The Joe Rogan Experience - #1369 - Christopher Ryan

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

Christopher Ryan, PhD is a psychologist, speaker, and author of New York Times best seller “Sex At Dawn” and he also hosts a podcast called “Tangentially Speaking" available on Spotify. His latest book “Civilized To Death” is available now: https://www.amazon.com/Civilized-Death-What-Lost-Modernity/dp/1451659105

and now the official hello hello chris ryan hello officially what's going on buddy how are you everything you distinguished looking motherfucker am i just saying what's going on with the goatee the whole deal yeah it comes and goes i don't know what have you been up to man i've been following your instagram chronicles you have you yeah you travel in the world in a van what are you doing vanthropology i call it It's the vanthropology tour. Yeah. Yeah, I love it, man. It's like, you know, you and I have probably spoken about in my 20s, I backpacked all over the world, hitchhiked to Alaska a couple times and, you know, did all these adventures.

A sprinter van that you have a bed in and a cooler and a freezer, that's kind of like a backpack for an older slightly richer dude you know that's that's how i look at it because you have everything you need with you yeah which is a feeling i love i love just being able to say you know what i'm tired i'm gonna pull over and sleep right here and before i do i'm gonna have a couple of beers and listen to some music and you know it's like everything i need is right here right can you what is the deal with pulling over in a Sprinter van and drinking? Are there a lot, you know, like you're not even allowed to be drunk in the back seat of your own car. Yeah, I believe if you have a bed, it's considered a domicile. That's what I've been told.

I'm not a legal expert. But my understanding is that the front two seats are considered the vehicle but beyond that in the back where you have the bed and the all the stuff that's considered your house so a warrant to search is is the same as someone coming into your house oh yeah because i i know a dude who got in trouble because he was drunk in the back seat of his car because he knew he was drunk and so he's like i'm not fucking driving i'm just gonna sleep it off and he laid down the back seat of his car and the cops knocked on the door and he opened up the door and he said yeah i'm drunk and i'm sleeping off they arrested him that's bullshit yeah well you know some cops they

feel like they have to make a certain number of arrests. You know, some places have... Quotas. Yeah. I've always thought that's so strange. Like, what happens if no one commits crimes? What do they do about the quotas? Do they just make up crimes?

And how do they fill those prisons that are, you know, dependent upon 98% occupancy rate? Yeah. They just assume that there's going to be a certain amount of people that fuck up like what happens if something happened some i mean i don't know what it would be other than a mass consumption of mushrooms across oh with people just stop breaking laws yeah people just stop they'll just pass the law i mean every one of us breaks several laws every day right like there are laws we don't even know exist that we're breaking.

Like what kind of laws do you think? Oh, God. I read an article about this years ago. I'd be hard-pressed to give you examples right now, but I'm sure there are financial laws. And we're all cheating on our taxes. Not me. Not me. Not me.

But everyone I know except for Joe. Well, I hand mine off to accountants. I don't handle that at all. But, I mean, cutting corners. We're all cutting corners. I ran two yellow lights on my way here, I'm sure. I probably, you know, it's four miles per hour over the speed limit. So that's how they'd get you.

Yeah. What about autonomous vehicles? Yeah. Once that kicks into gear, that's how they'd get you. Yeah. I mean. What about autonomous vehicles? Yeah. Once that kicks into gear, that's going to be really interesting when no one's ever breaking the speed limit. What do they do? What is this, Jamie? Six laws you broke without realizing it.

Jamie, you're the best, man. Cracked.com always has great articles like this. So what does it say? What do we got here? Connecting to unsecure Wi-Fi networks. That's a law? That's the law? What? What? There you go. So if you go to Starbucks and it's an unsecure wi-fi networks that's the law what what so if you

go to starbucks and it's an unsecure or the airport that's there you go open for that purpose but like if someone your neighbor leaves theirs on open i'm think that's what it's saying right here oh i say do that wi-fi squatting what about every time you click on one of you update some software and you click agree i have read and agree to this? You didn't read that shit. Nobody reads it. One of the things that Snowden talked about yesterday. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, about the terms and conditions that you accept. And who knows what's in there that then you're not complying with. Well, you'd have to have a lawyer go over every piece of it and then a lot of is open to interpretation, and they can change it at a moment's notice. One of the things that you see in terms and conditions is they have the ability to change it without notice, which is like what, you know. Sam Harris had a great podcast with this guy who was an expert in data collection.

He was talking about what's actually happening now is that we have, there's a commodity, and that commodity is data, and we didn't know it was a commodity. And then all of a sudden these companies like Facebook and Google made billions and billions of dollars off of this commodity that we didn't even know we were giving up. And we didn't know that they had it. We didn't know it was valuable.

And then, you know, this is their business model. And then also their business model is tricking you into clicking on things by getting you outraged so they're consistently bringing up things whether it's you know trump or abortion or whatever it is that like gets you riled up that outrage algorithm is going to find your little soft spot yeah oh god i saw you just posted something on that recently on twitter facebook thing yeah facebook yeah yeah it was an argument that facebook is the the what it is is an an algorithm that's designed to find outrage it's not free speech right and it's just an outrage accelerometer Well, you think about even, you know, that goes back to Willie Randolph Hearst, you know,

saying like, you know, I'll give you the war, you know, you give me the war, I'll sell the papers and get the public behind it because it's good business. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting world, isn't it? It is. Were you talking about Tristan Harris? Was that the guy on Sam Harris' podcast, the ethicist?

I do not know. I don't remember. I heard him on Sam Harris' podcast. He was a – I think he has a PhD in computer science and philosophy, and he worked at Google as their, like, in-house ethicist. And then he quit because it's like – There's no such job. Don't be evil. Exactly. They stopped no such job don't be evil exactly they stopped having that don't be evil doesn't exist it doesn't exist how crazy is that when you have

that yeah let's get rid of that you can be evil what a weird thing to both have and then weirder still to remove yeah yeah i want to get a marriage contract that has that clause in it where you can update it without notification. Just get that in there. Have your lawyer slip that into the prenup. At any moment, you could bail. It's fine. Or bail or just change the terms.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's a strange world, Joe. That's why I like being in my van. Keep things simple. Well, humans are strange creatures you know and we vary so widely that you

you know trying to make any sense of putting 300 million of us together on a lot on island essentially yeah like good luck with that and we vary not only individually but i think we vary uh we become different creatures in different conditions. So people sometimes will ask me like, what's your, you know, what is human nature? What's your opinion, you know,

based on these books. And I say, it's like asking what's the natural state of H2O. Right. Is it boiling? Is it ice? Exactly. What's the pressure?

What's the altitude? Don't you feel like you're different people with different people as well? Yeah. Yeah. I had a girlfriend um a spanish she was her mother was french her father's catalan she was raised in spain and then lived in miami which was 13 to 15 or something so she spoke english really well spanish french and catalan perfectly right and we were living in San Francisco, and I was high.

I was smoking a joint. She was across the room talking to her mom on the phone in French. And then her mom put her dad on the phone, so she switched to Catalan. And I was just high enough that I noticed, like, wow, that's not Peggy talking two different languages. And then three, because she would, like, put her hand on the phone and say, my mom said, no, no, no. So, English, French, Catalan. It's not Peggy speaking three languages. Those are three different Peggies.

She's different. Her facial tics and her movements and her body position changed depending on the language she was speaking, right? And at the time I was in grad school, and I thought, this is like multiple personality disorder. So, I started researching multiple personality, and I sort of came up with this idea that language, in her case, because she learned them all when she was very young, reconfigures the brain in such a way that she actually has different identities in those languages and next time we were fucking i started talking to her in spanish and she freaked out she got at you yes she like like i was i was a stranger suddenly yeah i just said i you know

just said like you're beautiful or something she's like like, ah, get away. It's muy guapa. Eddie's muy guapa. I'm like, get away from me, you creep. Because our whole relationship had been in English. Yeah. Yeah. It was strange. So anyway, so I looked into multiple personality disorder.

The story has everything. And I don't know if you've checked that out. You remember Stanley Krippner, my buddy who came down and did the podcast with you? He had done a bunch of research on that. And there was a movie called Sybil. Yeah, I remember that. He was the consultant for that movie. He was also a consultant for Rosemary's Baby.

Remember that? The Possession. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. That's a Polanski movie. I think so, yeah. Yeah, one of the. Anyway. That's a Polanski movie. I think so, yeah. Yeah, one of the early ones. Yeah.

People have, with multiple personality disorder, the research is bizarre. It seems to indicate that people have different physiological states in the different personalities. So you could have a different baseline heart rate, blood pressure, these sort of – Different baseline heart rate? Yeah, in the different – even – now this is – I don't know how reliable this is, but I even read that some people have different ocular pressure so that one personality needs reading glasses and another doesn't. What? Yeah. Oh, my God.

How much is psychosomatic? Like, really. How much of who you are and how your body works is dependent upon the way your brain is catching things? Right. Culture, language, personal experience. I mean, it's all your mood, how much you slept the night before you know all these things uh tie into identity is something we take for granted but it's if you start to look at it it's like it's like gravity you know gravity we sort of included in our calculations but nobody

has any idea what's happening right how does that work like oh two things are attracted real touchy about it oh really yeah yeah when i brought it up he i think he's we had a weird conversation and i think part of the weird conversation was the first conversation that he's had publicly since he's been accused of you know right but he came back from sexual misconduct yeah well he was you know they found him innocent according to whatever internal investigation they had when they were doing his television show, Planetarium. But it's still, even if he's proven innocent, you've got the weight of who knows how many people that think you're a creep now. And he's carrying that around because he was always thought of as being this jovial really sweet nice guy so he's a little tense anyway that's why i start out admitting i'm a creep it's good ladies and gentlemen i am a fucking creep you

can't just take it from the machine you cannot shame charlie sheen um but we had this conversation about gravity and it was weird it was like i was arguing with him but i wasn't arguing it was like i was like what what is causing like like what causes it and he's like we know like he went into this whole thing we know what it is we know how to measure it we can that's good enough for me yeah it was it was a very tense conversation that's interesting yeah because it is a faith-based thing there you know like right. They know how to measure it. But we also know how to measure placebo. Right. And we don't know how the fuck that works.

We know that hypnosis, people can have open heart surgery under hypnosis or have limbs amputated or all sorts of amazing things with no anesthesia whatsoever. Has that really been done? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Have you ever been hypnotized? Yeah. But I don't have high hypnotic

ability that differs uh it's another thing that differs among people and stanley actually has a really interesting theory along those lines which is that in prehistoric populations hypnotic ability would be adaptive because a lot of the healing rituals were keying into placebo response. So if we have a certain ritual, if you're susceptible to, you know, you believe in that, like voodoo, there's a, you know, voodoo death. People die when a spell is cast or a curse because they believe it. If you don't believe it, it doesn't happen. So it happens the opposite direction as well with healing so his his idea is that that would

have been a very adaptive um characteristic in prehistoric societies whereas in contemporary societies it's maladaptive because you're more susceptible to advertising or you're easier to manipulate yeah yeah so i uh yeah i've i've uh when i was in grad school i had some professors who worked with hypnosis and i studied it a bit uh along the same around the same time i was looking at multiple personality disorder because i was real interested in this question of how the brain and the body interact, how much of – there's all this research showing that people with the same condition in hospitals, exactly the same age, same prognosis and all that, they heal significantly faster if their hospital window looks out on trees as opposed to looks out at another building. Something like that. Just looking at something like nature keys the body into some sort of energy

that helps it to heal. Completely makes sense. I've met people with multiple personalities. Well, Roseanne. Roseanne's got multiple. Doesn't she? Make sure that's true. I know another one that's a weird one

is the football player Herschel Walker. I think he had trauma-induced multiple personality disorders. Wow. Does she? There's an article that says Bill Maher reminds us she does, and then Roseanne says she doesn't. Yeah, I think she does. 2001 says having seven personalities is tough, her saying it.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing about Roseanne. I mean, I'm saying this for the 10th time, I guess. She was hit by a car when she was 15, and she was put in a mental institute for nine months afterwards. She had severe brain damage, and she lost her ability to do mathematics and really scrambled her brain. And that is probably the birth of the Roseanne that we know, the comedian. the birth of the Roseanne that we know, the comedian. And that's also the case with Sam Kinison. Sam Kinison was also like a pretty normal kid, and then he was hit by a car and pretty severe brain damage as well. And brain damage, especially has an impact on your ability to be rational and impulsive behavior. Like people with brain damage a lot of times get very impulsive.

It's very so widely. Yeah. You know, it's what happens to you dependent upon like what kind of trauma, where the trauma is, what part of your brain. But when they said it about Herschel Walker, I was always confused. I wonder if it was from football, like football trauma, or was it personal trauma, like abuse? Yeah. People that are diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, if I remember correctly, almost always were severely abused as kids. In fact, the rationale is that they develop the alternate personalities as a way of escaping a reality that's intolerable.

Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, people do weird things with horrible memories. You know, they bury them to the point where they don't even really have access to them anymore. Yeah. Sexual abuse and some traumatic events when you're young. Yeah. But the fucking human brain,

then the way it adapts and molds to things is so bizarre. Yeah. There's a, there's an anecdote that is in this book, civilized to death. Notice that segue. Oh, good segue.

Um, pull that bitch over here. Yeah. It's, uh, by the way, the, the art is done by a guy who listens to my podcast.

