Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 310: Joey Diaz

Episode Date: October 27, 2018

Joey Diaz, priest, pope, guru, and founder of the Church of What's Happening Now joins the DTFH! This episode is sponsored by [Eero](https://eero.com/) (use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout for $100 off!) and [Robinhood Financial](http://duncan.robinhood.com/) (get one free stock when you sign up!). Friday, November 16th - Come see "[Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism](https://www.samarasacenter.com/cutting-through-spiritual-materialism-lots-of-icing-not-much-cake/)" with Duncan & David Nichtern at the Samarasa Center in Echo Park, LA!

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in the line. Buck plug machine, opening time for the DTFH. Everybody, let's roll it down. Pull the train board, open up the tracks. Get your mouth dental floss. Definitely use nitrous oxide whenever you can. It's time for the Juck and Trussell Family Hour Podcast. If you listen closely, then you might hear

the heartbeat of a thing that lives inside your mind called your identity. It wants so much to be a thing, even though it knows it's not that it makes the toilet up your brain, shifts out all your thoughts, creates a trap, made out of where you wish you were and where you hope you're not.

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Oh, money by me. Yeah. I was very disappointed by the DTFH. Trussell's family. How are you? I don't think it's fair to call this a comedy podcast. I'm not sure he's a connoisseur.

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on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. In fact, Brian doesn't even know I'm doing it. Praise the seven moons of Poseidon. We have a glorious podcast for you today. With us is a guru, a priest, a pope, a reverend, a saint, an enlightened being, and most importantly,

the founder of the Church of What's Happening Now. Joey Diaz, a.k.a. Mad Flavor, is here with us today. We're going to dive right into that, but first, some quick business. A deep thank you to Robin Hood for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Robin Hood, it's an investing app

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Head over to patreon.com, Ford slash DTFH and subscribe, and you will have access to additional DTFH related stuff, including an extra hour-long rambling thing that I do once a month, sometimes more. I'm trying to do that more, actually. And just stuff that maybe I just feel a little too, like squeamish or nervous or cowardly to place on the main feed.

Some music, for example, and also a link to our Discord server, which is a place where you can go and hang out with other people who listen to the show. And maybe some people who don't listen to the show. I don't know. But also, you will get commercial-free episodes that come out sooner than they do on the main feed.

And also, you will be supporting the thriving megastructure, which in this dimension is known as the Dunkin Trussell Family Hour podcast. That's patreon.com, Ford slash DTFH. Also, Christmas is coming, and the best way to embody the spirit of that holiday is to buy stuff and give it to your friends to show them that you love them, because truly, that's the only way to express love.

And the best way to express love is by going to the shop located at DunkinTrussell.com. We've got a lot of new stuff. In fact, it's all new. Hoodies, shirts, t-shirts. I know there was a drought for the longest time at the store. I know there was just an infinite supply of the same stuff. I don't expect you to trust me and go back to the website

and look at the shop, but go look at the shop. It's all new stuff. Head over to DunkinTrussell.com and click on the shop to see for yourself. Get some wonderful, blessed temple garb for you to wear around your octagon or tetrahedron or geodesic dome. If you're going to be around Los Angeles on November 16th, come to the Samarasah Center,

where I'm going to be doing basically a podcast, even though technically that's not what it is, but the other words for it are pretty boring, even more boring than podcasts. Dialogue, having a conversation, sitting down with David Nickturn, who's my meditation teacher, and who was a student of Chogyam Trumpa Rinpoche, and who teaches meditation classes all over the world.

He's also an Emmy award-winning composer. He's been on the podcast, I think a couple of times now, and is potentially deeply cheesy as this is going to sound. I'm really enjoying having formal meditation instruction and an actual meditation teacher. So, if you want to come listen to us, yep, and have a conversation about the topic of spiritual materialism, then head over to samarasahcenter.com

and look for David Nickturn. It's coming up on November 16th. Today's guest is an unduplicated manifestation of completely undomesticated comedy, a kind of vortex, a walking cyclone of not just present-moment-style awareness, but brilliant, original, unique icon. Joey has had one of the craziest lives that I have ever heard of.

He is someone who has spent time in prison for kidnapping, and though that is incredibly interesting, to me, what is especially magnetizing about Joey Diaz is not so much his sordid past, but his beautiful present, and the fact that he has transformed a lifetime of chaos, not just into undomesticated comedy, but also into a philosophy that he lives by. Well, you've strapped over your third eye

and send a beam of rainbow light shooting through the time-space continuum to rain down upon today's guest, Joey Diaz. Welcome, welcome on you that you are with us Shaken, no need to be blue Welcome to you It's the drinking trussel Trussel, trussel, trussel, trussel, trussel, trussel, trussel

Trussel basement. You got an hour? Yeah. Joey, thank you so much man. It's so great to see you. No, it's great to see you, brother. Hanging out with you is so... I'm lucky.

No, I'm lucky. You're my brother. What friend? Brothers. Because you're like, I don't mean to like flatter you too much at the beginning of a podcast and put you in an odd position. But like, you are the comedian and philosopher. You're like the quintessential thing.

Like you're it. Which is that comedians are like not just funny. Like underneath that is like real, real philosophy. Fuel. There has to be a little fuel. Yeah. And it's fuel from the years that you've gained. You know, when you...

When somebody comes up to you now and they tell you what they want to do in comedy. Yeah. You don't want to have a big judgmental and shit on somebody's dreams. Right. But you've been through where they've been through. Right. And you want to tell them you have a fucking horrible idea. But what type of person would that make you?

Right. No idea that comes from us is bad. It's how we perceive it that's bad. But we usually have pretty good ideas as comics. I watched Roseanne Barr and Larry King one night. Just getting back from a gig and Roseanne was on and he asked her a question. He said, why did you throw the ABC staff out of the Christmas party? Why did you do all these things?

And she goes, we got to remember I'm a stand up comic. I'm a writer. I'm a producer. I'm the director and I know what works. And ABC's goal was to knock Cosby down from being number one at the time and we did it. And after I had that formula, I didn't need them anymore. I proved to myself. So as a comic, we've lived two lives.

We live our personal lives and then you live the struggle that you get involved with that. Every 90 days, you got to ask yourself, why the fuck am I doing this? Maybe more. Now the other day we were talking about being an atheist and not believing in whatever. I would love to look you in the face as a smart individual and say that once a person dies, he dies and there's no heaven, there's no hell, there's no religion. I would love to tell you that, but I can't because I've experienced it. When you experienced signs, you say to yourself, okay, there may not be a God.

I don't know if he's Chinese. I don't know if he's Buddha. I don't know if it's a chick with eight heads. But there's something out there that keeps you alive every couple of months that you're such a fucking asshole and you're so proud that you're too scared to reveal it. But that's what's been keeping us alive. It's something, a sign every 90 days that happens and it's not a raise at your job. It's not your wife sucking your dick the best she's ever done.

It's not you fucking a coworker up the ass. It's this moment where you go to do something and you go, wow, what just happened? Right. You know, and that's where the philosophy comes in understanding all those things at once. You know that there's a name for that. Actually, weird. I wrote it down here. Rogit is a name for Buddhism.

It means the one taste. And so it's the idea that underneath everything or in everything is this one taste and it's good. Essentially, everything's fundamentally good. And that thing, the sign you're talking about, one way to put it would be it's when you get that you taste it again. Maybe you just taste it for a second. Something happens, some weird intersection, a synchronicity, a kind of weird miracle, or maybe it's you don't even know what it is. It's just like a feeling all of a sudden, but it's not a feeling. It's deeper than that.

And then once you got that, you're set. Everything can come from that. Everything can come from that. But if you don't have that, or if you've forgotten it and you don't quite believe it's there, you maybe have read about it, but you're looking into the world for it. Or even worse, you're trying to rearrange the world to make that taste happen. You go crazy. You go insane. That's the problem.

People are crazy, for lack of a better word. Well, when you don't see that sign, it's because you haven't put the efforts in. And that's what kills people. That's the biggest frustration because I was involved in that when I wanted, but I didn't do anything to show the universe that I wanted. You have to show the universe and you have to show yourself. It's really weird. February 19, 1985, it was my birthday. It was my 22nd birthday.

And I was a pretty popular kid and whatever. But at this time, I had become a criminal and I was trying to get my life together. I wasn't doing blow. And I'll never forget being in a Chinese restaurant, one of my favorite Chinese restaurant, The Enchanted Lily. Yes. In Fort Lee, New Jersey. Having Szechuan beef with white rice on an egg roll. Yeah.

