Tucker Carlson - Tim Dillon (0:45) Disney World and Disney Adults (9:58) The Life of a Comedian (35:53) Los Angeles in 2024 (1:05:20) Cancel Culture (1:16:49) Tony Blinken Singing in Ukraine (1:52:40) The Worst Tim Dillon Ever Bombed
Tim Dillon dissects Disney World as a symbol of cultural regression, mocking "Disney adults" and their nostalgic escapism while critiquing tech’s homogenization of identity. He ties societal stagnation to Boomers’ hypocrisy—glorifying corporate roles yet dismissing labor—and warns about elite-driven wars like Ukraine, where NATO’s proxy conflicts ignore public apathy. A bombed Long Island fundraiser (frozen yogurt jokes after a cancer death) and a Ukraine bit exposing aid absurdity highlight his unfiltered style, while Russia’s NATO restrictions and agent opportunism reveal the industry’s moral flexibility. The era’s raw free speech may signal decline, but Dillon doubts outright suppression, calling it a "happy medium" of monetized dissent. [Automatically generated summary]
Like, the Little Mermaid is supposed to start you off, but then you go and find other things.
And what's terribly depressing to me, or disturbing, or both, is that you have people that are still as into it as they were when they were five, except they're 40. I think that's a big problem.
Well, societal collapse is, I think, the big connection.
But there's something about being a child forever and a place that tells you you should be a child forever and that it is good to have the qualities of a child forever.
It's kind of like there was a woman who in New Hampshire wanted to open a diaper spa where adults would wear diapers because they have some type of fetish where they like to be in diapers.
And this woman was trying to open it in this tiny New Hampshire town.
And many people in the town got mad at her.
You know, it's very hard to open a small business.
And nobody really wanted that.
And it was a diaper spa.
I was for it because I said, if you make the migrants that are coming into this country work at the diaper spa, they'll just go to Europe.
We just need to get everyone over to the diaper spa.
But I put a lot of the modern Disney World cultural stuff just above the diaper spa where you have people that are going to this place where they feel like children.
I don't know what it is.
I think you should go for your children.
It's an experience for them.
When it becomes about you in any way, I think it's sick.
And there was this really interesting cultural diffusion that happened when you met someone from Louisiana and someone from Seattle, Washington.
Now, I got to be honest with you, I feel like that's less true.
I feel like it's less true because I think everybody's kind of growing up with these same algorithms.
They're being fed the same things.
And when you meet people, they're not as interesting as they once were because you've all kind of had a similar childhood whether you know it or not because you've been fed the exact same stimuli over and over again every day on your phone.
Which, I mean, even leaving aside the potential for controlling people's brains and making them obedient serfs, which does seem like the point to me, it homogenizes everything and makes everyone just sort of flat and boring.
It makes everybody boring, and it's one of the things that, again, you would think that the great promise of technology would be the exact opposite, which is that everybody was going to be more unique or more interesting, but that hasn't happened.
And the idea behind the personal computer was this is your window into the world, but it's also a way to broadcast your own unique qualities and you're you, you're distinct from everyone else.
And then you look at the Apple store and everyone's dressed exactly the same.
Yeah, well, I can't speak for all comedians, but I know a lot of us do travel a lot and a lot of us talk to people.
I've always just been very curious about the world.
So I'm incredibly curious about why things are the way they are, why certain people and certain ideas become popular, why certain things seem to be inevitable, how the society is set up, the things that we know, the things we don't know.
The kind of hidden power structures that we start to realize how enduring they are as we've been older.
You don't realize that when you're young, everything when you're young seems to be...
I remember watching Saturday Night Live as a kid, which was a hilarious show that I loved, and it was Bush and Gore.
It was very funny, and it was these two guys.
We had Will Ferrell, and I forgot.
I think Daryl Hammond did Al Gore, and it was really funny.
You thought that was what the world was.
We have two people.
They have opposing ideas.
We all go vote.
And then one of those people becomes a president for four years.
And then that person enacts an agenda that people either disagree with or agree with.
I read a book called Family of Secrets, which was an interesting book by a guy named Russ Baker and he wrote about the Bush family and it was about Basically, a lot of these events from JFK to Watergate, that he had this alternate understanding of how these events had happened.
He had gone and interviewed lots of people, and he had researched.
I think the book took him about five years.
It came out in, I think, 2007 or 2009, maybe.
And I was reading it.
I was in the mortgage business and it had fallen apart and there was nothing to do.
So we'd all sit in our offices and kind of fuck off because it was nothing to do.
So I was reading this book and it was really- Where did you get it?
And me and a friend were reading it and we each got them.
And I was reading it and I started to analyze things in a way that I never had before.
Basically, it was kind of this light that went off in my head.
And I'm like, well, what if everyone's lying?
You know, what if everyone's not telling the truth?
What would it look like then?
What would it look like if everyone was just making things up or telling you what you wanted to hear?
And I mean, it was like, you know, it really is an interesting way to look at things.
It's a bit cynical.
But when you start looking at all these things.
You go, it doesn't even make sense.
It doesn't make sense that you'd have a country where you're out of all these billionaires, and then they would be told what to do by these people in Congress that have no money.
And some of them are relatively uneducated.
You have all these billionaires that are controlling large sectors of the economy, but they're just going to take edicts.
