Comedian Chad Daniels reveals how Google and Pandora exploit artists’ content—from ads tied to his private data to lawsuits over comedy royalties—while Joe Rogan exposes music industry scams like Columbia Records’ inflated sales and the infamous "MC Hammer clause." They debate AI’s ethical use, from Sinatra singing Eminem to Scarlett Johansson’s voice lawsuit, and question viral content’s legality. Daniels’ frustration over uncredited album use mirrors Rogan’s concerns about monetized privacy breaches, like Alexa surveillance or ad fraud schemes. The episode underscores how creative labor faces systemic exploitation, even as tech and media blur consent and ownership. [Automatically generated summary]
I think they're probably the best about that because they're the first company that actually stepped in and said, we're going to stop companies from being able to share your information.
They're the first.
What exactly did they do, Jamie?
They made some sort of a big deal.
It was an advertising move and a lot of people got pissed off at them for it.
I feel like that was a way that they made artists seem more popular than they were.
I think that was part of their deals.
They could say they sold, you know, millions and millions of records.
I also think it was probably a way that they could rip artists off Because they could say, we lost all this money on Columbia.
They could factor it in and say, I know it seems like you sold a million copies, but actually 400,000 of them are Columbia, and nobody's paid for them.
I remember it was, like, the most extravagant house.
He had, like, this super expensive marble that was being brought in, and, you know, and then they just, I guess they pulled the rug out from under him.
Yeah, those dirty bastards.
I don't know the whole story behind the MC Hammer thing, but they for sure...
So you had all these royalties coming in, and then all of a sudden, there was a bunch of estates, like the Robin Williams estate, I think maybe George Carlin.
They were like, hey, we should be getting more money for this, because it's 50-50 split.
But songwriters are getting a writer credit and a performance credit.
And so they wanted comics to do that.
But that doesn't really make sense because comedians are like, I'm not using your bits.
Right.
And so you wouldn't get a writing credit for my performance.
Okay, so instead of like an artist that didn't write their song, the comics are like, no, we deserve to get paid twice because we created the entire content.
The problem is when you're starting out, you say things in a very specific way, and that might not be the best way to say that bit, but that's the way you're kind of stuck saying it.
Even today, I'm working on a new one, and I'm like, I don't know about this.
I feel like there's another way to say this, and I'm just banking on the way that I've been saying it over and over and over again, and maybe I should just abandon it and let it sit there for a bit and come back to it.
They're probably working in the back of your head subconsciously, too, because even though you're not doing comedy for three months, you're still probably thinking, in three months I'm going to do comedy.
Yeah, like if you're the piano piece, if you can't figure it out, you play it before you go to bed a bunch of times, and then all of a sudden the next morning you wake up and you're like, fiddle-a-doo.
Yeah, but even the creation of an idea is so mysterious.
I mean, that's why people invoke the concept of the muse.
You know, that's the Steven Pressfield, he like swears by it.
The War of Art book is all about the muse, about summoning the muse when you write.
There's something weird going on, I'll tell you that, because it seems like they just like enter into your head like a photon, like some shit from space, just doot, all of a sudden it's in there, and like, oh, that was an idea.
And even though it's your idea, like I take credit for writing, like I'll take credit for fixing jokes, I'll take credit for like going up, but I always feel like I can't really take credit for the original idea.
The original idea is almost like this little gift.
Like, you see something, or somebody's doing something, and you go, oh shit, and that sparks something, and you just go, alright, I gotta write this down.
It's one of the only art forms where almost everybody writes their own stuff.
Like, if you think about musicians, there's a lot of musicians who write their own music, and they're kind of revered, right?
Musicians, when you go to see a musician, like a singer-songwriter, and they write their own stuff, and you sit there, and you're like, wow, this person crafted this in their mind, and practiced it alone, and You know, there's something, like, magical about that.
But you can go see, like, a really talented singer that has writers that write for them.
And they're great, too, but you don't feel the same, you know?
I was reading that some people have a thing in their head where when they're talking to someone with an accent, to make that person feel more comfortable, they start to speak in the accent without even knowing.
Yeah, I mean when I was a kid, I would switch accents like when I moved to new places.
I realized I only lived in Boston for like six years and I was 19 and I was on television for this thing that I did and I heard myself on TV and I was like, ew!
Yeah, the best place to do stand-up because to develop there like you're you are that treadmill is going you gotta hop on you gotta move get moving Everybody's moving nobody in the audience has any attention span.
They don't want to hear you dilly-dally and Pontificate up there.
You've got to start the car up, let it run, heat the inside to defrost the windshield, get the fucking scraper.
And then you're out there on a fucking skating rink.
Your street's a skating rink, so you have to drive five miles an hour, and you have to make sure that you hit the brakes way before the car in front of you, or you're going to cause a pileup.
In Tibet, I don't know which religion, I don't know what they're practicing, but they have this ritual called the Tibetan Sky Funeral.
And instead of burying people, what they do is they chop them up and they feed them to vultures.
Yeah, and this graphic video of this online because it's like this big ritual.
So this graphic video of these dudes with these like giant cutting boards and fucking cleavers hacking up people and there's a swarm of vultures all around them.
So they're hacking up body parts and then these vultures are just devouring these human beings.
Though, I mean, look, nobody wants their loved one to be reduced to meat, you know, but is it better that you're taking your loved one and you're pumping them filled with some toxic chemical that makes it so that they'll never, never rot?
You can exhume them years later and find fentanyl traces and shit.
And if you believe that this person was murdered, do a better job now.
How much time do you need?
You know, do it and film it and get all your...