I'm saying to myself, look at me. I've created such a hole in my life that here I am eating dinner alone on my birthday. Right. And I started to feel sorry for myself. And at this time, I was a Catholic. And at this time, I was involved with Santeria, but at this time in my life, I was disenchanted with everything. That's why I had become a criminal because I didn't have how can God take your mother away? Right.

That's bullshit. There's no way God takes your mother away. Right. But now, 30 years later, I feel completely different. There was a reason because it turned me into who I am today. When I was 27, 28, 29, I would already been locked up. I get out of this prison cell and I knock this girl up. I'm out of the prison cell two weeks and I fuck her in the woods and I knocked her up.

You know, and I forget what the point I was getting to that. You're talking. I got all this stuff thrown at me and I was really confused. And I was 28 years old and I had this confusion and I didn't know what to do. So the first thing I turned to was the Catholic Church. And I went and I got confirmed because I got thrown out of Catholic school before I could get my confirmation. Confirmation is the sacrament of the Holy Spirit. So I knew something.

My spirit wasn't settled just to give people in yourself some background. Is confirmation a ritual? What is it? Confirmation is one of the seven sacraments. So there's baptism, Holy Communion, anointing of the sick, you know, your death, marriage, confirmation. Those are all the seven sacraments. Gotcha. But I was lost and I had a friend, Lenny, who was friend, had HIV and was running a restaurant, a vegan pseudo restaurant in 1980.

We're going back to 90 now. And it was at a place called Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. So for me to see Lenny, I would have to, the reason why I went to see Lenny was because I got a free meal. I was a starving comic and I would go into Lenny and he'd mix up some vegan stuff for me. But I started taking pamphlets on the way out. And I started and I went to see Ginsburg talk and I went to see a couple of Tibetan monks talk. You went to see Pride. Did you go see Chogyam Trump or Rinpoche?

I love to tell your name. Was he wearing glasses? They all had glasses. Did he wear a suit? They were all intellectuals. No, they had the trip with a monk, a tyrant. But I listened to them in my mind and I took a course. I took a course on walking meditation there, Monday nights at six o'clock.

And we wouldn't do it there. We'd go to a place in Chautaco Park and everybody had stinky feet. You know, it was like fucking a stink bomb of a festival. Yeah. But I went through it and that's why I learned. That was the first time I learned about karma because I added up what I made from when I robbed that guy. And I added up what the attorney bills were and I had made a $500 profit. So for two years, my life was worth $500.

That means I went to prison for $500 fucking dollars for 250 a year. I was already very karma-ly aware that made me how they say today woke. I always believed in karma after that. I always knew that what I put in, I would get out and that's why I'm here sitting across from you today. I'm Catholic and I have santeria roots and everything. But there's a lot of Buddhism things in my life. Oh, that's great. In my life.

I don't know quotes like you and I haven't read a lot about it. But in my daily routine, you know, my daily routine is to make somebody's day to call somebody out of the blue and throw them off. You never know what they're going through. You do do that, man. And that means a lot. You have to. You have to. You know, people make fun of me on Facebook and they always go, you always say the same stupid shit.

When you wake up in the morning and you're two feet at the floor, if you don't say it's a beautiful day to be alive. And the first person you see, you say good morning to regardless of your mood, that will change the way you think for the day. Yeah. Those stupid words in the beginning, it's a beautiful day to be alive. That is a comic. As we're walking the pee, we're out of joke in there. And as we're peeing, we're giggling. It's a beautiful day to be alive.

Not for Roseanne. That dumb fuck. You know, we'll always say ourselves. And that's why I put that down because I want you to say that to yourself every morning when your feet hit the ground. Yeah. Even if you're homeless, it's a beautiful day to be a fucking alive. It's raining. The blizzards coming.

I got a half a veggie and cheese sandwich. Yeah. But life, it's a beautiful day to be alive. Whenever I play with my kids in the afternoon, and I'm sitting there like I'm sitting at martial art. This is going to happen to you. One day you're going to be in a martial arts class. It's Wednesday at four o'clock. Your daughter's doing everything bad.

Yeah. But she's smiling and she's running around with six other kids. And for some reason you look at your phone at 4.30 and you go, I got another half hour of this torture. That's what you say to yourself. Yeah. And then you think of somebody like Ralphie May or a lot of Freddie Soto. Sure. A lot of our friends had died that left kids.

And you say to yourself, I wonder what they would give right now just to be at this fucking football game or this stupid rehearsal or this. Because it's never stupid. That time you're spending with people is quality. I was talking about contact on the way here that you and I, if we didn't have wives, we could, we'd grub hub. Yeah. And reefer. Instacart. We could stay in this house for days if you let us at a time.

Why leave? It's nice. And then that's when depression sets in. That's when all those bad things come in because four walls do creep up in a motherfucker. They sure do. And there's two types of four walls. There's the four walls in your house and there's the four walls in your mind. Yeah.

So you always have to be aware of eight walls at all times. This year I went through a big four wall thing. You know, I was telling you on the way here that I sold the show. It's about my family or whatever. But it's about a guy that can't believe he's where he's at, which is where I am every day. Like, after this podcast, you went out and goofed around, we'll smoke and join. Yeah. We'll giggle.

I think you set up the corner. There's a place that I could buy balls to put women's mouths and capes and rings on the knuckles. That's right. And you could pull them. We'll giggle about that. But the reality is an hour from now, I'm at a dinner table saying prayers for a five-year-old girl.

Do you know how creepy that is? Do you have no idea how creeped up that is? In an hour, no matter what we talk about, M-G-H, M-D-H-D, we saw a fucking the devil in an hour. I'm going to be with a little girl who's explaining her day to me and wants my attention. Yes. She doesn't want money. She doesn't want a bicycle.

She doesn't want to meet fucking anybody. She just looks at you. You're her world. You're what she believes. A lot of responsibility, man. They just want to sit where you can cover. That's it. Every night, before I go do comedy, I got a call for half an hour, 45 minutes.

And she goes off to reservation, and she wants to do it with sticks. But I look at the big picture. Time. I'm spending time with her. Time is of the essence. Yeah. Before I leave, I listen, Duncan, let's be honest here. I told you that when you become a parent, don't read the books.

Just look at your mother, look at your father, make an easily assessment of where they did well and where they did bad because they weren't perfect, our parents. Oh, I know. They weren't perfect. Sure. So I want you to do Abe Lincoln clothes and work on the gaps. Abe Lincoln clothes is where you take a piece of paper and you put a line through the middle and you put the benefits in the cons.

Oh, sure. Our trust will just offer me a job making $60,000 a year. The benefits are I get to work with Duncan, I get to learn from Duncan. I get to make $60,000 a year. What's the, I got to drive from Woodland Hills every day. Yeah. Duncan doesn't work Mondays. Yeah.

You know, there's always, and then you have to make an assessment of what works for you. And that's what I did. I took a look at my mom. I took a look at my stepdad. I put them together and I saw the holes in that game. Yeah. And those, my game has to be stronger than that to fill those gaps. See that thing right there, man, if you look at the world in a non-selfish way, which is

what you're doing, you're a non-selfish person. You've figured it out. And not only are you a non-selfish person, the way you are, you can't bullshit. You've had some contact with reality. And now because of that, being around you is like being around reality and not bullshit. You can't just get that either. No. You have to like work for that.

You don't just get to be like that. You just have, you have to work for that. Well, you and I were talking about Judge Cavill on the drive. Yeah. And we were talking about my disagreement with the whole thing because you could not judge a person as an American, as a human being. I cannot judge Duncan for what he did in 1982. I'm going to tell you why.

I've gotten to this point in my life because I had three worlds. I had a world where God took my mother from me, so I lashed out at the world. How did I lash out by robbing people, by being a shitty person, by doing shitty things. If I saw a homeless guy, I'd light him on fire. I'd shoot a dog. When you see that happening in your neighborhood, somebody shoots a cat. I wasn't doing that. I was going at the world.

I was angry at the world. And I had that part of my life for about 10 years, but then I got pissed at the world for something else. Okay. So the world, I'm angry at the world. I'm lashing out at the world, but I'll tell you what world. I'm going to give you a break. I'm going to give you what's coming to me. I want you to give me what's coming to me.

Because the world took my mother, now you owe me something. Oh, is that the worst attitude to have? Yeah. I was trying to still lash out at people. I was doing a lot better. When you're lashing out against the world, you're doing a lot better because at least you're getting that shit out. Now when you go into the mind phase that the world owes you something. Well, God took my father at six.

So the world owes me a fucking favor. That's the worst reality to conquer. When you really think that the world owes you something because your father was Richard Pryor. Well, because your father was a state senator. When you think the world owes you something, boy, is that a cold reality. That reality landed me to sleep in a rocket ship at a park. That's right. Yeah, sure, of course.

