Chapo Trap House - Episode 268 - Condom Depot Presents: Fighting in the Age of Horniness feat. Jon Bois (12/2/18)

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

We talk to documentary filmmakers Jon Bois and Felix Biederman about their triumphant new film on mixed martial arts, politics and society, "Fighting in the Age of Loneliness". Watch Fighting in the Age of Loneliness here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oNB6tlSZ2A&list=PLUXSZMIiUfFRSunlJERh9k1RFNnGGhnzG&index=2 Felix mentions Shannon Strucci's Fake Friends videos, find them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vD_CAYt4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLA-uFKjQ-g Tickets to E1 Live feat. Felix and Virgil here: https://www.unionhallny.com/event/1782322-e1-live-brooklyn Info on Princeton Event: Name: Civilized Conversation with Virgil Texas, Matt Christman, and Will Menaker Date: 12/6 Time: 6:00PM Location: Whig Hall @ Princeton University (45 minutes from Philadelphia, for those who might want to make the drive up) Details: Event will be open to public and free of charge. New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New York fans are welcome! To attend, please contact Justin Wittekind at [e-mail], who will give you information about how to get to the event either by car or by transit and who to contact

Hello, everybody. It's your boy, Will Menaker, and it's your Chompo. Joining me this week, of course, is Felix Biedermann and Amber Frost. Hello. But sitting in with us today, we have a very special guest. It's John Boyce. John, hello. Thank you. Is that how you say it, Boyce? Well, you tell me. Oh, no, I've always wondered. People have said it any kind of way, so yeah, Boyce works. John Dad Boyce.

You know, it's interesting is Frank, Frank Meir, like the fighter who famously fought Brock Lesnar, the just psycho-Dakotin, WWE guy. He always pronounced his name as Frank Meir, and then Brock always called him Frank Burr. And for like a week, Frank Meir said his own name that way. He was like bullied into doing that. He doesn't do it anymore. It was one of the strangest things that's happened. Well, to be fair, I'm only pronouncing it how Felix pronounces it. So it's the only time I've heard it. Yeah. And so I say it the right way.

Yeah. However way I say it, I'm going to try three more different ways during the show. That's the right way every time. Oh, I mean, that's how we hedged our bets in the documentary. Just say something like four different ways, and one of them is going to be right. It turned out like Japanese pretty bad, but I nailed like 40% of them. Brazilian Portuguese like actually like 85%. It's a fake language anyway.

That's a different romance language, but I fucked up Dutch the worst. Apparently, there's a way to say a Boston's name that I did wrong. Or that's not the way you say it. The way I've always heard it. I don't know. I thought I'm pleasantly surprised with my stats. When we do fighting in the age of loneliness of loneliness, the five part documentary about the documentary, you can do a stat breakdown of my pronunciations. Oh yeah, with like a nice infographic that shows your, you know, your wins and losses and draws.

Yeah. It's just a Google Earth on my apartment. You're in street view, just vaping outside. They're like, this, this, why isn't this moving? I'm like, you're telling me. Well, yeah, Felix and John, of course, the creative team behind the new documentary series Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, a series about the history of MMA and its place in our bizarre neoliberal culture.

And it's about so much more. That's the really, really impressive thing about it is that I thought I have to support my strange brain damage brother by watching, watching this thing he made. And like, it did a really good job of zooming out. I assumed it would be like really tech kind of technically oriented or whatever. And you definitely had some of that. But I was really impressed about how you contextualized it culturally. Well, thank you. I mean, this started basically about two years ago. I hung out with Felix and I was like, Felix, you know how in politics, you punch your ballot, but in fighting, you

punch your opponent? It's very much the same. It's a metaphor simile allegory. And he was like, yeah, it is. And then we made this doc, this documentary for two years. And it's out. Yeah, it was built entirely on that premise. It was like, you know, one time, yeah, two years ago, I turned to John and I said, you know, two fighters in the octagon, it goes to decision, but two politicians in a Congress, yeah, that goes to election. Damn. And yeah, that's basically the root of the script.

Well, fighting in the age of loneliness, like, can you sum up like, where did the title come from? And like, what were you trying to capture with that? What is the age of loneliness? Now. Yeah. I mean, I've always said it's an exceptionally lonely time and I've touched on it a lot on this show, but I, it sort of stemmed from like a concept from a friend of the show, Shan Strucci, her concept of parasocial relationships, which is sort of people pantomiming friendship through the media figures whose products they consume. And I thought it was a very, very

succinct apt description of like our age of media consumption. It's in her video, fake friends. We put the link in the description, but it also stems from like a Kevin Phillips thing, which I've talked about his idea that as we go further into the 21st century, we become more futile in our thinking. We, we less have elected representatives, more have just individual powerful people whose identity, whose like identities as media figures or politicians reflect our values and our, our who we are. And there's something like that for everyone. You know, you, you, there is the monarch for, for gamers. There's the monarch for, you know, racist teenagers. And then you're both of

those things. Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, MMA, it started out as this sort of thing, I think, for like a sort of like dislocated white middle class. And obviously, obviously there are like a huge explosion of like demographics of people who watch MMA, but that's certainly how it started. And I wanted to sort of like trace how it got that way. And why, you know, why, why in the early 90s did this become such a thing? And why did it become such a thing in the late 2000s?

And why is it the way it is now? And you can kind of, you know, you can trace sort of our increasing cultural loneliness and individual atomization to the trends in the sport, just like you can do it with the trends of a bunch of other things. I think it's also like a, like a, you touched on this with like corporate culture kind of becoming more restrictive and delineated and stuff. And I think people like rightfully feel very overly domesticated by a world that is nonetheless, you know, very savage and all the, all the protections of a basic welfare state, what little we had started to evaporate. And I don't know, it just kind of made perfect sense that people were like, well, what if

we had this, this animalistic game that made us feel less undomesticated? I mean, like, look, we're not going to get out of this without talking about Fight Club, but we're not going to do it yet. Well, there were, well, you know, I actually just started on this as a sequel to Fight Club. Fight Club 2, why Tyler Durden is cool, is the point of the movie when he was a cool guy, he's a cool guy, he's my friend and he's real. Dude, I want that furniture Ed Norton's got. It's fucking sick, dog. He doesn't understand the movie. Yo, I don't know. Yo, no shit, dude. I don't understand

why he left that job. That was fucking sick. We were talking earlier and you said like the highest compliment someone paid this documentary is that it's, it's Adam Curtis for stupid guys. It's like Adam Curtis for flat print hat guys. The nicest thing anyone said to me, my God. And what you guys do is, yeah, you, you know, you talk about, you know, this post Reagan and Thatcher era in the West when we basically just sort of snipped away all of the things that sort of bound the middle class together and sort of community and some sense of security

and just sort of cut people adrift at a time when they were still, their lives became more regimented and surveilled and sort of controlled in a way. And then I just, And they were told that it was, that it was more civilized. Yeah. They're like, this is a civilizing thing. And it's like, actually, this is incredibly savage. It's just really, it's just really domesticated. And I thought I thought about this like of this sort of a culture of atomized individuals

and then like MMA and the UFC as a sport, as this sort of like spectacle of like two of those atoms combining in like that octagon ring and then just like beating the shit out of each other as a way of like finding connection in some way through, as you say, consensual violence. One thing about Felix's script that really resonated with me was that in chapter four, he notes that it's not really part of our discourse, but people just check the hell out in the odds. It really struck a chord with me because like, I remember being, you know, it was like 2004

I was working in some dumpy Radio Shack in Virginia, getting paid basically minimum wage. There was no chance of anyone unionizing, everyone was two beaten down. There was basically no prospect for the future for anybody. And that's something that really is not that talked about, I guess, because the people, the majority of people experiencing that never get a place where they do talk about it or they're too just like fed up and tired to talk about it. But it's often, you know, it's nice to kind of try to tell that story. And I think we took a really good stab at it.