I guess maybe.
Remember that HBO show, Autopsy?
Do you ever remember that show?
There's a great show by this guy dr. Michael badden and dr. Michael bad would always catch like Husbands that poison their wives secretly or wives that have poisoned all their husbands and people that kill people like in secret sneaky ways and gotten away with it And then he gets on the case and he finds it's like really crazy crazy examples one of them was this one guy and After his wife had died,
I don't even know if it was his wife, it was maybe his girlfriend, but he kept buying cases of perfume and no one could figure out why this guy was doing this, but he left his wife in the bed and never reported that she was dead and kept fucking her and put like a mask on her and then eventually put like some artificial vagina down there and the perfume,
he was pouring perfume on her to mask the decay And so eventually, finally, they caught him, but they got these images of what used to be his wife with, like, a mask on the face, and there was clothes on what's left of this body, and then there's this, like, tube where the vagina is, and this fucking psycho was banging her corpse and, like, passing out from the smell and just...
Cases of perfume.
This dude was just pouring perfume all over her corpse.
My daughter has a friend who her boyfriend's sister died and she's getting into makeup and hair for a living and they asked her to do the makeup and hair of the dead sister.
But trees definitely live well off of fertilizer when it comes from dead animals.
Yeah, they eat what's there.
They take it in, suck it up.
Which is what fertilizer is.
Which is why our food sucks.
Because we give them fake food.
We basically feed our processed food processed food.
Right?
Because nitrogen is what, you know, we take nitrogen and a bunch of other bullshit chemicals and we pour it on this dead topsoil so that these poor corn can survive.
And then we eat the corn and there's like no nourishment.
Yeah, I guess there's that one dude that used to live by a bridge, and he would go out and talk guys off the ledge, and so, I mean, I guess maybe that is.
He's one of the rare guys that lived, and he said as he jumped, he'd realize what a horrible mistake he made, and he wanted to take it back, but he couldn't.
And he lived, but he was all fucked up, but lived a happier life.
Like, was thankful that he was alive, which is kind of crazy.
Just the one line that you've got to do, okay, please?
Yes, sir.
Okay?
Foul ball, a male hygiene spray.
You know, sometimes below the waterline you could reek.
That's why I need new foul ball.
Something to part-bearer thing.
I had it upside down.
Sorry!
This is fabulous.
I couldn't believe it.
Probably this can's too cold.
Would you do the line now, just to introduce the one line, okay?
Yes.
Hello.
I'm Salton Heston.
You know, I have very few Jewish friends, if any.
But I'd like to say, won't you please help support the United Goyim College Fund?
Help learn a child to eat hot dogs this year, mayonnaise and corned beefs.
Can we get another actor in, please?
Howard, give me a chance, please.
I need this.
He's gonna say!
You're not gonna do it.
I'm gonna cut camera.
You gotta do it online now.
Just...
All right?
Can we hear it, please?
Okay.
You know, what I would have loved to have seen, actually, is if they could have combined and dropped off funeral and the Olympics and had him in the bobsled run.
All right, I'm ready, Harb.
All right, can we get it now?
Yes, sir, I think we can.
Do you want me to hold the cue card?
No.
Yeah, I can.
Okay.
The one that says, now we're doing commercial.
Okay.
Storm, Storm, that's a German name, isn't it?
Storm.
You sound like a dog.
I love that old Storm.
Come here, boy.
Hey, off the leg.
We're ready now.
Here we go.
I'm ready to say that line hard because I love you.
I love you for the man that you are.
An incredible man.
More than just one night.
A man who can, I don't know, make you realize, ouch.
Who are you?
I'm ready now.
Okay.
You're ready.
Thank you, Mr. Williams.
Thank you, Howard.
Yes, Howard Storm is now directing Comer...
Commercials.
Again, I can get it this time.
Yeah, once more.
Hi.
I'm Jack Nicholson, and you know, Howard Storm is directing goddamn commercials.
It's incredible that he can find a camera small enough to work with, but God bless him for trying.
His first commercial was Billy Barty on a footstool.
You know, you could excuse someone for a lot of things.
You don't, I don't know how his brain worked.
Obviously, he had like mental problems, which wound up, there was a lot of physical problems that wound up contributing to his suicide.
But depression was part of that too.
But, it's like, you have to also put it in context.
There wasn't anybody like him back then.
There was Jonathan Winters who he took inspiration from who a lot of people forgot about.
Jonathan Winters was like really weird like that.
He would do really weird crazy stuff and act like just like different characters and just wouldn't be there and just would hold on to it and people would like panic and they wouldn't know what to do.
So I think he took a lot of inspiration from Jonathan Winters who's an amazing talent too.
I think the real deal was like a deeply depressed person that the reason why they were so good at getting people entertained is because they needed so much more than the average person just to hit like a baseline.
You know, I think when people are super depressed and then they use comedy as like a way to just like a drug to just get them like Richard Jenny apparently was only happy when he's killing and And then when he got off stage, he was depressed.
So back then in the 1980s and 90s, like what the thing was, was you would graduate into movies, like a Jim Carrey, or into TV like a Seinfeld and you have your own show.
He always ate, like, clean, organic food, drank water, no booze, fuck you, you know, up in the morning, always running, always calisthenics, always was shredded, never gained weight in between fights, even today.
I had him on the podcast today, like, a couple months ago.
Just crime and violence in the worst neighborhood in Brooklyn.
He lived in Bed-Stuy, right?
So, Brownsville, I think, originally, in Bed-Stuy.
Terrible neighborhoods.
Real bad.