It's really, it looks like, but the art by a guy who listens to my podcast. It's really – It looks like the art by a guy who listens to your podcast. A cheeseburger, a chimp wearing a cheeseburger with a nice suit on. Yeah, he's got an iPhone. Oh, yeah, the story. So there's a species of grasshopper in North Africa that they hang out. They're grasshoppers. They're dispersed.

They eat grass. They chill, right? Rains come. The grasslands expand. Grasshopper population increases. Then the rains stop. The grasslands contract to the point where the density of the grasshoppers triggers dormant genes. So there's an epigenetic event in these grasshoppers,

and they start to transform, and not over generations, individuals. Front legs get shorter, back legs get longer, thorax changes, shape of the head changes, coloring changes, and behavior changes from being these chilled out, solitary, relaxed grasshoppers. They start attacking each other. They become cannibalistic. And they swarm. Locusts.

Locusts. Exactly. They become locusts. Yeah. So this species of grasshopper and locust is the same species. It's the same DNA. It's just responding to different conditions. So we're talking about

the brain and you know who you are and what identity is and all that and this i was reminded of this when you said uh you know people are so different and the h2o thing we're not only different as individuals in the same context we change completely given the context we're in yeah so the focus of this book is the hunter-gatherers were essentially a different sort of animal. They were essentially, you know, the parallel is with the grasshoppers and now we're swarming. Yeah. Now we're a different kind of animal even though our DNA is the same. Well, that completely makes sense.

I mean, people that live in small towns are so different than people that live in cities. Yeah. It's so rare that you find someone who has a small town sensibility in Manhattan. Yeah, they get chewed up. Yeah. Literally. Yeah, literally. Yeah.

The locust thing is amazing. Have you ever written or read, rather, the accounts of the settlers in the pioneer days making their way across the country and dealing with these swarms of locusts and really not having any idea what to do with them or how to handle it. Eat them. Yeah, you can.

The Native Americans ate them. Yeah. That's probably a real good move, right? Yeah. That's one of the things that people think is probably an excellent solution to some of the issues that people have with meat. Because a lot of people don't have any problem killing bugs, but they wouldn't want to kill a lamb right you know but you can have cricket protein it's we call it micro agriculture yeah yeah cricket protein is apparently like very healthy i've eaten crickets yeah i have too in thailand i've had them in mexico oh yeah mexico

they've they had them fried and we were staying at a resort in, where was it? Punta Mita? Yeah, I think it was down there. Puerto Vallarta. Yeah. And they had a bowl in the resort. Like, when we walked into the hotel room, we're like, okay. Yeah, they had, like, sliced mangoes, and then they had fucking crickets.

And I was like, all right, I'll try that. I hosted Fear Factor. There's a restaurant here in L.A. that I was at just a couple weeks ago that has all sorts of crickets and grasshoppers. Really? What's it called? It's a Mexican place. They specialize in mole. Ah.

I don't remember what it's called. A good Mexican place? It's really good. Isn't it weird that like there's a lot of great Mexican food in L.A., but it's like, you know, like your basic burrito joints and taco joints. It's not like gourmet Mexican food. There's very few gourmet Mexican places. Oh, there's places. Is that it right there?

Yeah, that's it. That's right. Couldn't remember the name. Jamie. Guela Gueza. Jamie's on top of it. Is that it? Have you been there?

No, I just, I know the word. It's like a, I don't know if it means party, but it's a celebration down in the Oaxaca. Yeah. Damn. Oaxaca. Serving up insects. Yeah. Check it out. It's a a I don't know if it means party But it's a celebration Down in like The Oaxaca Yeah Damn Oaxaca Serving up insects Yeah Check it out

It's a good place I really The mole is fantastic Where is that at? What part of LA? On Olympic Olympic Okay

Deep in the heart of Texas Yeah Bam Beautiful Yeah Mole I love mole And let's face it

Shrimp, lobster That's just bugs Those are just big sea bugs. Well, we found that out on Fear Factor. It was people that are allergic to shellfish are also allergic to roaches. Yeah, we found that out the hard way. A lawsuit? No, no.

The dude was allergic to shellfish and he had to eat roaches for this thing. And they wound up having to give him an adrenaline shot. Oh, yeah. EpiPen. Yeah, he was seizing up a, yeah. EpiPen. Yeah, he was seasoned up a little bit. That's not good. Your windpipe starts constricting.

Yeah. I'm not allergic to anything as far as I know. Congratulations. I'm very happy. Me too. Yeah, that's a bummer, man. Allergies are a bummer, especially freaking peanuts. I've heard peanut allergies are so bad that people will ask you to not eat peanuts on a plane

with someone who has a peanut allergy. Like some people's peanut allergy are so bad that people will ask you to not eat peanuts on a plane with someone who has a peanut allergy like some people's peanut allergy is so severe yeah even like the dust of you chewing peanuts on a plane next to them can get them sick and and it's interesting to think about the state of consciousness and how that affects allergies because apparently and again i'm always cautious about saying shit on the show because there's so many people listening so caveat it's been a long time since i read the research but if i remember correctly uh under hypnosis a lot of people with allergies no longer in fact i remember the research yeah there was a it was a

setup where the person could see so like you and i are talking across the table and there was a it was a setup where the person could see so like you and i are talking across the table and there's a mirror behind me and in the mirror in your peripheral vision you see uh roses and you're allergic to roses you'll have a reaction, even though they're plastic roses. So it sort of enters the consciousness and triggers the response subconsciously. Yeah, I think that's how it was. And then with people under hypnosis, like Andrew Weil wrote about this cat allergies. He was tripping. He was on MDMA, I think, and he was playing with a cat and had no reaction to it.

Wow. Yeah. Look. Yeah. Look at this. Self-hypnosis squelches allergies. I need a Jamie in my life. You do. Damn. Picturing ski slopes reduces hay fever symptoms by a third.

Look at that. Picturing ski slopes. How weird. What a weird. Ah, I'm skiing. Well, because you're picturing a place where there's no pollen. Right. Right?

You could probably picture the surface of Mars, too. Yeah. Well, if you've got a needle, you get a shot, and the doctor's about to give you the shot, and you start tensing up. You feel the anticipation. It makes it like your heart starts quickening, and you get really weirded out by it. But then you get the shot, and you're like, oh, that wasn't shit. Why was I freaking out like that? But's this the psychosomatic aspect of it i think that's what life is basically in a nutshell yeah it's an analogy like we're always worried about things

we spend so much time worrying about things most of which never occur yeah you know and even the ones that do occur it's like wow whatever like death you know what is i'm not worried about death dying maybe if it takes too long but if it's if it takes like an hour or a day to die that's a tiny fraction of your life who gives a shit you're not a guy that really spends a lot of time working on fitness or health or anything else that's a nice way to put it well you you enjoyed that article lazy fuck is what you're trying to say i love you but uh i take it as a compliment you i got better things to do than work out joe i get it um you enjoyed that article that i wrote a long time ago i did the sand yeah human body is

like a sandcastle yeah yeah you can make it beautiful but it's not gonna last yeah it's and you know that going in you You know that way. Yeah. I mean, I've got this idea for a book, if I keep writing books, which is sort of a self-help book, but it's a parody of self-help books. And so it'll be calling attention to the way so much of what we do to try to be healthy is actually counterproductive because we stress, especially Americans. Everything's work. You know, everything turns into work. And Americans are very suspicious of pleasure. We're taught that pleasure is, you know, evil and dangerous and all this.

I've never bought that line of reasoning. I've always felt like what feels good generally is good. There's a reason it feels good you know now that can get corrupted by advertising and false messaging from a sick society that tells you you know sit on the sofa and drink beer and eat bags of chips all day but if you get beyond that and you can actually hear the voice of your body I think if your body is telling you to you know stay in bed because it's a rainy cold day now i know this is totally against your perspective on life where you're like you gotta tame the inner bitch you gotta get out of bed you gotta work out it doesn't matter

i'm like no man i'm staying in bed like you you go do what you need to do i used to climb mountains with this friend of mine in sp, and he was like you. He was a fucking billy goat. He'd go up the – and I'd go with him until I got to a nice spot with a nice view. I'd be like, dude, I'll be here when you come down. Taking a nap. Got a bottle of wine and some cheese. I appreciate that, too.

I'm not married to my perspective But I think I have A very peculiar biology That demands a certain amount of exertion Yeah Me personally And I have friends like that I mean I You know I have lots of friends

Like man if I don't run every day I feel like shit I'm like Running is very addictive though I feel fine Yeah you get used to There's a high that you get from running that's really interesting. And any long-term cardiovascular exercise, you get this.

It's like we did, you know, last October, we did the Sober October thing where we had this crazy fitness challenge. So all of us were doing cardio like five hours a day, like really crazy amounts of cardio. crazy amounts of cardio and one of the things that tom segura and i both agreed on is like the the amount of internal chatter dissipates to zero like you have no anxiety it goes i didn't realize i had any anxiety until that happened and then i was like god it goes to zero it goes to nothing like when you do like five hours on a treadmill or you're just running just run for when you when it's done man there's this like peace of mind that comes with that this uh release of endorphins that's incredibly addictive because that feeling is so pleasing so it's not that it doesn't it doesn't feel good to get out of bed and and to just push when you don't want to, but the end result feels amazing.

It does feel really good. I wonder if there's any research looking into whether that effect happens universally. Because I've worked out. I've run. There were times in my life I've never gotten a runner's high. Never. I get my teeth hurt, my knees hurt, my back hurts. I feel my brain bouncing around in my skull.

I'm half a mile into it, and I'm like, fuck this. This doesn't feel good. You have to get in shape first. That's a big part of it. It's not that simple it's like for me uh i never really got into running um but i like the first time i really did any serious running i my my friend cam haynes had a 5k which is what is that three miles something like that something like that yeah um and i didn't run at all in preparation for it and when i ran the the

5k i was like jesus christ this is hard like i didn't have and there was no good feeling at all yeah you know it's running on concrete and shit right in vegas it's gross in vegas smelling sin in the air and uh but when it was over i was like okay obviously uh i'm not i'm in good shape but not in good running shape at all. So I should probably get in shape for this. So then I started running. And then when I got into running, and particularly running hills, then I started feeling it once I kind of got in that kind of shape.

And then when the workouts are over, like I run all the time now. And when it's over, I just have this. Yeah, you and Marshall are doing your thing.'s great yeah i fucking love and he loves it too it's a crazy bonding experience with that dog you know when because he loves it you know i got my dad a golden retriever to the best years ago when my dad was like you know i can maybe it's genetic because he was pretty lazy he'd come home from work and he'd you know sit in front of the tv and drink vodka and get upset about the news and and uh my mother didn't like dogs but i my sister and i convinced her that dad needs a dog because dad will get this dog and he'll go for walks because the dog needs to walk and so we got a golden retriever

he named it stoli. Bad sign right there. And then he never went for walks. Stoli just sat next to him and got fat. Oh, poor Stoli. I know. I know. Well, it's common. Doesn't always work.

No. Yeah, it helps me get going because I know that he needs exercise. Yeah. It does. But it helps me too. And it's fun. Like, I talk to him when we run, you i guess we're running you know i have a little conversations with him yeah cool fun he's not judging you right pretty of a fuck i could be fat i could cover in shit he wouldn't

give he'd probably prefer that make you more interesting yeah it's but the the runner's high is a real thing but you have to achieve some level of fitness before I think it kicks in. Yeah. Closest I've come to that is the sex high. Post. Yeah. No, during. Post-coital?

Oh, okay. During. Maybe there's like a workout element to that. Well, sex when you're really aroused and you're really attracted to the person. Like in the middle of the act of it it it's like you're on a drug yeah it can be like this incredible elevation where you you're high basically you're high in this sure endorphins aroused state yeah yeah and you have that that hyper focus that you're talking about you know removing anxiety you're not thinking about yeah you know anything other than where you are it's one of those uh beautiful moments i had a

guy in my podcast recently who's like a legend in the the world of uh like high risk stuff he's a base jumper and he flies those wingsuits what's his name oh fuck what is his name he lives in bozeman montana super stump no that's crazy because my friend andy stump lives in montana too i'm sure he knows him he's the he holds the world record for that wingsuit ben stewart could it be i man i don't remember i'm sure andy knows him yeah for sure he lives in bozeman and this guy's 44 he's been doing it a long time and it's about how old andy is and he's probably they probably fly together yeah yeah really nice guy but it was interesting like how you know here's this guy who's doing this super high risk adrenaline

stuff and like he just had done this thing where he's paragliding with another dude on the brooks range in. Oh, Jesus Christ. And just the two of them, and they land and camp. Oh, my God. You know, nowhere, bears everywhere. Like, forget it. And then they'd get up the next morning, jump off the mountain, and keep going. It's like, fuck.

But this guy was so calm. He was just like, it was like talking to Buddha or something. He was just like so centered and relaxed and focused it was beautiful we had a really enjoyable conversation from my perspective anyway um because i tend to be kind of scattered and you know tangentially speaking right i'm going all over the place whereas he was just like it was just really centered and balanced it was nice you have to have laser focus if you're gonna fuck around with that kind of stuff that's it you don't want to is that the jam yeah jeff shapiro that's him yeah look at him yeah thanks jamie he looks like yeah

and that's his uh his falcon he's got this falcon as well right when i was starting to love him yeah he's got a fucking falcon he's all into into flight man he's yeah i guess so yeah he's really he's a cool dude those wingsuits man i mean talk about risk versus reward fuck he told his story he was like he said yeah you know i've had the experience a few times of you know standing on this toes over the cliff 3 000 feet up or whatever and fist bump with your buddy and he goes and says, see you down there. He goes and then you hear it. Bang.