Yeah, I mean, I, it was, it's something I've been thinking about, I guess, like, since during the lead up to the 2016 election. I mean, there's just all this, all this talk about like non voters and how we have this, we have this idea of non voters as like a monolith, which is fucking insane because it's almost half the country. But no, yeah, sure. There are some people, the archetype, like the liberal meter archetype is just like, there's some shitty, like 22 year old who's like, you know, Matt Tracy, it's like between

a turd and a douche. But that's, you know, I think that's the vast majority or the vast, that's a very small minority of it. I think the vast majority are people who are like, they can't even think about that shit. They don't. Yeah, they're, they're completely fucking checked out and flattened and they don't feel like they have a reason to see the positive application of power or politics in their lives.

It's the thing that infuriates me about like, you know, one of the top like media class things that you do is whenever a natural disaster hits a state that voted red, you're like, yep, that's what you get. Whereas like, what, 80% of the people didn't even think about voting in that state. It's kind of what you do is you just blame those people. Well, God is punishing them, obviously. Right. Oh man.

Yeah, if we can all become Westboro Baptist church guys, You get what you deserve. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of, that is a decent amount of what liberals do now. But yeah, no, that time period was, I think like Mark Fisher was probably the only person who kind of talked about like the listlessness and like hopelessness of it or whatever. And he talked about like the anhedonia where it's just like you are incapable of experiencing like joy, like nothing feels particularly alive around you.

So you just sort of sludging through life and like, I don't know. Obviously, it makes sense that like two people beating the shit out of each other in a really primitive way. It might be something that could break through that. Well, like you described, like there's a kind of intimacy in that. And like was we're talking about this era where people's lives are like the era that we've all been born into and grew up in. It was like a time when like our lives couldn't be like more physically like safer, but are

actually like more fragile and like more like unsafe, socially, emotionally or psychologically more unmoored and unstable than it was in the past. And that like, like I said, this two guys sort of like meeting together and then having that violent confrontation as a kind of active intimacy or connection with another human being. Yeah, I mean, there is something to be said about like the way that like if you watch a great fight or even like a bad one, because I think it's hard for fighters to tell often if they're in a bad fight because they've been fighting for 15 minutes. But there is, I'd say, I wish I could do a statistical breakdown of it, but it would

literally take years. There was all often like a very deep, powerful embrace between the two after. And it's something you don't, I think that there is this desire in the larger culture to see like two people like have this real emotional moment after this. And for as much as you can make fun of MMA and say it's taughtry and trashy and dumb and it is as those things as much as like anything else in our culture. There is something undeniably real about two people who have for two months, all they have done is thought about each other.

And they're the main focus in their lives and overcoming the other person is there. That is to them, the only person in their way for a better life for whatever it is that they want, whether it's to buy food and shelter in a future for their family or to realize this personal goal coming from years of strife or whatever. And just this one person in their way and how powerful it is that after they've shared this thing that even though it is viewed by often millions of people, only they can understand what they did. They know each other in this way.

And that connection they have after there's all, yeah, there's that like deep like bro-y hug. I don't just mean male fighters between women fighters too. That it's cool in this way that's hard to explain. And I think it sort of deeply connects to people. It's a genuine connection that I think most people will never have. Yeah. It reminds me specifically of what you said reminds me of Bonnar Griffin, you know, the

the ultimate fighter fight that kind of like saved the UFC or whatever. And, you know, I was looking at photos while we were producing this of the fight and they just beat the absolute like dog shit out of each other for, you know, however, for like 15 minutes, I think it was. And at the end, it's just photos of them hugging and raising each other's hands up. And it's almost like they're expressing a feeling of like, God, buddy, we did it like we actually did it. And it's strange because they almost sort of express themselves as teammates when they

just got done beating the shit out of each other. You describe MMA and like the UFC, like you describe the dawn of this sport as being a sport for sort of weirdos and outsiders at a time in our culture where more and more people were feeling like weirdos and outsiders. So John and Felix, like who are like in the course of writing and researching this documentary or just in general, who are some of your favorite like oddball characters to come out of this world that you liked talking about or portraying on film? There are a bunch of Japanese fighters that I think that I think Japan was sort of ahead

of this the curve on this because, you know, they of course experienced the last decade. I think that engendered a lot of weirdos and outcasts and people who never fit in. They were like literally on the kind of neoliberal atomization tip before we before we were. It happened so quick for them. Yeah. And so Mino-A-Man, I'm not going to even try to say this for some of my fucked up enough Japanese because they're not going to piss anyone off. But his last name was Mino.

His nickname was Mino-A-Man. He was a pro wrestler who his nickname was the giant killer and he would train by like he would go to an airport like outside an airport and try to outrun an airplane taking off. This is like that who was the Roman emperor that told his men to go out and beat the sea and so they just started stabbing the ocean. Was that Caligula? It might have been Caligula in between fucking his sister and a horse or whatever.

Everyone has good and bad sons. I mean pride, the promotion he fought in, the promotion he made his name in, it was famous and we talk about this in the documentary for purposely like matching up very diminutive fighters with like physical giants just to be like, oh, what would it be like if this happened? But he only wanted those fights. He only wanted to fight. He was about like five, eight and about 180 pounds and he would just fight like guys who

were verging on seven feet tall, like 400 pounds. That was all the only type of fight he wanted to take. And there's Takenori Gomi who was just, he was a fucking prodigy, like knowing there are very few fighters who were like him because he could, he could sprawl, sprawl and brawl meaning that he could use his wrestling to keep himself off the ground and just knock people out in the way and control the fight in this way. But he was also like, he was a wild man, like he, he, he would just like sort of train in high schools with high school wrestling games and not for like, he wasn't a pervert.

But he was just a weird guy and he was just like, just got drunk constantly. Yeah. Yeah. I train with high school wrestling teams. Still not a pervert though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There was some, but I think my favorite fighter I would say is John Jones. I think John Jones is like the, to me, he's the most interesting guy in the sport because we've never really seen anyone like him. And John Jones is, you know, if you watch the NFL, you're familiar with Arthur and Chandler Jones, uh, I forget what teams they play for now, but. One's retired. Yeah. And I think Arthur, right?

Yeah. I think so. Yeah. And Chandler is a wide receiver. If I remember right. He used to be on the Patriots. I don't really watch football. No, it's, it's crazy.

