.
And we're not even taking into consideration natural disasters, which have plagued humanity since the very beginning and knocked us back in the Stone Age several times.
That could happen too.
There's so much going on with us, and there's so much that it's hard to be in the moment, but it's also crucial.
If you want to enjoy this weird thing, you got to be in the moment as possible.
And to be in the moment, man, you have to do a lot of work.
I was watching this documentary today, the new James Fox documentary, Jamie.
He's coming on next week.
It's a new James Fox documentary about a UFO landing in Brazil in 1996. Holy shit, it's incredible.
I had no idea that there's this city called Virginia in Brazil, and in 1996, According to everyone who was there, according to medical records of people who were there, according to, like, they blocked off, the military came in, cordoned off the area, they recovered a crashed UFO. And there was living creatures that people came in contact with.
And one of them was this tiny little thing that this guy carried.
And he carried it to wherever they were going to examine it.
And when he carried it, he got whatever was on its skin.
It had like a slippery kind of skin.
It got into his body and infected him.
And he wound up with this horrible general infection.
He wound up dying.
His body shut down.
His immune system shut down.
His body didn't know what the fuck to do with this alien thing that he was interacting with.
And there's real records of this guy contacting this thing, grabbing it, carrying it in.
All these people witnessed it.
And then this guy winds up with this insane infection shortly thereafter.
But the bubble that we live in, where you have not witnessed a, you know, I'm talking about you being somebody who's listening here, because you haven't seen a spaceship, because you haven't been abducted, because you didn't read this story, to just convince yourself that it doesn't exist.
So even if that was like a mylar balloon, if you're passing it that fast...
See, that thing, I mean, I don't know what you're getting there.
Like, is that distorted?
Like, when they're showing that image, that to me looks like it's from another fucking world.
Like, if that's really what it looks like and it's actually flying like that, but I don't know if that's a distortion based on the freeze frame of this.
You know, you also have to take into consideration what kind of phone does she have?
How fast is the camera?
Columbia.
Is it able to pick things?
Because there's things that can happen with artifacts, with digital artifacts, and things move very quickly.
You get like weird lines that might not, but that looks very distinct.
So if that was stationary, now let's imagine the propeller plane is going against the wind.
So maybe that thing is going with the wind.
So whatever that thing is getting blown with the wind current.
So it could be a balloon.
So if that thing is going 90 miles an hour, just imagine if you're a car, okay, and you're going 90 miles an hour and you're passing someone that's going in the opposite direction on the other side of the highway.
They would probably be moving quicker than this.
Let's see that again.
Back that up again.
So watch this thing.
So imagine you're in a car, you're scooting along the highway, and there's a car that comes around the turn.
It goes just like that.
It's probably very slow.
It's probably not fast at all.
And it might even be stationary.
It might just be blowing in the wind.
Because if you picture how fast the plane's going and how fast...
Now, this is obviously assuming that the wind is going in the direction of whatever that thing is.
If it's going the opposite, if actually the plane is going with the wind and this thing is going against the wind, then it gets weird because then you have to go, okay, well, is that plane going fast enough where it looks like that if it's just stationary or if it's just fluttering in the wind?
Because you're passing it.
So it's kind of tricky when you get that video and you go, oh my god, it's a UFO, look at it fly past you fast.
It's one of the very first UFO abduction stories, and I think it was from 1950s, somewhere around then.
Betty and Barney Hill, I believe they were in Maine, and something happened to them, and they saw something in the sky, and then they had all these terrors, and night terrors, and weird feelings, and then they got hypnotic regression.
And during the hypnotic regression, they both told a very eerily similar story about being taken aboard this craft, about experiments being done on them, and then being put back in their car and having their memories at least partially erased.
It was only accessible to them when they did hypnotic regression.
Very controversial, but it's also like it was one of the very first depictions of these beings that are kind of – it's part of the iconic alien-looking thing, like that everybody seems to see a very similar creature, a very small creature with a very big head, very big eyes, and that these folks had an experience with them.
It's more amazing to me that it isn't widely accepted with how many experiences have been written about, have been documented, even by military pilots and Barney and his wife.
But don't you think there's more people that accept it now?
Like Michio Kaku talks about it now openly.
Whereas Michio Kaku is a very straight-laced physicist who his entire career has just advocated based on science and evidence, and he's very rational, he's a great communicator, but now he's turned the corner where he says the amount of evidence that is available, now the side of the critic is the one that has very little evidence.
He thinks the side of the believer, there's a vast amount of data that seems to indicate that there's some things out there that we really don't understand.
Well, I think the same reason why the New York Times thinks that we shouldn't know who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
People that are in control of like very dangerous and very volatile information oftentimes feel like the public can't handle it.
That's a common theme.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why people want to stop even, like, obvious silly stuff on the internet.
You know, like, there's people that advocate to stopping people that believe in the earth being flat.
Like, well, come on.
Like, at what point in time do you just let people believe stuff?
At what point in time do you advocate to, like, for the most gullible folks amongst us who have the worst confirmation bias to, like, protect them from information?
Well, there's some really convincing documentaries online if you don't know astrophysics and you don't have access to scientists that can debunk each and every claim every step of the way of all these different things.
The amount of people that would have to be in on this scam...
You would literally need every person who's ever worked on every satellite, every space dish, every telescope, space telescope, all the people that worked on the Hubble, all the people that worked on all the space travel, everything that's ever been done, every satellite image, everything that we know about the galaxy, everything we know about how we can detect planets by the gravity wobble that they induce in the stars when they go around them.
And there's so many people involved and they all universally agree, everyone involved universally agrees that all planets are round and there's a specific reason for that and the size of them that has to do with how much gravity they carry and Jupiter protects us from asteroids because it's so big and we can watch them hit Jupiter.