The reality of the world owe you something? What are you talking about? It's like if I come here to live with you and you give me that nice bed over there and you go, Joey, that's yours. Tomorrow my wife will give you a ride down to whatever and you could go looking for a job. What job are you talking about? I'm staying here with you. You know, 10, 11 years ago, you crashed at my apartment for three days while you got an apartment for comedy. Now I'm going to do the same.

But this time we're friends. I'm going to stay here for a month or two. You're doing great. You got money. You could throw me a couple dollars. Absolutely. Not to mention what's for breakfast every morning. It's when the world, when I came out.

Joey, the funny thing is, if you literally did that, it would make my month. That's funny. I know you're, I don't mean to mess up your example, but if you, dude, I'll make you breakfast. It's so weird how in 84 I came out here and I have an uncle who lives in Glendale. Yes. We did not talk for 25 years because I came out here demanding shit. Right. I came out here going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

What do you mean you put me upstairs from the bar? No, you're not. You're going to lend me 1,500. You're going to get me an apartment. They're going to lend me another 1,500 to put down in a car. And I'm going to get a job and I'll finance you. I'll pay you back after you co-sign the loan. Right.

I'll never forget to look on his face like, are you retarded? He's like, I'll do everything for you in the world except pay for your luxuries. I will not give you money from marijuana. I will not give you money for alcohol and I will not give you money to go to a movie, but I will feed you and I will take care of your rent while you get your life together. I was insulted Duncan. I got like, I'm flabbergasted. How dare you?

How dare you? And then I got some lumps and I ended up going to prison. And once I got out of prison, I realized the world don't owe you dick. I seen people in prison that would say to me, doesn't really matter. Because when I get out, I'm going to go on disability anyway. They had a whole division in prison of selling you on the thought of you're disabled. You're never going to be able to get a job. Right.

So why don't we do the paperwork now so we get the process started? You have a kid, Duncan? Yeah, I do. What do you live? In Hollywood. Okay, what we're going to do is we're going to get you $8.91 a month and for the rest of your life, you got to check for $8.91 a month. Right.

And these guys accept it. They accept the disability. You're right. And they end up in jail because you can't live on $8.91 a month. Right. But you're selling your soul for $8.91 a month because now because you went to prison, the world owes you something. That's right.

Right then is when I go, no, I'm not disabled. I don't want to sign into none of your fucking stupid programs. And in fact, for years, I never put down, I had a felony on applications. They would come back to me a week later and go, we're going to ask you a question. Is there kidnapping on their Jose? And I go, Jose Diaz? You know how many Jose Diaz's there are? You know, you're not going to get me on this.

And I would lie myself through it or whatever. But those are the three positions of your mind. My mind now when I wake up is it's a beautiful day of being alive. And it's my responsibility to make it even better. This is the third world. This is the third world. Yeah. And this world has been around for about 11 years.

Gotcha. This world of... Balance. I have to wake up. It's a beautiful day to be alive, but I still got to justify my existence. Yeah. I still have to go back to, and this is it. This is it.

Well, you know, there's two things that you make me think of. But one of them is that when you're telling me, don't read any books, just look at the truth. And from that, you will derive how to be a great parent. Similarly, in Buddhism, what I love so much about it, at least what I'm being taught, even though there's a lot of great books on Buddhism, and they're fascinating, and the story of it's incredible. Incredible. But it's not about books.

It's about an experience. And the experience is contact with reality and a process to contact reality. And the process to contact reality is called Gom in Tibet, which means self-knowing. That's what meditation is. It means self-knowing. So people automatically have this idea, oh, meditation is this or that. Meditation is to know the self. And in Buddhism, what everything is, what everyone is, what the world actually is, is fundamentally good.

And this fundamental goodness gets covered up or kind of like confused by transitory phenomena, as it's called. So still this fundamental goodness, oh, there's all this shit flying around, right? And so in that place, people start getting into the different modes you're talking about, which is like somebody's like, ah, man, I'm a victim. This world fucking sucks. This world fucking sucks because shit never goes my way. But those kinds of people are the people who win the lottery and fucking die, kill their family. They get what they want.

And their life still fucking sucks. It didn't work, right? That's why everyone's like, whoa, that's like a real thing. Winning a lottery can ruin a person's life. But if their mind is in any of those first two worlds you're talking about. Because those first two worlds are based on ignorance. And the ignorance is that you don't know who you are. You're ignorant of your true self.

You haven't looked at what your parents were like. You haven't looked at your past. You haven't looked deeply into yourself at all. And this isn't a thing you just do once, either. Every morning you do it. Every morning you do it. Every morning you try to make contact with that fundamental ground that isn't based on circumstance. Because if you're basing your life on whether shit's going right for you or not,

or whether the weather is good today, that fucking thing where you look at the weather and you're like, oh, it's raining. I'm not going to go out today. If you're like making your life based on any of that shit, then you have lost what you are. And now you're fucked. And that leads to suffering. That leads to deep, endless, infinite suffering. And also it leads to karma.

Because in that place you're going to start making decisions that are based on ignorance. And now you're going to start doing either selfish shit, or you can go down the other side of the road. It's always just imbalance. You're either going to be like trying to hurt the world, or you're going to be acting like, God, the world has destroyed me. And I deserve this or that. And it's all just based on this one problem,

which is you're not going to make yourself happy if you think you can rearrange shit around you in a certain way. And then there's going to be happiness. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's like having poison ivy on your leg and scratching your fucking head. It's never going to work. Or another way to put it would be, it's like just scratching poison ivy and it's spreading all over your body.

And so the itch is so bad that you, instead of scratching, getting to the root of the problem, you keep getting around fucking poison ivy. You keep falling into the same trap over and over again. You pretend that somewhere down the line you can make this itch stop happening through external means. That's why I love about what I'm being taught. And probably, you know, the school that you were in is actually weirdly, when you mentioned Naropa, it's very funny to me and it gives me goosebumps, kinda. Because my meditation teacher is a student of this Chokin Trumpa Rinpoche,

who was in this lineage of Buddhism called the Kagu lineage, and Naropa is within that. So it's really funny to me that you would just bring that up. I learned a lot going there. And I can't... I was young, I was selfish, I was out of prison, I wanted to get into comedy, and I was still a little judgmental. And there was a lot of people there that weren't my type of people.

But when I'd have a conversation with them, they would always have something enlightening to say to my journey, you know, about the journey I was in without even knowing me. Yeah, man, the enlightening staying stuff is great, but what I like about you is you don't need to say anything. I can sit around with you, and I like what you said to me, which is like, yeah, maybe I can say shit about Buddhism. Oh, it's called Netia Nizanda or some shit, right? Which is fine.

I mean, it's nice to have that. I like it, it kind of helps me a little bit. But who gives a fuck? That's knowledge. Who gives a fuck about knowledge? What we want is wisdom, wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is fine, but you can meet the fucking angriest person on earth, or the most selfish person on earth, and they can spout.

They can memorize scripture. They can fucking like go on and on and on and on and on and on and on. But they don't have this thing, which is this calm, a balance. Harmony is a way to put it, a kind of harmonious quality to them. This is not to say that you don't get pissed sometimes and blow your fucking stack. You know, I'm not saying that all the time. But I look at it a lot different now. You know, you're speaking about hitting a lot of these.

It's no different than what's going on in our world right now. Right. We were all young comics. We were friends with Joe Rogan. We were friends with him. We really cared about him and we're sincere friends. We stayed with him for a while. He got mad at you when he got married the first time.

He got mad at me of the drugs. He got pissed at Ari for a while, but we've always had this little family. Now the family stepped up. And now we're all put in different positions. It's hitting the lottery in my world. We've all hit the lottery. But we've hit the lottery in three ways. We've hit the lottery successful.

We've started to help other people. And we've also hit the lottery by spreading what we've known through podcasts. It's really weird, like what, to get behind the microphone and talk every week about our experiences. And for people to go, we just thought comics got their dick sucked. That's it. And did drugs. You know, I read Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce and I was sold. Like I was sold.

I wanted to hang out with strippers. I wanted to do heroin. And I wanted to sleep all day at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. That was it. I was pretty good with that. Breaking even. Having enough to pay the rent. Eat a little bit.

I don't need to go on vacation. I don't need a fancy car. And it's so weird. Now you pull up to the back of the economy store and there's a million dollars worth of cars on any given night. A million dollars worth of cars. I still drive my little Subaru that I paid $2.68 a month for. I lease it for three years, you know? Yeah.