John Jones is insane because, I mean, he'll never get this kind of recognition, but he's probably one of the greatest athletes who like has ever lived, I would say at least of this century, um, of any sport and people don't really view MMA athletes like in that particular way. But I was talking to, to, uh, you about this Felix a few months back and like the athlete he kind of reminds me of in some respects is Bo Jackson, who, you know, Bo Jackson is my like hero, like ever since I was a little kid and you know, they have this similarity for different reasons, which is that we saw this guy do things that seemed like they shouldn't

be possible. Um, just like, you know, uh, Bo Jackson just refused to practice or work out or whatever because he's like, why would I ever practice? I just want to go out there and play and he didn't need to practice or lift weights or anything. Same thing with John Jones, who, uh, basically learned moves he learned off YouTube. Like he would just watch YouTube and then he'd try the moves in the ring and they worked. And, um, you know, it looks like we're going to see Jones fight again, but for a while it

looked like we might ever never see him fight ever again because he kept getting pop for steroid use and he was facing a four year suspension at one time. And, um, you know, just like Bo Jackson broke his hip and we just never saw the greatest athlete of the 20th century play football again. Yeah. And the John Jones to set some context for him, he sort of burst onto the scene. Like there was always like grainy footage of him in pre UFC fights, just doing incredible throws on people that it made it look like they were a stunt person, like leaning into

the throw. He had this incredible wrestling degree. He, uh, he co, he comes in the UFC and just beats the shit out of everyone. His only loss to this day. It's a disqualification for throwing 12 to six elbows, which are when instead of throwing your elbows sort of at the side, like sort of horizontally, you bring, you sort of have your elbow at like a right angle to the floor and you bring it down. And there's no reason it's illegal other than this is literally the reason when they

were making the unified rules of mixed martial arts. One of the dumb shit athletic commissioners in, you know, whatever corrupt state government was like, Oh, I saw somebody break boards with that on TV in a karate demonstration. Imagine what could do to a human head. It's completely unscientific, but yeah, he, he lost because he did that to Matt Hamill in a fight. He would have just otherwise won by technical knockout. But the thing on John Jones was his dad was a Pentecostal minister and he was raised very

strictly, but he was sort of like a near duel as a kid in this family of like outstanding athletes in this devoutly religious household. He experienced the loss of his sister due to leukemia at the age of about 17, I think. And his image for his first fights we saw him was like this goody, goody Christian fighter and he would say things like, Oh, I used to call the police on kids who would smoke weed in high school. And so people like hardcore fans fucking hated him. They hated him so much because not only was he like that, he was fighting guys like Shogun

Hua, like these guys they had loved for years and years and years and just not even giving them a moment, just trashing them, just making them look like shit. Like they had just picked a guy out of the audience. And after like, you know, a little while on top, he gets a DUI and it's with, he's, he's married now. He was engaged at the time and has kids and there was a girl in the car. There was like a woman in the car and everyone's like, Oh, we got you, bitch. But something weird happened after that and he started to be more himself.

He started to like, he actually like kind of showed the guy he was, which is like this deeply damaged individual who, you know, he gets his girlfriend pregnant when he's like a kid, basically. He applies for a job to be a janitor at Lockheed Martin gets denied and the only thing he can think of, because he was a junior college wrestling champion, it's like, Oh my God, what if I fucking fight like both my brothers are like football stars. I could, I fucked up at that. Like I couldn't do that.

What if I just do this and he just, he's better than everyone. And of course he would have like this stunted development because every crucial time in his life, he was supposed to like be allowed to be a kid, something, whether it was the loss of a sibling or like an unexpected pregnancy, he never got to do it. And so he becomes this adult, he's thrust into this and he's like, okay, I have to act good. I have to act good. I have to act like how my dad would want me to act.

I hate it when people smoke weed. And then of course it break, you can't keep that up forever. You can, especially not if millions of people are watching you destroy people and you're like, I'm the shit. I'm the greatest of all time. What the fuck? I'm the greatest and all these people hate you. But then he started, that's when he started to be more himself and he had this fight

with Daniel Cormier, who, you know, I hate that it had to be Cormier because Daniel Cormier is one of the nicest people to ever compete in any sport, but they have this huge rivalry and there is this famous lead up to the fight where they get into a fight at the press conference before their fight and then they go on ESPN and they don't know the tape is rolling. They don't know they're live. And Jones who like, you never hear, you've never heard him say anything like this. The first thing he says is like, are you still there pussy and it's so fuck. It's like, so, and they just like, they have this insane back and forth where Cormier is

like, if I was over there, I'd spit your face and Jones goes, if you spit in my face, I fucking kill you. You know that. And it's so like, you can make fun of it because it's like very middle school, like, oh dude, I will kill you before the spitting that came out of your mouth. But it's so like, it's so like, there's so much unbridled hatred and rage that we had never seen in this guy before and he starts, he beats Cormier in this amazing fight. He goes on and on and then he experiences more steroid.

He blows for PEDs and we talk about PEDs a little bit in the documentary and he blows for cocaine. Like he had a cocoa hangover during one of his fights with Cormier. Which means you had to have done it like earlier that day. Yeah. It's like in and out of your system. And the great thing is he was so unapologetic about that because at the presser before the fight, Cormier was like, yeah, you junkie, like you cokehead or whatever.

And Jones was like, yeah, I'd be, I had cocaine one weekend and then I just came in and beat your ass. And that's it. And that was the same guy who snitched on kids who smoke pot. He's just awesome. Yeah. He's like, I see him as this, he's as much of a tragic figure as like a guy who, you know, has beat the shit out of anyone he's ever fought and made a ton of money doing

it is because I feel like, yeah, he's someone who never really got to experience his youth and he tried to get bits and pieces of it as like a professional adult. And the other thing that makes me like him is I think hardcore MMA fans have sort of twisted views of people and they've always just assumed Jones is a dick because he says these things that like a highly competitive person who is the best at what they do would say and, you know, beat up their favorite guys, but just anecdotally, I've heard like people who know the sport and cover the sport very well have told me like, yeah, he's, I've seen him like go out of his way for like fans, things that won't even make it to camera.

And I think that he's the exact type of like complex person who has good and bad sides and is also has the side of him that no one else has that. Yeah. He's my favorite. He's a land of contrast. He is. He lives in a society. By the way, one confound, I think the most confounding piece of feedback I've received

about our documentary on the PED point is I saw somebody call us cops because we said steroids were good, which they were good because your cops were saying the stories are good. Yes. Yeah. I don't think anyone can explain that to me. I just found it hilarious. I don't think he knew what a cop was. And I just like that's awesome.

Maybe he doesn't know the steroids. I do want to talk. People got mad. I you guys haven't gotten into it yet, but there is a part where we talk about steroids in the fifth part and they interpreted it as unambiguously pro-steroid and I guess that's kind of my fault for how I wrote it, but it's got to be your fault for what you believe or what you said. It was the only part where I'm on camera and I'm wearing a shirt that says, I love steroids

now. Look, I could see if people misinterpreted that. No, my point about steroids, there is steroid use in MMA. It's actually totally unscientific anecdotal numbers are to be believed it's prevalent and yet less prevalent than every other major professional sport. But my point about steroids was that the reason a lot of people take them is steroids have this amazing thing where they help you recover for an injury and go figure this incredibly demanding sport that sort of prohibits you from leading a normal life after.