Yeah, he's gone. Like I've carried dudes' bodies out of the woods. I've done that too many times. He was talking about these different approaches and how the young guys tend to be more, fuck it, man. They think they're indestructible. And at his age, he's seen enough. He's carried enough bodies.

He's lost enough friends that he's not thinking that way anymore. And he doesn't want to be around guys who are because he doesn't want to deal with the trauma. Well, there's a competitive aspect to it, too. Come on, don't be a pussy. you know like that stuff can get you killed too because then it just like sort of hijacks your own way of interacting with whatever the fuck this danger is yeah yeah yeah pure pressure yeah that's real yeah i start off i'm a pussy i'm a creep i'm a pussy. I'm a creep. I'm a pussy. You got no leverage. I'm lazy. You know what fascinates me, man?

Mob mentality. A mob mentality like if there's a riot, physical violence in a way that you would never – a lot of people who would never think about hitting someone when people are hitting people all over the place. You'll just dive in. People will dive in and kick people and punch people it's very weird like bar fights you see i've never seen one in real life i've seen a bunch of them hey does that happen people just randomly punching each other yeah yeah yeah people just punch people yeah i've seen some i've seen some pretty chaotic brawls it's uh it's But there's a strange feeling in the air. It's almost like a smell.

You know, like, Jim, you nodded. I was at a riot, and earlier in the day, we were like, the hornet's nest is going to explode tonight. We kind of felt it. What was the premise? It was after the Ohio State-Michigan game in, like, 2002. Ohio State-Michigan game, I know you don't really understand the football thing of it, but there, it's a huge day, big event.

We won in a very close game, undefeated season for Ohio State, so they were headed to the national championship. This then meant sofas on fire in the street for the next couple of hours. And then shortly as the night exploded, there was a couple bonfires in the middle of the street we went we saw that on the news so we went close to see it because we were a couple blocks away as we got close we heard the knee knocker bullets getting fired out so everybody scattered were those rubber bullets yeah from like so everyone went from one street on campus to like

three other streets then it started up again the street i was on seven cars got flipped over i think and lit on fire so people started trying to like move their car so they didn't lose it because their college kids don't have any money whatever a lot of those people got caught on videos expelled from school whatever but at the end of that street i was we were on it uh we saw all the riot police the SWAT team like lining up they started firing out tear gas everywhere a tear gas canister ended up on the porch of the house we were in like exploded in the house almost like we were all coughing and had to get the fuck out of there lasted for a couple hours like no one died anything like that there wasn't a lot of violence but just 12 to 15 cars got fucked up the thing is someone could have died that's what's really that's what's really crazy about those chaotic moments of

violence is that when when something's in the air right air and you see like a big brawl going on, it's like everything seems – it seems like civilization is flimsy. Like for that brief moment. I think there's a natural thing that kicks in with people that sort of allows them to act in war and allows them to act like when the tribe is invaded. Like when a neighboring army invades your village. There's some thing that kicks in where you like recognize there's violence and you just look to swing on anybody that's around you. And you see it in these brawls when you see some sort of a riot. Like you see these people and you're like, I guarantee you that guy's never punched anybody before in his life and he's running over trying to punch people and everybody's punching everybody and people are swinging and you know

you see it in these fucking when whenever you see like uh uh like an antifa versus proud boys type thing you know what i mean like these left versus right trump supporters versus bernie bros and you see chaos you're talking about online or online i haven't seen those in person but when you see these moments tribal these tribal moments where it feels like it could break out into violence at any time there's a smell in the air it's like it changes the atmosphere of the air and you feel feel like you've got to protect yourself. Like anything can happen at any moment. From people that you would never think of as being violent.

Like you would never assume that these folks would be violent to you. They don't look scary. They're not scary-looking people, but everybody just seems to get – it's like a thing happens, like the locust. Right. Like a little trigger happens with dormant yeah behavior patterns yeah yeah i've often wondered about what that is because i've been around it a bunch of times and uh well i was around it once big time in high school when i was in high when i was in high school there was a kid who lived in this really

nice house and he'd moved into the neighborhood for the first time, and he decided he was going to have a party to meet a bunch of people, make friends. And people started robbing his house, and a brawl broke out. I'll never forget it. I was there at the event horizon of the brawl. I was there at the moment it happened.

A girl did something to a guy. I can't remember what she did. I can't remember if she threw a drink at his face or if she hit him i don't remember but i remember him hitting her because i remember him i remember him pulling his hand back i'm like oh my god he's gonna punch her in the face and boom he punched her right i mean like he knew how to punch too it was like a real punch to the face the girl goes unconscious and then you know she falls back and then chaos i mean people diving on top of people piles of people out in the yard everybody's fighting everybody you're just ducking it's like a movie and then and almost everyone has no idea what they're even fighting about i saw the moment

it happened i was there god i wish i could remember memory Memory is so sucky. You know, it really is. I have like this blurry slide, but I do remember that fist hitting her face. Because I remember he went like this. I was like, oh, no, he knows how to punch. And he went, bang, just cracked her in the face. And she just like, her head went back and she went out cold. And I think somebody caught her. I think somebody caught her as she was going down. And then it was just melee.

But I remember the feeling in the air. Because that was the first time I think I'd ever been around anything like that. I was like, whoa, it's piles of kids fighting on the, you know, everyone's team. And were you fighting? No, I was running away from everybody. I was like, I gotta get the fuck out of here. I mean, I always did martial arts, but I was very, very rarely involved in any extracurricular altercations um so i just got the fuck out of there and the other time was when i was a security guard for uh great woods

great woods is a place in mansfield massachusetts was like this concert venue and uh neil young was playing of all people and there was a there's a lawn area i've slept in his bed have you really yo i can't tell that story oh shit yeah never mind but i haven't so it's an amphitheater so there's this like this covered uh seated area and then behind the covered seated areas is gigantic lawn area and i don't remember it was cold out i remember what the deal was but people started lighting fires on the lawn like little bonfires and then it's just then chaos broke out we started trying the security people started trying to put out the fires and tell people to stop and then people started hitting people and just crazy and

i i always kept a hoodie with me because i you know i was getting like nine dollars an hour or something like that i'm not gonna get shot for $9 an hour or beat up. Fuck this. So as soon as shit went crazy, I put my zip up. I put my hoodie on. I'm like, I quit. I quit the job. Nice.

And as I was leaving, as I was quitting, I was watching people just beat the fuck out of people. And I was like dodging my way through this thing. I'm like, get out of here with this stupid fucking job. You got to know when to leave, man. But it was a feeling. It was like, like oh there's that fucking smell in the air like anything can happen at any moment now right yeah i mean you

think about these dudes who you know come back from war with ptsd you know again it's this consciousness context dependent behavior where you know they they do things in that situation and then they come back to the normal world. It's like coming out of a dream, and it's hard to believe you did that. It's hard to believe that was you. And how do you integrate that into your life with your wife and your kids and mom and dad and the neighbors? I mean, those poor guys, they're dealing with some real heavy shit there. And no one tells you how to do that either.

No, no one knows how to do it. Right. Yeah. And no one gives a shit, right? Like once they get there, you know, get you to go do what they want to do, then, you know, it's hard to even get, you know, what, a two-year wait for any sort of psychological counseling? Is it really? Yeah. It depends on the state, but at least that.

But at least that. I had a guy on the podcast. Actually, the one Jamie showed us right before the wingsuit dude was a dude who had been in Iraq. And then he came back and worked as a SWAT team commander. So he was doing all sorts of really heavy stuff. And then he just got out. And now he's living off-grid in Idaho, raising three little boys with his wife. And he's a former Mormon. So he sort of talked about how Mormonism taught him to respect authority and do what he was told. And that just fed right into his experience in the Army and with the police. But, man, I have so much compassion for those guys who get out and like look back and say what did i do you know yeah who was that guy right how and how they sort of like stop that like stop the thought process when they come back into civilization yeah but still have the memories and and how do you trust yourself right you know that i'm not gonna hurt anyone else you know

yeah it's it's hard and and yeah like like we were just saying that they get very little uh support you know they they're sent off to do this horrible stuff and then they come back and it's like okay now don't do that anymore. Yeah, the incremental progress that we achieve as a civilization is, it's amazing, but also so frustratingly slow that no one, I mean, no one I've ever talked to thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no war. No one. No one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no murder. No one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no murder no one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no rape where we

just we just figure it out like i'm pretty confident if it was just the three of us forever no one would rape anybody no one would murder just the three of us three of us i sure hope not but you know what i'm saying because i'm probably the victim here but you know what I'm saying? Because I'm probably the victim here. But you know what I'm saying? What number of people, how many people do they have to be before one of those things becomes a possibility? If you have a group of close friends, a group of close friends who are good communicators and good, honest, healthy, friendly people can live together. friendly people can live together and you know whatever issues you might have with someone not doing the dishes or someone forgetting to put back your lawnmower or whatever the fuck it is you could work that out it's no big deal like what is what's the number of people 150 okay that's dunbar's number yeah i'm sure you've heard about that yeah i mean that might really be it that might really be what we're programmed for that Well, that's where hunter-gatherer groups always splinter.

Yeah. They never get beyond that. And I think that's why, because a hunter-gatherer group, which is egalitarian and sharing and cooperative and all that, by necessity, right, because that's how our ancestors survived, is by taking care of each other, mitigating risk. You need reputational damage and if everyone doesn't know everyone reputational damage is no longer effective so if you let's say you go and you're you're a good hunter and you kill an antelope and then you don't share it and you just keep it for yourself that's not going to go over real well with a hunter-gatherer group you're you're going to be ridiculed chastised maybe expelled from the group maybe have a hunting

accident and die because that hoarding selfish behavior is extremely taboo in a hunter-gatherer society whereas you know you look at our society where reputational damage is no longer functional outside of your group of friends. As long as you're good to your friends, your golfing buddies, you can screw the rest of the world. You can not pay your contractors for years and become president. Everyone in New York – I worked in real estate in New York in the 80s. Everyone knew who that guy was and what he was up to. And you couldn't trust him. He was full of shit and he ripped everybody off.

But that's how business works in New York. Even the company I was working for is really interesting to see how your leverage increased when you owed somebody a lot of money. There's that truism. If you owe someone five bucks, you have a problem. If you owe them a million bucks, they have a problem. You really see that. But yeah, I think 150 is the cutoff for how many people we can keep track of, I think. Dunbar's number has proved to be pretty accurate.

Well, it seems to be what we evolved to sort of be accustomed to, right? That's the number of people. Well, that's the neocortex. Dunbar was looking at the brain anatomy of different primates, and by looking at the proportion of a neocortex to the rest of the brain, he predicted the maximum social size of those primates, of each of the species. Wow. And that's how he came to the estimate of 150 for humans.

And then they went and looked at people, they did data collection. That's so crazy. Yeah. The physical size of something like that, that there's a direct correlation, like the direct correlation between the size of primates' testicles and the amount of promiscuous females in the area you've read sex at dawn finally i read it a long time ago man i read it a long time ago i'm thinking i might do uh

i did the audiobook of civilized today which i really enjoyed that process i'm thinking i might do a 10th anniversary director's cut audiobook of sex at dawn did you do the audio version no who did actors oh yuck yeah oh yuck my friend steve ranella he wrote a book on buffalo the american buffalo you know just the history of buffalo in this country and um someone else wrote it and he finally got the rights back and he did it himself now. Yeah. But it just killed him. That's what I'm going to do. Because the person who read it was like a soap opera actor.

Right. Had no connection to the material at all. And in Sex at Dawn, there are a lot of jokes and sort of wry asides and stuff. And the people who read it, they don't get it. They didn't get the humor. So it's just the straight ahead. It's as if someone took your comedy material and just read it in a monotone. That's called criticizing me in a blog.

That's what you do when someone takes it and just puts it in quotes like that. Yeah, good point. There's no delivery there. There's no voice. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. And I think I'm going to – I don't know if Steve did this or not, but I think I'm going to, as I said, a director's cut. So I'll – when I read a paragraph that reminds me of something or what I thought when I wrote that or my dad really wanted me to include that phrase or whatever little asides. So there will be some commentary as well, I think.

Yeah, that's a good move. Yeah. David Goggins had a really interesting way he did his. asides so there'll be some commentary as well i think yeah that's a good move yeah david goggins had a really interesting way he did his he did his book where uh he actually didn't read it he had a friend read it um and then in between paragraphs they discussed all the different events that happened that he talked about and he gave other details that weren't in the book right so the audio book is essentially like an audio book slash podcast yeah yeah so you're not just getting a reading of the book you're getting bonus material as well yeah yeah it's it's really good it's really good that's yeah i mean there's no rules of that kind of stuff you know it's your book right you can kind

of do whatever you want and you could even talk about how you feel now about that chapter. Sure. You could always do that. What I would change. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Or how you feel about the material itself and how you interact with the facts that you

uncovered versus before. Yeah. Yeah. There is a, I don't listen to audio books much, but in the van last summer, I listened to the Keith Richards autobiography. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It was interesting. He reads like the beginning, and then this actor who sounds like him, has the same accent, reads most of it.