From the guy, the local milkman that ran for Congress in Georgia, and he's going to tell those guys what to do?
That never made sense to me.
And it also never made sense to me that when I watched SNL as a kid, I'd watch these debates, and they were almost identical to the ones on TV. They were kind of silly.
And they were, you know, you'd have these two guys and Bush wasn't a great speaker and Gore was kind of insufferable.
And they did these characters really well.
But I'm like, it's so weird that a comedy show is almost identical to the actual world that we live in.
I'm like, there's no way that that's the only level of power in the country.
There's very little chance that that's how it is.
And then, you know, you start reading, you read books.
Like The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot about the creation of the National Security State, about the Dulles Brothers and how influential they were.
And you read all these books.
He founded Salon.com and stuff like that and then wrote that book.
It was completely removed from polite society.
But you read all these books, you get interested in it.
My body knew I was going to start, so they prepared.
But I realized how acting was interesting because in Hollywood, I was really close to getting a job once, but I was four inches too tall.
And the kid that got it was four inches shorter.
And he looked better next to the star of the show.
It was Grace Under Fire.
Brett Butler was a sitcom.
And you realize how arbitrary a lot of these decisions are that are made.
And when you're a little kid, you become a little cynical because you're auditioning for all this stuff.
And you're looking at the way that...
And sometimes the director's son gets the job.
And sometimes you don't even know why you didn't get the job.
You did a great job.
You're basically, as a young person, you're aware of the limits of certain types of meritocracy, where it's like there's stuff behind the scenes happening.
Well, when I was young, I was very supportive of like the Iraq war and George W. Bush, you know, but I was, you know, on cocaine and that really- Did that help?
That helps.
It really did.
It's a patriotic drug, to be honest.
But I was believing everything that everyone said.
We were invaded by these people and we were invaded because they don't have shopping malls in Afghanistan and they don't have McDonald's and they can't get chicken nuggets like I do with my friends who can't smoke pot in the mall.
So they all decided to kill us.
Well, that's terrible.
So we have to go over there and build shopping malls so that these guys can go hang out and get whatever they need so that they're not miserable and all that stuff.
And I believed it.
I believed all of it.
I'm a fervent advocate of that because it made a lot of sense.
I'm like, we've got a good thing.
They've got a thing that's not too good.
We have to go and help them.
And it was this thing where I just believed that.
And I believed in it.
And I voted for Bush.
And I thought that my first vote was for Bush.
It was the second term.
And I had friends that went off to Iraq.
I'm like, we got to do this.
We can't dishonor their memory by pulling out and doing all this stuff.
I really believed that.
I've now completely switched.
I now see it as a complete disaster, a huge mistake and error.
And as far as 9-11, at that point, I believed that it was exactly how they said it happened.
And now, quite frankly, I don't know.
I mean, it seems improbable that all of these things happened the way that they said that they happened.
I don't know what exactly happened.
And people have attacked me for saying that, you know, because I just I question now more than I did.
A group of people that have a lot of power and a lot of influence.
And they probably have different ideas.
They're probably not a monolith.
They probably are different religions and races.
But they're interested in preserving their level of power.
I think that becomes their main...
Their main objective, and I think this is the thing that they all kind of relate on, whether they sue each other or dislike each other or have wars with each other in the press, and we tend to think that these are blood feuds, and probably some of them are, but at the end of the day, they are all interested in retaining their level of power in American society and all over the world, and I think those people operate in a lot of different ways.
A huge way, I believe, that they operate is subverting the democratic process here and all over the world.
Meaning the will of the people cannot get in the way of whatever they want to do.
So I think they have to disguise that agenda in any way that they can.
The new thing now, for example, is...
Today, I'm in a diner and I'm watching.
I'm having breakfast and I'm watching.
You know, this terrible airstrike in Rafa, this place I didn't even know existed a month ago, right?
I'm not like a...
And this guy's holding up this headless child.
It's horrific, and we're watching it in the diner.
And you're watching it, and listen, I think Israel should exist.
I believe they have a right to exist.
Anti-Semitism exists, blah, blah, blah.
I know that it's not all great over there.
But you're watching this, and then you go, this seems...
Unreal.
It seems very extreme.
And then the position of people on the internet that are supporting this no matter what, without any, is, well, do you know how Hamas treats gay people and women?
And you go, how dumb do I look?
How stupid do I look that this is the argument?
How dumb do I look that you're expecting me to believe?
That American foreign policy has been about the rights of women?
And is that why we were in Afghanistan?
It had nothing to do with mining rights or lithium ion or any of that stuff.
It has nothing to do with the strategic importance of certain locations.
It all has to do with...
Teaching girls to read and protecting gay people and teaching women to read.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
But that emotional appeal works on people and they go, well, I guess we have to kill children then.
That baby is homophobic.
Kill!
And you start going, it doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense from a logical standpoint.
It makes absolutely no sense.
People can debate about Israel or what we should be doing or giving them or funding.
Right.
So again, you're shoehorning this narrative into this conflict.
And it's, I think, the way a lot of these people that have an agenda operate, where they go, we need to present this Ukraine war as a way that we are fighting a murderous dictator who's going to take over all of Europe.