People want to take this amazing chemical. It allows them to not be sidelined for a fucking year when they take it. Yeah. I mean, I'm as pro-steroid as you are basically. Honestly, I mean, my only thing I have to say against is like, if you're like a teen, you probably shouldn't use it, but like, or don't like do too much, I guess, or maybe do too much. Or do it with your friends.

That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, don't do it alone. We're all doing it right now. We're all writing out right now. I want to be the cool steroid dad. Just the most arrested man in history, 16-year-old son and 20 of his friends are just doing

anavar in your basement. Oh, there has to be steroid dad. There are. Yeah. I mean, Sage North cuts dad. Oh, yeah. Which he was fascinating to me because like, you know, you're talking earlier about how it's kind of difficult to be a, like in terms of like athlete personas, every sport has

their wholesome guys and like all sports, almost every sport has to run off the fact that there's one wholesome guy who would call the cops on someone smoking weed or is really Jesus-y or whatever. Yeah. Every sport needs a Tebow. Yeah. I mean, Sage North cut is like this weird, but it doesn't work. It doesn't make any sense.

It seems like a, it's just like, it's like finding out that Alice Cooper is really Christian. It's just like one of these things that doesn't make sense and it's like, why are you like this? And it seems like he's trying to bring some kind of a respectability to a fundamentally Carney sport. Ridiculous sport. Well, Sage is interesting because he's like one of those few guys in sports who I actually believe is like that, like there's this.

It seems earnest. It's totally earnest. And he's like an angel. He watched, he was training with Tyron Woodley and Tyron Woodley watched the movie, Birth of a Nation with it, not the DW Griffith one, the movie, Birth of a Nation. The one about the Nat Turner slave. Yeah. Yeah.

And Sage North got first, he literally, he cooked chicken with Sage and he put seasoning on the chicken. Sage went, whoa, it tastes so much better. That literally happened and then they watched Birth of a Nation and Sage went, he was like completely depressed and was like, oh my God, why did we do that? Yeah. Yeah. He's the cutest.

This is like giving vodka to Rod and Todd. Yeah. He's just like, he's this weird, almost impenetrable kind of chipper wholesomeness that just makes zero sense in a sport where people just beat the shit out of each other. Everyone he knows is kind of a psycho and he's just so, he's like, oh man, there is this. Irrepressibly wholesome. Yeah.

He posted this picture once where he's like shirtless, like cleaning his truck and he's like, getting it all cleaned, like, you know, like women try and hit on him too. He's my favorite thing and he just does not get it. Yeah. No, there was, yeah, that happened. Like, I think, I think it was Tessa Torres or someone else replied to it when he was walking his truck, you know, with his glistening muscles out. It was like me next.

And he went, awesome. Bring your truck over. Well, John, you mentioned that every, every sport needs a T-bow. Let me ask you this. You know, if you're a GM in UFC right now, you taking a chance, you're signing T-bow, you want him on your team, get him in the, get him in the rock to go on. Of course. He's a multi-sport talent.

I mean, he's hitting 204 for the New York Mets Triple H. 204 is really good. I want to become the Tim T-Bow of eSports, just not good at all and not Christian. Just I'm going to be like, Baha'i. It's got to be, it's got, you got to have a weird form. You hold your controller upside down or something. Just everyone yelling at me because I'm praying over communications. John, like, what were the, was there anything that you sort of like a thread that you pulled out, putting this stuff together that like didn't make the cut, you know, you always

got to, you know, kill your favorites or whatever in any creative endeavor, but what, you know, what was left on the cutting room floor that didn't make it into the documentary that still interests you or you wish that you could have more time or space to expand on? Oh, man. I got an answer for that for sure. It's the very first UFC fight, UFC one in 1993. And we talked about the tournament, but we didn't really talk about the actual first fight of the night, which was Felix, maybe you can help me out with the pronunciation,

but no. Oh yeah. I can't do that. That's my department, right? Right. Just however you say it, it's going to be right. Taylor Tully, I guess, the, the Sumo wrestler. Oh, I'm not going to try it.

We're going to call him that. Yeah. He was fighting against Gerard Gordeaux, who was just this insanely dirty kickboxer. And so, you know, there's a weight mismatch of like 150 or 200 pounds. It's really even striking watching a video of it. And he's this, you know, Tully's this giant Sumo wrestler, they meet in the ring and they go to the center, Tully, the only thing he really knows how to do is just bum rush him. And you know, with his head down, his head leading the way, which is very bad.

That's kind of their whole move. This kind of, kind of what you do, a very incompatible move because Gordeaux just winds up and just kicks the unholy shit out of his face. So hard that a couple of Tully's teeth come flying out. One of them, according to a couple of things I read, gets implanted in Gordeaux's foot. Yeah. The thing is, they still have a couple more fights to go in that night. So they're like, okay, well, what do you want to do?

And the doctor's like, okay, well, if we take this tooth out of your foot, blood's going to go everywhere and you're not going to be able to fight. So they decide to leave the tooth in and just wrap it up. So he fought two more fights that night with someone else's tooth in his foot. Well, you got to wrap it up. Otherwise, it violates the, if he kicks someone, it would violate the rule against biting. Right? Good point.

So Gordeaux guy, you said he was incredibly dirty, and then in that same one where he, in the finals, he faced off against what, Hoist Gracie? Yeah. And he bit him, bit his ear or something on that fight, and then you said like to get back at him when Hoist Gracie finally tapped him out. He kept him in that fucking hold like about five or 10 seconds longer than he should have. You see him tap like at least 15 times in that video. He's just like, God, Jesus, I'm beat.

Stop. And even the announcers are like, hey, it's over. I don't know what he's doing. It's over. But the fact that there's like a sense of like, like those are the rules, no eye gouging and no biting or whatever. But fundamentally, you're going to not do those rules when you panic. Like that's the most interesting thing to me.

Or like, remember like Tyson and Holyfield, and it was just like, oh, you saw him losing and he panicked. And just like this, you know, animal part of your brain turns on and all of a sudden you forget that you're playing a sport and you only remember that there's someone attacking you. So yeah, you're getting a biting someone's at some point. Oh yeah, absolutely. I had a bunch of things I wish like we, I mean, this is how you know, I'm a great writer.

I need 16 hours to tell the story, but no, I mean, I saw some comments about, you know, why didn't you talk more about McGregor's sort of like Conor McGregor has like more of a like race baiting style of trash talk. Yeah. It's just like, there's just simply wasn't time for a lot of stuff. I wanted to talk about Chechnya a lot, Chechnya and MMA, I didn't have time for that. Like we have a, we have a section about Khabib and Conor, but it just, you know, literally that if we got into everything we wanted to get in with Khabib and Conor, it's like probably

another 25 minutes. Oh yeah. There's a one point he calls them. Conor calls Khabib's father a terrorist rat, which is pretty cool. Yeah. I wanted to talk about Affliction a lot and Affliction was the same company as the T-shirts. Right. Yeah.