Like staying grounded where we're at has been very important to me. Staying grounded right now is the hardest thing I do. It's not comedy. It's not parenting. Because when we perform and we walk off stage, there's an adoration. We could buy that adoration. Yeah. Or we could take that adoration with a grain of salt.

Yeah. I learned to take that adoration with a grain of salt from working with Rogan. When I was a feature, I'd pull over. They'd pull me over and go, you're way better than him. He's horrible. And then 10 minutes later, I'd see them on Rogan getting a picture taken signing an autograph. And I'd assume that these are the same people that came back three weeks later. And then watch Carlos Mencia.

Yeah. So I saw a lot of feature acts that lost it. I can't name how many feature acts I've worked until I come back and go, hey, come here. This weekend I worked with such and such and half the audience told me I was way better than him. And they can't recover from that. They don't understand the nature of people. Right. Oh, that shit.

They don't understand. I know what you mean. When people get puffed up. Yeah. When people get puffed up. Yeah. And this job right now as comedians is the ego. Yeah.

Like I have let my ego completely go. I don't care about Netflix specials. I don't care about what number you're on the podcast. I don't care about anything. I'm back to my Buddhist ways. When you're a Buddhist, you don't need necessities. You don't, you don't strive to get a Corvette. You strive to feel like a Corvette.

God damn it. That's brilliant. You don't strive to buy a Mercedes. You strive to turn your mind into a Mercedes Benz. That's beautiful, man. And that's what I'm doing right now every day. Yeah. I don't want to get caught up in anything.

You know, it fucks with me when Rogan goes on a podcast. That's the funniest guy in the world. It's a great compliment. I know where he's coming from. But to me, when he says that, I forced myself to thinking about the time I went to Carville Ice Cream. And I looked down and there was like a charity for these poor little black kids with flies. And it probably had like $18 in the can and some change.

Yeah. And I just took the change jar and put it under my arm and walked out and bought a bag of reefer. So I always take a good memory and I mix it with a bad memory. So I never forget who the fuck I really am. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Fuck yeah. Like I never forget.

Like you just told me that like, you know, after a podcast, a kid will pull me over and go, you're listening to the podcast, changed my life and they got tears in their eyes. And I understand it. When I was a kid, what kept me together was certain music. Certain music kept me together. I'm not saying I'm as great as those musicians or anything, but I'll hug that person while I'm hugging him. I'm like, you poor bastard.

If you knew that 10 years ago, I was putting a fucking roofie in some chick's drink just to stick my finger up her ass and Rob, you wouldn't be hugging me. Yeah. Yeah. They still would though. So that's the contrast. So whenever somebody says something positive to me, I always think about something I did that was just awful.

Yeah. Like in a hilarious type of way. And I go, see what I'm saying? It all balanced out. That's right. So that's a good thing I did balance that with that bad thing I did. Now I'm okay. I'm not going to leave here yelling at the valet driver.

Yeah. Because my car wasn't there first. That's right. About things that don't matter in this life. I requested bottled water. I know that's even that, you know, fuck you, not chilled room temperature. You know, that, that'll never. Cause they haven't, they haven't scratched the itch, man.

Like it doesn't matter. You know, you see all the different variants of this very, of what's just considered to be like, there's a fundamental delusion that people have. Well, there's actually like, you could say there's maybe three big problems and, and, and one of them is aggression. And I think maybe, and they're all connected. They all play off of each other. So like the three big problems we have our aggression, desire and aversion.

Right. So basically the problem is either people don't want to be where they are and they want something else, you know, and the two play on each other. So a person, I want something. I think that if I get this thing, I'm going to feel better. If I get the Netflix special, I'm going to feel better. If I get on the, I'm going to feel better on the, on the tonight show. If I sell out a Coliseum, I'm going to feel better.

And so all these things lead to aggression because you want all this fucking shit because inside you've detected that you don't feel right. You feel insecure is the way it's described or anxious, you know, and, and the, and everybody feels anxious. That's Buddhist. One way to put, and again, when I say that's Buddhism guys, I'm just learning this shit so I could easily be fucking it up. Look into it yourself.

Please. I am just clearly not some Buddhist teacher. But the idea is that instead of getting into your fucking head that that anxiety you've got inside of you, which is coming from a kind of groundlessness, you know, which is that really we don't know what's going to happen in the next moment. We don't know. A meteor has slammed into the earth and wiped out the fucking dinosaurs. That's not bullshit.

It actually happened. A fucking mountain fell out of the sky into the earth and shifted the climate to completely kill almost everything on the fucking planet. That's what we're, we, that's happens here. So there's a fundamental insecurity to everything. Also, Freddie Soto is a great example, goes to bed, partying, doesn't wake up. That's how life is any given moment. You hear about this fucking dude.

He was ordering fucking Carl's Jr. I think it was Carl's Jr. Lean out the window. I don't know how he did it. Put his car in reverse slammed into a tree. I think he still had the fucking bag in his hand like he was reaching for the back slams the car into reverse. It's late night, dead, right?

That's how the world really is. So we don't know what's going to happen in the next moment. So that can't be necessarily a very pleasant experience. If you've attached yourself to the idea that you are a continuous self, that this thing that you're doing is going to keep going, right? And so because that's not a great feeling, and you can always tell man, generally going along with what you're talking about, getting pissed about Perrier is also, if you bring up death around those people, they don't want to talk about it.

Like my fucking dad died, right? And so I'll say to people, oh, my dad died, you know? And they either know about death or they don't. The people who know about death, they're like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But they won't do what can often happen, which is where people are just like, they get kind of like pale and they're freaked, right? And they know they're going to die now, and they're thinking about, oh, I'm going to fucking die, man.

Oh, Jesus Christ, they might even try to get away from you because you're reminding them of something that's going to happen to all of us, which is not that big a fucking deal, man. But the problem is it's an itch. It's an insecure feeling. It's a feeling of like, I got to make this, I got to make myself feel better. I know how to do it. I'll get famous.

I know how to do it. I'll get my dick sucked. I know how to do it. I'll shoot heroin. I know how to do it. And you've been trying that over and over. I'll go in my phone and look on Twitter or I'll eat a big fuck, whatever. It doesn't work.

The problem is it doesn't work. It just distracts you from the reality of your predicament. And this creates karma for you, right? That's Buddhism. And within that, you're either trying to get somewhere or you don't want to be where you're at. And generally in some way, you're pissed off about it. And that's aggression.

Even though it doesn't have to be pissed off about it, there's just this general sense sometimes when you get around people where you're like, maybe you're just like somewhere out to eat. And when they bring you the pariah you ordered, they go slam the cup down and walk off. Thanks a lot. Whatever. I don't care if that happens, but you can look at the person and realize, oh, okay, they're pissed.

There's aggression in them, right? These are the three problems. It's like in the wheel of life and Buddhism, which has within all the worlds you're kind of talking about, the hell realms, the realm of the jealous gods, as it's called, the realm of the gods, the human realm, the animal realm, in the center of that wheel, we have aversion, we have desire, and we've got fucking aggression. A quick word from our sponsors. It's time to get rid of your cursed crappy router and head over to ero.com.

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Thanks E-R-O. Now, when I had the aggression for all those years, it was aggression brought up through frustration. From 1997, when I moved to LA, another emotion popped this head up. That emotion was called frustration. No matter what you do, when you're working at a job, you could figure out your homework. Duncan, I'm giving you a term paper on the psychosis of analysis of whatever. You get together with your tutor and you figure it out.

You make references to different books, you read whatever and you figure out this term paper. And then comes this thing called the career, which a lot of people eventually have to bump into. Some people go to law school, they do the seven years, they get whatever, they become a law clerk and then they go on their own practice and it's a journey for them. But they also know that they're getting four hundred dollars, they're in an office where they're getting a few clients a month and it's okay.

The uncertainty of moving to Los Angeles gave me this certain frustration. It wasn't anger because I was very happy to be here. But that frustration made me get aggressive. That frustration of having ten good sets in a row and nobody paying attention to you. Did they call you yet for the documentary at the comedy store? No. Where we're all doing some little piece, they're going to be contacting you because I saw your name on the list.

Cool. And it's been funny that I've been thinking about it a lot, what, you know, the frustration that I had at that time, believe it or not, my psychiatry was the comedy store because even though Montreal didn't want me, agents didn't want me, I wasn't getting invited to the big shows, you know, I couldn't go on opening Anthony, Mitzi sure accepted me. That's right. And in my world, I would go, you know what? Yeah, Opie and Anthony is a big deal.