And then Steve began, I know because he told me, and changing his views on things.
And then the next thing you know, Steve Bing has committed suicide, and I don't know, but a friend of mine who's very close to Steve Bing, and I was friends with Steve Bing, said, no, that's not what happened.
People that like scream and yell at people in restaurants when something's not macrobiotic or weak.
They apparently became all humanitarians in the span of one night.
And then the Ukraine flags roll over the place.
And if you asked any question about the Ukraine, Or what was going on, or why Russia went in, or why they would be in NATO. Because they hate our freedoms.
Yeah, right.
So it was the same kind of argument.
It's the same very strange Manichaean, good and evil argument.
And so when people say to you, you can't ask questions, you can't know things.
It's why every dictator in the world hates comedians.
They don't want anybody asking any questions about anything, and they shut everything down.
And that's why people that get offended very easily usually have something to hide.
The coolest people in the world are the people who will poke fun out on the show, and they don't care, and they think it's fun, and they go, this guy's a buffoon, and who cares?
And I go, and these people just overnight became like great allies and like brave people that we loved.
So it was like, okay, listen, I feel bad their country got invaded and they're doing what they have to do and whatever, but I just don't know.
You know, it's just very interesting to hear people that have never thought, I mean, these people that I live around have never had a thought about another human being in their life.
They've never had a thought.
And in fact, they wouldn't even be effective at what they do if they didn't.
These agents and managers, they can't see you as a human being.
And they're always like the black sheep of a very wealthy family when everyone else is successful.
So it's always like you have a guy, when you have an agent, they go, my brother works at Goldman Sachs, my sister is a neurosurgeon, and I do this because I have no talent or skills except I was born rich.
And I'm a sociopath, and I don't have any educational background, but I was never going to work at Popeyes making chicken sandwiches.
So I sit here at a desk, and that's who most of them are.
One time I went to a Thai restaurant and it was closed and it was very sad.
Usually you have to look at other races for human emotions.
They're like Mexicans.
You know what I mean?
Who are usually coming out of a church or doing something like that.
It's a very weird place.
I've learned to love parts of it and hate parts of it.
It's very different from where I lived.
It's these vast canyons, and mountains are very empty, and it's very hollow, and people are very passive, aggressive, and kind of laid back, and they're not as intense.
I grew up in New York and Long Island with a lot of intense people, and it's just a town that functions primarily with the...
The only rule there is that everything's always great.
So everybody is always like, things are great.
How are you?
Oh, good.
No matter what's going on in their lives, they want to present this thing.
Everything's great because you want to be near winners.
You want to be near good people and people that are doing well.
And everybody just has to present that side of themselves at all times, which is why people say, oh, it's fake and that it's not real.
That's kind of the guiding principle of that place.
I mean, I think there are little groups of people that have honest moments.
I've had honest moments there with people, but the people that I've had honest moments with, it's very funny because it's the only place where someone will meet up with you.
Um, and like, look around and you think they're selling you heroin, but then they're just going to say something remotely conservative.
You know, it's very, yeah.
You know, people kind of just like, oh, like, you know, the border is, oh, it doesn't look good.
Somebody be like, Biden is a little old, but it is weird because everybody's like terrified of like, you know, but that's changing now because I think.
The institutions have less power and the internet has grown and people are more free.
so I think it is changing and there are definitely opportunities for people to kind of connect with an audience outside of that system and I think that system is now also responding very positively for the first time to people that have gained an audience on the internet I think they're starting to understand the value of that and that it isn't this world in which everybody's good or bad or perfect or not
there are people that make mistakes and there's people that also are you know really good people that are not reflected by a certain action you know what I mean like there's this idea that like people are entire people They're not just one thing you didn't like.
Struggling with addiction have not been helped by the people whose job it is to help them.
And the government's job is to provide a safe environment for everyone, for people that are addicted to drugs and people that aren't addicted to drugs.
So the way to provide a safe environment for people that are addicted to drugs is not permit them to live on the street and use drugs in a tent.
It is not to permit people to use drugs.
Fentanyl on the street and to overdose on the street and die.
And this is not a compassionate thing and this is not a good policy.
I remember when they broke up this homeless encampment in Echo Park.
A lot of people were protesting.
They were very excited.
People are nuts there.
People go, well, I go buy things there.
I buy little lanyards and stuff that they're selling.
I go, do you think this is a long-term solution when you have this homeless encampment in a park and then people are treating it like a farmer's market?
All these wealthy white people that want to help are going there giving them money for heroin and buying an avocado or some crazy thing.
And I don't even know what people were selling there.
But when the cops broke it up, there was a lot of tension in the community because the community was against it.
They didn't want the homeless encampment broken up.
They were very angry.
They were like, how dare these fascists break up this homeless encampment?
I was standing the other day in San Francisco and this woman said to me, I said she was, you know, I go, yeah, the city is, you know, falling apart.
And I go, the mayor in London Breed, I go, I don't know what she's really doing.
She goes, she goes, yep, she's trying to criminalize addiction.
We went down that road.
And I'm like, wait a minute.
So you're, you're.
Take is that the mayor of San Francisco is too conservative because you're trying to criminalize it.
I'm like, you got to criminalize the behaviors that are often inherent with addiction.
Robbing people, selling drugs.