And then Johnny Depp reads a couple of chapters, and then Keith comes back at the end. Depp reads a couple of chapters, and then Keith comes back at the end. Well, that was one of the weird things about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was Johnny Depp reading Hunter Thompson. And then, you know, honestly did a better job of reading Hunter Thompson than Hunter Thompson has done reading Hunter Thompson. You know, there's that famous speech about being there at the end of the 60s and watching the waves pull back. Sure. You know that? It crested at the Rocky Mountains and then rolled back into the sea.

That's a fantastic speech, but the way Johnny Depp said it was better. Yeah. Like he- Have you ever seen Breakfast with Hunter? Yes. Do you remember? He freaks out about that particular passage. Because who was it?

Alex? Well, they were going to animate it. They were going to animate it. Yeah. And he fucking pulls out the gun and kicks him off the property and totally loses his shit. You're going to take the best thing I've ever written and make it a fucking cartoon. Yeah.

Oh, my God. That's amazing. That guy used to go off. He was so crazy. Did you ever meet him? No. Angry. Angry that i never met him yeah yeah i would have loved to meet him yeah and you probably there were probably a few years

there where i could have you could have yeah fuck yeah there's a few people dick gregory he's one that i really wish i met i would have loved to talk to him about what it was like to show the kennedy assassination footage on geraldo rivera like 10 plus years after the fact you know the zapruder film yeah he introduces a pruder film to the world really yeah dick gregory's like a comedian a black comedian yeah yeah right yeah i remember yeah he brought the zapruder film to uhdo Rivera, and they played the Kennedy assassination on television. No shit. It hadn't been seen publicly. No.

Not only had it not been seen publicly, I believe Time Magazine owned it. I think they bought the rights to it. See if that's true. And they shelved it for, I want to say, 12 years. It was like 75 when it aired on television somewhere in that range and you know the assassination was 63 was it 63 i think it was 63 i was born in 62 yeah yeah so it was right after i was born and so no one had seen his head go back into the left until that footage. And then people were like, wait, what the?

Really? Which doesn't necessarily. So how did Dick Gregory get the rights? I do not remember. I think, I don't remember. Who else? Have you met Werner Herzog? I've not.

Are you into him? No, I'd love to. Yes. He's a character. Grizzly Man is one of my all-time favorite movies. Yeah, me too. It's one of the best unintentional comedies ever, but I don't think it's particularly unintentional.

There's a fucking moment in that film where the sheriff, when the sheriff's talking about the body and carrying the body off in bags, he's like, what did you think? Well, first time I heard about it, I thought he was retarded. And then the kid just has a smash cut to the sheriff's face and i'm fucking howling yeah i'm howling laughing and i'm like this guy did this on purpose like there's so many cuts in this movie that are so humorous yeah i gotta think that and werner herzog's have you ever heard him on eric weinstein's podcast no brilliant guy oh yeah he's really

interesting intense guy and very dark sense of humor oh yeah yeah yeah well that's why i thought i was like this motherfucker did this on purpose yeah he made this a comedy so do you think that what was the name of the character timothy treadwell yes yeah yes when i watched that movie my feeling was this guy is closeted yes gay dude 100 yeah you felt that too okay he brings up if i was gay it would be easy but i'm not gay right so he says because you say why can't i find a girl you know he's like walking through the woods with this like lispy gay way of talking yeah and he's talking to the, for people who don't know what this documentary is about, it's about a guy named Timothy Treadwell. And Timothy Treadwell was, well, I guess you could say he was a bear expert, but not really.

Because the real bear experts were like, this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. He should get out of there. Like what he's doing, he doesn't need to protect these bears. He's pretending that he's protecting these bears. He's living with them. I think there was a certain element of it that was suicide by bear. Yeah. I really do.

And he was walking through the woods holding this camcorder, getting film, going, if I was gay, it would be so easy. Right. Talking to the camcorder as his only friend because he was out there alone for every summer. But no one who's not gay says, well, if I was gay, it would be really easy. I've said that a lot. Unless you're being funny with a friend. Yeah. Like, well, if I was gay, I would just hook up with some dudes.

But he's saying it like, why can't I find a girl? If I was gay, it'd be so easy. No, it wouldn't. You're still living in the woods with monsters. You're going to get a bunch of gay guys. Gay guys, they want to be in Boys Town. I think they should remake the movie in a bear bar. On Broadway.

That would be hilarious. That would be hilarious. Grizzly man. Yeah, instead of doing it with the forest and actual grizzly bears. In the West Village. Yeah, if I was gay, it'd be easy. There's bears everywhere. I went to a bear bar with Andrew Sullivan and Dan Savage.

There's actually a bear bar? Oh, there are lots of bear bars. They call them bear bars? Yeah. Oh, that's hilarious. Yes. And for people who don't know what we're talking about, bears are big, hairy- Gay guys.

Gay guys. Think Tom Segura and Bert Kreischer. They do a podcast called Two Bears, One Cave. Oh, do they that's hilarious but neither one of them is gay but yeah beside the point but if they were gay they'd be bears yeah yeah yeah i don't know bears dan savage is a trip i've had him on the podcast yeah yeah i know i saw that that was interesting he's an interesting guy he's he's super smart and funny as shit and and he's armed with nothing but a sense of humor and a

great intellect and a big heart he's and honesty yeah he's changed the world he's saved who knows how many lives you know he's a he's beautiful i really like dan a lot yeah when someone can just be themselves again you know that's who he is and timothy treadwell if he had listened to dance savage everything would be different well that leap man that coming out leap fuck it's got to be so hard for people i i know several guys that are closeted and it's torturous yeah torturous to see and one of them you know i've talked to him i was like just come out man no one gives a fuck we don't care no one cares you it'll be a giant relief yeah just they worry about especially you know actors yeah they worry about their careers yeah yeah i mean what you know when your career is more

important than the the integrity of yourself but i don't think it hurts you i don't believe it yeah i don't believe it the only thing that would hurt with actors is leading man yeah rock hudson kind of guy yeah that's one thing that's fucking real like if you're a like i don't know if tom cruise is gay but that's always been this stupid rumor right let's let's assume it's true yeah if he did come out of the closet man nobody wants to go see a movie where he's the leading man. He's got a wife and kids. You'd be like, that guy's sucking dick. Like, he would never buy into it.

That's the – like, a gay woman, like Jodie Foster, okay, could easily play a straight woman in a movie and no one would care. It'd be fine. But when a gay – that is the fucking glass ceiling in Hollywood. It's one of them, right? That is the fucking glass ceiling in Hollywood. It's one of them, right? When a gay man comes out of the closet, those roles, John Travolta or whatever it is, whoever it would be. I don't know if he's gay either.

But if he was, that's where the buck stops. You cannot be the leading man who's the married guy with kids. Or the hot man who's in a sexual relationship with a woman. If we know that you're having sex with men. But then it's funny, right? We can watch straight actors pretend to be gay like Bird Back Mountain. That's no problem. Sure. No problem.

Yeah. Very strange. Yeah. That's one of the last open prejudices that we all accept because no one's been able to bridge that gap except what's that dude's name that fucking he's got three names little skinny guy used to be on a sitcom how i met your mother neil patrick harris yeah that guy duke hauser yeah that guy he's openly gay and didn't he play a womanizer on a sitcom i think on how i met your mother yeah yeah i've never watched it but but the thing about sitcoms is they're like plays like those kind of sitcoms in front of an audience they're horseshit you know it's like it's not it's not

like a movie it's horseshit you know you know it's horseshit everyone knows it's horseshit anything with a laugh track i'm very suspicious or studio audience like happy days like i love henry winkler but the fawns yeah that's horseshit no wait is henry winkler gay I'm very suspicious or studio audience. Like Happy Days. I love Henry Winkler, but The Fonz. That's horse shit. No, wait. Is Henry Winkler gay? No, I don't think so. Maybe.

I always assumed he was because he was so overcompensating with The Fonz. I think that was the character. You meet him in real life, he is the nicest guy I've ever met. Yeah. He's so friendly. He's in Barry now, right? Is he? Yeah.

He plays an acting coach in Barry. I haven't seen it. I hear it's great. I've never seen Barry. He's a Barry now, right? Is he? Yeah, he plays an acting coach in Barry. I haven't seen it. I hear it's great. I've never seen Barry. He's a fly fisherman. He wrote a book on fly fishing. And I think the book's called I Never Met an Idiot on the River. Because there's something about fly fishing.

Fly fishing is a very weird pursuit because a lot of it is catch and release. Yeah. pursuit because a lot of it is catch and release yeah which as a person who enjoys the outdoors and enjoys eating fish that i catch i'm very torn on that activity a catch and release activity i know it's fun and i have done it i get it but it's weird it weird. You're sticking a hook through an animal's face. I was going to say, it traumatizes the fish. It's got to. How many of them die? Well, fly fishing, very few. Because you're dealing with barbless hooks for the most part.

So it just goes into this cartilage in their mouth they don't really feel. And then allegedly don't really feel. I don't know if they feel it. And then they pull it out and they're fine. But there's some catch and release, especially with three prong barbed hooks where the animals definitely die you know they get they get caught in their gills and they start bleeding from their gills and then you have to release them anyway because you know in some places the regulation is catch and release yeah but people love doing it they find like peace like drifting a fly past this

area where the fish is lying dormant and then you pull the fly and then the fish grabs it and then you got them oh boy but you're tapping into this sort of primal reward system that you have in your dna that makes you want to uh catch these fish but it gives you a reason to be out by the river out in the morning normally it's morning or dusk when the flies are landing. I think I've been hunting since the last time you and I spoke. Yeah, bow hunting. You went bow hunting?

Yeah, yeah, on Hawaii, Big Island. Oh, didn't you go with Kyle Kingsbury and Ben Greenfield and all those guys? That was a deer, Axis deer trip to Malakai. You have a bow? I do. How often do you practice? Since I went hunting, not much. But before I went, every day.

Yeah, I was into it. Did you have a coach? No. I had some friends who helped me out. And I watched some, you know, Cam, your buddy. Cam Harris. Yeah, I watched some of his videos. But yeah, it was an interesting experience.

So first I went on that trip with, yeah, Peter. Atiyah. Atiyah and Ben Greenfield, like all these podcast human optimization guys. Who set that whole thing up? My buddy Kyle Tierman, who's a big wave surfer. Oh, okay. He spends a lot of time in Hawaii, and he knows a lot of people there. Healy, Jeff Healy, I think, big surfer dude.

Anyway, so he knew all these people, and I guess Aubrey and some other, those guys sort of asked him to hook them up with a trip. And so he put it all together and then at the last minute i think aubrey couldn't go i think because you were coming down to austin and he wanted to you know coordinate with you or something so they said yo chris if you want to go it's it's all paid for and i'm like helicopters hawaii yeah so did you have to practice leading up to that or were you already shooting a bow? I was already shooting because Kyle Tierman and I had already planned a trip for like three weeks after that. So I was already practicing for that, which was going to be a pig hunting trip on the big island. But then I went on this deer thing but mainly i went on the deer thing just because it was an opportunity to fly around in helicopters and see molokai which is

amazing right but i didn't hunt on that because i didn't honestly i didn't want to um hurt anything you know i didn't feel like you were competent enough with it no i didn't want to do it well the deer are farther away and they're much harder. They're much more aware and like socking them is a lot harder. And so I just basically hung out and had a good time. They're so hard. Yeah. They're so, that animal, axis deer is an animal that evolved to get away from tigers.

Right. They're the fastest thing I've ever hunted by far. Super alert. I hunted them with Cam Haynes and. On Molokai? No, on Lanai. Oh. away from tigers right they're they're the fastest thing i've ever hunted by far super alert i hunted with cam haynes and um malachi no on lanai and um john dudley just uh just before you guys went and we were there between the time we were there and the when we were there the last spring there was 150 hunters that went there to bow hunt one was successful really everyone else pulled out a rifle huh everyone else was like fuck this because you can't get anywhere near those goddamn

things without them jumping but if you can get your stalking skills down or you can sneak up on an axis deer and kill one with a bow holy shit that's that's black belt level stuff. Well, the dudes I were with, Peter Attia, he got two or three, I remember. He's very, very, very into it. He's a super, super smart guy. Yeah, he is. He's cool. I enjoyed hanging with all those dudes. But then the next three weeks later, we went, Kyle and me and Simon Rex.

I don't know if you know him. He's an actor. Slash comedian. Slash comedian. Slash comedian. Dirt nasty. Dirt nasty rapper. Yeah, he's a good friend of mine. Anyway, we went on this pig hunting trip, and that was interesting.

That was, you know, I wanted to have the experience because I'd never hunted. I'd never killed anything, and I eat meat, so I felt like I have this, you know, responsibility to to have the experience and confront it and all that and um i was actually the first of our group to to kill a pig and uh it was strange i didn't feel sad or traumatized i felt heightened awareness, you know, like, but I think I might hunt again. I'm probably, I'm moving to Colorado. I just bought land in Colorado. Oh, yeah?

What part? Sort of south central. It's a tiny little town. And, yeah, it's an interesting area there. But anyway, there's a lot of elk hunting there. And I'll probably do some elk hunting with local people you're gonna do it with a bow again no i think i'll use a rifle yeah because i think that's the way to go yeah not gonna be completely obsessed and do it every day i'm not yeah uh because i don't do that yeah um and also i don't you know the thing about a bow is and maybe this is what you're

implying here if you're not really good the chances of you of an elk running off or a pig running off with an arrow in its ass and dying a slow horrible death is quite high if you hit him with a rifle high powered rifle with a scope you, and you're in the right range. You can still wound them, but you're much more competent with a rifle. And it's a better meat-gathering tool. It's a good way to describe it. And Colorado has, I think, twice as many elk as any other state or country. Yeah. Colorado is one of the best places in the world to elk hunt

yeah so that's a good spot if you're looking and also you're taking a life you take an elk that's a lot of meat i shot this pig it was about you know it was a yearling i think it's not a lot of meat on a pig that size no so yeah it's but it was it was interesting are you living in this van are you no i have an No, I have an apartment. I still have an apartment in L.A., but I'm about to give it up, I think. Just to just be a nomad? Yeah, because, I mean, I was in the van five months, and it's like, okay, I'm paying rent to what? Like to leave my clothes there, basically.