You know, a lot of crime, a lot of violence.
And then at 13 years of age, he gets adopted by this guy, Customato, who's one of the greatest boxing minds of all time.
And he's also a hypnotist.
So from age 13 on, he's hypnotizing Mike and telling Mike he's the greatest of all time.
He's the greatest of all time.
He's going to be the greatest heavyweight the world has ever seen.
And then on top of it, you have crazy genetics.
Mike, I had Teddy Allison.
He told me that when Mike was 13, he was knocking out grown men.
And they wouldn't believe he was 13. He'd bring them to boxing tournaments.
They're like, how old is that kid?
He goes, 13. He goes, he's fucking 16. He goes, okay, he's 16. He put him in with the 16-year-olds.
He'd knock the 16-year-olds out.
Yeah, he was a freak.
So you have that sometimes, you know, you have kids that just have extraordinary genes and then you have this perfect storm of a very intelligent person who is deeply neglected as a child and then adopted by a genius.
Not just a boxing genius, but a genius in terms of psychology and life and philosophy, and he understood war, and he was a war historian, and he was a boxing historian, and he was also managed by this guy Jim Jeffries, or Jim Jacobs rather, excuse me.
Jim Jacobs had Jim Jeffries tapes, or James Jeffries.
Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey.
He had all the film footage of fighters, some of the greatest boxers of all time.
Willie Pep, Floyd Patterson.
He had all this old footage on reels.
And he was like the biggest collector of old boxing footage.
And Mike was being managed by him.
So Mike would sit there all day and watch Jack Dempsey fight, watch Jack Johnson fight, watch Stanley Greb, watch these old, old killers.
You know, these guys that existed, you know, decades ago and no one gets a chance to see them.
Because, you know, we're talking about 1980. You don't even have VHS tapes, right?
When did they come along?
They were like 82 or something like that, right?
So he's getting, like, this is happening to him in the 70s, like late 70s.
Like, let's make sense of this.
So he's 58, he's a year older than me, and so how old was he when he was 13?
No VHS. So the only way you can see these things is if they put them on television, which they might, but then you have to watch it while it's on TV. You can't rewatch it again.
Jim Jacobs who also did the commentary in a lot of those.
If you watch a lot of those old films, they're black and white and there's no sound.
And they like put in sound later and Jim Jacobs does the commentary.
I know his voice.
And he was a genius, too.
And they had this incredible convergence of all these things that created Mike Tyson in, like, 1986, where people were like, holy shit!
When he would walk out there with no bathrobe and just fucking...
He was a perfect creation of the universe.
Like, the universe, all the factors that would come into play that make something super special.
All came in in his, I mean, to be a boxing champion, it could not have had a better convergence of mind, talent, background, and then the people that were influencing him.
But yeah, I would think hypnotizing anybody before they were aware of what the fuck that means But I don't think hypnotizing is what people think it is either.
I've only been hypnotized once, so I can't speak to what the total potential of what someone can do with hypnosis is.
But you're aware of what's going on.
It's not like you're going to take your clothes off and blow the sky.
It doesn't make any sense.
You're just in a different state of consciousness.
And it's almost like you're allowed to look at things for what they really are versus all this noise that's around most of the ideas in your head.
Where you're blaming other people when you should probably blame yourself when, you know, you were lazy and that's why it went bad and it wasn't like someone else's fault and all that stuff that keeps people on the wrong track, that keeps people drinking too much and gambling too much, all those weird things that are going on in your head, like, you'll get past that and you'll see you.
And you see you for a brief amount of time, and you kind of analyze what it is that's fucking with you.
And then someone who's like a good performance psychologist can implant ideas, like help you implant ideas in your mind of how you're going to approach things from now on.
How are you going to look at things from now on?
I know a lot of fighters use them.
A lot of fighters use.
Hypnotists and performance coaches.
The guy who did it to me is my friend Vinny Shorman, and he does it to a lot of fighters.
I mean, some fighters, there's a thing that happens with some fighters in the midst of a chaotic fight.
They will forget about the game plan and they will just go on instinct and start throwing down and they wind up getting knocked out or something goes bad.
They panic.
I want to say panic, but they don't think straight.
That's the best way to say it.
They're still fighting.
It's chaos.
But you're letting that lizard brain take over.
And you're not sticking to the game plan.
The really good fighters know how, even in these chaotic scrambles, to keep things technical.
Don't do anything that's going to get you caught.
It looks nutty when you're watching it on television.
But if you're watching a tactician like a Max Holloway or a San Hagen or Sean O'Malley, these fighters are very tactical.
Everything they're doing is to elicit a reaction from you and then they have counters based on how you do things and then they start downloading how you're moving and reacting to things and then they'll start plotting and moving.
Anderson Silva was the very best at that.
He would take the first round and he would just be kind of like moving with you and moving with you and then towards the end of the round he started fucking you up.
Well, he was just so smart that he didn't care if people were booing.
And then the UFC would get mad at him.
They'd get mad at him because those performances, even though he's the greatest of all time, at the time he was for sure, in my eyes, he's still in the conversation.
During his time period when he was running shit, still in my book, if not the greatest, one of the greatest of all time, for sure.
He's in the conversation, whatever that, the conversation's so subjective, and I change my opinion on it all the time.
But during that time period, he didn't give a fuck if people were booing.
He didn't care.
So the UFC would get mad at him.
But I was always of the mind that he's doing the 100% correct thing.
He's the best fighter.
And to fight the best, you gotta know when to attack and when not to attack.
And sometimes you don't attack at all.
Sometimes, if he does something out of character and forces it, that was not his style.