Yeah, Montreal is a big deal. But they're not as big as Mitzi sure. Right. Like in my world is both you and I both worked alongside her and we both took a peek into the world of her soul, which was a scary fucking soul. Well, she was a teacher, man. She was, well, she was also a teacher. And I told Rogan this yesterday, I go 10 years from now, they're going to be talking about

her experiences like acting teachers talk about Stanislav. That's right. 100%. 100%. And like, I was just talking to Tony Henchcliffe about this, talking about night at the comedy store late night, this like kind of playfulness for lack of a better word starts happening between comedians, a kind of weird improv. You know, people start fucking with each other in a way.

It's a weird thing that starts happening. You can't even like, I can't even put my finger on what it is, but it's almost like an energy jumps around that place. And within that energy, we're all refining each other through interacting with each other in some way or another. I don't know what it is, but you're right. It's like, and when they study Mitzi, they could, I think, maybe you could sum up what she taught or one of like her philosophies when it comes to comedy, which is be yourself.

Be yourself. That was it. Be yourself on stage. Find out how to be yourself on stage. And she would say, mystical shit, man. Like I can remember talking to her when I was like, I don't know, maybe, maybe doing the potluck and just fucking not knowing anything and being like, Mitzi, I want to find my voice. And she goes, what's the matter, I need you to lose it.

And within that is like on one level, it's just funny. It's like, but on another level, that is such a deep fucking thing to say, man. It's two things mixing one, find, be yourself. Well to be myself, I have to find myself and to find myself. That implies I've lost myself, right? And how can I lose myself and simultaneously be a self? And yet that's it, man. Everybody's looking for themselves and they're looking for it in all the wrong places.

But if, and if the idea is that like humans are fundamentally good and you find yourself or become yourself and then you start transmitting that on stage and mixed into that self that you are or what's like, and this is a wooey thing to say in your karmic field is funny, you're funny, you're distorting reality in a funny way, then not only are you going to be funny telling jokes, but how many times have you seen like a, maybe like a comedy writer decides to do comedy for a little bit and gets on stage and has these really technically precise jokes that are good jokes, like you can look at and be like, those are good, that math is good for those jokes.

And yet there's this like brittle dryness to the performance. And then like when I see you get on stage, when I see you on stage, like you've got great jokes, man. But in the same way when some of my meditation teachers are sitting there, they're already talking when they're not talking. And the way they're talking is because they're being themselves because they spend a lot of fucking time figuring out what that is. Where'd you find yourself?

Oh my God, man. That's a great question, Joey. Was it on the stage? Hell, no, it was not on stage. It was not on stage. You know, I've had that thing you're talking about, the twinkle where I like saw it, the thing that makes you want to get up in the morning and do the thing you're talking about. Which for me lately is just I get up in the morning, I just sit still and I look at my

breath. I watch my breath go into my nose, I watch my breath go out of my nose. And I do that for about half an hour. And then within that I watch my mind. And then I see within my mind a trap. And the trap is the thing that in the past I would address in the wrong ways. That's the main thing. So anyway, for me it's like, I don't think you just find yourself once.

I think it's a practice. So it's like a practice. You don't just find it, you lose, you're sort of like hot air balloon, maybe it lands for a second and you look around and you're like, holy shit, this is fucking paradise. This is paradise. I'm living in fucking paradise. This is amazing. And it might be the worst day.

You might be in a fight with your wife. You might be getting a fucking cancer diagnosis. You might be, this is, I'll give you an example, man, thank God, and I'm sorry this is a cheesy thing to say. Well, no, it isn't. Thank God for teachers like you. Thank God for my meditation teachers. Just thank God.

You know, people who are not just full of knowledge but have wisdom. Cause like, this is where it pays off. I'm sitting next to my dying dad, right? And everybody, you see somebody get around a dying person and they immediately start lying to them, you know, and I saw that firsthand and I understand why people do that because everyone's afraid of death and they don't want to acknowledge their own death and they certainly don't want to acknowledge they're about to lose a friend. So they get around the person and my dad thought it was funny as shit.

He would say to me on the phone, people are, you know, coming out to me, Duncan, they're saying, I look good. I don't know what the fuck they're talking about, you know, right? So I would get around him and when he was, when people die, they, they lose their mind. They like their personality shifts. They start sliding through time. He's back in Vietnam for a second. He's in the present with me for a second.

He's just confused for a second. He's saying sentences that sound right, but the words are wrong. This is what happens when people are dying. Yet his soul is there. That doesn't matter. You can still feel his soul. It's fucking beautiful. But the times he was there, he'd say, what's happening?

And I would say, well, you're dying, dad. You're dying. You know that, right? You're dying because I didn't want to be like, you're fine, you're going to be better tomorrow. I wanted to be in the truth with him, you know, and you would see the look of gratitude in his eyes. Oh, shit. Okay.

Here's somebody who's telling me the truth. So to me, sitting next to my dying father and being heartbroken, yet simultaneously knowing that the world is good and that even this is good and that even this moment is good and everything will continue to be good. That's to me, a moment of kind of like finding myself. But if I don't like continually sort of train by working with teachers or even just like the way you're like, you need to get out and be at the comedy store, be around comics. Really what you're saying is you need to be around the teachers.

You need to be around the community, you know, because like from that, we keep getting reminded of something fundamentally good. The world is fundamentally good. What we come from is fundamentally good and it doesn't fucking matter if a meteor slams into the planet. It's still good. If the planet evaporates, still good. If the universe evaporates, still good, that, you know, that, that's what it's all about.

And once you just touch that once, even if you're like, get confused again, I don't know, you're still going to be okay. You just have to touch that once. I don't know, man. When I touched it, it's funny how you could get confused at any age. I had a rough time this year. I had a rough time from about March till about, I had a rough time from about March till about mid June this year.

Yeah. Just I got into my head. I was shooting an Netflix special. I had a lot of little things going on. I wasn't sure about the road. I wasn't sure about going out every night. I forgot that I have this quarter to eight guilt at about 730 every night. This anxiety runs through my body.

Yes. Because since the time I was 15 at 730, it means something had to be done. Either you got to go pick up a bag of dope. Oh, you got to go here. You got to go there. So all those years of doing comedy and this and that, I would get this eight o'clock anxiety. I'd call it.

Yeah. In the old days, it was simple. All I had to do was go get a grandma blow and not even do it. Just have it in my pocket. As long as I had the grandma coat in my top pocket, we're good. The anxiety would go away? Everything. Focus would come back.

It was like eating an Adderall. Focus would come back. I was ready to go to the store and kill. I loved everybody, but this was weird. From the moment that anxiety started to the moment I had that cocaine in my hand, it was a total blackout. There was no stopping for red lights. Oh, shit.

Okay. There was no, I didn't want to hear what you had to say. Sure. So now I got off the coke and the anxiety kind of went away, but I call it the transfer of addictions. Yeah. It's called transferring of addictions. It's what I've been doing all my life and it works for me.

It works for me, Joe Diaz, because now it's expired to the marijuana and out of all the evils, marijuana is the least out of all of them. Sure. Hey, can I say something real quick? Good. Nothing's evil. Right. No, no, but in my world, I was in an evil place.

I'm sorry if that's, you know, when you're doing heroin on Monday nights and you're not doing coke the rest of the week and you think that your heroin problem is to cure the solving cocaine and you're, and you're trying to get the phone number, the 20, 60 minutes because you want to talk to the producers, there is something wrong with you. It's a fucking problem. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

That was the problem in 2007. I had written a monologue out, but I was about to call 60 minutes explain to them how I could save the world from cocaine abuse by giving them a little bit of heroin on Monday, four shots of heroin once a month and there'd be no cocaine abuse. We'd win the war on drugs and we'd sink Pablo Escobar. He wouldn't have nobody to sell it to. Yeah. And we've been importing heroin for so long, but just a little dosage.

I was getting a $7 bag of heroin sent out to me and I was splitting it in twos and it lasted me the whole summer. So after the 90 days of the summer, I came to that conclusion, wow, I've only done coke once in 90 days. Wow. Right. I'm on to something. Yeah.

So because of losing my mind in those certain areas, I have transferred addictions. You know, people just transfer addictions. They go from nail biting, that's right to smoking reefer to, you know, we all have a transfer right now. So after I stopped doing coke, I went to my original transfer addiction, which was at a quarter to eight, just so nobody's feelings get hurt. I roll a joint and I go for a ride in the car, I get out at a park, I smoke it, stop at a 7-Eleven, get a coke zero and go home.