Right. Like I don't really need to be doing that. No, I admire that sort of nomad sense of life. I don't ever see myself doing it. Yeah. But there's a romantic aspect to it that's undeniable. Well, your life's different, man. You have kids.

You know, you have a life here that's really you've built over a lot of time. You know, I just got here a few years ago. You're kind of a prisoner to that, though, in a certain way. You're a prisoner to all all your obligations there's oh sure that's one of the things that's romantic about this nomadic thing that you're doing yeah it's like you know i have to come here i have a certain amount of podcasts after a week but you don't you don't i don't i don't i mean that's i was thinking that we're talking about the closeted gay actors. What is money worth if you can't buy your freedom with it? Your freedom to be who you are as a closeted gay person, let's say.

What is it good for? I mean, that's the first thing. I think with the closeted gay folks, the real problem is the feeling that you're going to be rejected if you come out. I think that's entirely different than someone who gets wrapped up in jobs. One of the things that I could say about the jobs that I have is that I really do enjoy them. I'm enjoying this conversation. I love talking to people. I love doing stand-up.

Love it. And I still enjoy doing the UFC. Those are my three jobs. And I don't do the UFC as much as I used to. Would you do them all if you were making $100,000 a year total? I mean, I certainly obviously could live off $100,000 a year if that's what I made a year. So the money isn't what makes them fun. No. It's the thing itself.

Definitely. But that's what's made the money what's made the money is my i mean i think right i think it's my enjoyment of the things right that's made them interesting like one of the things about podcasts and i think there it there's is a parallel and stand up is that genuine enthusiasm like real legitimate enthusiasm is contagious yeah and if you're genuinely interested in talking to people and genuinely curious it's interesting to listen to right and you know you do your best to get out of your own way and you do your best i do my best to not be annoying and yeah fuck up sometimes there's no there's no ifs ands or buts about it

i'm a human being and i've done but you cop to it when you do which i think is another thing that's endearing and i mean you're a really interesting case as i'm sure you know and and i've watched you even since i've known you like your profile has moved much closer to mainstream american you know popular you were you were mentioned on fucking saturday night live a couple weeks ago yeah right you know and there were there's some article about joe where was it in harper's or the new yorkers something recently that i read like super mainstream um and but you're really interesting because you're like this man's man but you're also vulnerable you know you're also

like you admit when you fuck up like you had someone that the twitter guy on and you're like yeah i wasn't prepared i fucked it up and you had him back and that's cool that's and it's probably i don't know is it hard for you to maintain that kind of humility when you're getting all this pressure and opportunities and all this stuff coming at you no i don't think so no i think uh that's just being honest you know if you i mean i think if i'd stopped if i fucked up and i stopped admitting that i was fucking up it would all go off the rails there's no way i couldn't maintain who i am i would be thinking about it all the time right you'd be like back to the closeted gay dude right closeted you'd be a bullshit artist yeah exactly yeah you'd just

be pretending you're cooler than you are i think uh part of being a human being is making mistakes it's a messy thing to be a person you know and i mean i'm also big on forgiveness. And I think you have to be because human beings are fallible. And like we're saying, we vary from moment to the next. And to try to hold someone to who they were six months ago or a year ago or five years ago or what they said or what they did and not accept it and hold a grudge, to me, that's crazy. Do you want people to do that to you? What kind of life is that? and not accept it and hold a grudge, to me, that's crazy. I don't, like, do you want people to do that to you? What kind of life is that? What kind of civilization are we creating where people hold grudges and don't forgive people for things of the past?

But you also have to be able to forgive yourself. I struggle with that way more, believe it or not, than I struggle with forgiving other people. I can forgive other people pretty easy for whatever reason i've always been able to you know i've always so what's what's the difference i'm super self-critical and uh i have uh definitely some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder that allows me to get really good at things because i obsess right you know it's probably unhealthy but i manage it yeah but like the the the mania that goes on in my mind i just figured out a way to put it to use right it's like okay i got this

fucking engine like what do i stick it on let me stick a thing in there and i could drill a hole with that instead of just having it going which a lot of people do a lot of people don't find a focus for whatever mania they have going on in their mind. So I've found various things. That's one of the reasons why I don't ever see myself not doing anything. I don't have enough time. That's my issue. There's a lot of things that I love to do that I just don't have the time for. Do you feel like you're – how old are you?

52. Do you feel like you're sort of figuring things out? Always, yeah. I mean, like, I have this sense, 57, I have this sense that, like, I don't know, like, I finally learned to dance and the party's almost over. Yes. You know what I mean? That's a great way to say it. That's hilarious.

It's like I'm finally figuring this shit out and i'm almost 60 well i remember when i was like 26 25 and when i first came out here i remember thinking by boy by the time i'm 52 oh fucking everything solved there's arbitrary numbers that we have in our head of who you should be yeah at 50 or 60 or whatever the number is. And you're just alive, man. You're just alive. And while you're alive, you better forget about all those numbers. I remember thinking like the year 2000. When the year 2000 comes, like what's that going to be like?

Wow, I'm going to be so old. Dude, it's almost 2020. It's going to be 2020 in a couple months that's crazy that is such a nutty number that's so crazy yeah well that's why i love living in the van dude yeah i mean i've you know so much has since you and i said i don't know a year or so since we've seen each other yeah my dad's died i'm living in the van this book's come out like all this stuff's happening um but i've spent most of the time sitting by a campfire looking at the stars you know it's fucking the the times that i get outside like when i elk hunt every year

and i i spend time particularly in utah in the mountains the the places we go. It's just, it's cleansing in a way that is so hard to describe. It's so hard to describe what it's like just to be out there in the woods and be in the forest and be with the wild animals. And, you know, it's. You're home. Yeah. That's what this book's about. I don't mean to push the conversation to the book, but that's why I wrote the book. Like, we are designed by evolution. Civilized death. To live. Available now. Available at bookstores. why i wrote the book like we are designed by evolution

civilized to live now available at all your local bookstores and amazon and all that other stuff we're designed to live in that world yes so that's why it feels so good that's why golf courses look the way they do you know even fucking you know old executives love being out there on the grass and the water and the undulating hills it's the african savannah wow i know even when it's manicured right it still feels good it feels good to be connected to nature feels good to be on a lake yeah lakes are the best man to be able to sit on the dock of a lake like there's a feeling of like you know you look out you see tree you've ever been to Coeur d'Alene? Yeah, I was there this summer.

I haven't, but a friend of mine has a house there, and I saw a picture of the water. And, like, you look all the way down, like, 100 feet deep. Yeah. Down, you see the bottom, like, it's like a piece of glass. Yeah. This is bananas. Yeah, I didn't take a shower for about three months. You must have smelled amazing.

I smelled great, because every morning I jumped in a river. Oh. It was, you know, every morning. That counts. Yeah. That counts, though. Oh, yeah. Did you use soap or or no i know i haven't used soap in a decade oh jesus but you smell okay how weird yeah my microbiome is is working well there's articles written about that by by people that say you shouldn't use soap yeah no a lot of them because you're disrupting your microbiome yeah you don't i, I use deodorant. There's Coeur d'Alene.

Yeah. Sandpoint's really nice too. Idaho's great. Idaho's gorgeous. I love Boise. Yeah. And Montana, Western Montana. Oh, yeah, man.

Insane. Yeah. Look how pretty that is though. God damn that lake. And when you have a boat on a lake, it's like you have a car, but there's no road. Everything is a road. It's all flat. is a road it's all flat yeah so you can go wherever the fuck you want same thing with airplanes it's amazing what you can do that's even crazier you into flying well my friend bill uh has uh well he has a helicopter license

oh yeah and he took oh bill burr yeah yeah yeah he took me around his helicopter that's pretty well about that i was like that might be a cool thing to get into. That's hard. Yeah, he spent a lot of time learning how to fly. And it's expensive. Yeah. But a single-engine airplane, you can, I mean, a hundred grand, you get a decent single-engine airplane

and you can go wherever you want. My uncle has an amphibious plane, so he lands on lakes. Oh, wow. Yeah, and he used to... Could he land on ground, too? too yeah so that's amphibious so it has wheels and floats does you have to switch things up or yeah so you have to change out the no no you just push a button the wheels retract oh no shit yeah he forgot once and flipped it

so you don't want to forget how many people fly drunk? Yeah I bet they do Yeah Right? Well if the weather's good Wasn't that like a Patrick Swayze thing Like before he kicked the bucket? I don't know What are you laughing about?

Nothing What are you laughing about? You're laughing about something Huh? Harrison Ford I think Harrison Ford? Oh That's right

Right Was he drunk? Harrison Ford might have been Might have been I don't know Might have been Or maybe he's an old dude Old dudes look drunk all the time And babies might have been might have been i don't know might have been or might maybe he's an old dude old dudes

look drunk all the time and babies yeah yeah i mean that is a that's that's a great way to achieve privacy too right like you're if you're a guy like harrison ford i mean that guy it must be hard for that guy to go anywhere yeah right it's probably real hard for him to go to a regular airport yeah yeah i've got the perfect amount of fame i was thinking about this today on the Right? It's probably real hard for him to go to a regular airport. Yeah. Yeah. I've got the perfect amount of fame. I was thinking about this today on the airplane flying down from Portland. I was in the front row, so I had extra leg room, but I wasn't in business class. That's where I am in fame.

I want to stay right there. I've got a little extra leg room. Right. You could be normal, stretch your legs out. Some people recognize me, but they all like me. If you don't like me, you don't know who the hell I am. That's nice. Yeah.

So you're at a different level. There are people who recognize you who are like, fuck that guy, Joe. Me, nothing. I mean, you get mostly love, I'm sure. Remarkably, though, most people are nice. Yeah. Even people that don't like you, they don't really know you. Right.

If they knew you. It's some image they have. I'm nice. If you know me and you meet me i guarantee we're probably going to get along yeah and if we don't i'm going to work hard to make it on not uncomfortable yeah you know it's just the thing about people liking people and not liking people a lot of it is this severely limited way of communicating especially when it's one way right if you're putting out a podcast or you're putting out books yeah and they're reading your shit but they don't get to interact at all that builds

resentment there's a there's a lot of weird resentment that people develop when they listen to you right and they don't get to interact like say like especially someone like me who's always talking shit right i'm all i talk shit for a living, and I'm always giving my opinions. And some people have maybe even a strong point that I probably even agree with them, and they don't get to say anything. So they're sitting at home listening like, fuck this guy. I'm tired of his bull. Yeah, you occupy space in their lives. Yes, but they don't get to interact.

You owe them something. Yes, yes. That makes sense. Yes, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It's yes. That makes sense. Yes, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It's a crude way of communicating. Yeah. These one-way methods of communication are very crude.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking my buddy Simon and I were in a restaurant in Venice, and the woman recognized me and like, oh, I love your podcast, and gave me your number. And I was like, yeah, I'll give her a call sometime. And Simon's like, dude, I would never do that. never never you know interact with your fans you know and then i was like no but simon you don't get it she actually knows me like in simon's case like he was in scary movie three four five he was uh you know he he plays these characters so when people are like yo simon like they don't know him right they he's this the

face they recognize but they don't know the dude right so it's a different kind of thing i really like the van trips what the anthropology thing i'll say okay i'm gonna be in you know boise at this uh beer pub thursday at eight and people show up 50 100 people show up really oh yeah but it's mainly so they can meet each other so when you do this do you do live shows no do live shows i've never done a live show i've done like duncan's a couple times with him you know we've done we did the uh what was a couple years ago we did the keynote at the float conference in portland that's hilarious that's a good audience that oh yeah that's a tuned in group of people right but i don't do the shows i just he noted

a float conference with duncan yeah it was great oh my god that sounds perfect yeah oh that's hilarious but it's really just uh to build community that's what i want to do i want them to meet each other because they're all beautiful weirdos right you know and hopefully yeah they are i've never met anyone through the podcast that i didn't really actually like what kind of numbers do you get like what kind of downloads how many episodes you know it's hard to know but probably 50 000 an episode something like that that's perfect yeah that's a. That's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good number.

Between 50 and 100. Like, you know, when you and Duncan were on, when we were doing the shrimp parade thing, it would, you know, peak because it's you guys. Do you use advertising? I didn't. For five years, it was listener supported only. Patreon type deal? Yeah.