So for him to engage in a style that's not his style, then that's stupid.
The smart thing is to fight to the best of your abilities.
And unfortunately, some of those fights were not fun.
But you also get the Vitor Belfort fight from the same guy.
You know, you get the Okami fight, you get the Forrest Griffin fight, you get all those insane knockouts, those highlight reel knockouts.
There's a thing about performing in front of so many people with such high stakes, and if you've never experienced that before, the first time you ever fight for a championship fight, it's so crazy.
You see it in guys' faces sometimes.
You see the weight of it on them.
They're like, fuck, this is so heavy.
There's so much anxiety.
You just can't wait to get in there and get it.
And once it gets going, Then you're fine.
Then you're just going on instincts.
Then you're going on training, and then you're fighting.
But it's the buildup and the thinking and the anticipation and the anxiety.
He's used to that.
He's done that 13 times.
He defended the middleweight title, I believe, more than anyone ever.
But also, there's a thing about a guy like a Charles Barkley, or a guy like you, it's like you don't really have the time to dedicate to a thing like golf to really get great at it.
It's the same thing as playing pool.
The great pool players, they play eight hours a day.
Eight hours a day.
If you want to play like a Shane Van Boning level, you want to play like a Fedor Gorst level, you have to play eight hours a day.
They play eight hours a day.
They don't fuck around.
They're so in the groove all the time that if you're like a casual player, you just can't find that groove.
And they don't want to ever let that groove go.
They're in that groove all day long.
All day long.
They wake up in the morning and they start thinking about running balls.
They start thinking about putting English on balls.
If you want to play golf like a really great golfer, those fucking guys play every day.
Because if I have a night off and I can play for like five, six hours, like around four hours in, I start really getting the groove.
I start feeling it.
But it's like inconsistent.
It comes and goes.
But if you play with a great player and you watch them do it, they just never get out of the groove.
They're always there.
They very rarely miss.
They very rarely miss position.
Their cue ball's perfect.
It's always moving exactly where they want it to go.
And if it's not, they play safe.
And you watch and you're just like, what?
This is a feel of the movement of the balls that's only possible if you're so finely tuned to it that you're playing every day.
This guy, Fedor, he just won the World Championships.
He's a friend of mine.
He's been on the podcast before.
We were having a conversation on the phone about Q's because he had switched.
He was with this company Q-Tech and then he switched this company White Carbon.
And it was months ago.
And I was saying, we were talking about, you know, different approaches he uses and different equipment.
He's like, I'm still adjusting to this Q. I go, really?
I go, have you had it for like how long now?
He's like four months.
He goes, well, he goes, I'm pretty much there.
He goes, but I'm about three or four percent off.
3 or 4% off.
3 or 4% off.
This guy's a fucking robot.
His understanding of where he should be versus where he is, he wants to know exactly how much pressure to apply on that cue to make that ball dance exactly the way.
He's like, it's a little off.
He knows it's a little off.
I did it just right, but it went there instead of there.
And they have academies that teach people how to play.
There's a few really good teachers in this country, but there's no national system where you have a university that you go to to learn how to play snooker.
They have that.
At one point in time, there was real money in snooker in the UK. Like real money.
But what Three Cushion Billiards is, is this giant-ass table that has no pockets, and you have three balls.
And it's usually two white balls and a red ball, or two red balls and a white ball.
And see, right here, they do yellow sometimes, too, now.
So this guy has to hit a ball and then it has to go three cushions and then hit the second ball.
So it's all about understanding angles.
See if you can find a video of someone doing it.
It's fucking boring!
See, this is the game.
So he's got to hit a ball, and then it's got to go three cushions and hit another ball.
But what it really does is if you learn this game, it teaches you how billiard balls move around a table, so it really helps you play better position for pocket billiards, and it helps you learn how to play safe better and how to kick at balls better.
And you appreciate the athleticism that you have to have, the cardio that you have to have to be running back and forth and back and forth and sprinting and sideways and, you know, ducking and dodging and...
My kids both played soccer, junior and senior year, and it was great because I don't know anything about it, and it's the only sport I wouldn't yell at.
Because I didn't want people to go, that's fucking wrong, dude.
I got a rental car once because my car was in the shop.
He took the keys, made a copy of the keys, and then when I brought that rental car back, had me drive him there, and I didn't know it, he stole the car and then drove to Las Vegas because the cops were looking for him for writing bad checks.
Yeah, I remember my first exposure to comedy was probably, the actual stand-up comedy was probably Bill Cosby, or Bill Cosby record.
Because my parents had a Bill Cosby record, and they had Cheech and Chong, and I think they might have had a George Carlin one too, because everyone had records back then, because there was nothing on TV, and so you'd sit around and you'd listen to records.
You know, so we listened to Cheech and Chong when I was a little kid.
I was probably like eight or nine or something like that.
I was like, this is so funny.
And then when I was in high school, I got a hold of some Richard Pryor cassettes.
And me and my girlfriend were in my bedroom just howling, laughing at Richard Pryor.
Like, this is so crazy.
What he's saying is so crazy.
Because this is like, at the time, we're talking, I was in high school in 81, so this was probably like 83, something like that.
And so, in 1983, Richard Pryor was the king.
This was like when he was doing Live at the Sunset Strip.
And we were in the movie theater, and I'll never forget this, because this is the first time I'd ever experienced anything like this.
I'd never seen someone do stand-up comedy for a long time.
I had only seen, like, a guy do some jokes on The Tonight Show.
You know, like a real, like, cut-and-dry, set-up punchline, five-minute, all right, that was terrific, come sit on the couch.