You know, crimes that involve procuring drugs, trafficking people.
Like, there's all these things that happen.
And, you know, there's something that goes on, and it's on the West Coast more than the East Coast, for sure, where people don't understand the value of standards being enforced.
They don't see it.
They don't get it.
They think that it's a completely insensitive way to look at the situation and saying, like, we have a standard.
You don't sleep in a tent.
You don't camp on the street.
There are homeless shelters.
You got to go.
We have project room key.
You got to go to a hotel room.
But if you're going to participate in that program, you have to submit to drug testing and counseling because we can't have people.
Using drugs in that program and providing drugs to other people.
I'm sure there are problems in every community, but there's a lot of aimlessness.
It's like, you know, that's a thing of people...
People talk about race and all this stuff, but it's like, you know, the white people in the West Coast are maybe the most damaging group of people to civil society I've ever seen in my life.
I mean, when you talk about the people that live in Seattle and Portland, the things that laws that they pass and favor and...
I've never seen a group of people wreak more havoc on a civil society in my life than the West Coast of the United States.
Because these people, they have all these ideas, and then what happens is a few people die in front of them in a Whole Foods, and they start going, well, maybe, maybe.
And when someone dies in a Whole Foods in front of them, they start going, you know what?
Because the consequences for a lot of these people are just so far removed that they're just not.
They're just not.
They're behind a gate.
They're somewhere under 40 minutes out of the city, whatever it is.
And they just kind of don't care.
But then people start dying in Whole Foods and then they start going, yeah, maybe this isn't ideal.
This might not be great.
So it takes that, though.
It takes something extreme like that for these people to kind of wake up.
They seem to care mainly about the digital world in which they're creating and ushering people into at a very rapid pace.
And they don't seem to care about the real world.
And if I was a conspiracy nut, I might say that the worse the real world is, the more people are dependent on the digital world and the quicker you can get them all there.
That might be, if I was, you know, having fun, I might notice something like that.
So this idea that we demonized anybody that owned a two-family house and we said, look at this scumbag landlord and they own a three-family house where they live in one of the units and the other two units are people that they rent to and we said, look at these people.
They're pieces.
You know what happened?
All the corporate landlords bought everything, own everything, and are raising the price of residential real estate for everybody that is trying to buy a house.
And that's why these cities are really rich, wealthy city.
You go, who has all this money?
Who has all this money to buy these apartments?
And then you go, oh, it's criminals from all over the world that are washing a lot of dirty money in real estate.
And I'm sure maybe just rich people that aren't criminals, but a lot of them, a lot of them are guys.
If you look it up, there's like a guy, there's like a, it'll be like a guy who poisoned a river in Zambia.
And it's like, that's why all these real estate shows are fake.
They're all not true.
They're all these.
With these attractive women, they walk around and they find these like, they find like a guy who's a basketball player or a guy who's like an actor.
None of them are even buying the houses, by the way.
I know the people that work on these real estate shows, you know, they really sell the houses to a lot of people that just come in speaking complete Mandarin.
And I have a friend who's a real estate agent and they come in and speak complete Mandarin to a translator.
He just points.
He's in Beverly Hills and pointing.
There you go.
They stand outside and look at the view.
And they're the ones who are actually buying houses, or Russian nationals, oligarchs, or people from the United Arab Emirates, or people from the Brazilian mining magnets, or people from India.
It's not really a lot of domestic buyers in LA and New York.
It's a ton of foreign nationals.
And that's why these real estate shows aren't true.
If they were true, it would be a real estate agent greeting someone at the door and going, this is a beautiful house.
How did things go at the Hague?
Are you okay?
Everything was good at the Hague?
Great.
We saw that.
Take a look at the veranda.
They have a great...
That would be the real show, but it's not the real show, you know?
I think having this decentralized currency is actually a really cool thing.
But like everything else...
The world that grew around it was a world of criminals and con artists and flimflam artists and people that were full of shit and people that were just taking all this money and pumping all these things up and just all these were stock scams and Ponzi schemes and stuff like that.
Real estate to me seemed the most safe because I understood it.
I get it.
I understand.
People always need houses, want houses.
They give you joy.
They make you happy.
There are things that promote other things in society that I think are good, like having a family and keeping a family and having...
I have a house on Long Island where I can have my family come and visit.
I'm an hour from my father and I'm only a few hours from family that lives in Rhode Island.
I think having places for people to gather is very important.
It's part of my childhood.
And those things are huge.
And I don't think you get as much joy from Cum Rocket as an investment.
You might get more money.
So I understand that.
But I've also watched Friends not be able to.
And I got lucky because I was a comedian.
I got started a podcast.
Joe Rogan helped me out a lot by putting me on a bunch.
And I got really lucky, but I have friends that are hardworking people, firefighters, teachers, nurses, the people that actually do the jobs that make society work and run.
And they're having a tough time now because interest rates are 7% and the house values.
And with the rates, I think it's the most expensive time to buy in like 40 years or so.
But they lord around these big suburban castles and their whole sense of self.
Worth comes from this.
It comes from materialism.
So the idea that they would leave this big house, which is every argument that a boomer ever tries to win, they just point at their house.
I mean, they don't know anything.
They have zero idea.
They've read no books about anything.