Yeah. supported only deal yeah and then this friend of mine uh who has this company uh mud water um he was sort of launching that and he was like dude i want to i want to advertise on your podcast i'm like yeah i love you buddy but i don't yeah i don't do that and then he sent me an email that uh email chain where he was negotiating with another podcast that has roughly the same audience numbers as mine and i was like really i'm leaving that much on the table fuck so i i started at this point i only do ads for companies that i really like and that i use their stuff so i don't do you know i don't have a broker or any of that stuff yeah i think the subscription model like when people are paying like a paywall the the problem is the the growth is so limited so then you could either just do it for free and put it out there and maybe just sell books

or sell t-shirts t-shirts or you know in my case uh tickets to shows that would work right i'm gonna be in cleveland this weekend and detroit nice ladies and gentlemen what's it like to play detroit is detroit i love detroit i love detroit they're good people they're fun people they're happy you're there yeah detroit is not necessarily coming back to where it used to be it's a bit like what is a comeback right you know it's never going to be an auto industry when you get back in shape and you're 70 guess what you're never going to be who you were when you were 20 comeback? Right. It's never going to be an auto industry. When you get back in shape and you're 70, guess what? You're never going to be who you were when you were 20. Right. It's never going to be what it was.

Yeah. I mean, it was the richest city in America at one point in time, right? Yeah. During the peak of automobile production, I believe it was one of the richest cities in America. And it's a far cry from that now. And it's strange when you drive through the town and you see these boarded up buildings and factories with all their broken windows and just you could buy a house for

like 100 bucks like it's weird it's weird but then there's also a lot of like craft restaurants and these businesses that are building up and these hippies that have kind of moved in and you know they're kind of you know making stuff there and there's a lot of cool shit cheap enough to get in and do stuff yeah yeah which is you know if you're a young person growing up there you know like you could make something happen and with the internet the your ability to establish a business and your ability to you know to actually get something off the ground it's so much different than it ever has been before. And people love a good comeback story.

So Detroit, like a bunch of Detroit-made things could be exciting for people. Like, yeah, look at that. Detroit, I'll buy that. Yeah, it's Detroit-made. There's a company called Shinola. Have you ever heard of them? Yeah, the watches. Really nice watches, American-made watches.

They make a bunch of other stuff too, like bags, leather goods, things things along those lines but one of the things they proudly say is made in detroit and they make cool shit you know so it's there's something to that you know but the place i'm working at is the fox theater and it's just like really fucking cool old theater and what's interesting there's uh columns and it was back when people used to be able to smoke they smoked in there so much that all the columns are like they have that orangey nicotine sort of tint to them but one of the columns was replaced so this one column is like clear and smooth and clean and the other ones are like fucking orangey like you could it seems like you go up to him with a butter knife and just scrape the nicotine off of them you know but it's a beautiful

old building that was made way way way back in the day and they said that when it was first made it was one of the only buildings in detroit that had air conditioning so people would go to see movies there and they would pay to see movies just so they could fall asleep. They'd go in there in just the cool air, and they'd fall asleep during the summer because people would just be sweltering in the heat of the summer. I've done that in Bangkok. Yeah? Just gone to a cinema just to get out of the heat.

Nice. I fucking love Thailand, man. Oh, yeah. I love it. I really enjoyed Thailand when I was there. You went recently. Yeah, last summer. It's like people are so nice.

Food's great. Amazing. It's the one country I'm comfortable recommending to You went recently. Yeah, last summer. It's like, people are so nice. Food's great. Amazing. It's the one country I'm comfortable recommending to just about anyone. Yeah. Because the sort of confluence of convenience and safety and ease and it's still exotic and really interesting and very foreign.

You know, I wouldn't recommend India to everyone or Indonesia, but Thailand is like, whatever your tolerance is, you know, I wouldn't recommend India to everyone or Indonesia, but Thailand is like whatever your tolerance is, you'll find something there that works for you. Yeah, I know a lot of fighters who've gone there for camps, for training camps, and wound up either moving there or starting camps there or starting gyms there. They just love it so much. It's a good life. I feel like it's a part of their home. Yeah, I've been there a lot, probably 10 times over the years yeah it's real cheap too yeah in terms of like food eating yeah

lodging the best food in the world yeah as far as i'm concerned it's i love spicy food so to me it's it's excellent and it's balanced it's interesting it's not just like blast your face off spice it's really nice yeah did you go to laos at all no that's that's an interesting place really good yeah yeah i heard vietnam's amazing you know bourdain's one of his favorite yeah he loved it i know i know i was there for three months in vietnam um i didn't dig it that much there's some really beautiful places, but I found – I was traveling with Casilda, my wife, who's dark-skinned, and there's a lot of racism. She got harassed a lot because everyone assumed that she was a local and with me makes her a prostitute and dark skin makes her low class so there was a lot she got a dude punched her like she was on yeah an adolescent kid ran up we were on a motorbike

in this rice patties and this kid just ran up and punched her in the back and then ran off whoa yeah a young kid yeah like 15 or so yeah it was pretty heavy she got she got like physically accosted three times in vietnam how long were you there three months fuck yeah yeah so i i didn't dig vietnam that much then we went we got to laos and it was and there was like uh i mean it's it's a tough country they've had i mean shit storm been going on there since the 40s, you know, or even before that, the French occupation and all that. So I'm not blaming anyone. Isn't that a big part of the heroin trade, Laos as well? It was during the Vietnam War.

Yeah. Yeah. Now I think heroin is more coming out of Afghanistan. And Mexico, you know, they've got the cartels. Dude, do you see the fucking shit that's going down? Yeah. There's where the government and the armies have backed down and let the cartels run everything? Yeah, well, they took El Chapo's son back, right?

Yes. How insane is that? Yeah. I mean, how is that going to play out? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm going to Mexico in a couple months, but I'm going to a different part of this. Where are you going?

Chiapas, way down south on the border with Guatemala. I really love it down there. There's a town called San Cristobal de las Casas that's up in the Ponderosa Pines, maybe 4,000 feet. It's beautiful. Indian villages around, and they come down on market day. I'm going to go down there and work on another book. What are you writing now? You know, it's kind of under wraps because I talked about this book way too much,

and it slowed me down. Is it all about Neil Young's bed? Can we cut that out like i can get a guy in trouble for saying that um uh you remember the first time i was on this show how fucked up it was at the beginning were you even aware of that what happened so the first time i came on the show i didn't know you right and i didn't know anything about you because i was living in spain and duncan i'd done duncan shows the first time I came on the show, I didn't know you, right? And I didn't know anything about you because I was living in Spain. And Duncan, I had done Duncan shows. The first time I'd done a podcast, I didn't know what a podcast was. I came to LA to visit my parents.

I had this email from Duncan. I'm a comedian. You want to do a podcast? I'm like, sure. Never met a comedian. Don't know what a podcast is. So I did it. We had a good time.

And after, he's like, oh, you you know i'd love to introduce you to my friend joe rogan i think you guys would get along and you could do his podcast i'd never heard of joe rogan right and no insult intended or i just i lived in spain i didn't never watch fear factor i'd your whole thing was happening over here i didn't know about it and then i went back to spain i was like okay duncan's friend joe does this podcast in his living room the way duncan does i assumed right and i went back to spain and i was talking to my buddy voodoo who's a tattoo artist and uh he's like so how was la i was like yeah cool i did a podcast with this comedian it was really fun and interesting and he's like oh you should do

joe rogan's podcast i'm like dude how how do you know Duncan's friend Joe, right? It was this whole weird thing. He's like, no, dude, Joe Rogan's. So I tried to tell you that story the first time I came. And the point of the story is I'm an idiot. I don't know what's going on, right? I'm oblivious. But we got to the point where I said I didn't know you.

And you were like, so what did you do, Google me? And I was like uh well not really and then and then we had to do a sound check or you had to do an ad or something and it got the story got interrupted and I felt like you thought I was trying to diss you or something I definitely didn't yeah well I was paranoid then you lit up a joint and you pass the joint around and i'm like fuck if i don't hit this joint then i'm confirmed asshole here so i hit the joint even though i hadn't smoked any weed in months and it was this like california weed i'm holding literally i remember i'm holding the bottom of my chair trying not to fall out of the chair. And we start talking, and I'm telling this story about a dude that I had met on an airplane,

and he was super into Sex at Dawn, and then we were going to do a movie together and whatever. And then his wife took the book away from him. Do you remember all that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I was just like, oh, fuck, I shouldn't have told that story. I'm fucking everything up and i said to you can we just because we're like five minutes in at this point and i was like joe can we just like cut this and start over and you looked at me you said is live bitch you don't remember any of that i do now yeah i do now oh man i knew the guy yeah yeah exactly and and you were like say his name and then i said his name you're like no he's a friend of

mine and i'm like oh shit i should have said his name and the whole thing yeah and then i left casilda was here in the studio and we left we got in the car and I said man was that as awkward as I felt and she's like that's the worst I've ever seen you you were great established a great friendship yeah

no issues at all I don't know maybe you enjoyed watching me suffer I don't know I do enjoy watching people get too high it's not a suffer thing

It's like I've been there It's a commiseration thing I think One of the things about these sober October things Is you realize like There's so many things that are so much easier When you're not high It's almost like you handicap yourself By getting baked

I was talking to Red Band Brian Brian Red Band, about this. We were talking about how the early days of podcasts, we would get obliterated before we would do the podcast. For years, up until maybe 2013 or 14, I had a volcano. Do you know what that is? Oh, yeah. Those vaporizers it fills up this bag and you take these big deep hits off this thc vapor and then as soon as you put the bag down and we're okay let's get going let's start the podcast and be like oh my god what have we done and it was this

feeling every time we did the podcast was oh my god what have we done and you'd be in the middle of saying something and as you're saying like what am i talking about yeah i don't even know what i'm talking about and then you would say oh no no no it's not that like you would screw things up you get scrambled in your head when there's no pot at all that never happens like you i mean you might make mistakes but you know what you're talking about while you're talking about it right like when you're really really high like that there's a lot of times where you're talking about stuff where you literally don't know exactly what you're talking about yeah it's like that split personality thing we were talking about earlier marijuana has so many pros but it's got some cons like everything in life like like love and and good things and

bad things and food and sleep there's pros and cons and then the cons become very evident when you're not doing it you know i still think every time i do these sober october things i always think well i'm gonna cut back i'm gonna cut back on some weed and i think i did last year like after october i was like i am not gonna do it as much as i used to do it do you drink yeah a little bit like wine beer i love wine with meals yeah yeah if i have a nice meal i love a glass of red wine yeah i like a cold beer a hot day love that dude yeah yeah yeah i love that yeah i lived in you know i lived in spain 25 years or something and like over there wine is like water yeah you have wine with breakfast it's really oh yeah yeah it's it's

just part of life it's like olive oil it's on everything that's funny because i just saw a restaurant i was at a restaurant i was using the breath the bathroom and they had a sign up that said a meal without wine is called breakfast so that's italian yeah in spain they're like fuck it yeah i mean not everyone's doing it but workers like you'll see workers in a bar you know they have their sandwiches and a glass of wine yeah some coffee with little baileys in it nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with if you can handle it well you know when i got to spain i remember talking to people like wow like alcohol's everywhere and it's not like liquor licenses

here like every cafe serving wine and beer and whatever you just sell it it's everywhere yeah um and kids are there and it's it's just you know it's not set aside right um and the spanish guy said to me you know in spain we have many alcoholics but no drunks and it's true like you don't see people puking in the street you know raging drunken lunatics like you know in the u.s what about like sports events like soccer games they sell beer full strength beer uh i don't remember if they sell wine um and yeah i mean bar, Barcelona is a special place. I don't know what it's like in Madrid. I never went to a soccer game in Madrid.

But Barcelona, the Catalans are sort of dry, very self-contained people. So, you know, there's no raging. And right now there's rioting going on, but that's a political thing. What are they rioting over? Catalan independence. Yeah. Didn't something happen today in Hong Kong? I don't know.

I've been out of the loop today. The Hong Kong protests have been going on for so long now. It's months and months and months. It's like- Intense. And Chile now, too. And Santiago, Chile people are rioting. Yeah, shit's getting interesting.

It's heating up. Yeah, it's a strange time to be alive. It really is. Across the board. Yeah. I feel like we're at an inflection point. What's going on? Hong Kong frees murder suspect whose case led to protests.

Oh, interesting. Wow. Trying to take the air out of it. Yeah. You ever read of it. Yeah. You ever read Joseph Campbell? Yeah. So the hero with a thousand faces, his observation that societies all over the world have basically the same origin myth, which is the odyssey, right? goes out and has all these challenges and faces their fears and learns all the stuff and then returns home with the knowledge that they've gained and they realize that what they were

looking for all the time is actually home right i feel like as a species we're at the point in that journey where we're turning toward home that's my that's sort of the overriding narrative of this book, that where we are now is we've learned enough that we can go back to or go toward a way of living that replicates in important ways where we came from. So you're doing it, you're hunting, you're spending time in nature, we're looking at different ways of raising kids, we're looking at paleo diet, fasting, controlling the frequency of the light that comes into our eyes at night. There's this awareness that the way forward requires an understanding of where we came from. So I kind of feel when I'm having a good day, I feel like we're at this point now, this crisis point where these institutions, central institutions of Western civilization are collapsing around us.