And the comic would sit there, and I would tell you about the zoo.
You know, and so that was my exposure to comedy.
But in the theater, I remember, I'll never forget this, sitting in the theater, watching Live on the Sunset Trip, and looking at the audience, and people were moving around.
I remember this guy was holding his stomach, and he was slapping the chair, and his wife was slapping him.
There was a guy named Bob Woods who was a legend on Long Island.
He was this big guy.
This big, like, jolly guy.
And he was hilarious.
And he was a legend in Long Island.
And to this day, I'm upset that I never got a chance to see him live.
Because all the comics from that day, they always tell me, Bob Woods, Bob Woods.
This is like the early 80s.
So I think when I came along, I don't think I got to New York until 90. 90 or 91. And I think he'd already stopped.
This is Bob Woods.
He was a character, man.
Give me some volume.
unidentified
Let me introduce myself.
Here I am, Mr. Cholesterol.
The Incredible Bulk.
Hungry Jack.
A man called Horse.
Sir Lunch-A-Lot.
Chef Boy, are you fat?
Pizza on Earth, goodwill towards manicotti, rebel without a waistline, strawberry fields for breakfast, Lord of the Ringdings, the Earl of Sandwich, the Prince of Wales, and the Little House on the Prairie all rolled into one.
What can I tell you, folks?
What can I tell you?
I'm a fat fucking guy!
Boom, boom, bring some food to my room so we can eat it all night, keep the Brioche in sight.
And I woke up this morning, I got myself a ham hock!
I think it was one of those things where, see, let's find out what the specifics of it are.
Because there was another one in, I believe, Vancouver, where a comedian was getting heckled by these lesbians.
And then he starts making fun of them for being lesbians, saying a bunch of really rude things.
And that guy got fined, too.
Like a large number.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Canada does not have freedom of speech.
It's not the same as the United States.
It doesn't have a First Amendment.
They have hate crime laws.
So they have weird stuff.
This is why Jordan Peterson, way back in 2016, was telling them, you cannot have compelled speech laws.
Canadian who mocked disabled child singer did not breach limits of free speech.
That's not Mike Ward though.
Case pitted Quebec comedian Mike Ward against former child singer.
Oh, that must be the child singer that's sick.
Did not breach limits of free speech.
So it went to the Supreme Court.
So this is 2021. When did we have him on?
It was definitely way before that because it wasn't in Texas.
So he must have finally won.
Under the 5-4 split decision.
Wow.
Four people said fuck him.
Fuck your joke.
The top court ruled Friday while comedian Mike Ward's act ridiculed Jeremy Gabriel, a young man with Treacher Collins Syndrome.
syndrome.
He was chosen as a target not because of a disability, but because of his fame, which is true.
In its ruling, the court found that Ward's jokes did not seek to incite others to mock Gabriel and he cannot be blamed for the actions of Gabriel's classmates and others who parroted the jokes." See, folks, this is what happens when you try to be too nice.
You can't be too nice.
You can't go that far.
You gotta let people say things that are offensive.
If you don't, then the only way to enforce that is totalitarianism.
You start locking people in jail.
I know you want people to be a better person.
They should be encouraged to be better people, but you can't do that.
You can't fucking force people to say things or not say things.
But it's like that thing of like you try to set up society where you prevent people from being mean.
But the problem is people are going to be mean.
And the only way to prevent people from being mean is to really ostracize people who are mean and then have everybody else learn from that and like learn from the way you talk about these people that are mean.
And then we all kind of grow together.
You can't have laws that enforce your opinion of what someone can or cannot be allowed to say, because then you never get that guy's joke.
Your friend, sick, because I'm fucking my sister.
You don't get that.
You don't get that joke, because that's illegal.
So, like, then you don't get funsies, because that's just funsies.
It's like these kids now can take a chair from the back of the room, throw it at the teacher when he's not looking, and that teacher just has to sit there and take it.
Well, yeah, especially when you get into high school things get very very dangerous very very very dangerous because people are starting to get strong and They're aggressive and these men these young men have testosterone for the first time in their life So all of a sudden you're 13 and then boom the factory opens Yahoo and you start growing you got a mustache now now you're 14 and 15 and then you get this fucking loser teacher and This teacher's talking shit, and you want to fuck this teacher up.
And you know if you do, you'd be a hero for the rest of the class.
You'd be a legend for all your boys.
If this teacher's talking shit, you just grab his tie and box him in the face.
But if you were your dad's dad, that would have never happened.
You know?
You know what I'm saying?
Like, you know, we have the good fortune of understanding the mistakes of those who came before us.
And even, like, I mean, even thinking about, we can't even put our mind in what it must be like to be a kid that grows up in the south side of Chicago in 2024 where you're seeing people shot every weekend.
You can't put yourself into that.
So to expect that child to come out of that environment and then go to Yale and be fine with everything.
Be fine when he's heard bullets.
Whizzed by his head.
He's seen his friends get shot in the street.
He's seen drive-bys.
He's seen all that.
He's seen drug dealers rapping in the streets holding guns and smoking weed in front of everybody and street takeovers.
Have you seen that from the time you were a child?
But they're in a war in an American city, which is crazy.
But if you look at the death toll of people killed...
In Afghanistan during the height of the war, it's comparable to the people killed in South Side of Chicago.
I would imagine the people in the South Side of Chicago, more people get killed.
I think what happens in war, of course, is, depending upon the war, of course, but sometimes there's large amounts of debt, like in Gaza, if you can call it a war.