They're a very funny, the last really truly funny generation, I think, because everyone has becoming flattened, but they are just very funny and deeply.
Selfish.
I mean, it's funny to watch them.
And it is funny, but they're never going to get rid of these houses.
So their kids are kind of – they're being held hostage.
I mean, the whole economy.
I mean, Pelosi, Biden, these very old people, Mitch McConnell, they won't retire.
None of them have any plans on retiring.
They want to die in office.
And that's very much like across the board.
Nobody will sell their house.
Nobody will step down at their job.
It's just a generation of people that don't want to stop.
They turned around because there was too much traffic.
Can you imagine?
They were boomers even then.
And they literally turned their car around.
I mean, it's unforgivable.
It's unforgivable behavior.
What happens is we are led to believe they're this very progressive generation of very interesting- Change agents.
Agents of change and spiritual people, right?
And then we see, of course, that they're just selfish drug addicts that want to just do drugs in a field which has its benefits, but let's not pretend it's a grand life strategy, right?
And then they just kind of, you know, buy into the- Propagandize generation in terms of advertising.
My father, who I love, but will cry at commercials.
He would cry at the Budweiser Clydesdales and do the 9-11 thing.
He loved the Budweiser frogs.
They loved commercial.
Boomers adored commercials.
They liked a good Folgers commercial with family sitting together and they're drinking coffee.
Boomers loved commercials.
They thought that all of these things, that corporations really cared about them.
They were somewhat naive, and I think they're kind of like spinning out a little bit now because they've realized a little bit to some degree how wrong they were about everything, and now it's kind of becoming apparent.
Achievement or coming up with a company or an advancement to make people's lives better.
Then it became about comfort.
It's where do you live and how leafy green is the suburb?
Where's the pool?
And it was just like, let's relax.
Let's grill.
And I think what happened was a lot of these people just became Kind of creatures of this environment where everybody was one-upping each other with cars.
But they still had that hippie thing in them.
So they would still do weird stuff.
Like my friend's dad has a band.
And it's like he'll go and, you know, play in this band.
It's a terrible band.
But they'll have fun.
Like, you know, there were just these things that they, like, keep from that era.
Even though they, you know, have, you know, gone fully down the road of, like, just materialism.
And they didn't really like their children.
That's the other thing I find funny.
They view their children was like obstacles to their own success and fulfillment.
The boomers really didn't like their children.
It was the first generation of people that didn't really want their children to have it too much better than they did if they wanted them to have it better at all.
I don't know why they do what they do, but it's just very funny.
One very funny thing was after my mother died, I swear to God, I was on the phone with my aunt, which is her sister, and I go, I go, what do we think about a funeral?
They all turn them into alcoholics and everything.
But they're like, you want to be like that guy?
And it was usually like an in-shape guy, like working construction.
Like, you want to be a scumbag like him?
Or do you want to sit in an office like me and cheat on your mother?
So is this...
They always demonized other people.
You were always in a rat race with other kids.
They always talked about these other kids are doing better than you.
It was kind of a weird...
But nothing was really focused on excellence as much as it was focused on winning to make them look good.
So if you had boomer parents in sports, they were always kind of like...
They weren't getting you up and...
Making you train?
But they would go to the games and yell.
Like, they would go, like, there was this woman, this woman, her daughter was a swimmer, my mother was a swim coach, and this woman would get up and scream, you know, she'd be like...
Totally in her daughter's corner there, just screaming and yelling.
But you'd never see her at any of the practices at 8 a.m.
I mean, so there are two options for a boomer kid, a millennial or whatever you want to call me, a Gen X or whatever, succeeding, which they would be happy about because they would claim total credit for it, and then failing, and then they would go, well, you didn't listen to us.
Of course you failed.
And I think with me, they were very much like, he's going to be a big mess, and we're going to get to tell people all the time how you didn't listen to anything we said.
But then it ended up, it looked like it was going one way, it went the other way.
So they're fine now.
They're cool with it.
But it's just, they didn't expect it.
They didn't expect it.
They said to me, my father's wife said to me, who I do like a lot, but she said, she goes, how does someone like you who made every wrong decision in their life end up in a house like this?
You said you're friends with Louis C.K., who I don't know, and I'm not defending Louis C.K., but I remember reading the details of that and thinking, eh, you know, okay.
Well, I mean, it was a moment in which, and I don't know the details of every single accusation in that piece, but I do know that it was a moment where people weren't thinking.
I just think if people get caught up in these moral panics and they want to hurt people, and this is something deeply innate in our beings that have to be dealt with.
We have to figure out why we do this, but this is something that people like mobs and they like getting their pitchforks out.
And I think he's been able to have a phenomenal career.
He's made movies.
He's sold at Madison Square Garden.
He's done all these things.
His fans love him, and he's one of the greatest comedians that's ever lived.
So you have that.
But yeah, it was a time when people just wanted other people to be hurt.
It wasn't enough to say, I fucked up, no matter who it was or what they did.
And I think now, I think people are looking at the full picture of a human being and going like, you know what?
I think a lot of them are doing fine because I think as we talked about...
It's not the worst thing to have people turn on you because it builds resilience.
You know who your real friends are.
You fall back on your talent.
You lean on your talent.
You lean on the things that you can do better than anyone else and you try to make those even better.