They're just government, Wall Street, religion. It's all just like being exposed as incompetent and useless in many cases. But we've learned these really interesting things like birth control and passive energy and different ways of living on the earth without destroying it. And so the sort of metaphor I use in the book is that we're going to live in zoos, right? But do we want to live in the Calcutta Zoo or the San Diego Zoo? And I feel like, you know, what we're seeing now is we're clearly

in a moment of massive global change. And I hope that what the opportunity will, that's being presented is to redesign human existence in a way that's more in accordance with our nature does that make sense yeah that's i'm struggling to be optimistic well i'm glad i'm optimistic too i just yeah i always wonder if the numbers are just unmanageable well that's why i mentioned birth control yeah right like we know how to reduce global population but people want babies they but why do they want babies what's the incentive for women i think there's a biological need there's a feeling that's not all women but

many women have yeah where they have that biological clock it's telling them to have a baby when they have a baby i mean you've seen women that have children it's a it's the most intense bonding the most intense release of oxytocin the most intense love and and feeling of of connection with a another living creature that i've ever experienced that i could ever explain to someone and it's a natural part of being a human being it also changes who you are as a person when you are responsible for these little people and then you have love for these little people like Dave Chappelle said to me once something that really

resonated he said not only has it changed how much I love? It changed my capacity for love. And that resonated. I was like, that's what it is. It changed how I feel about other people. And the experience for a man is entirely different than it is for a woman because the woman literally creates the being in her body. A baby is growing inside a woman's body and then she gives birth to it.

With a man, you do what you always do. You fuck her. But now you have a baby. And it's undeniable that you love the baby, you love your child, but you did not have the experience of having it grow inside your body, which I think is a connection that no man is ever going to understand. You're never going to – I don't think it's possible to understand what a woman experiences when she has a baby grow inside of her body. for me which was a big one was it made me look at people um instead of looking at them like static

beings you see the whole thing yeah i looked at them i was like oh that was a baby yeah christopher ryan used to be a baby that was cute too yeah i bet you were adorable yeah and now here you are grown-ass man yeah i mean this is yeah this is uh something that's missing in our experience when we don't we're not there and we don't see that little person become a big person. Yeah. That's missing. I feel like I've gained – this is part of what I was referring to earlier where I said we're learning to dance and the party's almost over. I don't have kids.

I've been around kids. I feel I don't have kids. I've been around kids. But I feel like when I was in my 20s, let's say, I sort of worked this out recently in relationships that I think there are three things. There's attraction, there's compatibility, and there's love. And I look at a lot of my relationships with women, they had two of those. Always love. Sometimes the sex was great and sometimes the compatibility was great.

And very rarely all three of those. But I used to think love was a really limited, scarce experience in life. And the older I get, the more I feel like, no, love is, I could love anybody. If I spent enough time with them and got to know them, I'd feel love for them. Right. You know, that's not hard to find. It seems it's everywhere. When I was young, I thought it was really hard to find.

Well, for some people it is. You know, some people it is. It's hard to find someone who loves them. And some people are burdened down. Like, you're very free in the sense that because you have this unusual way of making money and you don't have a lot of needs, you don't need a lot of material things, some people are very burdened by these needs, you know, and they're not free. And they're confined to a job, and it's very difficult for them to meet anybody, right? And then they're also stressed out all the

time because of bills and horse shit and then work politics and work dynamics and dealing with the fucking environment of the office yeah and you got a boss that's an asshole who's like you know you have board meetings and shit and everybody's got to sit there and get cancer when this asshole talks you. You can feel it. Sitting at a board table and some guys, what we got to do with this company? That's right. The matrix.

I need you to be here after work. You're here nine to five. I want to see a real commitment. We're a family. Yeah, when I'm leaving at seven, I want to see you still here working. Like, what? Yeah.

No. And then it's hard to meet somebody. It's hard to find love. Yeah, okay. Certainly you're right about that. I didn't really mean in a dating sense so much as just like a compassion sense. You know what I mean? That everybody's lovable.

Sure. You know, like one of the things that I love doing in my podcast is meeting somebody who's never told their story before and never even thought of their life in terms of a narrative. And in the course of the podcast, having them realize how fucking interesting they are and how interesting their life is. But I've had people like break into tears and stuff, you know, because they've never thought. No one's ever asked. Everybody's interesting. Everybody's got some kind of bizarre story to tell. Often they don't know it. And I feel the same way. Everybody's lovable.

I'm not talking about romantic love. I know what you're saying. You reminded me of when you're talking about seeing the full person's life sometimes I've looked at like women that I was with

who were you know 35 years old and I see the old lady in them and be moved by that

you know like you're gonna be a beautiful old lady I'll be dead I'll be gone you're a weirdo I see that

and I'm like I gotta get out of here before she becomes an old lady uh oh I see menopause coming get me out of here i don't want anybody angry at me for shit i didn't even do yeah no i know what you're saying i know what you're saying and i mean everybody's lovable to somebody right i mean unless you're a fucking psychopath i had i had another thing i put on my list here i wanted to mention almost as a public service sleep apnea

I have sleep apnea do you know about this? do you snore? I have a mouthpiece do you have the CPAP machine? no no it's different it holds my tongue down it keeps my tongue from sliding back it made a world difference

that's why I wanted to mention it anybody who's got I was not breathing for 20 seconds at a time and uh yeah this this woman i was sleeping with like actually counted you know and she's like dude like you're choking you're suffocating yeah so i went and got a test it's super easy you take it home and hook this thing in your finger and all that and they told me i think it was like 25 episodes per hour is considered severe i had 74 every minute i was suffocating to the point where i sort of woke up and like my throat tissue you know the muscles contract so you can breathe again. So you're like always at the surface.

I got one of those machines. Dude, I'm like sleeping again. I'm dreaming. It's fantastic. Now, do you have a hard time putting that thing in your mouth? No, it's no problem. It's like scuba diving. You got a regulator.

I mean, you have the full face one that goes over your nose and your mouth if you tend to breathe through your mouth or they have them that just go over your nose which one do you have i have both i started because i used the nose one and then i i was breathing through my mouth and that's all weird so then i got the big one but after a month with that now i just use the nose one now that pumps air right what it does is it creates uh air pressure uh but just very slow it's adjustable it adjusts based on your reaction to it and so when you are uh when you're breathing the air pressure keeps the passages open so it can be anatomical it can be your tongue falling back i have that's what it is for me yeah yeah so it keeps the the passage open it's just the slight pressure and it's really nice because you take a it's like you take a deep breath and it fills your lungs because there's

just that little extra push and uh it's totally quiet like there's all this stigma around it like people think it's really like gross or loud or whatever it's not the. Like there's all this stigma around it. Like people think it's really gross or loud or whatever. It's not. The new machines are great. And they have a humidifier in them so you can adjust the. How do you power it up when you're camping and stuff? Well, I've got an electrical system in the van. And I also have a backup battery, a little lithium battery.

That's all you need? Yeah. And you can power the whole night like that? Yeah, if you don't use the humidifier if you use the humidifier it sucks up more because it's it's a heating thing does the humidifier help yeah it's great because you can adjust it you know like here in la we're in a desert it's dry so you can turn it up if you're you know i was in seattle to turn it off doesn't matter so it's just changed the way you you feel i feel so much better i'm like sleeping through the night i dream again yeah i didn't i mean i feel kind of evangelical about it because you know i know a lot of people have this men and women

and there's this weird kind of shame around it and i'm just trying to be like yeah it's a weird thing to be shameful yeah fuck it man sleep you gotta sleep it's really important it makes everything better you're like 50 more likely to have car accidents if you have sleep oh yeah yeah it'll fuck up your job it'll fuck you won't get hard-ons it'll like ruin everything some people it's really bad too and it goes on for years and years and years they don't even know about i was on a plane once and there was a guy behind me and i would hear yeah and i turned around and i was like oh this poor bastard he was a big guy like very overweight and i mean i was watching this guy lying there with his mouth open like this suffocating for a long time and then finally he would jostle and catch some air and uh he woke up

and i said hey man and i said do you know you have sleep apnea he's like what do you mean and i said okay i mean let me tell you what's going on and i showed him my mouthpiece i'm like i have this thing that i have to sleep with because it was a long flight we're on and uh i said you got to go to a doctor get that checked out and he goes oh okay thanks i go no no really, you got to go to a doctor, get that checked out. And he goes, oh, okay, thanks. I go, no, no, no, really? Yeah. You got to go to a doctor. I go, this is going to, it'll change your life.

Heart disease. Yeah. Like a lot of bad shit can happen. It also affects people's dietary choices. Because when you're exhausted like that, I know how I am. Like last night, I was tired. I came home from the improv. It was like one o'clock in the morning.

I should not have eaten. But I was like, fuck it. And I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at 1 a.m i definitely shouldn't have had that where's the alchemy and jalapenos man well i just felt like peanut butter and jelly yeah gotta do it it's a bad choice but when you're tired you make bad choices right you make bad dietary choices it's a very, very common when people are exhausted and overworked. And I think that has to apply to people with sleep apnea where you're always exhausted. Like throughout the day, you're just sucking down coffee and trying to stay awake. Yeah.

Yeah. My dad had it for sure. And he never had it treated. And yeah, maybe that's another reason that I'm sort of evangelical about it because it's like it's so easy so many of the things that mess up our lives are really hard to address like you know the litany of things you were talking about board meetings and all that but you know if you can get a good night's sleep for you know a visit to a doctor and then I mean this thing cost 800 bucks for this machine I have yeah it changes

your whole life your whole life solves the problem yeah you know like that's pretty cool it's pretty fucking cool some people have a problem with those c-pad machines but maybe it's just um the kind they use joey diaz changed his life he started using that thing he brings it he's got a portable unit he brings him on planes yeah brings it everywhere yeah yeah it's got a portable unit. It brings them on planes. Yeah. It brings it everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. I mean, I wish every problem were that easy to solve. Yeah, right? No kidding.

Yeah. What else you got there? On my list? I had a bunch of notes. Oh, the Motherfucker Awards. What's that? Do you know about that? So my buddy Kyle and I did it last year. So the idea is we're hiking one day in Topanga, and we're talking about how he's an environmental activist as well as a big wave surfer.

Kyle Tierman Show, he's a podcast as well. Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has got a podcast. He's a really good guy. He's like one of these, I think he's 28. He's like super earnest. And he's the kind of guy like you're having a conversation and you mention a book. And a week later, he's like, hey, I read that book you mentioned. It's really good.

It's like, all right. All young people should be like you. He's really like smart. Yeah, and serious about stuff. Anyway, we're talking about how hard it is to get people to pay attention to environmental issues because it's such a downer you know and i was like man i know all these comedians it would be cool if we could find a way to get comedy into the environmental thing and we came up with this idea where we flip everything upside down and we say, we have an award ceremony to honor the companies

that are doing the most to fuck Mother Earth. And the awards are accepted on behalf of the companies by comedians. So we did it last year and it was fucking wild. It was so great. So the presenters were people like Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone and the guy who was the founder of Greenpeace and, you know, different environmental people and sort of political people. And accepting on behalf of these people like Leo Flowers, if you know him, Jake Johansson. Moshe Kasher and Natasha Leggero did this incredible bit where they were incestuous brother-sister couple.

Yeah. Yeah. this incredible bit where they they were uh incestuous brother sister couple yeah yeah uh i think they represented uh chase bank um yeah and brendan walsh he's fantastic he looks like dennis miller there hey it does yeah so it was great and we wore tuxedos and we did this whole thing do it at at a a theater in the miraclewood. The Miracle Theater in Inglewood. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was great. And it's funded by various people,

but the Nell Newman Foundation, Paul Newman's daughter. Oh, cool. She's a big supporter. When are you doing it again? December 3rd. Ah, cool. Yeah, it's great.

Same place? Same place. If you're free, come accept an award. Yeah, let me find out. I think I'm out of town. Yeah, that's great. Same place? Same place. If you're free, come accept an award. Yeah, let me find out. I think I'm out of town. Yeah, that's the thing. We're lining up like Brian Callen. Oh, beautiful.

Yeah, he wants to do it, but it depends. We're working together tonight. Oh, good. We worked together last night. I had dinner with him a week ago. Yeah, we did two shows last night. We're doing two shows tonight. I like that guy a lot.

I love him to death. He's one of my favorite people doing two shows tonight he's i like that guy i love him the death he's one of my favorite people yeah and he's he's also real down to earth he's he's a real dude he's people often ask me like i guess i'm like a conduit to people like you and brian and it's like what are they like in real life they're they're like they seem to be i don't think you do as many podcasts as he does or as many as i do and be somebody else right i don't think it's too much work holding up the facade i don't think it would work yeah i don't think you could hold up a facade that that long yeah i don't i mean again everybody varies you vary who you are dependent upon the day and the stresses and the influences in life but

i don't know anybody who's full of shit like i don't know anybody who's doing a podcast who's got like a totally different persona right i bet a lot of those self-help fellows probably they're rocking that yeah that's a that's a full of shit industry yeah you know it's like it's one of those it's like there's people that are real self-help people that are doing real work and they really are committed to it and they love it and they really love helping people. And then there's other people that find that as like a niche. It's a way to get in. It's a little greased path. Yeah.

It helps you like slip on in. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it's hard to tell who's who in. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it's hard to tell who's who in that world. Yeah. That's a weird world. It's one of the weirdest worlds. The world of constant motivation where you're constantly motivating people and trying to find some new way to say things you've already said a thousand times.

And what's it all boil down to? It all boils down to the same simple shit again and again. It does. Experience over possessions, forgive yourself and others, love yourself and others. But sometimes they can say something that resonates. Some people can say something that resonates. But those people have to – there has to be something unique about them, like their life experiences. They have to have accomplished something.

There has to be some actual meat behind their words. And there's a lot of people that are doing it that are just doing it. They're not really doing anything else. Yeah. They just do that, and that's very strange. It's very strange because they've tapped into this need and this feeling that people have where they need to be motivated, and they need someone to say positive spiritual things that resonate with them. So these people have sort of found that as a way to become popular or famous or insta-famous or whatever.