And they were, they were this, I feel like it's funny to talk about the Affliction of mental illness. I just wanted to raise awareness and be sure it's cool, but they started an MMA promotion. Their CEO, Tom Atencio did it to compete with the USC because they had a falling out with Dana White over some weird T-shirt money bullshit. And so... Seems like there's a lot of Facebook style beefs in this sport. Oh my goodness.

So there's a multi-billion dollar companies and the head of it is like, you're a fucking thick pussy dude, honestly. But so Affliction was a very interesting promotion. They signed like, at the time, people seemed to think that the best heavyweight talent was outside the UFC and they signed most of it. And they, to their credit, they paid fighters a shitload of money. It was actually pretty cool, but they were just horribly run. I mean, amazingly well designed T-shirts though.

Amazing. Yeah. You look at the T-shirts. A beautiful aesthetic. Looking at the T-shirts, you would, you would, you would think it would be a better run promotion. But yeah, they, they had, they had this, they had a deal with Fedor Emile Enko who was thought to be the greatest heavyweight in the world. And I, some erroneously stated him to be the greatest of all time.

And that's not it. I think that's erroneous. Not because Emile Enko sucked, but because I don't think the heavyweight's going to be the greatest of all time. It's the most shallow talent pool kind of, but anyway, one of their investors was Donald Trump and their chief of operations was Michael Cohn. And I wanted to talk about it so much, but there just literally wasn't time. They're just like, to tell the main story, there, there are all these things that add

to it. You know, two hours is already so fucking much. And yeah. One of the, one of the threads that I noticed when I was talking to you about earlier in one of the little promo videos I saw is just the phrase condom depot really, really stuck in my head. Can you explain condom depot and it's like a depot? You like, you lead your horse in, you tie them up, you buy a bit of whiskey.

It's like a depot. I'm never, you sell the pelts that you caught. I'm never shopping a condom depot again. These tastes terrible. But this is, so condom depot was, it was like an online condom bullseller, like an online Costco for condoms. Dude, that is like that. That is the ultimate like humble brag shit.

It's like, yo, I fuck so much, I'm buying my condoms wholesale. I gotta get these things by the shipping pallet. How many of their sales do you think were just liars? Yeah, no shit. I need a thousand condoms a week. Like a guy who wanted to like impress a girl by like, yeah, this is my garage and they have a shipping pallet of magnum condoms, just like, yeah, those are all mine. Just like, yeah, you bring a girl home and like your entire nightstand is just made up

of pallets of condom depot condoms. Yeah, it's my furniture. One thing that I love about that, by the way, is that, okay, like when I first saw Felix's first draft of the script, I was like, oh, okay, well, he's just, that's just a flourish seat. Like there wasn't actually condom depot on people's shorts and it turns out there were. And like everyone at my company who reviewed the script were just like, you didn't photoshop that, right?

That was actually condom depot. But yeah. There is an interesting economics side to condom depot, though. There always is. There's always. Yeah. No, I work in condom depot. No, the economics department, not the cheese department, but so this was back before the

Reebok deal. And the Reebok deal, it was Reebok became sort of the exclusive fighter apparel sponsor, the UFC, meaning that they couldn't get outside sponsors and that used to be how fighters made a ton of their money. And condom depot was a big sponsor for the middle class of fighters, which we don't really have as much anymore. Fighters who would like maybe be in a contenders fight, probably never fight and certainly not win a belt.

And for a certain type of fighter, the best real estate you could get was on the back of their shorts. And everyone always laughed like that they had condom depot on the ass of their shorts. And of course, like every guy who watched it at Buffalo Wild Wings would be like, I would never put a condom in my ass. I'm not gay, but the reason they put it there is because for a certain type of fighter, like a wrestler who would stall a lot, who would sort of stall against the cage and the clinch, for about 70% of that fight, you're seeing their ass.

And that's huge. That's huge ban of real estate. And guys like someone like Jake Shields, who I think is kind of a MAGA guy now, interestingly enough, a vegan jujitsu guy, became a MAGA guy. But he, a guy like him would get a ton of money for having on his ass. And condom depot was one of the big sponsors. They famously, yeah, Sean Scherk, when he won the belt, had condom depot on his ass. Funny you bring it up, friends, are you sick of buying condoms?

Retail prices. I'm just, sorry, this is a live read now. We actually, this is our first live read on the show, it's for condom depot. We have a, it's a variety of deluxe premium condoms using the best premium latex and sheeps, bladders, a variety of different lubes, flavors, colors, and novelty items. Get your condoms at condom depot. Have safe sex at wholesale prices. Yes, you know, that's an unexplored boutique market is a animal lining condoms for like

mehub, renaissance fair people. You could, you could make a pretty penny off that. Each condom depot condom has a silver microbial layer, a wick away bacteria off your sweaty disgusting dick and clean you. Don't take a shower, buy condom depot. Do you, do you, do you fucking hate when your mailman makes fun of the place you buy condoms from? I'm Mark Merring going, don't you fucking hate using condoms?

Have unsafesextepot.com, we don't sell anything, we're advertising a lifestyle. It's just a raw dog advocacy group, like why are the Koch brothers funding this? The Mercer is their funding, just like the raw dog lifestyle. That's the affliction should have t-shirts in old English that says like raw dog, fuck condoms. I'm surprised they don't. I haven't seen an affliction shirt in the wild forever. Actually, that's really weird because like, I remember for the aughts is this like strange

frozen moment in American culture that seems so far away and distant from where our culture currently is. But like the era of like, yeah, affliction t-shirts and then before that the Von Dutch hat. These things come and go. Remember all the Sailor Jerry stuff? Oh my God. That was a time.

Actually, I had this conversation with someone recently, I had it with Cal, I was like, did we all just forget that all clothes were horrifying in like 2006? Go back and look at like a MTV Awards red carpet and it's like everyone looked awful. It's really weird. But like the affliction thing, that was like, it was a type of t-shirt that stood in for a type of person. The affliction t-shirt guy. Those people are still around, but like what have they morphed into because I haven't seen

an affliction t-shirt in a long time either. I've seen them on very, very, very recent immigrant men. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what they wear now. I mean, we would have to consult the experts, Michael and Tom and Aaron, on this. But I mean, there are some, they wear similar things. Well, do you see those algorithmically generated shirts that they have on Facebook that are

like, yeah, they're like, yeah, I'm a Gemini who is dishonorably disjointed. Discharged from the army. Yeah. Like my wife's a veterinarian. I've been dishonorably discharged from the army and I was born in July. Come fuck with me. I just got a microaggressed by Facebook trying to advertise me a pair of socks that said on the bottom of them, if I'm wearing these, leave me alone.

I'm watching Hallmark movies and bring me wine. Oh my gosh. Those are huge socks. On the bottom of the socks. Yeah. Those are junk. Those are like stockings. Yeah, first of all, you'd really have to zoom in to read the print, I think, like this

one on each foot. Yeah. So it's broken up, but also, why do they think I want that? I, yeah, I think a few people, you're one of the only people besides me who's broken the algorithm. Like, yeah, they just don't know how to advertise to me now, but that that sock design, that's like the Ben Garrison school. Everything out there.