Okay. That's part of the addiction thing. Got it. So then something else happened in 1991, I got into comedy, eight o'clock means you got to be on a stage, bitch. Wow. Okay, sure. I know you really want to watch Orange is the New Purple on Netflix with your girlfriend,

but I really don't give a fuck what you want to watch. Gotcha. You have to be on stage. Yes. All these years, I had all these, I have this by eight o'clock. So I think like in 2010, I was just battling this and I would control it by going out. Sure. I had the store, I had this, I had that.

Then when they stopped going to the store, I had a substitute, improv ain't the same. Okay. Haha, it's not the same. That factory is definitely not the same. Nobody really scratched the itch that the comedy store had given me. So I figured out a way just to go for a ride at night and do that. Now 2014 starts and I'm back at the store. But in the back of my mind, I was like, I got a call like when Mitzi was running it,

Sunday through Sunday. That's the only way the store works. Yeah, that's right. It's been calling for the whole week. I couldn't cover the spread. No, I'm not Duncan. I'm too old. I got to be up at eight with the baby.

That's right. And I got to watch the kid and you got to do this and you got to do that. So now I went into this mental fucking disaster. Mmm. Right. Cause your whole patterns based on that. Okay. Yeah.

So with that, the Netflix thing, just stupid shit. I watched the John Mulaney special who's a great comic, but a great writer and I said to myself, why can't I be John Mulaney? Why can't I leave this R rated fat fucking pig behind me? Yeah. So all those factors fucked me up. Mulaney will fuck you up. Mulaney fucked me up.

Don't watch Mulaney. That little motherfucker who I loved to death. He put this thing in my head before the Netflix special. And then when I got to the Netflix special, it wasn't John Mulaney. It was the Joe Diaz who they wanted to see, but it was too late in my head. I was pulling the John Mulaney. So as soon as I didn't do what I thought I was going to do, I laid on the floor like Connor McGregor did last Saturday.

Oh Jesus. It's like how Ron DeRouse got kicked in the head and she laid there. Yeah. She got kicked in the head and the head kick, the head kick hurt, but she wasn't laying there because of the punches or the abuse. She was laying there because you saw all the mistakes coming up to that event. I saw all the mistakes I did, not the triumphs. You see the mistakes and why you ended up on your back.

Yeah. And it doesn't have to be from a punch cake or a punch to the face. It could be you dealing with life that you end up on your back. That's right. And it's just because how you acted for a certain four month period. And then you pick up the pieces and you become a stronger individual. That's it. That, shooting that Netflix special, that playing right home with McGregor on his back

laying there thinking what the fuck just happened. And when I got back, I knew it would just happen. I had the answer. You know what the answer was? What? Mitzi. I went away from Mitzi's teachings. I went away from Mitzi's core beliefs.

Yeah. You know, I went away from all that stuff. I thought I could pull it off. I thought I could pull off Joe Diaz without what she had taught me. Yeah. And I realized, so now very seldom do you see me do a set in town outside the comedy store. Right.

My energy in the original room is the, I want you to think I'm going to kill you. That's what Mitzi wanted out of me. She wanted you to come out there. That's what she wanted from me. Because whenever you go up there in Dilla Dally, you're wasting your time. I want you coming out there like a Cuban mambo dancer, mamboing your way onto the stage because that's the only thing that works for you. She was right.

I was trying to go up there. Hi. How are you guys doing tonight? Oh yeah. You know, she doesn't want that from me. All those things hit me on the plane ride. That's why I know in 10 years, whether you develop it, I develop it, Paulie develops it, Rogan develops it.

One of us is going to put a book together and go, this is what she wanted out of a comic. This is the success rate that she had. These are the comics that are still around because there's tons of comics that are still around because of what they learned at that comedy store. That's right. Little things, not big things. She can't teach you how to be a comedian, but she's going to take a screw and adjust that screw to make you a better comic.

It's like she fuel injected your carburetor. Man, it is crazy and it is true. And it's because her philosophy was not, it wasn't based, the thing is not based on like, here's what you do other than you get on stage and be yourself. And if you want to really frustrate a bunch of people, or if you want to come up with a fucking thing that honestly you can't really monetize in a book, because it's two sentences, get on stage and be yourself. It's like, I don't know what you are or who you are or anything about you.

Only you know that. And you might not know who you are because you've been fucking hiding from yourself because you want to be John Mulaney. You want to be somebody that you saw or you want to be somebody you used to be, or you want to be something that you're not right in this fucking second. And this thing that you are right in this fucking second, it might be filled with pain. And this thing that you are in the second, it might be addicted or this thing that you are in the second might be confused or whatever it is.

But when you become, when you start training yourself to accept that and you kind of let go of the endless battle against the people who are fighting this ridiculous endless battle, people in this endless battle to become some version of John Mulaney. You know for them they might have a different John Mulaney, right? So they're in an endless war to try to become this other thing and it's really sad and it's a really tragic, tragic war they're fighting. And so this is why when you hear in like Buddhism, you'll hear the term surrender and people hear that I'm like, fuck that, I'm not surrendering, that means I'm a coward.

It's not that kind of surrender. It's a different kind of surrender and it's really paradoxical because through this surrender you win everything. You're actually losing by winning this ridiculous war if the war you're fighting is to be someone you're not. Congratulations, you did it. You're now someone you're not and now you're surrounded by people who want you to act like someone you're not.

Good job because now you got to fucking keep up this ridiculous act around everyone and this is where, man, how many times have you gotten in trouble, I don't know, maybe you didn't do this, maybe in the earlier in one of your other worlds you did this. But you go out to eat with a girl and you want to become what you think she might want you to be, so that's what a lot of people think seduction is and there's a whole fucking shitty, crazy, insane pickup artist books that are all based around analyze the person and become who you think they want you to be, trick them into liking you and then they like you.

God forbid that fucking works in a relationship cut to a year later and someone's saying to you, I don't, you're someone I don't even know and it's like no, actually this is who I am. I'm a crabby, sometimes depressed, angry, confused, stinky person who sometimes smokes too much fucking weed or gets two eyes lazy and I'm inside, I'm just a big mass of fucking chaos but because I've been putting on a show of being something, you know, now there's this rotten, rotten, awful anxiety that people are feeling all the time because they're just, I'm not saying, but PS, this is not like anything.

No, no, no, no, Duncan Chussell. Divorce rates aren't as high as they are because the only good, I've had one good relationship in my life and it's the relationship I'm in today. Yeah. You know why? Why? Because I want to nail it with my heart on my arm. Yeah.

I say a joke on stage, you take a girl out to a date, she goes pick me up at my house and you go over there and she's got cats and you're like, I love cats and when she's dressing you're kicking the cats, get the fuck out of here. Every guy has kicked the cats, get the fuck out of here but we'll tolerate that cat to get that piece of pussy. That's right. And then one day we get stuck with the reality of who she is, now she gains 20 pounds, she's got the piece of ass we are.

We have to maintain the lie that we've been telling her, I have a friend that I'm, he's my brother, I grew up with him, he's my brother and he's single today because every time he meets a girl, something has to change. I got in this car and then I go, well you don't smoke no more, oh, she doesn't let me smoke, you just lost. Yeah. You just look, but you still smoke, yeah, gotta get out of the car and walk around the corner and take a shower.

Yeah, oh, you're fucked. You lost, you didn't, when I met my wife I put all my cars on the line. I still remember the marijuana conversation. I still remember her going, I think that it's not going to work and I said, listen, if the kid is good everywhere else but smoking pot keeps him from, let the kid do what he does. That's right. And she went with it and we're still together today and she's never mentioned marijuana or the negative, nothing, nothing.

That's right. Because she knows I'm solid in every other area. That's right. I just like to smoke my reef. Yeah man, and that's fine and it's like, you're damn right and it's like, you know, I heard this thing and it sounds like it's off topic but it isn't and it's probably bullshit but it's like the coolest fucking thing ever but it's probably bullshit but maybe not.

So like right now there's kind of like a ketamine, like epidemic in certain parts, like people are really in a ketamine right now. And I heard this crazy thing and it's probably bullshit but it's kind of cool which is that the Yakuza when they're like about to close some kind of like really big deal with like some rival or some business thing that some of the leaders is probably bullshit but some of the leaders will like do some kind of psychedelic in the closing of the deal with the person they're like doing the deal with so they can merge with a person and see who they really are so that from that they can see if there's some bullshit hiding inside

of them, you know? And so like to me one of the things that I've known in various ways, not just with like intimate relationships, romantic relationships but with friends, if I can't take LSD with you, something's off, something's weird man, something's off, you know, it's like I'm not saying you're bad and I'm not saying I'm bad but if we can't trip together, which by the way I don't do anymore, never touch the stuff. Really? Well, I mean, come on man, it's illegal but if I'm around you and you can't, if I, if

I, and I'm not saying- I'm just talking about putting liquid acid in the communion wave is not telling me to leave. Who gives a fuck? I guess you're right. You know, actually I just had this guy Emmanuel Safarios on and he explained to me that, you know, possession in California is decriminalized unless you're with intent to sell. I don't know.