Like, there's large amounts of deaths, and large amounts in one day, right?
Which, in gang violence, you get it over the weekend.
You know, this guy got shot, that guy got shot, it's cumulative.
But I bet it's close.
And I believe it's higher.
I believe the death toll for the South Side of Chicago is as high or higher than Afghanistan at the height of the war.
I have people that will go through one of my albums, and then they'll actually make it into a sketch where they play all of the parts, me, my children, whatever it is that I'm talking about.
And then they put that out and tag me in it, and it's like, I don't know, they make money off of it.
I think Marques Brownlee was bringing it up that he pays a company to transcribe his videos for YouTube, upload as a transcription so people can look at it in closed captioning and whatnot.
There are now companies that exist that can rip that transcription off of YouTube.
People who lie about plastic surgery and you go and look at that.
Oh my goodness.
You're a fucking liar.
And then you get sucked in.
And it's like next, next, next, next.
So each one you click, they get a new click.
It's not all on one page.
It's in multiple pages.
There's multiple hits.
And then they're getting the ad revenue off of that.
We had a guy back in the day that went to jail because he rigged something so that every time you went to his website, if you afterwards bought something from Amazon, it would credit his account.
Like you went through his website, his website link to get Amazon.
But this guy went to jail because he was making money that really wasn't his money.
So instead of someone saying, hey, I don't know if they still do this, but the way it used to do it, they would say, hey, if you want to support this podcast, use our Amazon link.
On our website, and we get a cutback from Amazon every time you use it.
And so they would do it as a way to support, and then it would also, it would probably facilitate some impulse purchases that maybe you would never make before.
Like you go, oh, this guy's got a great podcast.
I'm going to help him out by going to Amazon.
Oh, I can use socks.
And then you start buying things off of Amazon.
It's so easy.
And then, you know, so this guy would do that.
If you would go to that Amazon, even if you didn't buy anything, he would put a cookie in your computer.
Now that I'm thinking about it, when we played it here, it was different because she was the voice of her, right?
So she was the voice that Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with.
But the clip that we played, it was her like bedtime talking, you know, like he was laying in bed and I think she had like more of a raspy time to go to sleep voice.
Whereas in, you know, the regular ChatGPT implementation is like Scarlett at the office.
I think it's highly likely that the universe is way stranger than we think it is.
Way stranger.
And I don't even know if it's as conventional as a thing gets in a ship and flies here from another place.
I think it might be interdimensional traveling.
It might be something that's...
I've always been here.
There's that thought because there's so many instances of things like what we think of that are in like the Bhagavad Gita and these ancient texts that are thousands and thousands of years old and they're talking about things that fly in the sky, flying chariots, flying things that have gods in them.
Some of these things that people see streaking across the sky, they see something extraordinary, it lights up the sky, and then mythology gets attached to that, right?
And then people, you know, ten years from now tell that story.
And then other people tell the story that's told to them by the people that were there, and then that gets a little twisted up like a game of telephone.
There's some of that too.
But then there's also uniformity.
There's uniformity to the descriptions of the movements of the ships and what these things do and why they're interested in us and what they say.
It gets very weird.
It gets very weird to the point it's like, okay, if this is a mass illusion, if this is a creation of the mind, like Carl Jung thought it was a creation of the mind, thought it was some sort of an illusion that people conjure up in their mind, but it's just like a common illusion.
But then there's also like physical evidence of these things.
The physical evidence is when things get real weird.
Because they're like, if you're telling the truth, then this isn't totally an illusion.
Or maybe it's all those things.
Maybe it's total bullshit, lies, people with myths that make up myths about comets and natural disasters and all kinds of other stuff, and also interdimensional beings.
Occasionally.
And then also things that have always been here.
Occasionally.
And then also things from another planet.
Occasionally.
I mean, all things are, it's not binary, right?
It's not either UFOs or bullshit or, you know, they're real.
Yeah, there could be a lot of things going on simultaneously, and we're concentrating on one.
Some of them I 100% am convinced are government drones that work on some incredibly sophisticated propulsion system that probably doesn't have a person in it, but they probably can move at fantastic speeds using some new novel propulsion system that they don't want to release to the public.
weaponize it yet.
So they're probably flying these things around and saying rates of speed, they just can't put guns on them yet.
They can't figure out how to shoot people with them, so they're just fucking with them.
And then I think that's the reason why they keep getting sighted over these military spaces.
I think they try them out on the troops just like they try out vaccines in the troops, just like they try out burn pits.
You know, they didn't test burn pits to make sure that people weren't going to get sick if they're just breathing in toxic fumes from all the garbage from thousands of troops.
No, they just did it.
You know, I think they probably do the same thing with everything.
The thing about Bigfoot that's really interesting, though, is that Native Americans have a bunch of different names for them.
There's a lot of names for them, and they don't really have a lot of fake animals.
It's not a common trait in North American culture, in any Native American culture, rather, to worship a bunch of different things or to talk about a bunch of different things that aren't real.
Like, mostly they were talking about real things and then spirits, right?
Like, they would talk about the different spirits of the sky and spirits of the sun and nature.
They're essentially talking about Mother Earth and God and Gaia and nature.
But they didn't have, like, fake animals.
They did have Bigfoot.
There's a lot of Bigfoot that makes you go, I think at one point in time it was real.
I would love if the afterlife, you were just there for an hour, hooked you up to a fucking cord, put everything that happened in there so you know, and then that's out.
If there's ever been a real indication that we're in a simulation, it's like this season of USA is the craziest season that's ever existed.