You have to be more effective in a way.
You can't coast.
The tide will not carry you so you have to find ways to create your own Environment and create your own inertia to move the things you're doing forward because you won't be carried anymore by the mainstream.
So you have to just go and I think that's ultimately a good thing.
I think I get enough of people that don't like what I do or say, for sure.
I think things are appropriately difficult, meaning like I have friction and that's good.
I think that people, I'm not a person who is beloved.
With a lot of what I say, but my fans of people that like what I do like me, but then there are people that need some convincing.
I think that's good.
I think that's good.
I don't mind that when I sit down with people and my manager or people like that will tell me, they go, yeah, they like you, but they don't know really who you are.
I think you get a lot of similar stuff where people go, well, they have ideas about you that are not from you.
I know some people in journalism, but I participated once in this thing where there's a few journalists that wanted to talk to a comedian because they were like, we want to start using more comedy in our pieces.
But I think if you're lounging around in a DC townhouse trying to figure out what problems that you need to go out and desperately solve, you have a deficit of purpose.
This idea gives them the sense that now we're back in World War II, and there's good, and there's evil, and this is the purpose.
This is why we've all been on the planet, to confront the country with the most nuclear weapons of any other country over two regions of the two northern provinces in Ukraine, which if you Google image them, I mean, take it.
We have a huge national security apparatus that relies on conflicts.
We sell a lot of weapons.
We have a huge investment in that.
You know, we're arming the Ukraine in kind of an unwinnable war that everybody knew was unwinnable and it was incredibly bloody and it didn't have to be.
And, you know, this is something where the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, went and performed Rock in the Free World.
If my child died in a war and then the Secretary of State of the country that's supposedly backing us showed up to play music, I would kind of, Be in the middle of the war, by the way.
The war's not over.
It would be a little disturbing to me.
So it's just very strange.
And then, you know, the Kamala Harris thing of like, well, this was a bigger country that invaded a smaller country.
And that was her.
I mean, Kamala Harris is like a Brentwood mom, you know?
She's like a wine drunk kind of Brentwood mom.
And so that's the way a mom would explain that.
That's where like a Brentwood, California, Pacific Palisades.
You know, tuna tartare chardonnay mom explains that.
She goes, it's a bigger country and they've invaded a smaller country.
So that's the level of understanding they want us to have of any conflict.
Is Macron in France going to NATO troops in Ukraine?
Remember when they were trying to enforce a no-fly zone?
I remember doing a show in the Warner Theater in D.C. It was a great theater.
And I'm like, what the, I mean, I'm like, you know, a no-fly zone enforcing that guarantees a hot war, an actual war with Russia immediately overnight.
So certain people go, well, the maid, the nanny, I'm getting my nails done.
We've got cheaper help at the beach club or whatever it is.
There are people that have a direct benefit from it.
There are people that feel like they ignore any potential negative or downside because they feel like They have a lot of guilt for whatever reason.
Maybe it's the colonial period of the 17th, 18th centuries, or they feel like that the right thing to do is just to ignore any potential downside to immigration because they feel guilty about how the country was established or how people were treated or any of that that feeds into that mindset, even though if you go back, obviously, before the 17th and 18th century.
Slavery was all over the world.
Conquest was all over the world.
People were killing each other.
Different races were subjugating and killing other races.
People fought over land, religion.
I mean, it was a madhouse.
It was plunder.
It was violence.
This was the way of the world.
But most people don't have any knowledge of the ancient world.
They don't have any knowledge of anything past.
That period of colonialism is where most people start their knowledge of history.
And in that period, the West is seen as the enemy of anything that is good.
And so the guilt that gets embedded into people is then, I think, manifested in these conversations about immigration, where it's like, listen, to me, it's very economic.
There's times when the country will need more immigrants, and there's times when the country will need less.
But there's probably a way to kind of decide who comes into the country.
We should be able to check their background to make sure that they are not...
Well, if you're importing millions of people, over 10 million people with no education and no skills, high-tech skills, at exactly the moment when technology, AI, is going to eliminate millions of jobs, especially low-end jobs, what is that?
So I think that's happening, but South Florida is good.
I think that, you know, Texas, I think Central Texas is still going to grow.
I think it slowed down.
Austin was like a boom during the pandemic.
Central Texas, I think, will grow.
I think, like, Idaho, I think any of those areas, obviously Montana, all those areas are getting very expensive.
But, you know, Idaho, I think, you know, climate-wise is going to be...
Pretty good.
Any of those mountainous regions that are incredibly pretty and, you know, I think they're not going to be 115 degrees and stuff.
So I think a lot of people will probably migrate in that area.
I think Hudson, New York, that area, anywhere that's an hour and a half, two hours out of the city because people are working remote or they're working two or three days a week, areas like that, I think that Hudson Valley is going to be big, you know?
I think Washington State, of all of those, Washington State is the most resilient.
I think Portland is tough.
I think that unless they reverse a lot of their policies, it's going to be tough.
But I think the lifestyle of the West Coast, Washington State's a beautiful state.
Seattle's a little bit of a mess, but most people live there not to live in Seattle.
They live there to live in the mountains and the lakes.
It's beautiful.
I think Washington State, I think their tax system is a little better, and I think that there's a lot of people.