Anyway, the point is, so the point is this, I want, if I know that when I am tripping I'm going to become who I really am for better or for worse because everybody's a big jumble of things, you know, memory, strange stuff. And this is the other thing man, if you haven't developed some compassionate ability, don't take a psychedelic with somebody. You know, that's the other thing about it too, which is like, if you're tripping with someone and then they do start showing you some side of themselves that you hadn't seen before, earlier versions of me might see that and be like, holy shit, right, but you have

to figure out a way to love everybody, you know, and in a relationship, on stage, whatever it may be, you know, if you've been working on that, I think people can see it. I kind of got off on a tangent here, man. I guess what I'm meaning to say is this, you might be able to trick someone you want to impress into thinking you're someone you're not. And you might even be able to trick your kids into thinking you're someone you're not. And you might be able to trick your boss into thinking you're someone you're not, but try to trick a room of 120 people in the fucking original room that you're someone you're not.

It doesn't work. It doesn't work. You might, maybe, maybe. Once or twice. Hypnotized. But not every week. Yeah. Not every week.

No, you'll get them. No. No, it's true. And you know, you can't trick yourself. It's weird. You said something. And I've discussed this with cocaine, but I've never discussed it with acid. When my mother first died, I got over that first 18-month hump by doing acid and seeing

the bigger picture. But I'll tell you something else, whenever I did acid and I had a pee, I refused to look at myself in the mirror. Yeah. That's right. I would wash my hands and look at my hands and never look at myself in the mirror because I never wanted to see that person when I was tripping. That's right.

It took me years to look at that person in the mirror and it was when I got off coke. I never really looked seriously at that person in the mirror. Yeah, I would glance and spit on my hair to go a certain way. But that was the thing about me doing LSD. I miss doing all those things. And at my age now, I feel that if I do them, I'm putting other people at harm. But I've had it up at the office and there's nights I'll split a tab and I'll go to your office and I'll put it on dark side of the moon and I'll bring a notebook with me.

And I'll just write and I'll think of an old memory or something. I never had a bad trip and I've never had a bad trip because I never went into that state going into a mental. I would always end crying. Do you watch Man on Fire? No. There's a movie Man on Fire with Denzel Washington and he's an alcoholic and it shows him at three in the morning how he would act.

Having conversations, pulling a gun around the room, braggadocio and then you just watch yourself fall asleep. I was doing the same thing with the acid. I was preparing myself for the next week or the next day. I'm going to tell Duncan he could suck my dick and then I'm going to stick it in his neck and tell him, don't talk to me about Buddhism no more and all of a sudden as the trip would wear off, I would break down. My true emotions would come out.

I'd cry. The pain would come out. The reason why I tripped and while I was crying, I'd pass out. That's what it's for Man. If you ask me, that's a good use of it. Here's the thing Man because you weren't resisting who you were. Bad trips 100% or at least my bad trip or what challenging trips as I've been taught to say by some of my friends who are in the field of harm reduction, they say don't even

use the word bad trip because it's already like setting a thing in someone's head. He's tripping out. It's a challenging trip and it's like in general, if a person is having this, they're doing the exact same thing they were doing when they weren't tripping, which is they're resisting something that they need to let go to, whatever it is. The moment you let go, stop resisting whatever the fuck it is and start crying, it can be very healing Man. This is not just you don't have to be tripping for this.

It's like everybody's clinging Man, they don't want to fucking let go. They don't want to cry. They don't want to let go. They don't want to be because people are vulnerable. We're vulnerable. Underneath there is like a lot of like vulnerability and sweetness and like all the aggressive bullshit on top. Since 1995, I've had this hate in my heart.

I've had this true, true, true hatred. I mean, still there. No, no, no, hatred where I saw myself slicing this person's throat, you know, like when you're a comic, you see yourself going up on stage. You know, when you go to Weight Watchers, you see yourself at 185 pounds. You have to visualize it before you could see it. In 1995, I swore, I put my hand up to the universe and I said they're not going to get away with this and that's just the way it is.

That's the person I am and nobody could talk me out of it. By 2000, the anger was worse. By 2003, the anger was worse. But comedy, comedy was doing well. I was doing movies. I was getting a little successful in comedy. People were talking to me. I was opening for Rogan and it just built and it's all been built, you know, and I'm

going to kill this motherfucker because the plan was if I didn't succeed in Colorado on the way out of town, I was going to kill my uncle first and then go on a plane, go to Denver, finish these motherfuckers off. But this was going to be medieval style. This was going to be no bullets, no guns. This was going into the house, sitting them both down, slicing them up, making the one eat the other one's pussy, shoving the dick in the other guy's mouth. This was real.

Like you were actually in your mind. It's not like some fantasy. No, no. Wow. This was just on the way out. This is the list on the way out, you know. But what I mean is you meant to do this. Oh, 150 percent.

I knew that it would come to this eventually. This is how this is going to end. This is going to end with me down 911 and saying that there's been a situation over here. Come over here. I would untie him. You are in fucking pain. I would put the fucking both bodies on the floor, put a gun in one of their hands, shoot them twice, shoot myself in the leg with that gun and go that.

I just blacked out. I came over here to have a conversation and I blacked out. Would have made a great episode of Forensic Files. And they would have put me in an insane asylum. I would have gone to court and put peanut butter in my pants and stuck my finger in my ass and wet it in front of the judge and it was real peanut butter and you know, something like. I don't know if that gets you off the hook.

It tries. At least don't give you a mental evaluation. You get Jello and you watch TV and hang out with fucking Jack Nicholson in one floor over the cuckoo. Yeah. Sure. And I don't know, I kept having this and I had to confront her. I had to call them for something.

It was my ex-wife, her husband and my daughter who I haven't had contact with since she was nine. Now, 20s, nine. Still no contact from her. No, no. She's pissed. And then we know I've called and talked to the mother and the whole thing. Do you think she knows who you are?

Oh yeah, she knows. So she knows you're out there. She sees you on. She knows. She knows the whole deal. They just told her whatever they told her and froze the girl up and I bet the girl feels bad. But whoever you were back then, based on this is completely different.

Yeah. It doesn't really matter. But she knows that. She knows you're based on. I've written her and eaten the males and I've done everything I can. I hired an investigator to justify my, just to make sure I wasn't killing somebody that was innocent. I hired an investigator and I even found that worse shit and it fueled me up.

And I called her about three years ago, my ex-wife, like a gentleman and I said, hey, I'm really sorry about what happened between us, knowing I'm still gonna stab her in the fucking throat. You know, I still called her because you have to keep your friends close and the enemies closer. Wait, you said this was three years ago? Three years ago I called and I said, hey, I know that we got off to a wrong foot. This has just been terrible.

But we're adults now. That was a long fucking time ago and I hope you accept my apology and she was like, yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna text you your number now and have her give you a call. That's been three years ago. I never got a call. I went online. I found her.

I hired the investigator. He found where she lived in an email and I've emailed her a couple of times. I've hit her up on Twitter. No call. So for a couple of months I suffered. You know, I'm looking at this new little girl I have and I'm comparing it to her and I, our relationship started breaking up into five. So as soon as Mercy turned five, I became more aware.

I got really more aware because her and I were in a relationship and it was, and you know what, I woke up one night in the middle of the night and I went to the kitchen and I rolled the joint and I made coffees like three in the morning. I thought to myself, I know, you know what, I'm gonna call this lady and say this. I'm gonna say, look, I was sitting with my daughter the other day, the new one, the five year old I have now Mercy. We were sitting at a park or something one day and I was watching her play and I was watching my patients and I go, you know, who the fuck was I kidding?

20 years ago, I didn't have this patients. Right. You know, I didn't have this. I didn't have these qualities that I have today and something turned me around and I said, would I leave Mercy with a guy like me in 1995? There you go. And I go, no, I wouldn't know. I wouldn't.

So from that start of the training, the event of thoughts and on this week's list, one of the things I was going to do was call Kathy. That's her name, leave her a message. She has, I always have to leave a message and she'll call me back and I was just going to say, look, I just want to let you know that it's over between us. I'm not mad and I'm never going to be mad at you. I just want you to know that I understood why you did the things you did. And at the end, we both gained something.