One thing, it really is some Houdini level magic that affliction accomplished what they did, which is to call their like super aggro shit, um, affliction, which is like, I got to go get this checked out. Like, yeah. Exactly. Wow. Those are look like shit. I know.

These are the socks that Facebook decided. So the scenario is like, hey, sit down and come to the level of my foot and like stare at my foot from a foot away. So yeah. Is that for like doms? It's like corny doms. If you can read this hallmark and bring me wine, I should have a, they should have socks to say, uh, if you can read this print, uh, you're a disgusting little worm.

We should. Yeah. Yeah. But it is weird that they, it was called. It's just a classic case of like a dumb guy hearing a word that he doesn't really know what it means. And he's like, that just sounds awesome. But do you think that like, uh, I, I think maybe it's morphed into like the affliction

stuff because it's like, yeah, I'm afflicted. I'm afflicted with, with rage and, and just strangeness. Yo, I'm, I'm possessed by the devil dog. I have stage four beast mode. Do you think that has morphed into like the, the Joker kind of stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's it. Like all the, it's just like, uh, dinosaurs never went away. They just all flew. They all became birds. So when you see like a stork or ostrich or really looking at a T-rex and when you see like a, like a Joker guy being, or like with damaged on their forehead or just. Someone being very twisted.

Yeah. That's like the affliction guys. They went from afflicted to twisted. That's stage five. It's terminal. Stage five. Beast mode. I'm, I'm, I'm sorry, sir.

Your wife has gone full beast mode. I do wish, uh, I could, after watching the episodes that I've seen, I wish I could have seen more of the audience, uh, I'm so curious. I'm so curious there. So the early audience, it was, it looked like a lot of guys were long haul truckers, honestly, but the later audiences, uh, they were more diverse, uh, but you had a strong contingent of, you know, the ideal cross-section Trump voter, a sort of suburban, uh, like upper middle class guy who has a blue collar affectation.

Right. And my favorite, I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to try to find this gift for this episode. So people know what I'm talking about. It's the greatest gift of the late 2000s, you'll see. It's these two guys, two like middle-aged guys with highlights, uh, wearing like club shirts with pop collars, just like the, and they realized the camera's on them and they just like freak out and start doing the shittiest shadow boxing ever and it was just like, if someone ever is like, what was 2008 like, I'm just going to send them that.

I'm, I'm curious to like the, the documentary has been out, what, like, uh, about a week now, like the last episode premiered, uh, Friday, Friday, a little earlier this week. So like it's been like a little amount of time. I'm just curious, like how is, if you've gotten any feedback, like how has this been received by the broader MMA world? Well the CEO of YouTube called me and said it's getting so many hits, he's asking permission to put the most powerful servers online. That's frankly very cool.

Yeah. He's going to get a new CD-ROM for it. No, it's been, it's been really, um, positive overall. I mean, there's been definitely, uh, the minority of people I expected, which is like, what are politics doing in this? And there's also like my audience, SB nation audience that is suddenly, um, being exposed to the dirtbag left, which is really, really funny. And they're like, where did all these politics come from?

I don't understand how you made fun of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Those are the two kinds of politics. What are you doing? Yeah. And I was like, I was like, you know what the thing about me is, I skewer both sides. Uh, yeah. No, I, I, I saw like there were a lot of like MAGA people in I think episode two who were like, that clip, Donald Trump is why I voted for Donald Trump.

It's like, okay, man. Wait, what was the clip with Donald Trump? Or no, it wasn't Donald Trump. It was, it was Dana White at the Republican convention being like, Donald Trump came to the UFC and that's why I'm voting for him. And it's like, it was like one of the guys who lies. He's like, I was a Bernie supporter, but then it's like, maybe, but like, yeah, you probably weren't mad.

And I don't believe you. But like, as to that, that, that reaction, which I imagine is fairly commonplace, like to me, obviously nothing makes more sense than weaving in like the politics of our era with the popular culture and entertainment of it. But like, how do you respond to someone who's like a UFC fan and they, they say like, you know, why, why are politics in my sports documentary? Well, the UFC literally made a documentary just like very recently about how cool Donald Trump is.

So there you go, man. No, this is just counter-programming. Yeah. But I mean, I'm surprised you get it because you, like you did the Randall Cunningham thing. Yeah. Like you've done a lot. Yeah. I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, I've done a bunch of pro union, definitely left leaning shit over the years, but I guess this is the one they can't, they can't take. But I mean, most of them are still really receptive to it. But like, you think people like, they react, they have like an instinctive kind of like revulsion or like, oh, what's politics doing in this? Because like, our entertainment is so precious to people because it's like, that's what they do.

Like that's their thing to hang on to when they're not working or whatever. And they don't want to think even at their job about this kind of stuff. And then like their thing, whether it's like a sport or a TV show or like music. And then when like politics gets put in that, like they, there's like an instinctual like, oh, get that away from me because I don't want to, I don't want to cross the streams or whatever. I do actually have a lot of sympathy for that, strangely, because like, yeah, of course, like politics kind of is, is part of, it's woven into everything now.

But I do understand the desire to just like escape all that shit and sports have served that role for me a lot of the time. Like, to me, sports are great because it's the one place where I don't have to have an opinion because opinions are exhausting for me to have. I fucking hate having. And the second something is like low stakes enough where I don't have to have an opinion. I'll be like, that's fine. All the teams are playing good.

I'm just going to watch this. I'm just frictionlessly just appreciate things without getting mad or upset or whatever. So like, I get it when people just want to just sit down and not be bothered for a little while. Christopher Lash wrote really, really well about games and sports in the 70s because there was like this kind of like allegedly progressive term away from sports because they're like, oh, they're so competitive and they, they teach, you know, competition. He's like, actually like competition is good.

It's just, it shouldn't be it like the whole idea of sports is that it puts competition in a place where the stakes are very low. He had this really good line and he says games here referring to anything, but he's mostly talking about sports. Games satisfy the need for free fantasy in the search for gratuitous difficulty simultaneously. They combine childlike exuberance with deliberately creative complications. They enlist skill and intelligence, the utmost concentration of purpose on behalf of utterly useless activities, which make no contribution to the struggle of man against nature, to

the wealth or comfort of the community or its physical survival. And that's his argument for sports. And it's like a very, like it's a good thing, but also we can talk about the politics of sports. It's going to be fine. You can always go back to watching them and hit each other afterwards. Yeah, no. Yeah.

I'm, yeah, I'm also sympathetic to that. Like I, if you just wanted to be an escape, yeah, I'm fine with you not watching it straight at highly, you know, buy some fake accounts to up the views. It's literally all I'm asking. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, that's what we did, Felix. We're getting about so far about 80,000 to 150,000 views per episode. Most of those are bots.

We've only had about 17 or 18 people watching this. All right. Well, that's what I expected. Yeah. Right. It's fine. Well, I don't think I should let us get to the end of the episode without bringing up the news item that I'm sure all of you are thinking about and really preoccupied

with, you know, emotionally and psychologically. I'm talking about the passing of our 41st president, George Herbert Walker Bush, who died at the age of 94 the other day, and has been reunited with his lovely wife, Barbara, and XXX, Tintacion in heaven. It was, you know, unexpected friendship. They both had, like, earlier in life, it sucks that we both lost him in 2016, X and George H.W. Bush. But George is there, you know, I have word from staffers in heaven.