I would say that that area- Holds and builds in the West Coast.
And I think Orange County, California, which is about an hour and a half south of LA, where the DA actually prosecutes crime and people feel better raising their families there.
And they get that lifestyle of being by the beach and things like that.
I think that holds.
And hopefully San Francisco's reversed and gets better.
It seems to be over in the sense that it's becoming more and more difficult, I think, for people now.
There's trade-offs to owning a home.
Owning a home is not perfect for everybody.
It's not right for everybody.
You know, always ideal.
It is ideal for people that have the finances to do it and to live, you know?
I think people are looking at their lives now and they're going, the amount of money and work and all the things that we're going to have to do to own this home just may kill us.
And I think, again, it's like we are a capitalist country.
I'm a capitalist.
I think it's great to make money.
But I do think that there is a point where consolidation, you have all these companies, you have three or four companies running everything, doing everything.
You're preventing the spirit of capitalism.
You're preventing small businesses.
You're preventing competition.
You're preventing all these things.
And you become like...
You have this conglomerate of all of these different multinational corporations that just are these nameless, faceless blobs that own the government.
I mean, it's just hard to imagine people opening a restaurant, starting a bed and breakfast, opening a hardware store, opening a business.
They can't do it.
Now, owning a home is the new opening of business.
I remember 20 years ago, people were like, we can't open a business.
Are you nuts?
Now it's like people going, oh, I can't own a home.
So, because I remember people in this country used to open businesses.
That was also a thing.
People used to actually have a business and work for themselves.
That has all been put out.
I mean, there are still people doing that, but it's very few.
And corporations run everything.
You go to New York City, everything's a Chase Bank.
Everything's a steakhouse that has 15 locations.
Everything is a, you know, and it used to be like mom and pop diners and stuff that had great food and weren't that expensive.
And like, you know, maybe you waited a little longer.
Maybe there's an attitude.
Maybe there's a crazy person there who ran the place who was kind of an eccentric, but it was fun.
Now everything is corporate.
I mean, every sushi restaurant looks like every steakhouse and they all look like hedge funds.
You know what I mean?
Like you go into every place and you're like, what does a hedge fund look like?
Just do kind of marble and like a neurology clinic, right?
*laughs* So everything, and I know you're big on architecture, so that's one of my things too, is it's like the sameness of everything, how hollow and corporate it is.
It's designed to just exist primarily on a screen.
And, you know, it's like, you know, you lost a lot.
That's the thing of people, people go, oh, who cares for small businesses?
Like, no, but the country we live in is fundamentally different.
People are just, they're just being ushered into this new thing and nobody's...
Asking, everything is the same 10 corporations.
It's the same 20 restaurants.
You go to any town and you have the football stadium, the baseball stadium, you have the two chain steakhouses everyone's heard of, a cheesecake factory, a mall, a bad area, some historic place that no one goes, and a Marriott, a Hilton, a nice old hotel that's kind of broken down but is kind of like...
Charming and it has a brunch on a Sunday.
And then it's surrounded by 45 minutes to an hour of urban decay.
That's every city in America outside of 10. Where's the resistance?
Everything that the internet says is good, we vibe with.
We totally are.
We're open to everything.
We're going to do everything you want.
If you want a black female CEO, you're going to get one.
We're not stopping the sweatshops, but you're going to get a black female CEO. We can get anything you want.
We will do anything you want.
You want a polyamorous orgy here at Chase?
We'll do it.
We're going to foreclose on everyone's house, but we'll do that.
And they keep moving the goalpost around where you're kind of confused.
You go, what exactly is happening?
And that's why I'm amazed at their ability to do it.
When we grew up, we always looked at these corporate Wall Street guys.
You're all fucking criminals.
Yes.
We're watching our own backs, even though we know you need to make money, and maybe there's a way for us to make money together, but we always got to watch our backs.
The tech people are now very much like, we're utopians, we're great, we're good, everything's good, we drink green juices, we ride bikes, we care about the environment, we care about you, and that's it.
All the 14-year-olds are killing themselves because of our product, but we're good people, and there's something really scary about it.
People that come to you, it's always very, and I'm just the type of guy where if somebody comes to me out of nowhere and goes, hi, I care about you.
I love you and I care about you and I want you to have the best life ever.
I mean, there's something straightforward about knowing people's intentions.
Intentions are big.
And if they're out in the open, I'm much more comfortable.
If I know why, if I walk into, if you walk on a car lot and somebody comes up to you to sell you a car, it's completely understandable.
Whether that person's honest or not, whether they're going to give you a good deal or not, you know exactly what they're trying to do and you know what their end goal is.
They want to sell you a car so they can- Yeah, yeah, exactly.
When someone's trying to remake the world you live in for your benefit and you have no idea why they're trying to do it and you have no idea what it will look like, you have no concept of- What this world is going to look like.
We were all promised this world is this tech world.
We're going to connect everybody, everybody, all this stuff.
And the free and open exchange of ideas and information, what it kind of becomes is this lonely, isolating thing where everybody, you know, teenagers are being severely damaged by these products that are out there.
There are people that are, their mental health has deteriorated on these platforms, right?
And, you know, there doesn't seem to be any accountability.
Nobody cares.
There's a few books about it, and a few people are upset about it.