Yes, I lost a daughter, but I didn't have a life. Right. I didn't have a life at that time. I was just a nomad. I had no life. I had a semi code and I go, we both made out on this deal. You got to raise your daughter, how you wanted without me being an animal in our life, and I ended up with a life.

As far as I'm concerned, we're even. I want to wish you all the luck in the world. I want to wish her all the luck in the world. My number is always available. My door is always open, but if I don't hear from any of yous ever again, we're cool. We're cool because we both gave each other what we wanted. You wanted to raise her in a normal way. The time I smacked her husband and the cops came and she was four and she was in the car

crying and I looked at her and I go, does she really need this? No kid needs this. That's right. It's a great feeling to smack somebody in the mouth, but not in front of a four year old daughter. This is going to stay with her forever. That's right. And today, today I'm the way home.

I'm going to go home today. I'm going to make the call around four and that's how I'm going to end my week this week after your podcast. That is so cool and powerful and great. I had to do it just to let me live in peace. I could get hit by a fucking truck tomorrow and whoever I faced will go, come here. Yeah, you robbed this. Yeah, you lied.

You did all these things, but you're dying at peace. That's the biggest fucking gift somebody can have man. What you this thing that you're going to do. It's just what's beautiful about it is it's preceded by truth. You made contact with the truth there and the truth is the truth hurts. Fuck yeah. But it's the truth. It's the truth.

And we both got something out of it. We both got the most important things in our lives out of it. I got a life. I did not have a life until 1995. I was 32 years old. I did not have a life. Yeah. You know, you were lost.

Lost. Completely lost and going down a fox hole of even worse. Oh, and it gets. Here's the thing, man. It's like to pull yourself out of a tales, the tailspin you were in is we call it grace. It is not generally going to, it's a miracle. There's no way you pull it to pull like for any of us to really pull pull ourselves out of the tailspin of like habitual patterns that are leading to like a down trajectory.

That's just hurting people is like a miracle. It's a miracle. But you can't fucking pull yourself out of a tailspin. If you don't even know where the ground is, like you got to find the ground, you have to know what the fuck you're flying above and you have to know what the plane is and who you are. Then all that shit leads to wisdom. But the wisdom sucks because there's one idea of redemption.

That idea is you look back, it's a, it's like a movie style redemption. You look back at the things you've done and the decisions you've made and there's a kind of like sadness or a sense of like mild regret. That ain't fucking redemption. That's not redemption. It's when you look back and you realize, oh my fucking God, I hurt people. I said things when I was fucking pissed off that people might never forget for the rest of their lives.

And when there's a kid involved, there's no way to sweeten that up. It's like, there's no way to sweeten it up. It's to sweeten it up is to do, I think, an injustice to yourself and the person who suffered. It's like, instead of trying to sweeten it up, what's happening is you're expanding your awareness of who you are. So you don't have this pocket of ignorance that's sitting in your fucking psyche where this whole thing that you were just festering there, but you're pretending, oh no, it wasn't

quite that bad. No, look at it as it is. It was bad. Yeah. It was bad. There's freedom in that. Even though it hurts. Who wants to cut some of these dick off and put it in their mouth?

You got to be pretty fucking angry. They want to do something like that and for even for that thought to keep you up. Yeah. To plan it. To think about it. To plan it. Yeah. But here's where it gets, you get, you're really lucky, man.

Because I've been taught that fucking trajectory. So like in this world, there's people who think when you die, that's it, right? And then there's people who have this idea of like the Christian infinite hell thing, right? But the way I've been taught is no, the way it actually works is like the downward trajectory starts happening and you experience hell while you're alive. So all of a sudden, like, you know, the reason you, when you look in the mirror on acid, you're seeing your projections, right?

So if you're a very paranoid person, if you're someone who's afraid of death, maybe, then you might start seeing yourself as a skeleton or you might start seeing yourself like, yourself aging or you might start seeing like all kinds of weird shit that you're like not prepared to look at. It's no different than what we're doing in every fucking second, man. The bottom line is, man, the moment you, every time you find this pocket of like bullshit inside of you, like a blister, it's like your psyche formed a blister around your past. And it's nasty and it's just sitting there festering.

And so you go around and you're mad or the world sucks or you're always paranoid or the same shit starts repeating outside of yourself because what you have inside of you is so fucking unbearable to admit that it's there and look into it and really see it and accept that's who I fucking am. That's part of who I am. It's not who I am. It's a piece because you can't look at it in yourself. You start seeing it out here everywhere.

Now all around you is the bullshit. That's all you see. That's all you see. You don't see the beauty because you're blinded. That's right, man. And then it gets even worse because your projection starts acting like you're paranoia because people get around you and you're projecting some weird bullshit onto them and they don't like it.

So then they start confirming your ignorance and then the next thing you know, downward trajectory and it's like shit, sun, shadows get longer. People actually are fucking you over. People are doing weird shit to you. People are cutting you off in traffic. It's not just like normal causality. There it does seem to be bad luck starts happening all the time. Real bad luck.

In the same way good luck happens, there's no way that could have happened. That same kind of bad luck starts happening. Fuck yeah. Yeah, man. Weird shit starts happening. Downward trajectory. Now you ever see Jacob's ladder? Yes.

Dude, remember when the subway train goes by and it's like there's weird things and they're going like looking out of the fucking, that shit starts happening. That movie is by the way all about this. So downward trajectory and then you fucking die because you're living a paranoid life and you get shot, you overdose, you do something stupid, you die and so a lot of people to justify what they're doing, they think, yeah, then it's fucking over. But no, no, no, no, the trajectory keeps fucking happening dude and now you're in this realm called the bardo and that's now the same way you're projecting onto the physical world.

The projection continues, but now you don't have a body and the projections become what are known as like demons and the demons start ripping you apart. They start eating you and tearing you to bits and like it keeps confirming this bullshit ignorance in the most intense and severe and horrific ways until either you reincarnate and you get born into a fucking like family that is continuing this karmic pattern or it's somewhere along the trajectory. You do what you did in this life, which is you realize who you are or you start working on it or you just start getting the intention that you want that to happen and then shit

starts brightening up. I've been working on it for 30 fucking years. I can tell. For 30 years and you finally get this, this piece. That's it. Look what you named your daughter. Mercy. Yeah.

Yeah, it's peace. Yeah, man. And it's such a like, and then the other thing is when you do that, I don't mean to keep ranting here, man. I know it's 230. I'm going to keep ranting. Don't want to hold you here, Joey. I just find it very inspiring because the other thing about it is it's one thing to

like meet a person and I love seeing a person who's like had a great life and who's like is doing great. That's awesome. It's good. There's it's wonderful. In fact, we all suffer. Ever anyone who's like gotten to a point where they're not selfish to me. That's pretty miraculous.

But, you know, this is in the Bible, which in the New Testament, when they talk about the prodigal son goes away, blows all his fucking dough, fucks up his life, fucks around, fucks off, comes back to his father's farm just to work there, but purely like humble, humbled by his, how he's been hurt by the world and his like selfishness. And the father gives him everything. It isn't like punishing now. You know, it's not that thing some people do when you've been a shithead and they never let you forget.

Maybe they're like, okay, it's okay, but underneath it, there's this weird tax you're going to be paying for the rest of your life. In that story, the father is like throws a celebration, gives his son everything. I think the other sons are like, what the fuck? We've been here working on the goddamn farm while he's out at our houses, blown all the money and you're throwing up, giving him everything. And the line, I think it's something on the lines of like, that which was lost has been found.

You know, you've been here the whole time. You've been found. You've been in my domain. You've been here with me. He was lost, lost, lost, lost. And now he's back and that's redemption, which is that once you look at the thing, pop that fucking blister, deal with the pain in a real way, done. Done.

Done. Done. Freedom. Freedom. You did it, you know? And that's why there's always in the Bible, this again and again and again and again and again and again. This thing of like, no, it's cool.

Glad to see you again. And it's real. Now you gotta go smoke 20 joints. I'm happy you had me onto that. Joey, thank you so much. It was great to see you. It's great to see you. Congratulations on the birth of your child.

Thank you, brother. And as soon as you have the child, I'll come down here and we'll talk about fatherhood every six months and see how much you've grown. I can't wait. Thank you. Thank you. Howdy, Krishna. Howdy, Krishna to you.

Much thanks to Joey Diaz for appearing on this episode of the DTFH. A huge thank you to our sponsors, Iroh and Robin Hood. All the links you need to get to them will be at dunkatrustle.com. And much thanks to you for continuing to listen to the DTFH. Don't forget to subscribe to us on whatever the server is that you're currently using. And if you want commercial free episodes of this stuff or you just want extra DTFH, head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH. God bless you, sweet darlings.

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