The George H.W. Bush and Barry Seal are recording an album with XXX and Tintacion. You love to see it, man. George H.W. Bush, probably the first president that I had a sort of an awareness or memory of, like, I was alive during a good chunk of the Reagan administration, but I had almost no conception of him at all as president or anything that happened then, because I was too young. I remember the first Gulf War, vividly, and George H.W. Bush managing that weird sort of transition from the 80s into the 90s.

And I was just wondering, any thoughts or recollections, again, number 41? I honestly just keep looking at this political cartoon. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. With George and Barbara making out in front of the pearly gates. But the weird thing is, you still have to be your old, nearly dead self in heaven. Like, they don't even get to be young again.

It's just like two burlap sacks rubbing up against each other. That's what you're joining your beloved in the hereafter is going to be. Maybe that's what the 27 Club is, just like people who wait outside, do you be the first to get an iPhone? They're like, oh, this is a perfect age to be forever. I got it. You know, my thoughts on, we've joked around a lot, but I have some serious thoughts on Bush.

You guys don't mind? Yeah. We used to worry about Desert Storm. Now we worry about Stormy Daniels. I'll be performing live in Uncusville, Connecticut at the Gulf of Mojito. Well, I mean, I've noticed that, again, I don't want to spend too much time because I feel like we've already done this with John McCain's death. And by the way, I did see a newspaper cartoon where it was like George Bush landing his

plane in heaven and John McCain's plane is already there and he's like, welcome, brother. Yeah. McCain and McCain is like, I've honestly done that before. I've landed it properly before. But yeah, I mean, we are being treated now again, like in a very predictable way to a sort of reassessment and as of George H.W. Bush is like, even though he was a one-term president, he was just such a fundamentally decent man and human being and like being set up intentionally as a contrast to Donald Trump or like a Republican of yesteryear.

Yeah. And it's just like, yeah, I mean, he was also still like head of the fucking CIA and Reagan's vice president, like pretty much a ghoul his entire life. Campaign run by Lee Atwater. Yeah. And Roger Ailes. Yeah. And like, you know, of course, it's the same thing.

It's like, if you make fun of him dying even slightly, it's just like a man has died, have some decency. And Felix, I think you said it best. It's like, he wasn't murdered or like died of some tragic illness or whatever. He was 94. He lived along what counts for happiness among, you know, lost lives. Yeah. Well, that is the thing that like annoyed me on both sides.

Like, every time like someone like this dies and like how he died, like rich surrounded by his family that he only hates like half of. I'm like, Barbara, who literally hated anything that came out of it. Except Neil, Neil's the Neil's the king of the family. Everyone respects Neil. But you know, probably got to spend the last 20 years was like doing whatever stupid shit he thought was cool, like collecting grandfather clocks. And so for both, like for the, you know, sort of NRO conservatives slash like center, center

liberal media who were like, a man has died and it's like, well, he died better. Than 99.99% of it literally happens to every one man. No, these people don't understand mortality and I think the internet, it does this too with people we like where they're like, no, not this person who is a thousand years old. Like they, it's like people forget that people die. Well, let's say for all like the NRO guys who are like, you know, you know, have you like, this is civility is just like degraded so more, we can't even let a man die in peace. And it's just like, what are you mad about?

He won. I'm making fun of him, but he fucking won. He got everything he wanted. That is the thing that is sort of the funny thing about, you know, I literally found out about while we were streaming, while we were playing this dumb game called realm Royale. And we're like, I was like, oh my God, really? And we like laughed about, but it's like, why are we laughing? Cause it's like, yeah, he won.

That's literally going to happen to all of us. And he died better than probably anyone I like anyone is and it's like, yeah, everything like we got him, he just checked out at the end of a long career of successes. Yeah. It's like he, whatever anyone, people are like, oh, we got you, you fucker. Oh, you, you, oh, it looks like you couldn't live forever, bitch. Okay. The thing that literally no one has done.

I mean, it's going to happen with Kiss Jurt. I guess the catharsis when people like this die, but with Kiss Jurt, it's like, yeah, no one even came close to getting like whatever it would make McCain and now George W. Bush when any of these like sort of, you know, ancient vampires finally turns into dust or whatever. It's just Kissinger still out there, still drawing breath. And obviously he's every, every time one of these guys dies, Kissinger starts trending online because people are just fucking like just hoping they're just waddling around like

a fucking psychopath. I can't wait for him to fucking die and like the world will be made slightly, slightly better by him exiting this mortal plan of existence, but like again, he fucking won. But even came close to fucking even like putting cuffs on him for a trial that he'd probably be acquitted of. You know what I mean? Like, so it's like a very, very Pyrrhic victory. But if you think I'm going to be nice to any of these people or just like talk about, you

know, how graceful and respectful and dignified they were like fuck off. Here's my like, I gave people the same mental exercise to ease their nerves when John McCain died and they saw the hagiography do the same thing I told you then mentally replaced. Like when you see Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, be like, you know, he was an honorable man. Replace George HW Bush's name with Chris Benoit and just imagine they're eulogizing him. It just, you, you just, you, you, you have a lot more fun seeing the equal hagiography. Just do that. You know, don't, it's easy.

It's easy to get frustrated with all this shit. It sucks, sucks to see the hagiography, but you know, end of the day, he won. He's dead. Pretend they're talking about Chris Benoit and just go to condom depot, get yourself in a float shirt. It's okay. Keep going. By the way, John, as long as you're here and I noticed you, you did it again for George

HW Bush. You have a, I think one of the, the, the funniest continually running gags on Twitter of just saying like, you know, say what you want about George HW Bush, but I got receipts and then you just post like an incredibly low resolution image of like text that just is illegible. It's like, you know, four pixels by six pixel. That's a, that's a great page. Thank you.

Don't stop doing it. Yeah. It's a very laborious process where I make increasingly low res JPEGs by screenshotting it, putting it in Photoshop and cycling it through the wash like five times until it's just totally illegible. But yeah, it's mostly just to make fun of nosy people. Like I'll tweet something like, oh, you want to tweet at me like this? Well, I've got the receipts and then it's just like, well, it's not your fucking business.

Why do you click on that? But I like the idea of juicing something with like juicing people with something that they really want to know and see, but it's just, yeah, it's like, yeah, like you said, been put through the wash like 10 fucking times. And it gets the great thing is like, we're so, I understand how people fall for it because I would fall for it too. But like if I do it sparingly enough, like only like once a month or something, people fall for it every fucking time and they get mad and when they get mad, it's because they

felt for it. It's such a good guy. Thank you. You remember when George HW Bush threw up on the Japanese Prime Minister? Oh, that's great. Wasn't that good? That was because he had a venom in him. That's why he lived so long.