It's also very co-opted by, you know, you also have the political angle, too, where it's like everybody's talking about banning TikTok, and I'm sure TikTok has spyware and what else, but everyone's talking about it because kids are now sitting down at the table with their family and watching the Gaza stuff, and they're going, why are we shooting this baby in the face?
And their family is going, well, you know, I don't know.
We were certainly not marinating in it from birth.
We were a generation of people that started, and some of us were more savvy than others.
But it started in middle school, but it didn't come on anywhere nearly as strong as it comes on for kids now because we didn't have smartphones attached to us, you know?
I mean, I had a flip phone in high school.
It was like, who cares?
You could call your friend and text, but it wasn't.
There's something about a friendship that I believe needs a physical dimension.
It doesn't mean you have to see them all the time, but the idea that you can have dinner with someone, even if it's once or twice a year, but the idea that you can be in their presence is important to me.
And it's not just somebody that exists online in the digital.
Well, I mean, sane is a relative term, but I think it helps to see people and get out of the world of whatever the entertainment business is and just see people.
Friends and people that are raising kids and have businesses and have lives and live in different parts of the country and are excited about different things and have challenges I don't have and have aspirations that I find very interesting and helping them in any way that I can or going there to just hang out with them and their families.
It's important to me to go and see the actual people living life.
I'm a big fan of that.
Yeah, I think people staying in a place.
I understand that people have to do it.
There was economic conditions in my life where I had to do it.
But now that I have the ability to kind of go and travel and meet people, I think it's a cool thing to do.
So I think I'm 39. I think I've got a few years left.
I don't think I'll be doing this forever on the road.
I do believe that.
I do believe that there's an end point to it.
Sorry, agents.
But I do believe that eventually you have to say like, okay, I've done enough and I've seen enough and this has been great, but I'm going to do it a lot less frequently.
So I don't think...
But there's a lot of people that, listen, everybody battles with things on the road.
The road is a difficult place to be because you're taken out of your environment.
I've been on the road now probably about consistently since about 20. 2018, 2017, 2018. Okay.
So we're under, it's under 10 years, you know?
Even before that, I was doing stuff, but it was much less, yeah, I wasn't like going all over the place.
I was like staying kind of, I was in New York and I would go like to Connecticut or Pennsylvania or Boston or DC, but now I'm doing a lot more and I'm all over the country and then we travel internationally too, so it's definitely.
I describe a scene where I say, this guy Zielinski, I said, I don't like him because he's ripped, he's good looking, and he wants money.
There's nothing worse than a good looking guy that doesn't know where to get any money.
I go, he pops up in the middle of the Grammy Awards when you're just trying to watch Wet Ass Pussy with your children.
And I said, you call them into the room and you bring out your pregnant 12-year-old and she's twerking in the living room and your other kid comes out and they're nonverbal and they're just in the back kind of swaying.
This guy from a country you've never heard of wants money.
And I go, Vladimir Putin's maybe not a great guy, but so far he's asked me for zero dollars.
The really good ones are funny, and I think the most important thing is to be funny, and then a lot of times that comes from a place of saying what you feel, and sometimes it comes from a place of creating great characters, and it can come from many different places, but certainly if you say what you want, and you take ownership of it, and you say it in a way that people find funny or interesting, that's the job.
That's the only job.
That's why it's a great job, is because It's really like the second oldest job.
And the oldest job, I don't think I'd be great at.
I certainly wouldn't command the prices I do in the second oldest job, which is being kind of a town crier.
It's all we do is we're standing in the town square and going, hey, hey, what's going on?
And so I think a lot of them are saying, and I think that that's going to be the major shift.
For the most part, there are films and everything.
And the platforms.
The internet has a lot more freedom.
There are a lot of restrictions and there are all kinds of profit models and monetization issues with all kinds of sites and whatever.
But if you look at it overall, there's a lot more freedom on the internet than there is in a corporate advertiser supported network.
So the freedom to say things now has increased.
And I think a lot of the people that existed 10 years ago weren't part of that system.
So maybe if they were, maybe they would have had, maybe they would have felt more comfortable.
I think they just came up at a time when there were sensors and everything you said had to go through standards and practices and sales and advertising.
And you had to have all these.
And you can still do really funny, great stuff with all of that.
I think it's also, we all feel, not to be cryptic, but I do feel like, not that we're, you know, I don't want to do the whole, like, we're living in our last days thing, but it does feel like times are too, like, I feel like we, you know, Things are getting hot all over the world and I think people realize the value now of Being just, let's get out with it.
It's like when people, when they're dying, they just kind of say what they need to say.
I think as our society is dying a little bit, people are saying what they need to say.
I think the time for politeness has gone out the window and niceties.
And I think people are kind of embracing just the truth of what they have to say.
Because we are living in times that are certainly wild and perilous.
Russia and China and all these things, North Korea, and you're looking at problems in your own country, like fentanyl, this, that, and the other thing.
And it's like, you know, the idyllic idea of America has kind of been shattered.
And I think a lot of people are picking up the pieces of that and they're like, listen, if I'm going to live in this country and I'm going to exist in this time, I'm going to speak and say what I want.
But how can you continue to run this country in the way that you are, if you're the people who are running it, and allow people to criticize you this precisely?