Yeah, it's like buying a membership to a gym and then never going. Or what I do sometimes like i i love to buy camping gear do you i don't really camp very much though yeah like but i love camping gear man like high quality tents and backpacks i go to rei i have grand plans yeah yeah i need stakes i need those little fucking aluminum stakes to get the tents into the dirt. Oh, dude. Clink, clink. Yeah.

The spiral ones. Oh, yeah. They're really good in sand as well. I got them. I got a special hammer to put them in, and then it's got holes that you hook and pull them up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've used it maybe twice in five years.

If you're lucky. Yeah. I bought one of them fucking, what are those things called? Those little stoves, the little propane stoves. Oh stoves oh yeah little thing yeah sits on top i never used it yeah just sitting in my i was like i'm gonna use this on our next trip but when you know when civilization collapses you got that in the garage that's really civilization collapses you really want flint and steel and you you want some tinder i mean you can't count on any of that shit because you don't know how to make a lighter so you can't count on lighters you got to be able to make a

fire without a lighter also when civilization ends you're not going to want to live yeah yeah that's the thing it's just too hard there's no way to really prepare for it no it's too hard yeah you know to to live i mean i guess if that's all you've ever known if all you've ever known was living in an incredibly primitive way and hunting and gathering you'd be fine with it well hunting and gathering is easy for hunter gatherers if you live in a fertile place even if you don't in the kalari Desert, the Kung San people work roughly 20 hours a week. And what we're calling work is hunting and gathering. What are they hunting?

I guess there are some sorts of antelope, rabbits, rats, desert rats. I don't know. I haven't spent much time in the Kalahari Desert. Speaking of rats, there's a fucking crazy article about these monkeys that are eating rats. Macawk? Macawk? How do you say it? Macawk monkeys?

Macawk. Macawk. Killer rat-eating monkey stunned scientist in Malaysia. I saw that yesterday, and I was going to gonna tweet it but i was like all right i've tweeted too many fucking crazy things today whenever i read something really bonkers and i tweet it but that one i'm like i'm saving this one for tomorrow but look at the size of that goddamn rat and these monkeys are ferocious predators and they thought of these monkeys as being primarily fruit eaters but no they they really favor eating rats and it's holding

this goddamn rat down and eating it head first it's a hell of an image fucking a right yeah well you ever been to something yeah it's like a sandwich yeah it's like he's eating a hoagie footlong rat fucking a man look at his like the distant look in his eyes like yes just eating a rat head yeah you ever been in a place with wild monkeys yes yeah yeah costa rica uh dude it was weird we were worried do they come right up to the yeah yeah okay we were staying at this resort and uh we we one of my kids wanted to feed the monkey an Oreo. And my wife was like, oh, we probably shouldn't. It's not good for him. And then I said, just give him one fucking Oreo.

Who cares? I bet he's already had an Oreo before. I forget what the conversation was. Anyway, the monkey takes the Oreo, opens it, and eats the white frosting. I was like, that little motherfucker's eating a lot of Oreos. He knew exactly what to do. He turned it, just like everybody does, and started scraping off the

frosting and looking right at you. Yeah, there was different kinds of monkeys, too. There was howler monkeys, and then there was big monkeys and little monkeys. That's a crazy place. Costa Rica is wild, man. Crocodiles and shit. That was another interesting place I visited.

The crocodiles are a trip, man, because we were in a boat, and we went on this sort of tour of this river system. And you go on a tour of the river system, and I'm watching this fucking 15-foot crocodile slide into the water from the bank. I'm like, fuck. And you see the crocodile slides all over the banks because these rivers are just filled with crocodiles and so anytime my kid would come anywhere close to the railing of the boat i'm like

hey hey hey let's stay over here let's stay in the middle the fuck away from the monsters i i met this dude long time ago i don't remember where he was but we were sitting around a fire talking about like bizarre experiences we'd had traveling, whatever. He was from, I think, New Hampshire. And he had a thing, like you and Marshall go running every morning, he had a thing where he and his dog would go down to the lake and take a swim every day at dusk. When he got home from work, he'd take the dog for a swim. It was a black lab, I think. And he went to visit his brother in Florida.

And he drove down there. And his brother was out when he arrived. And it was around dusk. And he's like, ah, let's go for a swim. There's a lake. And he jumps in the water with his dog. And they're swimming across the lake. And it's quiet, right?

And he hears this plop, plop. And he's like, wow, what was that? That's a weird sound. And then he realizes, right? And he hears this plop, plop. And he's like, well, what was that? That's a weird sound. And then he realizes, I'm in fucking Florida. I'm not in New Hampshire. There are alligators here. What the fuck am I doing? So he turns around and starts swimming back.

And he's swimming along, trying not to panic. And the fucking dog goes, argh, argh. Dog's gone fucking alligator or croc came up and took his dog never saw the dog again what that could have been him too yeah one of my favorite alligator stories from florida is there was a high-speed chase guy had a stolen car and uh he gets to a bridge the cops are chasing him guy jumps out of the car jumps off the bridge gets eaten immediately by an alligator literally landed in front of the alligator just lucky day snap they don't need people that often but they definitely will yeah

they do well the crocodiles alligators are less aggressive than crocodiles. And there are crocodiles in Florida, but they're much less frequent. What's the difference? American alligator is a smaller animal. They have a longer, pointier snout, and they have more exposed teeth. An alligator has a blunt, more rounded face, and they get much larger than American crocodiles. American crocodiles are pretty small. American alligators get pretty fucking big. So in Africa, do they have crocs and alligators?

No. Africa is just crocodiles. Just crocs. They have much, much, much more aggressive crocodiles, too. They have Nile crocodiles. Right. You see them take those water buffalo and stuff. Terrifying.

Saltwater crocodiles i thought i'd seen video what you said so i googled it four different times at least in the last couple years this has happened one guy lost his arm two people died the florida thing getting chased by the cops and ended up getting eaten by an alligator it's not just one time it's fucking florida man florida man is so wacky that is the place where all the refuges and the outcasts they all go to florida man yeah yeah more than once i'm sure it makes sense when you jump in the water man you're you're risking it like they don't just because alligators don't eat people as often as crocodiles do in africa it doesn't mean that they wouldn't. They don't have a rule book.

Like, oh, that's a person. Shouldn't eat them. They don't give a fuck if you're a dog or a person or a kid. There was an alligator ate a baby at Disney World. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Like three years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. A fucking two-year-old baby playing by the water. The alligator just slides up on the bank snatch pulls it right under oh man fuck that's a bad day yeah when i lived in florida when uh i was a kid uh we lived in gainesville and there was alligators everywhere and i remember one of them snatched some lady's dog and i was like jesus christ i didn't know they kill people's dogs yeah because you would see them floating around and they seemed so innocuous.

Because they were almost always still. They very rarely moved. There were signs. They didn't want you to feed them marshmallows. People would throw marshmallows, and the alligators would eat marshmallows. And they just don't want you to? They don't digest them well. Because they float?

The marshmallows float, I guess? Yeah. And they would just chew them up and swallow them. So people would throw marshmallows at the alligators just to see it. That was back when alligators were endangered. This was in the late 70s. And they're not endangered anymore. In fact, you could kill as many of them.

Like you can get a commercial hunting tag for 500 alligators. I watched that on that uh swamp people show never seen it this is a show about alligator killers they're just killing alligators because you know the commercial market the last indians to be pacified i hate that phrase that in the united states the last tribe to finally give up was the seminal in the everglades yeah like after the apaches and the and all that yeah because man they ever that would be a weird life yeah live in the everglades well the everglades are another thing that human beings ruined because of white trash people in florida because releasing pythons there's literally nothing left alive in the everglades all the deer are missing

all the raccoons are missing all all the all the marsh hares gone everything's missing like these scientists and biologists have done these uh surveys of wildlife and the difference between like 1980 and 2019 is so unbelievably stark yeah it's so crazy and it's all those fucking dorks that want to keep pets and then they release them they release them out there in the wild yeah yeah pythons but it's not just the everglades right it's i read recently like 30 of all the birds in north america are gone well are gone in the last 40 years. A lot of that's house cats. Have you ever seen the numbers of how many house cats, how many birds house cats kill?

Billions. Billions just in the United States. But they're cute. Adorable. Fucking billions, though. Killers. Billions of birds. Like scientists were baffled when they did the actual survey and they found the real numbers. They're like, this can't be real. This can't be right. Billions of birds Like you see Like scientists were Baffled When they did the actual survey

And they found the real numbers They're like This can't be real This can't be right Billions You have a cat right? Yeah two cats Oh you had a whole bit

In your stand up Where I had a cat I remember Yeah Yeah I like cats I love cats Yeah They're interesting creatures

I had three of them in Spain It was fun They had their own little world You know Oh yeah Three of them Did what they wanted was fun. They had their own little world. Oh, yeah. Three of them did what they wanted to do. The only bummer is litter boxes. Yeah.

So I had them outside. Got to have them outside the house. In my neighborhood, you cannot. Yeah. Coyotes. Yeah, no coyotes in Barcelona. Owls and coyotes. Yeah.

Those owls are a motherfucker. They'll snatch them up just as quick as anything. Yeah. We have big owls out here so if you were gonna die from an animal attack what animal would you uh like to die from you'd like a big cat because they would kill you before they'd eat you you know yeah a bear will just eat you yeah black bear will eat you grizzly bears sometimes eat you too well they'll fuck you up and anyway this is what i was told when i was in alaska that you play dead you. Grizzly bears sometimes. Grizzly bears will eat you too. Well, they'll fuck you up. Anyway, this is what I was told when I was in Alaska,

that you play dead with a grizzly but never with a black. Well, hmm. Because some grizzlies, if they think you're dead, they'll kick some dust on you and come back a week later when you're fermented. They're like French people. They want it to stink, you know? Like old cheese. That's not totally true. It depends on how hungry they are and to stink you know like old cheese that's not totally true

it depends on how hungry they are and whether or not they're old but you are more likely to be attacked by a black bear for predation right a friend of mine was attacked recently really yeah he had a he had a shoot a black bear yeah yeah he was uh he tried to chase it off and um he stumbled upon there was a smell he's a rancher he stumbled upon, there was a smell. He's a rancher. He stumbled upon this smell. And the smell was a dead cow. And this black bear had been eating this dead cow. And he tried to chase the black bear off.

And the black bear decided to try to go after him. And had to wind up shooting it. He had a rifle or a pistol? I think it was a pistol. But it wouldn't stop. It wouldn't leave him alone. He's trying to say, hey, get the fuck out of here. Go, go.

Throwing, waving his arms. Yeah. And it woofed at him. Then it turned around and came at him from another direction. And then it literally ran up within like 20 feet of him. He's like, okay, we're done here. That happened to me with a monkey once. Really?

Yeah. Did you shoot the monkey? I didn't. No. Did you feed him a rat? This was in Malaysia. I was in botanical gardens in Penang, Malaysia. I actually told this story at the beginning of Sex at Dawn.

I was with my girlfriend at the time. And like your situation in Costa Rica, she wanted to give some peanuts to these monkeys. These guys at the entrance were selling little bags of peanuts. These guys at the entrance were selling little bags of peanuts. And so she – there was this baby monkey hanging by his tail over the trail where we were. And she pulled out this bag of peanuts and like opened it. And that attracted all this attention from other monkeys. while she was handing a peanut to the baby this other monkey jumped out from the bushes leapt on her took the bag of peanuts and was gone like in a flash it was so happened so fast she's screaming i'm like what the fuck it was just like holy shit and we're surrounded by these

monkeys they're everywhere and that's when we realized like all the local people had these big sticks and we thought they were walking sticks or something they'd like to keep the monkeys away i didn't have a stick so i got like i was triggered yeah i got like fuck you monkeys you know like you're not you leave my girl alone he said that like joe dirt i was not into it right and uh yeah i felt like you know all this testosterone and adrenaline and i was like yeah and uh hulk smash yeah so we we you know 20 minutes later we're in this sort of field and uh there's a tree in the middle of the field and there are more baby monkeys and by now she's totally forgotten about it she's just like oh they're cute so i have the peanuts now and she wants to give more peanuts so i pull out a bag to give to her and this monkey comes out of the woods sort of a big one and he's like looking at me and i'm just like fuck you dude like i'm three times your size fuck you and he sort of

like moves you know sort of does this thing and he's looking at me and there's a branch. I picked up the branch and threw it at him. Right. Kind of like what your buddy was trying to do with his bear. Like, Hey, get the fuck out of here. You know?

And this monkey just looked at the branch land in front of him and looked up at me. And it was like, you fucked up. And he leapt over it and came charging at me with like these fangs just coming straight at me i went nuts i turned into a monkey i just started going no and i was like jumping up and down and spraying spit everywhere and he stopped and we're like and he's and my girlfriend's screaming and we're like ah and he's and my girlfriend's

screaming and we're like 10 feet away and then he just like backed up like yeah fuck you and left primal moment whoa very primal and you didn't plan that no no if i'd had a stick it wouldn't have been necessary so the moral of the story is carry a stick when you're all my walk softly yeah carry a big stick dude i wrap this up yeah let's go take a nap yeah i got shit to do oh no civilized to death the price of progress christopher ryan tangentially speaking and what's the other one talking about it forever the first book sex at dawn no no the what What do you call your podcast from the van? It's still just tangentially speaking? It's still tangentially speaking. It's just hashtag vanthropology on social media.

Always good to see you, brother. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Bye, everybody. That was fun. It was. It was.

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