He got the goop out of him. Yeah, he got the goop. That's why he lived so long. But it's interesting that like the thing of the hagiography, like if Trump dies after leaving office, which let's be honest, he probably will because he'll another ghoul who will live to be like a hundred and twenty years old against all odds. Yeah. Right.

And never his hideous diet and like guys who've been drinking Coke and eating McDonald's every day of his life. Doesn't sleep. All the hairspray that's soaked into his body. Yeah. God knows what chemicals just. He probably and he probably does some weird thing we don't know about like he requests as best as in places to live.

Yeah. I like it. He doesn't drink, but he does a shot of mercury every day. If he manages to die after leaving office and like by then, you know, I can't even imagine who will be president like, you know, President Laura Loomer, Donald Trump really reminds us of what dignity was like. If he manages to die out of office and whoever, whatever insane person is president then as we discussed, you know, Grimace, the Hamburglar.

Yeah. And he changed herself to the gate and we were like, fine, just want to be president. You know, I'm so sick of Hamburglar voters who won't support Grimace. But if he manages to die out of office, he will get the same kind of treatment where he was. Oh yeah. They'll say like, you know, a controversial president, but like, you know, he certainly was the president and you have to respect that.

You can't take that away from him. Yeah. And then yeah, there will be calls to be like, you know, let's not gloat or, you know, like a man has died. He's a father to four beautiful children. Also he fainted after he barfed, which is so fucking cool. Yeah. We didn't just barf.

I mean, who among us? What was it? It was like, didn't he say like jet lag or like food poisoning or something? I thought he had food poisoning. It was really interesting though, because this was a pre-internet time and like, I don't think it, I think everyone was slightly embarrassed by it. And if something like that had happened now, it would just be a solid week of whatever platform you were on.

You would just see a gif of that. Yeah. New York Times. Just a gif of that. That would be the entire front page of the New York Times home. No, here's what you would see. Just a gif of vomiting president. Here's what you would see.

I'd like the still shot of him just like leaning over and just like booting and the guy's laugh and it would just be like text on the image and it would be like the Japanese prime minister, me, George W. Bush and his vomit, like my anxiety and depression. I want to, I wonder how many guys there were who got their wires crossed about like urban legends and shit. We're like, I heard George W. Bush had to get a stomach pump in Japan because he had 70 liters of calm in there. He just got it mixed up with a lie about like Rod Stewart or something and it's like what

if- No joke though, George W. Bush was admitted to a hospital you are with a gerbil up his ass. That was a simpler time though. I wish we could have more things like urban legends and now everything just gets converted into sad girl memes. There's no mystery anymore. It sucks.

I want to do some statistical research and find out if there were those guys who thought George Bush had 72 liters of calm in his stomach and what if those are the guys who like they won the election for Clinton. They either went to Perot or- Yeah, they were Perot voters. Yeah, they were like, y'all I can't vote for Clinton, but that's sauce dude. You know, I've been a Republican voter my whole life, but I'm voting for Perot because I can't support a man who chugged six quarts of semen.

That's the funniest story, the Rod Stewart one, because it's like you couldn't even like make that many guys calm, you would have to like have that much calm like in containers and just come into the room and just drink all of it. There would be no sex involved. I mean he's got many fridge money. Yeah, that's true. That's just literally just drinking the gin. This writer is really confusing.

The other interesting thread to George H.W. Bush dying is like, you know, in the sort of like the hagiography and the civility police are like, you know, you're talking about a man who is like deeply respected by like at least half of this country, which is like, hey, not true. No. Like half of this country doesn't even remember George H.W. Bush. Yeah, he wasn't in infinity war. And like, and speaking about like, you know, the Republicans are conservatives, they're

like, you know, have some respect, like this guy mattered. And it's just like, but now like conservatism has gotten so weird, a good chunk of Trump supporters think George H.W. Bush assassinated John F. Kennedy, and it's like he was in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, by the way, and was the next of the CIA and Texas oil money. So not saying he did it or, you know, if I did it by George H.W. Bush, but a big part of the QAnon conspiracy theory is that JFK Jr. is still alive and is Q and shows up at Trump rallies, like seemingly looking like other people, which, you know, you do if you were faked your death years ago.

Of course. It's the smartest thing to do. But like a big part of it is they think JFK Jr.'s idiotic politics, sexy politics magazine, George, was called that because that was his way of telling people who killed his dad. Because there's no other George's book that it could have been named. Yeah. Actually, if you look at the first issue of George, and I've seen it. It's like Cindy Crawford doesn't cover a dress like George Washington.

But then like, you know, in the magazine, like where they give you like the headlines of like what else is in the magazine, one of them is like shooting a president, but it's about like photographers or something. And they're like, dude, he's telling you. But what I love about that conspiracy theory is like, okay, you're JFK Jr., you are widely considered the most eligible bachelor in America, like one of the most handsome, famous guy who has it all. How can I let people know?

Oh, I get it. I named my magazine cryptically after the guy who killed my father. Why not just be like, hey, hi, I'm JFK Jr., George HW Bush killed my dad. No, but it's like it's a little treasure hunt. Exactly. I love QAnon is like, it's like the Zyborg clock for boomers. They made their own massive RPG and JFK Jr.'s Johnny Five Aces. All right.

You think we should wrap it up? Yeah. I think so. And once again, I'd like to thank John Boyce for joining us today. The documentary is Fighting in the Age of Loneliness. I'd like to thank Tito Ortiz for thanking Felix for doing the documentary. Thank you to the Chapo FYM boys who got me this as a Christmas present. They got me a cameo of Tito Ortiz congratulating us on the doc.

Well, he said, Chapo FLM, you know, still wonderful. And this is the wrap it up segment sponsored by Conim Depot. Yeah, this is a this is the plug part of the show sponsored by Buttplug Depot. Again, get your get your butt plugs at Buttplug Depot at wholesale prices, antimicrobial. It will whip the shit away from your asshole and just leave you feeling very filled. I do actually we are Matt Virgil and myself will be at Princeton University on Thursday, December 6th for a civilized conversation about debate. At the Princeton Debating Society in a wig haul at Princeton University, the event will

be open to the public and free of charge. So if you want to come out and see us talk about how to how to debate intelligently and civilly at Princeton University, I will be moderating a debate between Matt and Virgil. Mostly I would expect to be about what to have for lunch. Oh, I have a I have a plug that also involves Virgil, actually Union Hall, December 17th, December 1 is coming to Brooklyn, New York. Virgil Texas will be participating in any of you if you want to really, honestly, but I will be as well.

Any any give us any hints of what characters will be portraying? Let's just say Chalmers, Pinochet Harding and Gilroy Monsanto may return. All right, once again, the documentary series is Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, Felix Biedermann, Amber Frost, Will Menaker and John Boyz. Thank you so much again for joining us, of course, and to you, signing off. Cheers. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Bye. Felix, I heard you're a big MMA fan and a fan of mine. I appreciate your support. Thank you very much. I heard you're coming out with a documentary, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness. And yes, it's pretty damn lonely as being a fighter. Congratulations to you, man. Talk about the history of MMA.

I hope it does really, really well. I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And this comes from all your boys at Shapro FLM. I appreciate your support, man. Thank you. Hope you have wonderful holidays. Peace.