There's so many twists and turns, so many plots, so many villains, So many incompetent, bumbling fools that you're like, there's no way that lady's a heartbeat away from the president.
There's no way.
There's no way someone is not telling her to stop saying that same thing over and over again.
It looks like if you were gonna have a bumbling person in a movie, like almost like a Comedy of Errors or a Coen Brothers movie about an assassination attempt on a president.
You have this lady, like here, watch what her gun is.
Look, look, she gets her gun out, she tried to put it in there, she couldn't do it, and she's thinking about putting it back in there.
Like, if he turns his head at the last second, and the bullet grazes his ears, if he didn't, it hits the back of his head, and he's dead, and then we fall into chaos, and who knows what the fuck happens?
There's a guy in the prone position on a roof 150 yards away from the former president.
The whole thing's nuts.
The whole thing stinks of either incompetence, or a design or We're in the Matrix.
This is a fucking fake movie.
It seems like almost...
To watch this, the most bombastic and manly of presidents, for lack of a better term, to see him with these two female bumbling Secret Service agents, especially the one, to see that, to see everything happen the way it is, to see that they knew this guy was on the roof, to hear that that guy had pointed his rifle before that at a cop...
So the cop engaged him, he pointed the ride bill, and the cop ran away.
The guy climbed the roof with a ladder.
You can see the ladder.
The whole thing is bananas.
He's 20 years old, and then you find out he was in a BlackRock commercial?
You're like, is this the Black Mirror?
Like, tell me what's going on.
Is this real?
Is this real?
And then Trump goes golfing with a bandage on his ear the next day?
Like, you're seeing this 20-year-old kid, his life is over.
Like, somehow or another, he talked himself into trying to assassinate the president as a lone gunman in Pennsylvania, got on top of a roof, either through sheer incompetence, Or for some other reason, he actually gets a shot off, and the president just moves his head at the right time?
The whole thing is, if it was in a movie, I'd be like, shut the fuck up!
Or maybe he wants him here to expose how crazy our political system really is.
Because the only way we find out how coordinated everything is, whether you're a Trump fan or not, even if you hate Trump, put that aside for a second and just look at how much coordination there is in the media to go after him.
And it exposes like this thing where you have to step back and go, wait a minute, hold on a second.
What's really going on?
Whether you hate that guy or not, hate him.
Hate him.
Think he's a crook.
Hate him.
Think he's a liar.
Hate him.
Don't you think it's weird that they're all in lockstep with the way they talk about him, even with things that aren't true?
Like, especially the Russia collusion hoax that they all talked about for years and years.
I thought it was real.
I thought, like, he colluded with Russia, and that was, like, the crazy thing about him winning the presidency.
Oh my god, he worked with Russia.
Maybe Russia has something on him.
He kept hearing about it, right?
That was just bullshit.
And they went through that for years and years, and then you start going, okay, What else is coordinated where everybody is saying something?
How about the Nord Stream pipeline?
Seymour Hersh says, we blew it up.
Esteemed journalist says, no matter what they say, I'm telling you, this was our doing.
We blew this up.
This wasn't some other country.
This wasn't Russia.
They wouldn't blow up their own pipeline.
We blew it up.
But every newspaper is like, this is bullshit.
This is impossible.
It could not happen.
This was Russian disinformation.
Russian disinformation.
You can hear it about every story.
It's so hard to understand.
What is the motivation to getting these stories out?
Are these narratives created by the real government that runs everything and then tells the news organizations that are in business with them what to say and what to do?
But if Trump wouldn't play the political game, if he wouldn't put the people on the Supreme Court, I know it's his job when he's in there, but if he wouldn't do any of that shit, he's definitely the come out on stage and be like, waving papers, you guys aren't gonna fucking believe this!
Well, he had a very close relationship to the Clintons to the point where he paid them to come to his wedding.
Or his daughter's wedding, or one of those things.
Like, you would pay them, and they would come to weddings and events, and he would go to events.
You know, that was, like, the famous thing that was at the White House Correspondence Center.
Do you remember that?
The White House Press Correspondence Dinner was always supposed to be this thing where comedians would do it, and they would, like, Michelle Wolfe did it one year, fucking crushed it.
You know, he was like saying he knows for sure that Obama came from Kenya, and then there's people that were like examining photoshops of the birth certificate.
It was a crazy conspiracy.
And that was, you know, he was roasting Trump in the audience, and you could see Trump in his head going, okay, I'm gonna fucking run now.
Like, that might have been the thing that got him to run.
Like, legitimately, that's how crazy that guy is.
That one moment where Obama was talking shit to him might be the reason why Trump was like, uh-huh.
I'll fucking show you.
Because you do not want that fucking guy on your bad side.
And the thing about this Trump stuff and just all of the stuff that's happening with social media and AI. The guy who's at the helm...
Of one of the biggest social media networks in the world is Elon Musk Elon Musk said that the odds of us not being in the simulation are in the billions He believes wholeheartedly that we're in a simulation See if you can find him saying that because it's such a nutty quote Because when someone says that you go.
Oh, yeah, maybe but when Elon Musk says that and he says it Definitively.
He says it like with pure confidence, and he's no hyperbole.
He's just stating it like this is something I've analyzed.
This is something I've thought about for a long time.
Well, the argument for the simulation, I think, is quite strong because if you assume any improvement at all over time, any improvement, 1%, 0.1%, just extend the time frame, make it a thousand years, a million years, the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
Civilization, if you count it, if you're very generous, civilization is maybe seven or eight thousand years old, if you count it from the first writing.
So this is on my podcast, he said that, but then there was another interview where he was being questioned, like, what are the odds?