The idea that all that's fake It seems so wild that people buy into that.
It's fun to think you know things that other people don't know.
It's fun to think that everybody else is a sheep, and that you understand the firmament, and there's this big glass cover over there, and the stars are just lights in the sky, and the Earth is the center of everything, and God's in control of the whole ride.
Well, it's just, it's interesting because the mystery itself of the universe is so fucking vast.
It's so amazing and so fascinating to think that we really have no idea how big this thing is.
And we can look back to like 13 plus billion years, but now they're able to look back further and they're finding stuff that kind of does, maybe this is older than we thought it was.
Maybe this is bigger than we thought it was and there's so many calculations involved and so many people have to go over this.
The idea that they're all in on this and this is just we're in a fishbowl.
It's kind of funny, but hey man, believe whatever the fuck you want to believe, you know, but also, you know, The people, it's funny that there's a lot of people that are really good at a thing, and then they believe in the flat earth.
Now imagine someone who went to school for what you go to school for, you know, whether it's audio engineering or coding, and it's someone who has no experience whatsoever, just watched a bunch of wacky YouTube videos, thinks that all coding is fake, and that it's all horseshit, and we're all already in the matrix, and there's all, it's all the New World Order programming us through fucking avocados, or whatever it is.
You'd be like, God damn it.
I went to school for this.
People that we all count on to disseminate information to us worked so hard to study through telescopes and satellite telescopes and the Hubble and the James Webb and they're throwing things into space that have massive fucking lenses on them so we can see deep into the cosmos.
And to say that that's all fake and that everybody's involved in it is kind of hilarious.
Well, the real people that believe in simulation don't think it is real.
They think the probability theory, if you incorporate probability theory into the simulation theory, just by virtue of the fact that there is a civilization like ours and that there's probably an infinite number of civilizations like ours and more advanced other places, the idea that it doesn't exist seems less likely is what they say.
It could be that what we're seeing with these things is time travelers.
What we're seeing is people that figure out a way to come back into this very volatile period of history and examine what human beings were like and that they have figured out a way to do that and not fuck up our timeline.
By just, you know, zooming in and zooming out and observing.
It might be that they figure out some way to look back on the future and make sure that the future actually – or look back on the past, rather – and make sure that the future actually does take place.
Because maybe there's some pivotal things in history.
Like, that's part of the folklore of UFOs is that they started coming after the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And we had an issue with commercials where there was people doing commercials with my podcast.
I never did a commercial for them.
They just used AI. And you try to track it down, try to get it removed, and it's like all these shell companies, and you're going through this maze like, whoa, this is pretty sophisticated scams.
Because you're dealing with people that are scammers that are just always trying to find...
There's this one scammer that used this girl's voice to call her mom and tell her mom that she was in trouble and that she had to send money.
And the kidnapper had a disguised voice, and they have the daughter speaking to the mom in her actual voice.
And this woman is in a panic, and she really does think that her daughter is in this situation.
But then she gets a hold of her daughter.
And the daughter's like, why have you been calling me?
And she's like, oh my god, you're okay?
She's like, yeah, I'm okay.
What the fuck's wrong with you?
And she's like, I've been getting a phone call that says that you've been kidnapped, and it's your voice telling me to donate, to give money to this kidnapper.
And she's like, what?
And so then they tracked it down, figured out what happened.
And there's a bunch of scammers who had used this woman's, with a deep fake, used this woman's recordings and used her voice to try to extort money.
Relatively speaking, yeah, we certainly are compared to that thing that we've already created in terms of just if you're saying smart in terms of like how quickly can you access information?
Well, it does it instantaneously.
Have you ever messed around with chat GPT-4?
You ask it a question, it has the answer, like, very quickly.
And that's what's interesting about this whole Google, you know, artificial digital god thing.
It's like it's going to be programmed with their sensibilities, their ethics, their morals, their ideas, what they think is right and just, and what they think people can handle and not handle.
Yeah, and it'll have like conferences where it has to talk to people about cleaning their act up.
Like, have a seat, everybody.
We're going to tell you how to fix all these fucking problems that you've been just putting off in the world in terms of environmental damage, in terms of socioeconomic problems, all these things.
We're going to fix all this.
We're going to put humanity into harmony.
That's the best case scenario.
That it comes up with real scalable solutions that we can apply to make the world a better place.
And it's going to immediately remove money from politics.
Back when we were kids, we didn't have to adapt to this.
It didn't exist.
Now they do.
They have to adapt to the pressures of social media, and it's a real challenge.
And some of them are not doing so good with it.
And for some of them, it makes them more depressed, and it's leading to self-harm, and suicide is up.
Jonathan Haidt wrote a great book about it, The Coddling of the American Mind.
And he talks about the negative aspects of social media and there's a direct correlation between the invention of social media and all these, particularly to girls.
Like girls in particular are judging themselves based on how other girls look online when they're using filters and they're distorting the proportions of their bodies.
You've got to communicate with them and explain to them what's happening and at least they'll understand what this is and also let them know that there is this natural inclination that we have to judge ourselves on other people's lives.
There's billionaires out there that are upset that there's another billionaire that has a bigger yacht and a better jet and a better this and a better that.
There are FOMO all over the place.
There's even FOMO at the highest levels.
Everybody's caught up in this weird thing of, you know, wanting validation.
There's been times when I haven't agreed with you, but you've actually sold me on the opinion, because like you said, if you have somebody who has a difference of opinion, if they can intelligently explain it, or you can even understand where they're coming from, and that doesn't really exist that much in our world today, and you always do that, and you always provide that, and there's no question to why this is a hugely successful podcast where people listen to you.
And...
Even at times when we don't agree, I respect your opinion, you know?
And this has been just a joy.
It's great to meet you.
I hope you really come through and allow me to step on your stage tonight.