And he said the odds of us not being in a simulation are in the billions.
He firmly believes it.
But it might be what the universe is, which we were talking about how the universe is stranger.
I think the universe is stranger than we think it is.
That might be why.
It might be because it's not totally real or nothing is totally real.
The idea of totally real is not real.
Like, our concept of things being real is, even if you, like, look at quantum physics, right, which I'm definitely gonna butcher, but there's the observer effect.
There's this thing that they do where they look at things on a quantum level, and when you're looking at them and measuring them, they have a different reaction.
There's something that's going on where we're interacting with matter.
Where it doesn't make any sense.
If you get down to the lowest levels of understandable reality, you get into subatomic particles, and then you have spooky action at a distance where these things are somehow or another, they're connected in vast spaces, but they interact with each other instantaneously.
And if you take photons, and photons are quantumly entangled, they figured out how to take some sort of a super sophisticated image of photons that are quantum entangled.
Applying tricks of holography, the researchers were able to read positional information into interference of two separated light waves, recovering enough information to recreate a yin-yang symbol programmed into the photon-generating apparatus.
Yeah, but I don't think they're saying they programmed that into it.
If you see what they're saying, the researchers were able to read positional information in the interference of two separated light waves, recovering enough information to recreate a yin-yang symbol programmed into the photon-generating apparatus.
I think they're saying that they're recreating this symbol based on what's happening.
I don't think they're saying they program it to look like that.
It says, as simple as the yin-yang looks, in this single static image represents a significant leap in measuring numerous quantum states in a short time.
Don't you think that Eric Weinstein would have picked up on that if that's what it was saying?
Go back to what it just said there, because I wanted to read the next...
Isn't quantum all sorts of directions, not just XY? It's a flat image, you know, and it's like all the dimensions, so it's in super space and up and down and left and right.
Individual points in a picture of traditional photography merely register light intensity.
The interference phenomena also registers the phase of the light waves in traditional holography.
A well-described undisturbed reference wave is superimposed with another wave of the same wavelength reflected off a three-dimensional object when a hologram is generated.
Interference occurs as a result of the phase variations between the two waves resulting in a complicated pattern of lines.
That's a lot of words.
Yeah, I don't know what the fuck I just said.
That's the problem.
We're too dumb.
We're too uneducated to really understand what the fuck they're saying.
There's some creative force that absolutely exists, and it's called the universe.
It literally makes all the stars.
It literally makes black holes.
It literally makes carbon-based life forms in Goldilocks zones on planets like ours.
It makes it.
The universe made us.
So if you wanted to find evidence of a god...
The universe is God.
It makes sense that it would be God.
It is everything.
We wanted to be a person.
We wanted to be, like, a guy with rules.
But there are some kind of rules, right?
As human beings, when we interact with each other incorrectly, we feel bad.
When we interact with each other correctly, we get things done together, we spread love, we spread joy, we spread happiness, and that's a lot of the tenets of religion are preaching that.
So it's almost like there's some guidelines that these people who had figured some whisper of what God is out and they wrote it down on these animal skins and they locked them up in a fucking clay pot in Qumran and they found them and deciphered them and that's what it is, right?
That's what the Dead Sea Scrolls are.
Whatever that is, is then literally interpreted, and it's interpreted by zealots, and it's interpreted by people that use it to control people's behavior, and it's interpreted in a manner that controls large populations and And forces people to be subjugated.
Like that is the whole reason why the revolution, when Martin Luther created a phonetic version of the Bible and others were doing it at the same time as well or similar time periods, people were freaking out because now the Bible was available to people that didn't read Latin.
So now the Bible is available in German.
And then guys like Martin Luther were saying, interpret the Bible as you will.
And the priest was like, no, you fucking don't.
We'll fucking kill you, dude.
They're like, you're ruining our whole gig.
Because their whole gig was they were the power.
They were the purveyors of control.
The fucking Pope ran the biggest army in the world at one point in time.
And even, I always say this, sorry if you heard it, but the people that, like, when you, in the Bible, in the beginning there was light.
What the fuck is the Big Bang?
That is the Big Bang.
So maybe they kind of understood some things, but they talked about it.
It was an oral tradition for a thousand years before it was even written down some of these stories.
And some of these stories have origins where they're super similar in other religions, super similar catastrophe tales, super similar, like there's Noah's Ark, which is real similar to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is real, like Thor is real similar to Jesus.
It's like, A lot of, like, real, like, what really happened?
And then when people become a fan of his, because he's got a huge following now because he killed Tony, and then when you go see him live, like the Black Keys came and they did my podcast and they were going to come to the club afterwards and they said, dude, can William Montgomery come?
Is he going to be on stage?
I go, I'll make sure he's there.
I'll call him up.
So he wasn't even scheduled to be on the show.
I called him, I go, William!
Black Keys want to see you.
So he went up there with full confidence in front of a crowd who knew who he was, and he fucking murders.
But I used to see him years ago, and people just didn't know what to make of him.
There was a famous story about a club that booked him and the guy before him It was like this really high-energy guy.
I think the guy actually did like a backflip on stage like something nutty like to close his set out and like super high energy that was the middle act and it was like a lot of hack bullshit and then Hedberg went on after him it was bombing and so he got fucked over like they gave him the middle pay even though he's headlining and they made the other guy headline and He's like, I got a contract.
They're like, fuck you, you bombed.
It was like a big, it was like a war with other comedians.
Stan Hope chimed in.
It was like a lot of shit going on.
But that was a guy that once he found, once people knew who, they would go to see him and he would murder.